The Musings & Ramblings of Mark Lilback
Apple
Safari vs. Chrome as default browser
Jan 16th
I’ve noticed more and more of the bloggers I read prefer Chrome over Safari (the two I remember off the top of my head are MG Siegler and Justin Williams.) So last month I decided to give it a try.
In general, I like Chrome better. However, I switched back to Safari after a few weeks because of one problem: bookmark syncing. With Safari’s use of iCloud, I can add a bookmark at home, work, on my laptop, on my iPad, or on my iPhone and it shows up on all of them. Chrome can’t do this.
I’ve never taken well to multitasking on the same computer, mainly because I hate having to switch my app windows around. It was great with Snow Leopard since I would make a space for each task I was working on. But with the “upgrade” of spaces in Lion, that no longer works for me. Since the spaces no longer stay in the same order when I use the keyboard to navigate them, that workflow broke for me.
My solution has been to multitask with multiple devices. When I’m at my desk, I’ll always have an iPad open so I can refer to a book, website, or wikipedia article. When I’m working in bed, I’ll have two iPads and possibly my laptop. In that situation, bookmark syncing is critical.
Other than that, I have a number of smaller problems with Chrome:
- History Menu: chrome’s is 100% useless. My bookmark bar has the most visited sites (duhh, who would frequently visit a site and not bookmark it?). Recently closed isn’t that useful, either. Safari gives you date-organized menus with days worth of history. Awesome.
- Bookmark Menu: Why the hell do I want the menu to contain the exact same bookmarks visible in the bookmark bar? Why are my other bookmarks hidden away at the bottom of the bookmark menu. Chrome has thrown over 10 years of muscle memory out the window for no good reason.
- I hate the title bar. I feel like there isn’t enough space in the Safari one, and I personally hate any window without a proper title bar. I hate when things don’t follow the HIG. Hell, I still don’t understand why anyone would want to theme any program or even use a desktop picture. I want 100% consistent UI in every program (fullscreen games being the only exception.
- Autostart of videos in background tabs. If there are multiple links on a page I want to follow or I just want to look at one of them later, I open them in new tabs. With YouTube search results I might open 10 tabs I want to look at. And Chrome will start playing them all as fast as possible. Stimpy, you idiot!!
Yes, there are plenty of bad things about Safari and good things about Chrome. I particularly like Chrome’s tabs much better. But without addressing bookmark syncing, Chrome has no chance of being my default browser. And yes, I’ve looked at Xmarks. But it requires an installer and I refuse to run it. If a add-on/extension works in Chrome and Firefox, it should work in Safari.
I don’t even require full-sync like Safari does with iCloud. As long as Chrome can sync with the desktop Safari bookmarks, Safari will take care of iCloud. Hell, at a minimum, let me reimport bookmarks skipping duplicates. Or let me export my chrome bookmarks to Safari’s (i.e. Other Bookmarks -> Bookmark Menu).
Chrome, you tempt me. But I gotta stick with Safari.
Sure, wipe out my bookmarks. Thanks, Apple.
Oct 13th
Earlier today Xcode downloaded a documentation update for Lion. I didn’t think anything of it, until I needed to look up something. All of a sudden, none of my bookmarks in Xcode work!
I know Xcode bookmarks really suck. I have to remember Mac OX bookmarks are above iOS bookmarks since you can’t rename them. Theoretically I could have four links to “Foundation Framework Reference” and have no way to distinguish which is which. But I still make use of them. But in my mind, blowing away a crapload of bookmarks like this must mean that no one at Apple uses them. Which in my mind, just confirms how bad they suck.
Automatic updates are nice, but not when they blow away your data and screw up your workflow.
I love the reliability of Unix
Mar 9th
I love how reliable and depenedable Mac OS X and its Unix underpinnings are. I was wondering when I last rebooted (I try to reboot every week or so) and got the following:
mlilback@pebbles$uptime 1:05 up 29 days, 14:49, 2 users, load averages: 0.54 0.72 0.70
And the only reason I rebooted 29 days ago was a system update that required a restart. And this is on my MacBook Pro. How many windoze laptops out there run that long without a reboot?
And I can never go back to a conventional hard drive again. I’ve got a 260 GB SSD drive and things are so freaking fast. At work I just got a 4-core iMac with a SSD and it is even faster. I can compile pretty much anything in under 5 minutes, even MacSQL which used to take 30 minutes for a clean build.
Why would I want a unified anything?
Sep 9th
I was just reading the list of enhancements coming to the iPad with iOS 4.2 and ran across this gem: See messages from all your accounts in a unified inbox.
Why is this considered a feature or improvement, let alone one of the top features in a OS update? The only reason I have multiple accounts is to keep them separate. Only giving out 1 email address would be a piece of cake. I have multiple accounts so I can organize my mail. I don’t every want to search across accounts, let alone view them together. Hell, it offends me that it is even possible in Mail (on Mac OS X) to accidentally click on the wrong spot and have all my mail listed together. Does Apple want to give me an anxiety attack?
I’ve got 6 email accounts right now with unread counts of 0, 1092, 593, 113, 1850 and 801. That doesn’t include the 20,000+ unread junk messages. Seeing those all at once would scare me off of email forever.
The same thing goes for phone companies. I was signing up for local phone service and one of the top features they listed was unified billing. Really? That’s a top feature? Better than caller-id? Better than voicemail? Better than fast upload speeds? Better than no filters on my Internet content?
Getting one fucking bill instead of two? Really? Honestly? Someone gives a shit about this? Someone considers it one of the top five features for any product or service?
How, in this over-digitized age where even fast food restaurants at the mall want your email address and for you to follow them on facebook, can someone need their messages consolidated instead of separated?
Option Clicking Issues in Xcode
Aug 11th
Starting with Leopard, NSTextView added support for rectangular selections and non-contiguous selections. Personally I’ve never used these features. However, they do get in my way.
You make a rectangular selection by holding the option key while you click and drag. For one, this changes the cursor to a crosshair that just looks wrong to me in a text view. Also, it interferes with drag a dropping a copy of some text.
Say I need to duplicate a string. Say I’m implementing initWithCoder: and encodeWithEncoder:. I’ll copy paste a bunch of lines real fast, like:
-(id)initWithCoder:(NSEncoder*)coder
{
self = [super init];
self.value1 = [coder decodeObjectForKey:@"AM_SOMECLASS_VAL1"];
self.value2 = [coder decodeObjectForKey:@"AM_SOMECLASS_VAL2"];
self.value3 = [coder decodeObjectForKey:@"AM_SOMECLASS_VAL3"];
return self;
}
-(void)encodeWithCoder:(NSCoder*)coder
{
[coder encodeObject: self.value1 forKey:@""];
[coder encodeObject: self.value2 forKey:@""];
[coder encodeObject: self.value3 forKey:@""];
}
Instead of typing the keys a second time, I’m going to quickly double click on a key in initWithCoder:, hold down option, and drag the key inside the appropriate line in encodeWithCoder:. That will work just like copy/paste, but I don’t have to switch between mouse and keyboard and it doesn’t erase whatever I have stored on the pasteboard.
Since Apple added rectangular selection, this would screw up a lot as I’d hit the option key too early and it would start a rectangular selection, not a drag-copy.
So I googled for a way to disable this, and boy did I have a hard time. And the solution is the defaults key NSProhibitMultipleTextSelectionByMouse. A google search returns only 3 links, the third one being to an old link to the older AppKit Release Notes.
So finally, here’s the solution. Use this command to disable this in Xcode:
defaults write com.apple.Xcode NSProhibitMultipleTextSelectionByMouse -bool YES
or disable it globally, as I did:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSProhibitMultipleTextSelectionByMouse -bool YES
This post is pretty verbose, but I really wanted to discuss this enough to make sure anyone else googling for this problem would find this and save themselves a lot of time.
