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.

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 purposely avoided ground zero this weekend. I would have liked to visit on my first trip back to NYC in almost six years, but it will always be a deeply personal affair for me, one I can’t share with the callous, sensationalistic press and disgusting politicians faking tears for votes.

As I’ve passed newsstands with full page pictures of the burning towers, as I’ve heard younger passengers on the bus I’m on say that 9/11 doesn’t mean anything specific to them, I can’t help but get upset. Not at the youth. Vietnam never meant anything to me, and I don’t expect 9/11 to mean much to them. But at the media, the politicians, the greedy trying to make a profit.

Imagine having lost a loved one on that fateful day. Then think about walking buy a newsstand covered with tabloid headlines next to pictures from that day. I guess I was fortunate to only lose friends and neighbors. I can’t imagine what it would feel like if I’d lost a wife or child.

If you want to remember 9/11, how about remembering the still ongoing war in Afghanistan that has cost so much that if we’d forgone it we could have easily provided universal healthcare, better education for our children, and not had such a massive debt.

Or think about the massive government intrusions we’ve allowed in our lives in the name of safety. I caused a stir in high school with an editorial titled “Big Brother is Watching”. I feel so neive to have gotten upset over cameras in the parking lot when today we let government employees grope infants and senior citizens.

I wish the press would spend 1/100 of the time the spend on 9/11 this weekend on the corruption and greed that has feed of the fears raised that day. But for those of us who were there, for those of us who lost loved ones, for those of us who still have nightmares about watching people jump 90 floors to their death instead of burning to death, please stop with the flag waving and the pictures. The pictures in my mind are more than enough.

I was wondering what some of the line endings in OmniGraffle were called, but I couldn’t find them documented anywhere in the Manual or even via a Google search. So I made up this list using OmniGraffle.

Click on the image to view it full sized. The image is public domain, so feel free to do whatever you like with it.

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.

I’m finally getting close to shipping my first iPad app but have run into one roadblock. What should I call it?

Right now I call it iMusicVideoPlayer because that’s what it does. However, I need something with more pizazz. So if you think you can help me out with a name (and get a credit in the app and on the product’s website), read on.

Lately I’ve become obsessed with watching music videos when I want to relax. However, Apple’s workflow for playing videos is gotta be the worst thing I’ve seen them produce.

Music Videos are added to iTunes, and are classified with Music. That means that when I’m listening to music, sometimes a video window will pop open and it blocks whatever I was working on. So I generally only use playlists that limit themselves to audio or video.

On the iPad, music videos are listed in the iPod application, but when you hit play it switches you to the Videos app. In this app, all your videos are shown as thumbnail images (12 per screen) sorted by the title. I’m approaching 200 music videos in my collection. Needless to say, scrolling through them 12 at a time really sucks. Especially when the artist name isn’t displayed. Also, when a video finishes, it doesn’t play another one. You have to scroll the list to select the next one you want to watch.

So my new app works just like the iPod application, but for videos. You can make playlists. You can browse by title, artist, or genre. And it works with more than Music Videos. You can transfer any video to your iPad to play with it. It can also link to or even download videos from YouTube. I’m also using it to store my collection of funny comedy clips from SNL.

What should I call it? Email me your suggestions. And if you have an iPad with Music Videos on it, I can set you up with a beta version.

I can’t comprehend how someone can get it this wrong. Hell, since the system is computerized, I’d have it adjust the prediction based on the actual temperature so it doesn’t look like I failed out of meteorological school.

Here are a couple of my favorite jokes

Q. Why can’t the police ever solve a redneck homicide?

A. Because there are no dental records and all the DNA is the same.

Q. Why does Mike Tyson cry during sex?

A. Mace will do that to you.

Q. Did you here about the Chinese couple who had a retarded baby?

A. They named him sum ting Wong.

Look at the insane box and packing paper Amazon used to send me a package of pens. Thanks to Amazon Prime, I ordered this $4 pack of pens and got it delivered in two days nothing. Actually, I ordered 4 items and all were shipped separately. Two others were small like this.

I have an addiction. A really bad addiction. And my mom has helped to make it worse with her Christmas present, which was just delivered today from Home Depot.

My addiction is popsicles. I can’t get enough of them. Sugar-free popsicles, of course, since I am diabetic. Now no other popsicle compares to a Blue Bell Bullet. They are heavenly. I’ve eaten 3 boxes in a couple of hours before (at 24 popsicles per box). Here in Morgantown I’m stuck with Popsicle-brand or Kroger’s store brand. Both are ok, but its like comparing a cheap snack cake with the best wedding cake you’ve ever eaten.

I only had room for at most 6 boxes in the freezer attached to my refrigerator. I’m guessing I can easily fit twenty in the freezer she bought me. Along with frozen vegetables, of course. I can’t live on popsicles alone, no matter how much I might like to.

Now if I could only find a way to fill it up with Blue Bell popsicles, I’d be in heaven.