"It embodied the Macintosh spirit for me: This is the Mac. It's supposed to be different.

The second commandment was Easy is hard. That is the essence of Apple. They do the work behind the scenes so that it works the way you imagine it should.""
One of the things that I always heard about you was that you had incredibly high standards and a very bad temper. You made it clear that it's not enough to have an idea. You have to work really hard to bring it to life."

sh superpack_10.7_2011.08.08.sh

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"The last two major releases of Mac OS X were both profoundly shaped by the meteoric rise of their younger sibling, iOS.""Leopard arrived later than expected, and in the same year that the iPhone was introduced. Its successor, Snow Leopard, famously arrived with no new features, concentrating instead on internal enhancements and bug fixes. Despite plausible official explanations, it was hard to shake the feeling that Apple's burgeoning mobile platform was stealing resources—not to mention the spotlight—from the Mac.

In this context, the name Lion starts to take on darker connotations. At the very least, it seems like the end of the big cat branding—after all, where can you go after Lion? Is this process of taking the best from iOS and bringing it back to the Mac platform just the first phase of a complete assimilation? Is Lion the end of the line for Mac OS X itself?""Though this is the second version of Mac OS X that doesn't support PowerPC processors, this is the first version that won't run PowerPC applications....Lion no longer includes Rosetta, even as an optional install."" Macworld reports that there will, in fact, be a physical manifestation of Lion. Starting in August, Apple will sell Lion on a USB stick for $69. Apple has also said that customers are welcome to bring their Macs to Apple retail stores for help buying and installing Lion.""after all the file compression magic added in Snow Leopard to reduce the footprint of the OS, Lion steals over half a gigabyte of your disk space as part of its installation process, and never gives it back. The partition's name makes Apple's intent clear: it's meant as a last-ditch mechanism to diagnose and repair a Mac with a hosed boot volume. ... Apparently Apple has decided that the ability to boot a Mac into a known-good (software) state is well worth sacrificing a small amount of disk space""the psychological effect of the shrunken appearance is something else entirely. Despite the tiny difference in the functional size, I find myself being ever-so-slightly more careful when targeting these widgets in Lion. It's a little annoying, especially since it's not clear to me how the new, smaller size fits into Lion's new look.""ghostly overlay scroll bars are straight out of iOS. ""Scroll bars do more than just let us scroll. First, their state tells us whether there's anything more to see. A window with "inactive" (usually shown as dimmed) scroll bars indicates that there is no content beyond what is currently visible in the window. Second, when a document has more content than can fit in a window, the scroll bars tell us our current position within that document. Finally, the size of the scroll thumb itself—or the amount of room the scroll thumb has to move within the scroll bar, if you want to look at it that way—gives some hint about the total size of the content.""all of the scrolling changes in Lion have preferences that allow them to be reverted to their pre-Lion behaviors.""There's no way around it: some pixels must be sacrificed to the gods of Fitts's law."" In my estimation, Lion crosses the line in a few places; the new window animation is the most egregious example. I look forward to discovering a way to disable it.""These graphics are writing checks this interface can't cash""But the Dock falls short, especially for novice users, as an application launcher. Or rather, it falls short if the application to be launched isn't actually in the Dock. Most novice users I know want to have every application they are likely to use available in the Dock at all times. As these users gain experience, the Dock can become a very crowded place. But why are these increasingly Mac-savvy users stuffing their Docks to the gills rather than limiting its contents to just the applications they use most frequently?""Despite decades of public exposure to personal computers, human expectations and habits have stubbornly refused to align with the traditional model of creating, opening, and saving documents. The tales of woe have become clichés:

The student who writes for an hour without saving and loses everything when the application crashes.
The businessman who accidentally saves over the "good" version of a document, then takes it upon himself to independently reinvent version control—poorly—by compulsively saving each new revision of every document under slightly different names.
The Mac power user who reflexively selects the "Don't Save" button for one document after another when quitting an application with many open windows, only to accidentally lose the one document that actually had important changes.
The father who swears he saved the important document, but can't, for the life of him, remember where it is or what he called it.
At this point, we can no longer call this a problem of education. We've tried education for years upon years; children have been born and grown to adulthood in the PC era. And yet even the geekiest among us have lost data, time, or both due to a "stupid" mistake related to creating, opening, and saving documents.

And so Apple's decree in Lion is as it was on the original Macintosh in 1984, and as it is on iOS today: the machine must serve the human, not the other way around. To that end, Apple has added APIs in Lion that, when used properly, enable the following experience.

The user does not have to remember to save documents. All work is automatically saved.
Closing a document or quitting an application does not require the user to make decisions about unsaved changes.
The user does not have to remember to save document changes before causing the document's file to be read by another application (e.g., attaching an open document with unsaved changes to an e-mail).
Quitting an application, logging out, or restarting the computer does not mean that all open documents and windows have to be manually re-opened next time.""The user does not have to manually manage multiple copies of document files in order to retrieve old versions.
If you still don't get it, check out the item in the File menu formerly known as "Save." It now reads "Save a Version" instead. Every time a Lion-savvy application autosaves a document, it stores a copy of the previous version before it overwrites the file with the new data.""There is no graphical interface to previous versions of documents outside of an application. Previous versions can't be viewed or restored from within the Finder, for example. Forcing all version manipulation to be within the application is limiting, but it also neatly solves the problem of how to present document contents with full fidelity—beyond what Quick Look offers—when looking at past revisions."" In Lion, the OS may terminate applications that are not in use in order to reclaim resources—primarily memory, but also things like file descriptors, CPU cycles, and processes.

You read that right. Lion will quit your running applications behind your back if it decides it needs the resources, and if you don't appear to be using them. The heuristic for determining whether an application is "in use" is very conservative: it must not be the active application, it must have no visible, non-minimized windows—and, of course, it must explicitly support Automatic Termination.""One particularly scary example is the implementation of hard links on HFS+. To keep track of hard links, HFS+ creates a separate file for each hard link inside a hidden directory at the root level of the volume. Hidden directories are kind of creepy to begin with, but the real scare comes when you remember that Time Machine is implemented using hard links to avoid unnecessary data duplication.""If a few bits or bytes get flipped one way or the other by the hardware, HFS+ won't notice."""The addition and prominence of "All My Files" is yet another vote of no-confidence in the user's ability to understand and navigate the file system. If you've ever seen a Mac user try to navigate from the top level of his hard drive down to his Documents folder, you can begin to understand the challenge Apple is up against here. The "All My Files" item is just what the doctor ordered. In the increasingly rare cases when novices use the Finder directly, rather than managing their data from within an application like iTunes or iPhoto, all they want to know is, "Where are all my files?" Asked and answered.

Expert users with thousands upon thousands of files will likely find the "All My Files" feature less useful. But if you stop thinking of it as a "location" and start thinking of it as a saved search to which you can apply additional filters with the toolbar's search field, it starts to get more interesting. The only remaining barrier is performance, which does suffer as the number of files increases.""A new sort order has also been added to all views: Date Added. This is an ideal order for the Downloads folder. Sorting by creation or modification date was always problematic for files that preserved their timestamps through the download process (e.g., zip-compressed Mac applications). This would cause "new" downloads to appear in unexpected positions in the list. I'm tempted to declare Date Added sorting as best new feature in the Finder, but I'm afraid that might seem like damning with faint praise.""The Finder's destructive mix of browser and spatial behaviors remains in Lion. The tradition of subtly changing the rules that govern when, where, and how view state changes are applied and honored also continues. Just in case anyone thought they had finally figured out how the Snow Leopard Finder decides what view to show when displaying the contents of a folder in a particular window, Lion changes the rules again.""Safari's downloads window has been subsumed into the toolbar and is now displayed as an iPad-style popover. (This is a standard control available to all Cocoa applications in Lion.) When starting a download, an icon leaps from the point of the clic[…]

"Respect for screen real estate is back in a big way. I’m delighted. I’m very intrigued by what they did with scrolling, scroll bars, and window resizing. It looks awesome. Full screen apps are a no brainer. If they werent’ so damn modal I’d have expected them much sooner. It’s interesting to think about what it is that enables them to finally arrive now.

Applications now just are. They don’t run, they are. User experience guys have known for decades that this was the right model, so it’s nice to see that we are finally doing it. The design looks sufficently elegant and complex. Particularly the codependency on changes in how documents are managed."

"Unfortunately, there is an invisible file called DS_Store in every Mac OS folder that also gets added and that later generates validation errors (since it is present, but not declared in the manifest).

To remedy this problem, use the first zip line as usual:

zip -0Xq file.epub mimetype""
But, to keep those pesky DS_Store files from being erroneously added to your EPUB file, you should modify the second line so it looks like this:

zip -Xr9Dq file.epub * -x *.DS_Store"

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"The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system. To that end we provide the command-line driven MacPorts software package under a BSD License, and through it easy access to thousands of ports that greatly simplify the task of compiling and installing open-source software on your Mac."

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now exports epub! http://twitter.com/liza/status/29408303319

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In essence, recommendations of Mac software for TeX. Packaged as a single zip, see http://www.tug.org/mactex/2009/mactextras.html or download individual files from clickable links.

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"What was interesting to me is that apart from being alarmed at the disk drive noises, and asking "is this what they called a floppy disk?", my teenagers sat down and immediately knew how to use MacPaint, MacDraw and Word 3.0. They understood how to interact with Ultima II. The graphical user interface notions introduced with the Mac are still alive and well.

This got me thinking about the longevity of user interfaces. For example, the rotary dial telephone that I grew up with was an interface introduced in the US in 1919. It lasted about 60 years. The Model T Ford that I wrote about last July had the same basic driver interface as my car does today and is still going strong, but the television I grew up with has almost nothing in common with the one I own today."

"Unless you’re a hardcore geek who loves to build and customize your own applications, Tinderbox may prove to be more software than you need."

"

Everybody loves the drag and drop nature of OS X. Drag an app into your applications folder, and it's installed. You'd think it would be that easy to delete an app — just a matter of dragging it to the trash. But it's not. Apps install support files on your computer that generate clutter. Introducing AppZapper. Simply drag one or more apps onto AppZapper. Then, watch as it finds the extra files and lets you delete them with one click."

"At least the grinning dildos in the Windows video are fictional, whereas eerie replicant Mac monks really are everywhere, standing over your shoulder in their charcoal pullovers, smirking with amusement at your hopelessly inferior OS"

"Rounded rectangles simple seem ‘easier on the eye’ than the square-edged variety. Why?"

"The challenge here seems to have been to find the right balance between shrinking the mac laptops and growing the ipod/iphone. When I wrote about "MacPad" I presumed they would be shrinking the laptop. But now it seems more like they're growing the ipod/iphone."

via http://blog.omnigroup.com/2009/03/25/new-from-the-omni-group-omnigraphsketcher/

"The Mac software ecosystem faces a plague. A plague of Everything Buckets. Indulge me.""Computers work best with structured data. Everything Buckets discourage the use of structured data by providing a convenient place to commingle “structureless” data like RTF and PDF documents. Rather than forcing the user to figure out the rhyme and reason of their data (for example, by putting receipts in a financial management application and addresses in an address book), Everything Buckets cry: “throw it all in here! Search it! Maybe I’ll corrupt my proprietary database, but maybe I won’t and you’ll have the joy of sifting through a mire of RTF documents. Doesn’t that sound great?”"“use software that does one thing well.”

"During the day, computer screens look good—they're designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn't be looking at the sun."