Month: January 2004

Last weekend I finally upgraded my iMac to Mac OS X 10.3, or Panther. After using it for a few days, I’d say it’s well worth the price. The changes I’ve noticed aren’t as significant as Steve would like you to believe, but combined they improve on what was already an enjoyable user experience. But that’s not what I want to write about.

I also picked up iLife ’04 at the same time. Ever since I played with Sonic Foundry’s (nay, Sony Media Software’s) ACID when it was first released, I’ve been entranced by loop-based music creation. Reading about GarageBand, I was once again swept away by the delusion of making my own music. I had to have it.

GarageBand is indeed cool. While I haven’t written my magnum opus yet, I’ve been very impressed by it’s clean, intuitive interface and real time music processing. But I have another idea. I was reading Lessig the other day, and he mentions GarageBand, and the fact that it’s currently CC-less. So I was thinking: how would you add CC licensing to GarageBand? I don’t have an answer to that yet (Apple, are you listening?), but the train of thought led me to an idea I think would be cool. Let me share the process with you, though.

So I was thinking about adding CC license generation to GarageBand, and starting poking around looking for Export hooks, etc. And then I started thinking about consuming CC material into GarageBand. I found Apple’s Loop SDK, and began wondering if I could use that to make CC loops/samples available to GarageBand. Feed it CC content instead of making it produce CC content. I haven’t looked at the SDK yet, but I did remember Lucas Gonze’s work on specifying CC metadata in SMIL. And an open source SMIL authoring tool.

And then I thought: what about an application for remixing content using SMIL? It could consume samples (or entire songs) and use SMIL to specify the remix. With repositories of CC licensed music like OpSound and MagnaTune available, it even seems possible to incorporate sample retrieval and search into the application. And of course, everything it produced could be CC licensed.

I call it Remix.

As I’ve said before, I previously used Linux both at home and at work, 100% of the time. Gentoo was my distro of choice both at home and at work for several reasons. I’ve tried most of the major distros and the experience typically goes like this: honeymoon, annoyance, frustration, anger, fdisk. Mandrake, Red Hat (nay, Fedora) and Lycoris all went this way. I was initially enamoured by their surface beauty, with the anti-aliased icons and clean GTK themes. And then I’d try to either install something or modify something and run into problems with either dependencies or custom patches. And that’s when I’d get pissed off, swear at the screen, and go download an ISO of whatever distro I decided “had to be better.” Gentoo ended up as the longest lasting distro for the simple reason that it did so little on it’s own. It appealed to the control freak in me. The ability to re-build all your software to squeeze the last possible processor cycle out made me feel like I was being efficient and conservation-minded. Never mind that the shear number of configuration files was a little daunting, and that I never really got around to working through all the updated files presented by etc-update, I was in control.

I put an end to the cycle at home about 6 months ago when I purchased an iMac. As I worked to justify my purchase to myself, I realized that there are two things about computing that make me enjoy it: first, the ability to control things. I’m a control freak, and UNIX/Linux/*nix appeals to that demon (daemon?) inside. Second, I like pretty things. I know that beauty is only skin deep, but I am that shallow. I want my desktop environment to look good and be functional. I don’t need lots of eye candy, but good font support, anti-aliasing and pleasing pallettes go a long way, thank you. So Mac OS X is great for me in these respects. That, and it’s crunchy BSD center lets me do all the development work I need to.

The problem has now been remedied at work, as well, by an altogether unlikely suspect. My desktop machine at work died right before the holiday break. When my new one arrived shortly after my return, I decided I didn’t have 48 hours to kill while X rebuilt under Gentoo (I’m exagerating, yes, but not by much). So I returned to my first distro, Debian. I left Debian in search of a distro that had a faster release cycle, fresher packages, and prettier look and feel (you know, the trophy distro). But I’ve always missed the great package management and dependency resolution facilities it offered.

So I installed Sarge on my new machine, and I’m blown away by how far it’s come. OK, so the installer is still a little cryptic, and the fact that it uses cfdisk for partitioning will probably turn off beginners, but right out of the box, it looks, feels, and performs better than Gentoo ever did. I was able to install Gnome 2.4, Thunderbird, Firebird and OpenOffice in an afternoon, and within 24 hours I was completely up and running. It’s amazing to me that a distro so frequently maligned for it’s backwardness is now my favorite in terms of integration and the ever elusive “fit and finish.” Is it ready for use by my grandparents? Probably not. But for a developer who secretly longs for Mac OS X at work, it’s just what the doctor ordered.

After writing my complaint about Word and word processing on Mac OS X, I decided to do “yet another” search for something to quell my angst. What I found suprised me. Pleasantly.

First, LyX has been Aqua-fied. Sort of. I found a non-X11 distribution of LyX which apparently uses Qt-Mac for it’s widgets. It’s nice: I have lots of LyX documents lying around I can now open and edit with ease. Of course, it’s still obviously not a first-class Mac citizen: keyboard shortcuts and file dialogs look totally wrong. That and, well, embarassingly enough, you can’t really print. Well, maybe some people can, but I couldn’t after an hour of fiddling, and really, that’s about all I can devote to it right now.

My other find is what really knocked my socks off. Mellel is a shareware word processor, and with a price tag of $29USD, it’s absolutely amazing. OK, so it doesn’t import or export to Word, but it has an amazing set of features and doesn’t feel bloated or slow in the least. What’s more, it’s obviously built for Mac OS X, and as such has the typography and layout controls we’ve come to expect. After using it to write a short curriculum guide this morning, I shelled out the purchase cost without hesitation.

To anyone looking for a real alternative for your personal word processing, I can’t recommend Mellel enough. It’s right there with OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner now in my “must-have” pile.

Windows drives me nuts. I count myself fortunate that I only have to use it at work, and even then not on my own desktop. Until September I used Linux at home and work. Then I broke down and purchased an iMac. And I love it. Except for the fact that I’ve ended up using Microsoft Word on it.

Why Word, you ask? Well, my iMac came bundled with AppleWorks and MacFile (for opening/saving to Microsoft formats). I tried using AppleWorks for a while, and was pleasantly suprised; it wasn’t phenomenal, but it got the job done. Then MacFile started flaking out on me, creating files that seemed, well, like garbage. And when your professors require documents in Word format, you quickly loose patience with the troubleshooting process. So I picked up my $10 campus-license copy of Office v.X and installed it, reluctantly. Since the end of last semester I’ve returned to AppleWorks, but every time I fire it up, I’m reminded that it’s in dire need of an update.

And this leads to my quandry: what’s so great about Word? I know that I don’t need all the “features” packed into Word. It’s one of the most resource-intensive applications I run (my iMac noticably slows just having it open). It crashes less frequently than it’s Windows counterpart, but more often than it should. All in all, there’s nothing that great about Word. Except that it works (mostly), and it looks pretty.

By “pretty” I mean that it has enough fit and finish to appear like it belongs on Mac OS X. I’ve used AbiWord, OpenOffice and Lyx under X11 on my Mac, and while I like certain things about them all, it’s a jarring experience going back and forth between Aqua-land and Motif/GTK/etc-land. So I am on a quest. I want a basic, stable, Aqua word processor. I know that basic is a vague term, but for me it means “more features than TextEdit, fewer than Word.” AbiWord’s feature set definitly fills the bill; OpenOffice may be a little heavier than I’d like. It’s like porn; I’ll know it when I see it. Open Source would be nice, but just slightly less evil than Word would be acceptable. Ideas?