Year: 2003

After a highly enjoyable Panther install party around Mr Webb‘s house, I’m now in a position to give my first impressions of Mac OSX.3. In no particular order (and with no claims made towards total accuracy):

• The new chrome Apple logo that you get when you start up or login to your account is bloody ugly and and tacky and I can’t see what motivated them to use it;
• My spacing between icons is strange and seems absurdly large;
• I can’t use the trackpad to click on the login screen – which is highly annoying;
• Removing the clock application was a strange move, but merging it with the clock in the menu bar and allowing you to choose how to use it makes a certain amount of sense. Having said that, when you switch from digital to analogue view you’re left with a strange shadow box around the analogue face, that seems to be a bug;
• There are a number of occasions where windows appear partly obscured by the top menu bar – this is strange behaviour and confusing, and is hence probably a bug;
• Fast-user switching is well-represented and mostly elegant, although the rotating cube is actually just really funny to watch because it’s so over-the-top;
• The application switcher (Apple-Tab) is beautiful, elegant and well-developed;
• The Font Book application is initially confusing, but is likely to have considerable utility; The redeveloped default font pane is really useful;
• There are a number of strange new interface widgits around the place, including a kind of tiny, almost unnoticeable nubbin that allows you to drag entirely random panes out the side of other panes. This is particularly evident in the Font applications and is extremely strange and clunky. The generic font interface also has some odd rotating knob controls that don’t act quite the way I expected;
• Both modes of the Finder are powerful and mostly functional, but the ‘action’ button is a terrible confusing mistake and both views could have done with more polish and attention to detail. They are – however – much much faster and more responsive as windows, which is much to be applauded;
• Subtle dividers in the top-menu items are extremely elegant, practical and pleasing, but the generally flatter, greyer interface is a bit of a downer;
• Exposé’s controls are in a bit of conflict with some of my illluminated keyboard controls, but that doesn’t matter – it’s a beautiful, elegant and well-presented feature that may take a little one to become habituated with, but is likely to be transformatively useful;
• Mail’s new threading mode is totally incomprehensible;
• Mail is faster, more responsive and more strident than you’d think;

Generally, I’m impressed by the functionality but not impressed by the finish. This one feels half-done – that it wasn’t possible to get it any further down the line before launch date. I have a feeling that over the next few months we’ll see a few patches that resolve 90% of OS’s problems. And when they do – it’s going to be more awesome than ever.

I’d just like to apologise for the relative lack of posting over the last few days on both plasticbag.org and Everything in Moderation. Looking around me I see a near infinity of “things that need to get done”, very few of which are actually getting done. I’m feeling a little swamped and something’s got to give. At the moment that’s the weblog(s). It’s a shame, though, cos there’s so much going on in my head and otherwise that I’d love to be able to write up in greater detail… Patience!

According to a good friend of mine, I spent a good five minutes in the Warner West End’s first-floor loo with Aaron Caffrey – a (tall, enblondened) nineteen year old who was acquitted sometime in the last few days of crashing Port of Houston computer systems. Of course, being completely out of touch with everything that’s happened in the world since I went down with the flu last week, I didn’t notice at all and looked rather blank at my friend while he explained the whole situation to me. Young Katy seemed vaguely clued up on the whole thing too. I am – it seems – out of touch.

Anyway, I can report that at no time during our lavatory-time together did Aaron attempt to break into my systems, that he does indeed fit the stereotype remarkably well and that – in unrelated news – that League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a tedious, unexceptional, bland and irritating adaptation of the Alan Moore / Kevin O’Neill comic book and that I very much don’t recommend it.

Addendum: For those of you actually looking for useful links about Aaron, you might do better here:

• Teen hacker cleared by jury
• Teenager cleared of hacking
• Hacking suspect takes the stand

I’ve not got an awful lot to say about this this fantastically interesting mind-map of social software, but I think it’s slightly too important and interesting to be left loitering in the linklog.

So I’m sitting at my new Powerbook watching The Man of Law’s Tale when Cameron Marlow IM’s me to say that he’s in this conference watching a paper called, Visual Factors In Constructing Authenticity In Weblogs and they’ve just started citing the design of my site. It would probably be disingenuous of me to say that I just ripped off kottke, although when I first showed it to him, he did think it was a joke. Sigh. Anyway, it looks like an interesting paper:

The emergence of weblogs as contributing to the public sphere has returned concerns about authenticity in renewed form: readers who encounter weblogs must construct some basis of trust in the content and the subjectivity represented there in textual form. Many sources of authenticity are largely verbal (mutual citations, ideological coherence, recognized links, ease of access, ranking on index sites). Beyond these, however, there are visual cues which tend to promote confidence: these visual cues are more easily overlooked but nonetheless important in establishing the writers’ credibility.

Ack! My baby’s in London. But when will it arrive in my hands?!

So here’s a concept for a new Typepad weblog, inspired by the quirky and immensely pleasing post categories on a friend’s weblog. The concept is called The Emperor’s Animals and is basically a collection of funny animal links and stories from around the web. The site is designed to resemble 18th/19th Century illustrated guide to fabulous beasts and uses as post categories the The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge typology of animals outlined in Jorge Luis Borges’ The Analytical Language of John Wilkins. Please please will someone make this. I’d read it every day! Just in case you don’t know them off-by-heart already, these categories are:

1. belonging to the Emperor
2. embalmed
3. trained
4. pigs
5. sirens
6. fabulous
7. stray dogs
8. included in this classification
9. trembling like crazy
10. innumerable
11. drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
12. et cetera
13. just broke the vase
14. from a distance look like flies

My new Powerbook was shipped way earlier than I expected and I now find myself routinely checking its progress across the world every two or three hours. It started off in Taipei – a place I’ve never been – and then travelled across the world to Luxembourg – another place I’ve never been. When we finally meet, it will be as two explorers who have explored the world – weary and ready to settle down…

There’s another round of discussion going on post-FOOCamp about combatting spam by increasing transaction costs for e-mail. I’m not going to get too involved in it, because I’ve had many of the arguments before – most often with the lovely Cory Doctorow, but in a nutshell, my position is that there are many situations in online life where the effective removal of marginal cost has created problems in handling massive the subsequent massive amounts of abuse that such systems are prone too. I’m not convinced that building in restrictions into e-mail is particularly desirable, but there are lots of other situations where creating artificial scarcity and building-in increasing marginal costs (even if they are only in effort) might have significant positive impacts.

Here’s some of the older posts I’ve written on these subjects:

• Bringing the Scale back
• Abusability (read the ongoing discussion in the comments)
• By way of a response to Cory Doctorow
• Another response from Cory Doctorow
• On the manufacturing of scarcity
• Yet again manufacturing scarcity
• On increased and exponential marginal cost