I just installed iPhoto ‘09 and tried the face recognition feature:

Wickedly cool.

   _____________________
  /                     \
  | I love my new Mac!* |
  \______________  _____/
                 \/
                ______
               /      \      ___________________
               | *  * |  ___/                   \
               |  __  |     | It's so great for |
               \______/     | graphics!**       |
                            \___________________/

      * Except Xara isn't available for Mac.

            ** Until X11 starts crashing, making both
               Gimp and Inkscape completely unusable,
               forcing you to revert to ASCII for
               your stupid comics.

On Twitter, a “Retweet” is how we pass along interesting content to our followers. For example:

Notice the “RT” prefix, indicating this is a “Retweet”. People also spell out “Retweet”, but RT seems to be far more popular. Note that Retweeting is not an official Twitter feature, it’s just something people do.

There is another way, however. Many people now use the recycle symbol ♺ to indicate Retweets. I think this looks nicer than the alternatives, although ♺ has drawbacks:

• It consumes three bytes, cutting into your 140 byte limit.
• It might not display properly. When I use Twhirl, ♺ shows up as an empty box. (This could be the font I’m using, I need to investigate further.)

Finding the ♺ Character

You won’t find ♺ on your keyboard. On OS X, you can go to Edit -> Special Characters... to bring up this screen:

After a lot of scrolling and searching, you’ll eventually find the “RECYCLING SYMBOL FOR GENERIC MATERIALS” as shown above.

Typing ♺ and Other Unicode Characters

Provided you know the Unicode hex value (♺ = 267A), you can directly type the character. Just do this:

1. From the Apple menu, select System Preferences...
2. Click on International
3. Select the Input Menu tab
4. Scroll down and make these selections: U.S., U.S. Extended, and Unicode Hex Input

Via someone’s advice on Twitter, I found this blog entry explaining the same thing, but he (?) did not mention selecting “U.S. Extended”. Without that, this technique does not work.

Now, to create the ♺ symbol, hold option and type 267a.

Other notes:

• The Special Characters screen shows the hex values for characters in the tooltip for each character. Just hover your mouse pointer over the character for a few seconds.
• I found another article that says to hold down shift and option, but it works fine for me without the shift key.
• This bug may affect you.

My wife’s ancient PC finally died; it was a $400 Gateway we bought many years ago. Fortunately the hard drive was OK, so here I am, transferring the files from the old hard drive to a different PC. This process takes forever and is really annoying when it comes to application migration.

Here’s something PC users might not realize about OSX: most apps are simply dropped into the applications directory. I assume that moving most apps from one Mac to another is as simple as copying these directories. (I could be wrong, my Mac hasn’t died yet, so I have not had to try this!)

This is certainly not the case on Windows, where each application builds a web of intricate registry references, requiring a fresh install when moving to a new PC. What a pain.

For most applications, the Windows Registry seems like a huge design flaw. Why does a simplistic application like Print Shop need the Registry at all? Can’t installation be as simple as unzipping into Program Files and storing user preferences under each user’s profile directory?

I’m done with my rant. I feel better. Files are still copying…this could be a long night.

A human would never make this mistake:

I initially suspected this happened because the MP3s from Amazon have “(Album Version)” in their titles while the titles in the iTunes store do not.

Simple Test

To confirm my suspicion, I renamed the tracks to match the titles in the iTunes store. Unfortunately, Genius still provides the same “Top Songs You’re Missing”, so I think this flaw goes beyond simple title matching.

I find this odd because iTunes is able to automatically locate the album art. Perhaps some of the intelligence behind the album art locator needs to work its way into the Genius sidebar.

It’s all about design.

At first I thought it was just my iPod Touch with the new firmware. Then I heard about the iPhone 3G having similar problems.

I just installed Eclipse Ganymede on Leopard, and within minutes noticed weird screen artifacts and GUI problems. The welcome page had these big tooltips that were always chopped off. I’d show a picture here, but I can’t figure out how to get back to that page.

I then tried installing the Terracotta plugin, and eventually see this screen:

Although no plugin apears, it really is there…somewhere behind the broken GUI. I clicked next and proceeded through the installation successfully.

Other Eclipse screens show similar screen artifacts. For example, check out the weird blue button at the end of the Description field:

That is a real button…you can click on it, but I’m not sure what it does.

Do these Eclipse Ganymede problems exist on other platforms? Will porting SWT to Cocoa fix these artifacts?

I ran Vista since day one, on my relatively old desktop computer. Vista actually ran fairly well, and for the first year I had few performance complaints. Stability was good too. In the entire time I had Vista, I recall only one blue screen of death. That was due to an old video driver, I believe, and it never happened again.

I dutifully installed SP1, and Vista seemed to work fine. But then, over a period of many weeks, performance began to suffer. Each day, Vista slowed down a bit. I tried everything I could think of, for instance I ran CCleaner every night, uninstalled most apps, disabled the sidebar, disabled indexing, defragged routinely, etc. I even manually tweaked the page file settings.

Nothing helped, and no particular process in task manager was an obvious culprit. Vista SP1 just kept getting slower and slower, until it finally became unbearable.

Poor Vista performance is another reason I recently purchased my MacBook. I had the option of buying a high-end PC, but I had little confidence Vista would use that power efficiently. I hate spending a lot of money on computer hardware, but I hate waiting for sluggish computers even more.

Vista supports hardware-accelerated graphics. WPF seems to support really cool things like vector-based UIs. Yet where are the “native” Vista apps?

The Wikipedia WPF article mentions a handful of WPF apps, but for the most part, the Windows ecosystem is mired in backward compatibility hell. Bundled apps like Notepad, Paint, and the DOS shell are a disgrace, and have not really changed in years.

How can Microsoft expect third parties to develop Vista-specific apps if the bundled utilities don’t even take advantage of Vista features? This is incredibly hard to understand.

Good luck, Microsoft. I’m typing this on my new MacBook Pro, and it looks like I have plenty of native Cocoa apps from which to choose.