QuirkeyBlog

After a good two years of pounding the keys in to oblivion, my PowerBook G4 just got too slow. I’m not doing video editing or anything super processor heavy, but my typical work-mode involves at least one TextMate project, Safari, BonEcho Firefox, iTerm with autotest running, and at least one mongrel serving up my current project. My G5 can handle 3 times that, but my little ‘powpow’ just couldn’t take it.

So I did two things. First, I joined the Apple Developer Connection (ADC). This was a pretty awesome deal. Not only did I get a fresh copy of the Leopard Beta and this astoundingly nerdy t-shirt, but it also got me a nice discount on - Two, my beautiful new 15″ ‘Santa Rosa’ MacBook Pro. In the end, the ADC membership ended up costing less then nothing when you include the discount and the free copies of OS X.

I’ve had it for a little while now, and though I haven’t completely set it up, I can say one thing - holy crap this thing is fast.

(hopefully fast enough to give me time to blog more)

I’ve been a faithful Camino user since it was in Beta, and abandoned all other browsers (except for testing) a number of months ago. Lately though, Camino has been causing me more grief then joy. Here are the biggest problems I’ve been having:

1) Keychain support - As far as I can tell, Camino only stores one keychain entry per domain/host. This is fine for most of the time, but as a web developer there are some domains, particularly one where I’m an admin or have multiple apps installed where multiple keychain entries are completely necessary. For example, I’ll have one user/pass for domain.com/admin and another for domain.com/mysqladmin and another for domain.com/wordpress. In Safari and Firefox these keychain entries are all stored separately with the full URL path as the entry name. In Camino, I can only store one user/pass and basically have to pick which I should let the browser remember, and try to remember myself not to overwrite it.

2) Downloads Pane - after the 1.02 build every-time I download something, Camino freezes up until the download has sufficiently started and been added to the Downloads pane. This is a real hassle when trying to download many or large files.

3) Javascript support - This could be an issue with the Gecko engine and unfortunately I don’t have benchmarks to prove it, but heavy client side javascript seems much much much faster in every other browser. As this becomes more common, Camino has become to seem a lot more sluggish in general.

In light of all of this, I’ve moved my default browser back to Safari. This makes me especially excited because of the recent release of Inquisitor 3 - which is just plain SWEET looking, besides working a lot better.

UPDATE

I sent these issues to Camino Feedback and got a very quick response to these three points which I’m posting below:

1) This is a limitation of the older Keychain APIs we’re using (it was all that was available when our keychain support was written). They’re currently in the process of being re-written.

2) I’m guessing that you’re using Quicksilver, which is indexing the desktop, and you’re downloading to the desktop. A fix is being written, but in the mean time, there are several workarounds:

1. Don’t have QS index the desktop
2. Don’t download to the desktop
3. Keep your downloads list short

3) Yeah, there are a couple of open JS-related performance bugs.

Thanks, Stridey! I’ll definitely come back to Camino soon - I promise.

For the past month I’ve been rooting and voting on My Dream App for the one application that was ‘my dream app’ : Cookbook. I’m extremely pumped that it landed in the top three and is going to become a reality.

Kat and I do a fair amount of cooking because we love to do it. Though I like cooking off the top of my head (grab a bunch of ingredients and make something delicious), Cooking from recipes can be an education if you know how to extract techniques and flavors. We have a decent cookbook collection, but often we use Epicurous to find something new. Since our apartment lacks a printer, Kat’s iBook usually sits on the dining room table and Firefox becomes our cookbook.

With this app, I could see the computer becoming an integral part of our cooking ritual. Not only could we store recipes from the internet and magazines, but I could actually type out some of my ‘AQ originals’. Timers, Full Screen mode, and just the slickness of the interface, could make this unbelievably useful.

I wait anxiously for any previews or releases.

Thanks to iColours.ca and a little scary moment when I had to crack the cover off my Powerbook, it is now about 1000x cooler. See a detail which is regretfully blurry. It took me a while to figure out what I would want to put in the small space of the apple. Consider it an ode to my favorite bridge.

Quick OS X productivity tip:

In System Preferences > Date & Time (also accessible by clicking on the clock in your menu bar and selecting ‘Open Date & Time . . .’)

Under the ‘Clock’ Tab, Check ‘Announce the Time’ and select your interval.

Now you’ll have a friendly reminder that time is flying.

GTD is a lot about time and how you spend it. Merlin Mann suggests a bunch of different electronic timers to help you enforce the 2-minute rule.

I’m not that disciplined . . . yet. I’m slowly killing my bad habits of wasting time and getting lost in the noise of email, AIM, and my feed reader. One of my biggest issues is that I easily loose track of time. Even though there’s a clock glaring in the upper right of my screen, I often don’t take my eyes off of whatever I’m doing for long enough to notice that I’m a couple minutes late for a call, or I should have been out the door 10 minutes ago.

Having this friendly reminder every half-an-hour, not only reminds me of what I need to be doing, but lets me break up time into useful chunks. When I’m told, “It is now twelve thirty”, I can say to myself, OK, I’m going to spend the next 30 minutes wrapping this up, and then I’m going to move on to another task.

I can’t wait until Leopard and the upcoming speech improvements. That should make this even less annoying and more useful.