Query for Apple watchers

Here's a question for the Apple watchers among you (and you know who you are). WWDC 2004 was June 28-July 2, 2004. According to this page, WWDC 2006 will be June 11-16, 2006.

But when is WWDC 2005? And why hasn't the date been announced?

Why I care: my bet for when Tiger will ship is at or just before WWDC, assuming that WWDC is in late June. And given that people need some advance notice in order to make plans to go, it's surprising that no date has been officially announced yet.

Macworld Expo and Web Standards: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

I just got home from Macworld Expo, and I spent some time looking around through the eyes of someone who cares about Web standards…

The good: If you have OS X, and you don't have TextWrangler 2.0 from Bare Bones, go download it now. It's okay, I'll wait. Back now? Hey, it's free, it's from the same folks who make the amazing BBEdit, and did I mention that it's free? It doesn't have quite all the same features as BBEdit, but you should check it out if haven't yet. BBEdit is simply the finest text editor money can buy on OS X, and TextWrangler is a good way to get that first taste that'll make you want more.

The bad: Apple's newly-announced Pages application looks like a wonderful little lightweight page layout program… and a terrible disaster as a HTML editor. Yes, it does let you export as HTML but trust me, you shouldn't. The number one complaint about MS FrontPage is that it has a tendency to make pages that only look good in IE/Win. Pages created in Pages don't even look good in Safari.

The ugly: The only thing that looked worse than the way Pages-generated pages looked in Safari was how "View Source" looked for those same pages in Safari. Any application newly released in 2005 that doesn't know how to add a DOCTYPE to the page, well, shouldn't be used to create pages. Please.

Apple, please, please — either fix the HTML that Pages creates, or remove the HTML option entirely. The last thing the Web needs is more crap.

From a favorite mailing list

From one of my favorite daily mailing lists:
D I T H E R A T I
see the digerati dither, daily

COINCIDENTALLY, THAT'S ALSO THE PROFIT MARGIN ON THE MAC MINI

"'Why doesn't Apple offer a stripped-down iMac that's more affordable?'
If I had a nickel for every time I've heard that."

Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who's apparently heard this request 42 billion times, The Register, 11 January 2005

The best we can do right now at hardware analysis

In hardware news, Apple announced both the Mac mini and the iPod shuffle.

We want. We don't need, but we want.

Apple, the Internet, and DTP 2005

Almost eight years ago, I wrote an article called Apple, the Internet, and DTP. Among other things, it complained about the complete lack of entry-level page layout software available on the Mac. And that's been true for years.

Here's what I just wrote to a mailing list:

My take, from the keynote and just a few minutes playing with Pages on the show floor: Apple is lying through their teeth when they call it a word processor. It's not. It's a page layout program.

It doesn't compete with Word. It competes with InDesign.

Okay, not for anyone who's doing hard-core layout. It's for those folks who want to do a two or four page newsletter or short brochure. For their school, their holiday family letter, their kid's sports team, etc. Which is a heck of a lot of projects that aren't appropriate to try to lay out in Word, but where InDesign is overkill.

It's entirely about laying out pages, not about editing text. You get some lovely templates with greeked text, and you drag and drop and copy and paste your text and images into the areas.

The rumor mill here says that Apple is more willing to piss off Microsoft than Adobe, so they're calling it a word processing app instead of an entry-level page layout app. But the latter is what it is, no question. It's no competition for Word in any way.

Or in other words, it's taken eight years, but Apple has finally solved the problem that I bitched about then. Huzzah!

Off to the show

With this posting, we're just about off to Macworld Expo. Email reception and posting here will be intermittant, at best. If you need to contact us, well, you should have my cell phone number. If you're at the show, keep an eye out for us and say hi!

iPod to car stereo connection

This device lets you control your iPod with your car stereo.

Direct connection with CD quality sound = YES
Control your ipod using your car radio buttons = YES
Control your ipod using your steering wheel controls = YES
Charges your iPod internal battery = YES

My next car stereo is going to be able to do this, one way or another.

Sorry, kids

From the DNC's Kicking Ass weblog, a post by Josh McConaha that I think is worth reprinting in its entirety:

USA Today has revealed that conservative radio host Armstrong Williams collected $240,000 in taxpayer funds from the Department of Education after signing a contract which obligated him to promote George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act on air and to interview Bush Education Secretary Rod Paige about the initiative.

That $240,000 could have paid for six teachers this year…each of them with a job far more important than that of Armstrong.

On top of that, the public relations firm that arranged for the payment collected an additional $760,000 to promote No Child Left Behind. That $760,000 went to help pay for the production of video news releases, which are essentailly fake news reports presented by fake reporters distributed to media outlets in hopes of catching them in a moment of laziness. This, combined with secretly paying a radio personality to promote a government program, is illegal, and it was all done as part of Bush's massive PR campaign.

How many schools could have been repaired with that money? How many computers or books could have been purchased? Surely those school administrators who can't pay the bills associated with this unfunded program would appreciate even a small piece of the money that was spent on this massive, illegal, tax payer-funded public relations campaign.

Think about the waste, fraud, and arrogance this displays. Rather than doing its job — you know, educating children — the DoE instead decides to pay for corruption and lies. These people call themselves conservatives, but a true conservative would recoil from these sleazy tactics.

Blogger lunch regrets

According to the Hess Memorial Macworld Expo SF 2005 Events List, there's a blogger's lunch on Tuesday. Sadly, as with a previous blogger's get-together at Macworld Expo, it's not friendly for the mobility-impaired, so we can't attend.

Anyone want to get together some other time? We'll be around from Monday late afternoon till Friday early afternoon. We've got a lot of meetings scheduled, but we're always happy to see you.