Is Palm shooting itself in the foot?

Palm Pre is definitely the best thing to come out of Palm. And it appears that the Pre is a great phone at least judging from the reviews that appeared today (Pogue, Mossberg). The transfusion of Apple's DNA into Palm has transformed Palm to a company that gets it. And this is good. The iPhone needs some strong competition in order to avoid stagnation. And all previous competition has been absolutely pathetic. But ultimate market success is not determined by hardware and software comparisons. And there is something in Palm's strategy that I find completely inane.

The Palm Pre will be available initially only through Sprint in a CDMA version and then 6 months later by Verizon in the GSM version. Here is my guess on what will happen and why this will prove to be disastrous for the Pre.

People with Sprint contracts who want to stay with Sprint will buy the Pre. Everybody else will wait for the Verizon version. This means that initially Pre's sales will not be spectacular. Then the press will call the Pre a failure because for the press (and even more for the internet) something is either a runaway success or a failure. This will discourage (a) developers from writing applications for WebOS and (b) people from buying the Pre when it becomes available through Verizon (because nobody wants to buy a 6 months old failure). By the way, even now reviews portray the Pre as the underdog that tries to go against iPhone's dominance. This is great for the iPhone and disastrous for the Pre. After all, people root for the underdog only when their money is not at stake.

It would be much better for Palm if the fact that the Pre will be available for Verizon was not announced. At least then there would be a reasonable chance that people would switch to Sprint in order to get a Pre. Now this is just not going to happen.

Christianofascism

Abortion provider George Tiller shot to death at church; police search for suspect
Another abortion doctor gunned down

Πιστεύω εις ένα ΚΚ

Το ΚΚΕ (και κάθε ΚΚ) θυμίζει συχνά οργανωμένη θρησκεία σε σημείο να γίνεται γραφικό. Τελευταίο κρούσμα; Η Αλέκα Παπαρήγα προφητεύει ότι ετοιμάζεται προβοκάτσια εναντίον του ΚΚΕ. Δύο πράγματα μπορούν λογικά να συμβούν. Είτε θα γίνει κάτι το οποίο με αρκετό τράβηγμα θα θεωρηθεί ότι εκπληρώνει την προφητεία. Είτε δεν θα γίνει τίποτα, οπότε η Παπαρήγα θα πει ότι η αγωνιστική ετοιμότητα των ψηφοφόρων του ΚΚΕ απέτρεψε την προβοκάτσια. Στοιχηματίζω στο δεύτερο. Σε κάθε περίπτωση η προφητεία δεν θα διαψευσθεί.

Περί Macintosh

Διάβαζα στον Αθήναιο σήμερα περί Macintosh.

Έχω πάει το MacBook 4 φορές για επισκευή (μία για random shutdown syndrome, μία γιατί πέθανε η μπαταρία, και δύο γιατί έσπασε ένα κομμάτι από το πλαστικό). Κανονικά θα έπρεπε να ήμουν απογοητευμένος. Αν ήμουν στην Ελλάδα ενδεχομένως να ήμουν εξαγριωμένος. Εδώ, και τις 4 φορές πήγα το MacBook στο service centre (αφού είχα επικοινωνήσει πρώτα τηλεφωνικά μαζί τους) και μετά από 1 ώρα το πήρα πίσω επισκευασμένο. Παρόλο που απ'όσους υπολογιστές είχα το MacBook έχει παρουσιάσει τα περισσότερα προβλήματα, είναι ταυτόχρονα ο υπολογιστής από τον οποίο είμαι περισσότερο ικανοποιημένος. H απίστευτη εξυπηρέτηση στο service έχει παίξει τεράστιο ρόλο σ'αυτό.

Με δεδομένο ότι σκέφτομαι να επιστρέψω στην Ελλάδα, ανησυχώ για το πώς τέτοια φαινομενικά ασήμαντα πράγματα, επηρεάζουν δραματικά την ποιότητα ζωής. Και δυστυχώς οι διαφορές ανάμεσα στην Ολλανδία και στην Ελλάδα δεν περιορίζονται στο service των Mac.

GrowlMail substitute for Leopard

The upgrade to Leopard broke GrowlMail. It has been announced that the next version (1.1.3) of Growl will solve this problem. Until then I came up with a simple solution that replicates some of GrowlMail's functionality. You need to make a new rule in Mail that applies to every message and runs the following Applescript:

using terms from application "Mail"
 on perform mail action with messages msgs for rule theRule
  tell application "Mail"
   repeat with msg in msgs
    set sdr to sender of msg
    set sbj to subject of msg
    do shell script "echo \"" & sbj & "\" | /usr/local/bin/growlnotify \"" & sdr & "\""
   end repeat
  end tell
 end perform mail action with messages
end using terms from

Obviously you must install growlnotify for this to work. It is included in the Extras directory in the standard Growl distribution.

Update: After I posted this I found a pure Applescript solution. Now the script is:

using terms from application "Mail"
 on perform mail action with messages msgs for rule theRule
  tell application "Mail"
   repeat with msg in msgs
    set sdr to sender of msg
    set sbj to subject of msg
    tell me to notify(sdr, sbj)
   end repeat
  end tell
 end perform mail action with messages
end using terms from


on notify(sender, subject)
 tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
  set the allNotificationsList to {"New Mail"}
  set the enabledNotificationsList to {"New Mail"}
  register as application ¬
   "MailScript" all notifications allNotificationsList ¬
   default notifications enabledNotificationsList ¬
   icon of application "Mail"
  notify with name "New Mail" title sender description subject ¬
   application name "MailScript"
 end tell
end notify

Open File in Leopard

When you choose the Open File command in a program there are two sensible choices for which directory should be selected in the Open File dialog.

The first is that the Open File dialog remembers your last choice and goes again to the same directory. This is what Mac OS X was doing until Tiger.

The second is that the Open File dialog goes to the directory where the file in the frontmost window of the application resides (which is, by the way, exactly how Emacs behaves).

Guess what Leopard is doing.

X11 in Leopard

I installed Leopard doing an “Archive and Install” and then moving some of the archived files to my new account. After that I could not launch X11.app. When trying to launch X11 I could not even see a bouncing icon in the Dock and the message in the Console was:

([0x0-0x24024].org.x.X11_launcher[245]) Stray process with PGID equal to this dead job: PID 246 PPID 1 login

The problem was the file ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist that I had moved from my Tiger system. In environment.plist I had set DISPLAY to :0.0. This setting was useful in Tiger (and before) for launching X11 programs from Emacs. It turns out that setting the DISPLAY is not only unnecessary in Leopard but that if the DISPLAY is set in environment.plist, then X11 does not start at all. After deleting this entry from environment.plist and logging out and back in, the problem disappeared and now X11 starts normally.

iSDK

This is really great news. I had many doubts on what where the plans of Apple on making an SDK for the iPhone, but now it's official: an SDK will be released on February. Perhaps by that time the iPhone will also be available in the Netherlands, or I will get that job in France that I'm after. In any case, I think (hope!) that the iPhone is going to be a great platform for experimentation on mobile applications.

300

Apple has published a list of new features in Leopard. Some things that drew my attention besides the major new features like Time Machine or Spaces:

• Terminal gets (movable) tabs!
• Scripting Bridge: now one can write Cocoa and AppleScript programs in Python (and Ruby). By the way, the page lists this under both "AppleScript" and "Unix".
• Garbage collection in Obj-C.
• Preview gets Instant Alpha and the ability to rearrange pages in a PDF document or combine different PDF documents into one. All these, are things I could have used the previous days and I am sure I will need again in the future.
• DTrace.
• All strings in AppleScript are Unicode. Hopefully no more "as Unicode text".
• Inline editing and attachments in iCal. I was so tired of the previous "information" panel. Now if they would only add hierarchical todos.
• The menu of available wireless networks shows which are password protected and which are not.
• Interface Builder with animations. We will see a lot of silly interfaces. I will make at least one.
• System wide (English) grammar check.
• Automator is getting some new capabilities. I have not figured out yet how to use Automator efficiently and integrate it into my workflow. I will give it again a try after I install Leopard.

And this brings us to the only question: clean install or upgrade?