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Five Days with Lion

July 25, 2011 / Wade posted in Mac, Reviews, Uncategorized / No Comments

I’m a notorious late upgrader, but Mac OS X Lion caught my fancy back on Thursday; my new job doesn’t start ‘til the 28th, so it looked like either update now or update in December, the way new jobs tend to go. So I updated now. My first impression is: wow, but yikes. There’s a lot to love and a lot to be scared of.

What Kind of a Mac User Am I?

The thing about reviews of any sort is that, the closer the reviewer is to the kind of person you are, the more likely it is that the review will be relevant to you. Here’s who I am, so that you can decide if what I say is in any way useful, or if it’s just my usual claptrap. (ed. note — my bet’s on the latter!)

I’m the type of Mac user who writes Applescripts to get things done. I’m comfortable with the Terminal (or, what my lovely wife calls “that scary black screen”). I use a variety of Adobe products, and Office, and a bunch of Mac-specific tools (Things, OmniGraffle, MarsEdit) that you couldn’t pry me away from with a crowbar. I prefer to launch my apps with LaunchBar, although I used to be a Quicksilver user.

And I’ve been with the platform a long time. I remember OS9 and 8, yes, but I was a master of System 7, cut my teeth on System 6, and even worked on a Mac so old that it didn’t have an operating system number. Now I know my daemons and plists, but before I knew my Extensions and my DAs and that I had to use Font/DA Mover to move those around. I understand the concept behind a suitcase. I once considered getting a tattoo of Clarus. If this is you, you might find this review useful.

First, the Verdict

Definitely upgrade. Generally love it. Keep your eyes wide open, though: the big killer is the lack of Rosetta. If you need Rosetta, you need to stay on your existing OS.

Upgrading & the Mac App Store

The very first thing you experience when you upgrade to Lion is the upgrade process itself, and Lion’s is amazing. You just click on the Lion icon in the Mac App Store, the darned thing downloads — it didn’t take nearly as long as I feared, and I downloaded it on launch day, so I’d bet anyone with a cadle mobem or better would have it done by the end of dinner. The upgrade ran quickly and easily, and much sooner than I’d expected I was up and running in Lion.

Part of what made that up-and-running seem so fast is that Lion boots straight to the login screen, and only after you log in sends you to the ol’ blank gray screen with the spinning wait cursor that the OS shows during boot. I don’t know if boot overall is faster, but I sure felt better-served!

Does Lion Play Well With My 4-Year-Old MacBook Pro?

Yes, yes it does. I’ve got a MacBook Pro with a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo (a MacBookPro3,1 for the geeks out there), and it’s noticeably snappier with Lion than it was with Snow Leopard. Leopard was itself snappier than Tiger, so I think Apple’s on a bit of a roll here. The speed increase is perhaps most visible in the Finder — which was rewritten in Cocoa, so should be a lot faster — but app opening and closing, and file opening and saving, are noticeably faster as well. Memory usage might have gone down a smidge as well, although I’m still happy that I have 6 gigs of RAM.

Lion’s Look

The first thing I noticed was the new square corners and tiny close-minimize-maximize chic lets. I have to say, those latter I think don’t look much good at all, but the squarer corners are a change that’s really grown on me. Replacing many Aqua-themed control widgets with flatter controls with fewer colors definitely makes the screen less-busy and easier-on-the-eyes. Some have speculated that it could be easier to miss controls with these looks, but I haven’t had that problem. Frankly, I think it looks slick.

Scrolling

The first part of this look that’s a noticeable change is the new scrollbars: no arrows, no handles; heck, there’s no scroll thumb in newer apps that take advantage of the latest controls. This is kind of shocking to look at, but, I have to admit, I can’t remember the last time I relied much on the scrollbar; I generally work with 30-60 page documents, and the traditional scrollbar just isn’t that much use there. Gestures have also been changed: you drag down with two fingers to scroll down, and up with two fingers to scroll up. It sounds stupid, but it’s just like the swipes you do on a smartphone. I never really used the gestures to scroll before, but now I do, and I love it. I don’t miss the old way at all.

Window Management

Another big change is window management. Since back in the early days of the Mac, you moved a window from the titlebar at the top and resized it from a special control at one corner. Now, you can resize from any edge. Honestly, having moved back and forth between Windows and the Mac, I never really thought resize-from-all-sides was a big advantage for Windows, and I don’t care now.

Lion offers true fullscreen windows — not just maximized, but occupying the sole layer in a given space, and with no menubar or other chrome. (The menu pops up if you mouse to the top of the screen.) This is great for apps, like Mail, which you manage mostly through buttons in the interface or through key commands, and for apps like OmniGraffle that you control through palettes. Be careful, though! If your app really, really isn’t written for full-screen — like, say, Chrome — then you can get it to full-screen without the button that gets you out of full-screen ever appearing!

Of course, window management isn’t just sizing and moving windows, it’s seeing where all your windows are. Lion replaces Exposé and Spaces with Mission Control, which seemed super-cool in the demos and so far has only disappointed. Honestly, this is the piece that I wish I didn’t have the most in the entire upgrade. The big problem for me is that I used to group windows by activity in each space — one for mail, one for notes, one for to-dos, and one for each project. That was easy in Leopard and Snow Leopard, because you could just hit F8 and see all your Spaces and drag windows from one to the next. Unfortunately, with Mission Control, you have a two-step process to move windows between Spaces: you need to first navigate to the starting space, then enter Mission Control from there, then drag the windows over. That’s twice as much work. Plus, everything’s in a straight line, instead of a grid, so you can’t move directly from, say, Space 1 to Space 4 like you used to be able to.

Worse, full-screen apps don’t play well with Mission Control. Full-screen apps each get their own space, but there’s no way to directly switch to that space — it’s not numbered. The only ways to get there are to go into Mission Control or to command-arrow over there.

Frankly, Mission Control has left me with this pattern of using Lion in which I move back and forth in my spaces, as if along a ribbon of film. It reminds me of the good ol’ System 4 Switcher days, back before even MultiFinder.

Mail, iCal, and Address Book

iCal and Address Book have been re-done in new skeuomorphic looks. Skeuomorphic is a word I learned reading about iCal and Address Book’s new looks, and it means “look like real things.” They sure do! Address Book’s new look is skin-deep only; it works about the same, but now it looks like a book, rather than Baby’s First User Interface Design Project. It’s a meh.

iCal’s redesign, despite it’s stupid leather look, is awesome. The year view now gives you a heat map of how busy your days are, so you can see when you have time and when you don’t; it’s brilliant for setting far-future events based on free time. The month and week views are the same as they were before, which isn’t bad since I used to live in my week view; but the day view is my new favorite. You get the usual view of your day, but, instead of a bunch of wasted space, there’s now an agenda view of the whole week right next to it. Definitely the best way to look at your schedule!

Mail is similarly brilliant. Everyone talks about the 3-pane view, which is nice, but, to me, the other details are better. One is that the three-view is really a two-view: there’s a button to toggle the folder list opened and closed, which is great since we all mostly spend time in our inbox and only refer elsewhere sometimes. Most of the time that list can be out of the way, but it’s still easily at-hand when you need it.

The other is the new threaded mail view. Basically, the right-hand reading pane looks like GMail’s, but prettier. Brilliant! Honestly, with Mail’s great new look and powerful rules, plus Mail Act-On’s flexible rules and filing commands, I can hardly imagine needing more from my mail client.

If you live in iCal and Mail, then the $29.95 update to Lion is worth it just for those two apps; you’d easily spend more on third-party apps of a similar caliber.

Other New Features

One thing I rather don’t like is the new dialogs the system pops when it needs an Administrator password for something: you used to be able to click on a disclosure triangle to see exactly who was asking for something, but no more. I liked that info, and, thanks to the disclosure triangle, I can’t see how it would’ve gotten in anybody’s ways.

User account icons are circular with a fairly prominent beveled edge. Just looks stupid!

The Guest account is gone, which I can’t see how that’s an improvement.

E-mail and Calendar account prefs are now in the Preferences, rather than in a given app. Potentially useful, if all your apps can eventually draw from this.

Autocorrect in spelling works like on the iPhone, with little pop-up suggestion boxes and autocorrect. I think I have to get used to this, but I’m not sure what the point is on a non-multitouch screen. A portent of the future?

I’ve had some trouble with the new DVD player. Hopefully, that’s more the DVD I tried than the software itself!

Did I mention no Rosetta? This is a Do Not Upgrade if you’re reliant on, say, Microsoft Office 2004.

My Verdict

I really need to get better used to the desktop- and window-management paradigms from Mission Control. I suspect they’re good at the end of the day, but I need to learn how to use them.

Mail is one of the best e-mail clients I’ve ever used.

With the exception of Mission Control, I’m not really bothered by anything, and overall my computer is definitely faster. Lion’s a good upgrade! At $29.95, it’s a no-brainer for pretty much any Intel Mac user.

Why I’m Not Worried About the Debt Ceiling Talks

July 24, 2011 / Wade posted in Politics, Uncategorized / No Comments

Seems like every day, I hear “Obama did this” or “Boehner said that” or “Polls show the other thing.” So nobody can seem to agree about the debt ceiling. Meh; I’m not worried. See, I’ve learned an important lesson in life: don’t worry about the things that are going to happen for sure, no matter how bad they are. And we’re going to default on our debt for sure, no matter how bad an idea that is.

Now, clearly Wall Street disagrees with this assessment; and, despite the clear evidence that markets are not always rational, I do tend to think that the stock market knows a few things. In this case, I think they know too much: they know how bad it will really be for the economy if we default on our debt. But our pending default has much more to do with the dynamics of negotiation than it does with the economy. Let’s break it down.

How Negotiation Works

Here’s how a simple two-party negotiation works. Both parties live in a world of facts:

Based upon those facts, the two parties have separate opinions and positions:

There’s an area of intersection of those opinions and positions:

And the resolution lies somewhere in that area. It may move back and forth; it may be on the edge of one party’s acceptable opinions and positions; but that’s where you’ll almost always find the resolution.

Of course, sometimes there’s no overlap in opinions and positions:

In these cases, there’s really no room for an agreement.

When parties fail to reach an agreement, both are stuck with what the pros call their BATNA — their Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. In other words, they agree to disagree, and they both end up with whatever consequences they’ve prepared for themselves. Based on their failure to agree, the world of facts changes, and they live in a new environment:

Perhaps that environment leads to overlap in opinions and positions; perhaps not. Since these are imaginary people, we don’t care. Let’s move on to real people.

Where We Are

Now, right now, it appears to many that the problem that we have is that the GOP and the Democrats don’t have an overlap in opinions and positions:

However, the problem is actually much more serious than that: they don’t have an overlap in facts at all:

In this case, you can’t move the two circles of opinion to overlap, because you can’t move either out of its enclosing square of facts, and those don’t overlap at all. You’re stuck with a negotiation in which you’re horse-trading facts — “I’ll agree that the sky is green, if you’ll give me that grass is orange” — and that just leaves all the negotiators furious and their supporters feeling betrayed if an agreement is made.

Not only that, but the two sides BATNAs are also unrelated. If no agreement is reached, here’s what the two sides think will happen:

Not only not only that, but there’s a whole separate set of political facts perceived by each side, and those create substantial upsides in both parties’ BATNAs:

I’m sure you’ll be shocked, shocked to hear that I don’t see any overlap in each side’s perception of the political facts on the ground, any more than I see overlap in their perception of economic facts on the ground.

How to Solve Our Problem

Shoot the bastards. Ha! Just kidding. Well, sort of not. Shooting the bastards is how, historically, most of these disagreements about locus of power in Presidential systems actually have turned out. But I don’t mean that on the small scale; generally, these kinds of situations either resolve themselves by one party massively overplaying its hand and losing power, or by the two parties shooting it out at some length. The fun historical note is that the party that overplays its hand usually is empowered and unified by the experience and becomes a much more potent extra-governmental force. Usually with guns. Yeah, you knew I was going there.

No, there’s really no solution to this particular problem. Fortunately, this particular problem is only a consequence of another problem, one we’ve been struggling with meaningfully since 1980. Fundamentally, we’re not disagreeing on what to do about the economy; we’re disagreeing about what it means to be elected.

This is the source of our problem. The voters put in Obama as the executive. They also, more recently, put the Democrats in charge of the Senate. At the same time, they put the GOP in charge of the House. Question: whose agenda gets advanced given this split system?

Well, in the past, our electorate seems to have split majorities in the houses and holding of the Presidency in order to minimize the risk that radical policies get followed. This resulted in nobody doing anything too crazy, but it also meant that nothing happened on real issues like healthcare and tax reform. At Microsoft, they have this term “Strategy Tax” — that is, any strategy levies “taxes” on subsidiary or marginal activities, keeping these from being all they can be in the name of the larger strategy. I also say there’s such a thing as a “Lack of Strategy Tax” — that, as you delay making decisions about a difficult questions, your possible responses become more and more limited, until you’re stuck with only responses you considered non-optimal or even unacceptable earlier. In effect, your past you levied a tax on your future you by not making a decision.

And that’s the problem with the path we followed through the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s: we didn’t do anything too radical, but we levied a lack of strategy tax on our future selves, in things like healthcare; taxation; the responsibilities of government; how to grow jobs; social mobility; education; and more. And now we can see that those taxes have either come due, or are about to come due. Yet, by doing nothing, we’ve left ourselves only a set of edge responses.

And that’s the fundamental source of our problem. Our solutions are all a bit crazy, at least compared to what we’ve generally agreed to in the past (at least during quieter times). That means that someone needs to take the reins and either lead or pull us to the uncomfortable truth of what we do next.

Except here we went and split our government, and now nobody is clearly in charge. Did we elect the GOP and their crazy answers when we put them in charge of the House? Did we elect the Democrats and their crazy answers when we left them the Senate? Did we put Obama in charge of it all when we elected him back in ‘08? That’s the discussion we need to have. And, if we can have it in the next week or so, then we’ll resolve the situation. However, most countries that have this discussion without shooting at each other (or, without shooting at each other much) take months to years to resolve this situation.

And that’s why I’m not worried about the debt ceiling talks. No way are we going to resolve the underlying problem; no way are we going to come to agreement on proximal problems; nope, we’re going to default for sure. I might as well worry about Tuesday following Monday. Nope, the only thing I plan to worry about is: what do I want to make for my Debt Default party? Who’s on the invite list? I think that Court and I have a great deal of overlap in both our circles and our squares as we negotiate those out.

Robert Reich: The Shameful Murder of Dodd Frank

July 20, 2011 / Wade posted in Uncategorized / Comments Off

Link: Robert Reich: The Shameful Murder of Dodd Frank

robertreich:

Happy Birthday Dodd Frank,
Happy Birthday to you,
You’ve lost all your muscle,
And your teeth are gone, too.

One full year after the financial reform bill spearheaded through Congress by Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank was signed into law, Wall Street looks and acts much the way it did before….

Absolute capital corrupts absolutely?

Tea Party: Stupid or Brilliant?

July 15, 2011 / Wade posted in Politics, Uncategorized / No Comments

The recent compromise in Minnesota begs the perpetual lefty question: is the Tea Party’s insistence on certain aggressive policies genius or ignorance? After all, in MN, they insisted that the state require photo ID at polling places to vote — something the courts have consistently held is a tool to repress minority voting, and something the courts have consistently not permitted.

The stock “they’re idiots!” interpretation is that Tea Party members either:

Don’t know about this history of court rulings
Don’t believe these rulings apply to them
Are racist and just don’t care

All of that is possible. In fact, the Tea Party being a large group, I’m confident that at least some of those are true of some members, just as they would be true for any other large group.

But I’m actually not betting on that here; I’m betting on brilliant. When you’re negotiating, it’s always good to know which points are important to you, and which are ones you can compromise on. Sometimes, to get the most leverage, you might throw in some points you would never expect to win on, and then roll over on those points straight away.

Requiring ID at the polls seems like one of those. You can give up on it easily, at the end, because you know it’ll be caught up in the courts for years even if you got it. But the liberals hate the idea, so they’re prepared to fight against it and maybe even give up something meaningful to stop it. And, hey, best-case scenario, it gets passed and the current fairly-conservative Supreme Court finds it’s fine in a state like MN, without a history of discrimination at the polls, or simply denies cert and allows the more-conservative Circuit Court’s interpretation to stand.

So I think it’s brilliant.

The good thing, is that it’s easy to fight tactics like this: just give them the chance to win on it! Let ‘em have that point. In fact, speak in public about how you understand that’s such a big point to the opposition, even though you find it despicable, you’re going to give it to them right now. And then they’re stuck with it. Then they have to give away a negotiating point they might actually have won on.

And there’s two long-term outcomes:

Turns out requiring IDs at the polls works in the way people expect, is clearly discriminatory, and the courts knock it down
Turns out requiring IDs at the polls makes no difference in this day and age, and things are fine

Heck, you’ll know in one election, when you compare the racial breakdown of the exit poling data. Sure it’s a little risky medium-term, but it’s got short- and long-term benefits, and why not play the long game? I have the feeling the Tea Party is!

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-7-10)

July 12, 2011 / Wade posted in Uncategorized / Comments Off

Link: My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-7-10)

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

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