You’ll find Indiana fingers, Han Solo fingers, and fingers of every other mood and persuasion in the Harrison Ford Finger Gallery. (I’d like to see a Darth Vader finger gallery, myself.) And if that’s not enough gallery for your Friday morning, there’s also a Post-It Gallery to poke around in.
I’m not a fan of cell phones at all. I hate the sound of them ringing on crowded subways, I hate people who answer them at restaurants and during lectures, I hate that over-loud voice everyone uses with when talking on them. It’s been a couple of years now since I got rid of my own short-lived cell phone, and I don’t miss it a bit (despite the proclamations of everyone who swore that once I had one I’d wonder how I ever lived without it). However, I’m willing to admit that it’s probably not going to be more than another couple years before I end up getting another one. I’m not actually a Luddite, and it’s true that it’s more a lack of cell etiquette among everyone else with a phone that bothers me, as opposed to the phones themselves. And my owning or refusing to own a cell phone isn’t going to stop the rest of the world from being rude.
So I’ve been keeping half an eye out for related news and recommendations and whatnot, albeit with a certain amount of resignation. Interestingly enough, David Pogue has recently written a number of columns for the Times pertaining to cell phones. His email column for Circuits today is on Handspring’s slick new phone, and last week’s was on features that should be standard (and free) but aren’t. There are more in the Times archives (on camera phones, messaging, etc), but they’re old enough that you’ll have to pay a couple bucks if you want to read them.
(A mostly unrelated note - searching the Times site for David Pogue without quotes results in a polite query: “Did you intend to search for David Piggy?”)
Mac OS X Unleashed is not a pocket guide. It’s more of a massive tome than anything else - at over 1500 pages, it’s probably the heaviest technical book I own. (And that’s including Deitel & Deitel’s C: How to Program, which is weirdly weighty for its size.) Since Mac OS X Unleashed describes itself as “a complete guide and reference for Mac OS users”, my biggest question when approaching the book was whether this is in fact the case. It seems like if you’re going to shell out for an OS X book of this size and price, then it should ideally be the only OS X book you’ll have to buy.
What I Liked
There’s no shortage of good things about Unleashed, but the best is probably that the authors assume, for the most part,that you already know how to use your computer. Although there are many good books out there for those new to Macs, this is not one of them and does not try to be. That means that if you’ve already achieved a basic working knowledge of Mac OS, there’s still well over a thousand pages of information intended especially for you. A line from another review of Unleashed (posted anonymously on Amazon) that rang particularly true after reading the book: “If you’re looking for a book that says ‘this is called a mouse’ and tells you where to find iTunes in order to click on it, or drops the bombshell that command-p will print in many applications, you don’t need this volume, but if you want to get your hands dirty, it’s an excellent resource.”
However, I can understand that many people do want the basics in an OS X book. In fact, another Amazon reviewer makes this very point: “Coverage of the iApps is far less than it should be, and there isn’t enough information for a novice user like myself. I thought the author spent far too much time on the UNIX and Terminal side of Jaguar and not enough on the real-world tips that I’ve found in other books.” Still, I personally don’t really see that as a problem. There are plenty of real-world tips as long as your real world involves a shell, and if there’s one thing I’ve never needed a book for, it’s the iApps. In fact, I’ve always found it irritating that other OS X books spend so much time on them. But that’s me, and I’m not everyone.
There were several sections of the book that surprised me, including the chapter on web programming. It makes sense, though - the book is intended to “unleash” OS X, after all, and OS X does come with an Apache installation (even if System Preferences calls it Personal Web Sharing). Given that every OS X box has a webserver, it makes sense that many OS X users would want to know more about related topics. In fact, the chapters that focus on system and network administration comprise a pretty thorough introduction to the BSD side of OS X, and were fairly impressive. These were my favorite sections of the book, probably because they’re topics rarely dealt with - or at least rarely dealt with well - in Mac books.
What I Didn’t Like
The book suffers from some minor issues typical of most massive technical volumes - it’s informative, but also dry, dense, and not terribly readable. Also, while I appreciate the depth and scope of the book, it is a little unwieldy. This isn’t something you’ll be reading in bed or on the subway. It’s not a cheap book, either - its list price is $50. These problems are neither hugely important nor terribly surprising, but they’re also not inevitable - reference texts can be thorough without being dull, it’s just that this one happens to be both.
Probably the only other real complaint I have with the book is that at times it seems as though it can’t decide who its audience is. As I mentioned above, one of the things I liked about Unleashed was that most of the book seems firmly aimed at the intermediate to experienced user. And yet if that’s the case, then the chapters that cover things like Desktop Accessories (Calculator, Clock, Key Caps) seem out of place. It doesn’t seem like the introductory material offered in the book would really be enough to serve as a tutorial for an absolute beginner (as evidenced by complaints like the one I quoted earlier), but at the same time it’s difficult to figure out who else would need it. However, I’m not suggesting they skimped on advanced topics to squeeze in inappropriate Clock coverage - if there’s one thing this book has, it’s plenty of everything.
The Bottom line
I believe that Unleashed does live up to its title, and does a good job in the process. It’s not an introduction to OS X - it’s about getting more out of your system after you’ve already learned the basics. It doesn’t (usually) try to be a beginner’s book, but a quick-learning novice would probably do fine with it, and any moderately experienced Mac user will probably find that it serves his or her purposes effectively and efficiently. If given the choice (and funding), I’d probably still go with a couple different books, but I think Unleashed has in fact reached its goal of being a complete guide to OS X. You could do just fine with only this book, and at $50 it may be cheaper than buying a couple smaller books separately.
And Furthermore
Other reviews and sources of information on the book:
So it turns out that hell does exist, and it’s on network television, and it’s called American Juniors, and you’re sent there when you’re too busy playing Pokémon Ruby to turn off the TV after the Simpsons. No pocket monster is worth dozens of shrieking, off-key children in belly shirts. That’ll learn me.
Today’s MUG offers a guide to Forbidden Pleasures, including cigarette smoking (what sad times are these when tobacco is a forbidden pleasure in New York) and the inevitable absinthe (with which everyone remains fascinated despite the fact that there are easier ways to get loopy and cheaper ways to get drunk). Also, I’m not sure whether or not I’m glad I’ve only read four of the “most challenged books” on their list - on the one hand, maybe I should read more banned literature. On the other hand, most of those books aren’t that great.
Yes, I woke up in time for work today, thanks for asking. I do like iCal calling iTunes so far, but it’s going to have to battle with one of my bad habits - I’ve been using Audion’s alarm for so long that I can reset the time to give me another ten minutes and then crawl back into bed without actually waking completely up. Faking a snooze button with iCal would be a little trickier, but if I end up just getting up when I’m supposed to the first time then I’m not complaining. The reason I switched to an mp3 alarm in the first place was to break my snooze habit, after all - I wanted to force myself to physically get out of bed and go over to the keyboard to make the noise stop, the idea being that once I was up I’d be more likely to crawl into the shower than back into bed.
One of the last things keeping me using Audion over iTunes has been Audion’s alarm function - I’ve used it to wake up for work and school every weekday for years now. However, I can’t deny that iTunes (ugly as it is) has some pretty slick features that I’d like to play with, so I gave in and installed that iCal calling iTunes AppleScript to approximate an alarm. I’ve tried switching to iTunes before, but always ended up switching back after a couple of days. We’ll see how long I last this time.
O’Reilly has launched a new series of books called Head First. The first (and so far only) book in the series is Head First Java, which I picked up a few days ago. The interesting thing about the series is that it’s so un-O’Reilly like, at least at first glance - but the even more interesting thing is that it’s actually not as weird as it looks. See, the thing about the Head First books is that they’re full of goofy illustrations and programming puzzles and the whole thing comes off looking just a smidge sillier than you’d expect from the same people who did Unix Power Tools. However, while it may look like it should be called U CAN LEARN JAVA, it’s actually quite a solid tutorial. The series came out of an attempt to integrate “the latest research in cognitive science, neurobiology, and educational psychology” - which is to say it’s trying to actually teach you Java, rather than trying to act as a Java reference (or whatever). The style of the book struck me as very like something you’d get in an actual classroom environment, which I’m sure isn’t a coincidence. The press release promises that readers with some existing programming experience will “learn everything from fundamentals to advanced topics, including threads, network sockets, and distributed programming with RMI. More importantly, they’ll learn how to think like object-oriented developers. They won’t just be reading and solving puzzles - they’ll be writing real Java, and plenty of it.”
But does it work? I can’t say for sure yet - I’ve only read the first bit, but I found the premise of the series intriguing. I’ve got a year of C programming under my belt and I’m comfortable with scripting languages like PHP and Perl, but Java will be my first all-out object oriented programming language. I’m getting a bit of a head start for a class I’ll be taking next semester. I think the book will probably prove to be pretty useful, but we’ll see.
Last Sunday I spent all day playing Warcraft III. Today, I spent most of the day playing Pokémon Ruby - but at least it was something to do with the hours I spent on the Truly Fucked Up weekend Q service I’ll be enduring until sometime this fall. And anyway, my Pokémon habit isn’t my fault, it’s CowboyNeal’s.
Back in March, I made fun of Gawker clone Gothamist because the site was all assy in Mozilla. I can now report that it’s no longer so assy, but at least I can still make fun of its writer, Jen Chung, for her use of the royal we. It was cuter when Elizabeth Spiers did it (but even then it wasn’t that cute).