Sunday, 3 November 2002
No time to write recently; life has been even more crazy than usual. My parents visited this weekend; as always, it's wonderful to see them.
Since Wednesday, when I removed the Flash plugin, Chimera hasn't crashed once. How terrific. According to Simon Fraser, if you download the latest Flash beta plugin, it should fix the problem that was causing Chimera to crash.
I decided on a hiptop. My parents bought it at CompUSA in Brighton Wednesday before flying out here Thursday, and it's amazing and wonderful, especially for $100 after rebates. The interface is incredibly well-designed. It's still 1.0 feature-wise, but I haven't found a bug yet. So far I've managed to drop it on the concrete and get something blue all over some of the keys.
One of the amazingly elegant touches to the hiptop, which dawns on you after a while is its great asynchrony. The hiptop knows that its Internet connection, while always-on, will be intermittent, and doesn't bother you with “no network access” all the time; it simply queues everything from AIM messages to emails to SMS messages until the network is available, then goes about its business sending them. When necessary, there are subtle UI clues such as italicized names in the AIM client to indicate that someone isn't available.
The hiptop mail client is great, though I need to figure out some solution to duplicated mails between my primary local/IMAP accounts and the hiptop. Reading the same mail twice is annoying. You can directly address mailboxes on the hiptop by sending mail to mailbox#username\@tmail.com, which is rather neat; however it's not possible to configure a mailbox to match an account, that I could see. Perhaps I need to do some more digging.
I need a new Mac OS X FTP client. Interarchy 6 is slow and buggy. MacSFTP is nice and fast, Fugu is slower but still usable, but they don't support FTP. Transmit 2 has some incredibly useful features such as the preview pane, but it's too slow at operations I want to be fast (for example, when you try to delete a file, you have to wait at least 2 seconds for the sheet to come down and roll up). The interface is generally decent but flaky in places.
While talking on #macdev last night someone asked about OS X fonts, and I took some time to update my Mac OS X font rendering article for Jaguar, with new screenshots.
10:33 PM
