The Macalope » Applications

The curation of all fears

The Macalope — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 15:24:50 +0000

This week’s Macworld column looks at Ray Ozzie, Apple’s quarterly results and the Mac App Store.

Pre-Keynote Rumor Roundup

The Macalope — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 16:53:50 +0000

The Wall Street Journal is now in on the iTunes movie rentals rumor. This one strikes the Macalope as having a high probability of being true. As was discussed on last week’s MacBreak Weekly, video rentals are really one of the ways Apple can make a compelling proposition out of the Apple TV.

The Macalope gives this one six out of six antler points.

He’s less sanguine about the Safari on Windows rumor (tip o’ the antlers to Daring Fireball). Sure, there’s the “gateway app” philosophy that says the way Apple makes inroads to Windows users is to offer them cool apps to show them what they’re missing on OS X.

But a browser? Seems to the horny one that most of the hot action in the browser goes on in WebKit, not Safari. Meanwhile, Firefox has already established itself as the “not IE” browser for Windows including all those sarcastic “Get a real browser!” reminders. Also, based on what the Macalope’s hairy ears have picked up about the relative stability of running iTunes on Windows, he’s not so sure the “gateway app” philosophy is as sound as you might think.

But assuming Apple has ironed out its Windows development issues, then are there really any other apps the company has that it could/would/should port? You don’t want to to give away the farm by porting iLife and you don’t just want to hit a small segment of the market by porting a professional app like Aperture.

Three out of six antler points.

Neither really seems like a great announcement for WWDC. But, then, they could just be bubbling to the surface because of WWDC and might only get announced later.

Oh, and the Google rumor below gets five out of six antler points.

Seven minutes.

Is that real voodoo in there?

The Macalope — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 03:50:03 +0000

The Macalope fired up VoodooPad this afternoon to jot down some ideas and was presented with the “New version available” dialog box, prompting him to visit VoodooPad’s web site to download it.

That in and of itself wouldn’t be that unusual, except the Macalope wasn’t connected to the Internet at the time. So how did VoodooPad know there was a new version?

That is some powerful voodoo.

UPDATE: VoodooPad developer Gus Mueller provides the answer in comments:

VP checked that there was an update via a background thread the previous time you launched, and then the next time you launched it remembered that and let you know.

The reason why VP doesn’t let you know right away is because the HIG says not to. Something about annoying the user unpredictably.

Awwwww. And here the Macalope was hoping Flying Meat had implemented a new class called NSatan or something*. What a letdown!

Also, Gus’ answer begs the question as to what the HIG says about annoying the user predictably. That, apparently, is OK. Which would explain Mail.

* Little Cocoa joke there.