"Better"

I respect Merlin Mann.  I have for a long time. This site is proof that Mr. Mann accomplished one of his own standards for a good blog: 43 Folders made me want to start writing.  And when he says that he wants to stop focusing on a "portfolio of shallow but strongly-held opinions about nearly everything" and "demand personal focus on making good things" it's like a breath of fresh air.  As cool as making a blog in 15 minutes is, there is--or there should be--­­an art to software development. It's the same art that should be used in idea development. In either case, it's an art that takes dedication, thought, and time.

Don't misunderstand me; I know that Rails shows you how to develop a blog in 15 minutes to illustrate that Rails is a tool that gets out of your way and lets you write what's in your head. That's a wonderful thing, and Ruby and Rails both are very good at it once you learn how they work.  The problem is that you see more and more people who wrote 20 minute blogs because that's all the attention span they could muster, whereas if they had put a little time into it (say, three or four years) they could have written the next WordPress. And the reason for this is that we are all too excited to get on to the next great idea to spend too much time on this one.

Incidentally, that's my major complaint against Ruby on Rails.  Ruby: brilliant. It's like Smalltalk reborn.  Rails: excellent. You can develop brilliant apps to your heart's delight.  But somewhere between developing apps and deploying apps it's like all the engineers got distracted and hopped off the train.  The sheer number of mostly-working rails deployment strategies is testament to the fact that the core RoR team got distracted before they finished the job.  This is in direct contrast to the PHP/perl crowds, who wrote functional, intelligent Apache modules that are rigorously maintained and actually work.  But that's a topic for another post.

Returning to the point, there is a great need for all of us on this great big internet to not only write what we are thinking, but to think about what we are writing. I'll admit that I'm as guilty of publishing a first draft as anyone, and have just as much need to change that as the greenest Rails blog developer. 

It's the "...focus on making good things" that catches me.  That's the difference between, say, 8 Bit Theater and Gunnerkrigg Court: They're both interesting, both engaging, but Gunnerkrigg Court is a joy to look at and delicious to read, where 8-bit is kinda funny sometimes. The irony of 8-bit is that the author is capable of more; his Atomic Robo stories are fun and good looking, but are also clearly much harder to make.

And this definitely applies to me as well.  I have a lot of beta code wandering around out there that needs a few more wrinkles ironed out before I feel comfortable sharing it with the wider world. I have a lot of beta ideas that could use more testing and proving before I let them wander too far.

So, Coals[2]Newcastle will be put together a little more thoughtfully from now on.  Posts weighing in on pros and cons will be weighed a little more before they are published.  Diatribes will be rarer, but only because they have been replaced by critiques.  It's not much, but maybe I can be part of something that encourages us all to think before we send.

That said, there is still the question of what I'm going to do with the Crazy Apple News Site.  It could well be argued that a website that is nothing but jokes about Apple products is basically "snark" as Mann puts it.  Fortunately I have an answer for that as well:

P.G. Wodehouse.

P.G. Wodehouse wrote books that all basically used the same plot, but the plot was incidental to the story.  What he wrote was pure comedy gold, as funny today as the day he wrote it.   Somehow he took the manners of 1920's British drones and made them into lyrical works of art, unequaled in the English language. 

So, in short, I believe telling IT people about IT people (this site) and making fun of Apple people for the benefit of Apple people (CANS) can both be "better". And, with a some work and possibly some luck, they will be. 

And thank you, dear readers, for making "better" worth doing.

Google Chrome: First Impressions

Google has finally decided to take over your browser chrome as well as the content, and today we all saw the results. And by "we all" I mean "people using Windows, or in my case, people who have Windows running in a virtual machine for cases like this."
Google Chrome touts itself as a browser for today's web, not the web of 15 years ago. Sporting tabs that run in separate processes, easy bookmarking, and a "speed dial" like home page, an easy interface for spawning SSB's and many other features, Chrome seems to have picked up the best innovations of all the competing browsers and rolled them into one WebKit-based package. So how does it look?

The look is boring Google. Faded blue borders, soft edges, nice, but not in any way interesting, especially when compared with Opera and Firefox's latest looks. As near as I can tell, Chrome also lacks the skinning functionality --if such it can be called-- of Opera and Firefox.

Getting past the "chrome" of Chrome, you see a browser window. Yes, tabs are on top. Yes, it loads JavaScript very quickly. To the right of the "Omnibar" there is a button that looks like a page, and clicking it gives you a menu, which includes the ability to create an SSB for your current page. This has been a task that many have tried and failed at before, from Fluid to Prism, I haven't had any luck getting O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf to turn into a nice SSB that I can have running all the time. GMail, easy, Twitter, sure, but Safari? Nope. Chrome handled it perfectly. Sign-in is easy, password is remembered, and then I've got a link to my Bookshelf "program" on the desktop.

"Password remembered", however, is a problem. Chrome will store your passwords but doesn't give you an option of encrypting them or protecting them behind a master password, which is a major failing to my way of thinking. On a Mac I use 1Password to store all my signons, on Windows I use KeePass, or Firefox's password manager with a master password. (If you don't use a master password then programs like siw can mine all your passwords in one fell swoop. You've been warned.) On Chrome any password you store will be shown to anyone who sits at your desk, looks in the "options" menu and clicks "show password" while highlighting a site for which you've stored a password. Scary.

One of the reasons I keep coming back to Firefox--despite the speed of Safari and the all-around goodness of Opera--is add-ons. I can make Firefox do exactly what I want, not just what Mozilla wanted when they shipped the latest version. If Opera had an add-on API as simple and open as Firefox's I don't think I would have ever switched after I discovered them in 2003. If Safari had a site where I could find add-ons that worked as well as The App Store Mozilla's add on site I wouldn't have left Safari to come back to the 'Fox when version 3 came out. Chrome, at this point, suffers from the same problem: you get what Google thinks you need. Doesn't matter what you want, you get what they give you. For many people, this isn't a problem, but I have a hard time surfing without AdBlock plus (An excellent thing indeed. But, um, please turn it off for this site, okay?) and a very hard time developing without Firebug. This could be the deal-breaker. Yes, Chrome is open source, so someone could theoretically fork it, or incorporate it's good points into Firefox or even Safari and that would be great, but if Google wants to keep us coming to their sanctioned version of the app they need to make it extensible, and easily so.

Overall, Chrome is a good beta program in the original sense of the word, not the Google "We'll call it beta until it's end-of-life" sense of the word: It's got lots of promise, but it also has lots of room to grow. I'll be interested to see how that growth works out.