August 2005

For Report-an-Apple-Bug Friday I reported #4234503: “Round Textured Button highlights in gray when it should highlight in blue.”

The gist of it is this: in Tiger there’s a new button type that matches the toolbar buttons in Safari, System Preferences, Dictionary, and other apps, but the button can’t be used as-is because when you press it, it highlights gray instead of blue.

(Yes, I wrote about this before.)

So... did you report a bug to Apple today? Let’s have bug ids!

DrunkenBatman reports on the Safari Image of Doom for Report-an-Apple-Bug Friday. I haven’t reported my bug for the day yet, since I haven’t picked one yet.

Part of me wants to report as a bug that thing you see in Safari RSS and in Spotlight, where you have the scrollbar to the right of a non-scrolling area. I think it’s worth trying to nip this in the bud before you start seeing it everywhere, in more Apple apps and in apps from independent developers.

But I’ll probably report some other bug.

Speaking of Spotlight, Rory Prior did a mock-up of a proposed revised UI for Spotlight that I quite like—it solves a bunch of problems in the current Spotlight UI.

Linked-to in the comments for an earlier post: Mac OS X Tiger Quirks.

Just a quick reminder—tomorrow is Report-an-Apple-Bug Friday.

Bugs! You know you love ’em. (To squash ’em, that is.)

So here’s my question: if Google replaces Windows with their web-based operating system, on what operating system will it run?

The answer is, well, Windows.

A computer needs graphics routines, networking, a window manager, UI toolkit, XML parser, HTML display, etc.—even Google’s desktop apps need these things. Web browsers certainly needs these things.

But “these things” are provided by Windows. (And Mac OS X, Linux, ZETA, etc.)

Dammit, Jim, I’m a developer, not an analyst. What is it that I don’t understand?

There’s a CocoaRadio interview with me.

I can’t listen to it—it’s that whole your-voice-on-tape-thing—so I don’t know if I come across weird or not. (Oh, probably.)

But it was fun to do, and I recommend it. In other words—if you get email from Blake, say yes, you’ll do it.

I just reported my Interface-Builder-truncation bug: its id is 4224825.

If you reported a bug to Apple today—it being Report-an-Apple-Bug Friday—please leave a comment and say what your bug id is. (Oh, and why not say what the bug is too. But we gotta have an id—a bug id is a badge of honor.)

Dan Wood—the father of Report-an-Apple-Bug Friday—reported bug 4223632.

Update: Simone Manganelli reported #4223711.

Since tomorrow is Friday it’s report-a-bug-to-Apple day. I figured I’d run my bug by y’all in case it turns out to be not a bug. (Like last week! Though, arguably, it’s still a bug.)

Here’s the bug: Interface Builder often doesn’t display enough of an item’s name to be useful. You get things like the following:

It wouldn’t be so bad if you could at least hold your mouse over an item and get its name, as in the Dock. But you can’t—you have to actually select an item and look at the Info window to find out what it is.

(For programmers, time is the precious commodity. A frictionless workflow is essential. Any little thing like this that slows you down is a candidate for streamlining.)

Have you seen this one? It cracks me up.

Dan Wood: “I’m going to try to start a new regular feature for most Fridays... My idea is Report-an-Apple-Bug Friday, in which I point out an annoying Apple ‘bug’ and encourage all of my readers (Yes, you!) to report that bug (or some other bug you are inspired by) to Apple.”

I think this is a good idea—I myself get lazy about reporting bugs to Apple, so why not have a day for it?

I reported #4214767. The bug, which appears to be new in Tiger, is that when you drag a file or folder to a CD, it creates an alias rather than a copy.

(The work-around—holding down the option key—is easy, yes, but that doesn’t mean the bug shouldn’t be fixed.)

Nick Bradbury: “A few month ago I wrote about the threat that RSS, spam and spyware pose to RSS, and stated my concern that this threat was being ignored by much of the RSS community. So I’m glad to see that more people are talking about this problem...”

Dang it.

Update 4:07 p.m.: I could say a little more, it occurs to me.

These issues are hugely important, and I’m glad to see people talking and working on the problem. My biggest concern is with the issue of enclosures-as-vector (which is why it took so long before we added this feature)—but other issues such as search engine spam are very important too.

Tim Bray: Not 2.0: “I just wanted to say how much I’ve come to dislike this ‘Web 2.0’ faux-meme. It’s not only vacuous marketing hype, it can’t possibly be right.”

I agree that 2.0 doesn’t quite seem correct. If I had to give the Web a version number, I’d call it Web 0.2. We’re still in very early days.

Michael McCracken: The Open Apple Question: “OS X has been pretty successful building on open source lower-level software, like the darwin layer, gcc, and all the open source networking software. More recently, WebKit is open-source, and bugs are being fixed by people without apple.com in their email.”

DrunkenBlog: The Downward Spiral: “In a previous post, I mentioned I had to finish the last chat on another platform, because of a bunch of wonky bugs I was having to deal with in Mac OS 10.4, many of them involving text... Today we’ll follow the downward spiral that made me give up and finish it on another computer.”

Rory Prior takes a look at Spotlight’s user interface: “First of all it looks like a shining beacon of unified goodness. It could have been a brushed metal monstrosity, but someone put their foot down and said no. My thanks to that person.”

Buzz Andersen: “Contrary to the common perception, metal apps need not be ugly...”

Congrats to Buzz on the new gig on the Soundtrack Pro team!

Seth Dillingham is doing a software auction to raise money for research and treatment of cancer. Developers can donate licenses to their software to the cause. (Which we’ve done.)