Read it for yourself, but here are some of the main points of this ridiculous rant that attempts to make Steve Jobs look like a man that sells snake oil:

Original Macintosh

“What did this pretty beige box offer that a hundred other computers didn’t already offer, besides a higher price, much less choice in software and no compatibility with the rest of the world’s devices?”

Well, for starters, it had the first really successful, useful, graphical user interface powered by a mouse. This change in UI was so good and apparently successful that Microsoft made a really bad copy of it. I’m sure in your list of features and bang-for-buck you aren’t giving this important accomplishment much value. I just don’t see how, as an honest technology journalist, you can brush off the Macintosh as overpriced crap. Are you still working sans mouse today?

Apple Lisa

“Who remembers the Apple Lisa, a chunky desktop that sold for $9,995 in1983?”

OK. So the Lisa was a financial failure and a technological dead end thanks to the success of the Macintosh (see above). The price? Well, nobody put a gun to your head. Besides, Steve Jobs was kicked off of the Lisa team and as a result worked on the Macintosh. (see above)

Apple Newton

“Who remembers the Newton, a $700 PDA/paperweight?”

Try doing some research. You are conflating Steve Jobs with Apple. Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985. The Newton project was started in 1987. One of the first things Jobs did after becoming the Apple CEO in 1997 was kill the Newton.

NeXT

“Then there was the NeXT computer, to which Jobs devoted a decade of his life … starting at $6,500, Jobs sold only 50,000 units ever.”

Yes, the NeXT computers never sold well, but you make it sound like Jobs wasted a decade of his life on a complete failure. Maybe you didn’t know this – again, research – but the NeXT operating system was more highly regarded than the hardware. So much so that, when Apple was circling the drain after failing to build their own next-gen operating system, they purchased NeXT. This purchase is how Steve Jobs returned to Apple and also how Apple ended up with the operating system that it runs today. Without Steve Jobs’s return and that operating system – now called OSX – Apple wouldn’t exist today.

iPod

At this point you actually start giving Steve credit for creating something useful. But you still go on to piss and moan about paying higher prices for prettier things like Apple products have no real value above the competition. Never mind that you say this at a time when the rest of the consumer computer companies are struggling to build iPad and MacBook Air knock-offs at the same price point as Apple.

Discover magazine should be ashamed of themselves for publishing this misguided, lazy and factually incorrect editorial as though it were objective journalism. It makes me question everything else I read in their magazine.

It makes a good point. And I was actually taken to that comic by an article that breaks down the futility of how we all generally manage our passwords: 

“I’m sorry, but were you actually trying to remember your comical passwords?”
by Troy Hunt 
http://www.troyhunt.com/2011/08/im-sorry-but-were-you-actually-trying.html

It’s some good food for thought. I’m certainly looking in to programs like

1Password http://agilebits.com/products/1Password

And the prominent cross-platform (Mac, Windows and Linux/*NIX) but not nearly as easy to look at …

KeePassX http://www.keepassx.org/

Troy Sobotka

He makes some good points, but the last half of his post is a lot of alarmist speculation. The obvious answer to improving Gimp is to contribute to its development. Complaints about difficult developers sounds like a bunch of complaining. With any open source project you have to earn the respect of the senior developers through consistent work, usually the not-so-exciting kind. With any open source project there are more users than developers and certainly more users suggesting ideas than making any attempt to squash bugs, write documentation or provide objective and helpful feedback. Opinions and assholes.

Anyway, I left a LONG comment today and wanted to duplicate that comment here. The only thing I should have added is a need for Gimp to continue improving color management and that’s why I just said it. Anyway, here’s my comment:

I’m a professional graphic designer. I use Photoshop and Gimp at a very high level of proficiency. Just to point out where I’m coming from. I like Pshop and Gimp for their different strengths, but some of the above arguments are wrong. Gimp certainly has room for improvement, but anyone that actually used Photoshop in 1996 knows that Pshop itself has come a LONG way in 15 years.

I would like to point out something that needs to be understood about the importance of bit-depth. I am constantly working with hi-res jpegs from a wide variety of professional photographers every day. You know how many of those files use 32 bits/channel? None. You know how many of those files use 16 bits/channel? None. They are ALL in 8 bits/channel. It’s certainly great to have the higher bit-depth options, but the importance of that capability in terms of graphic design/manipulating images for press is greatly exaggerated.

Also, CMYK color space in Photoshop is misused by graphic designers because most of them know very little about color space and/or color management. Some of us know (I don’t mean to offend anyone) but the majority of designers I have worked with are completely oblivious. I’ve even seen creative directors explicitly instruct their designers to select “discard color profile” when confronted with the “What should I do?” dialog in Photoshop. The need for CMYK color space, though useful and great, is also greatly exaggerated.

I also think the complaints about the UX are very subjective and usually only illustrate how little effort the commenter put into learning about and using the Gimp.

Two things that would greatly improve Gimp and many people’s impressions of Gimp are:

• better image scaling/anti-aliasing algorithms
• layer groups and layer styles

Those two things are certainly complex, but if they were implemented, and it sounds like they will be soon, I would be extremely satisfied with Gimp’s capabilities.

I think it’s healthy to critique software, but the Gimp rarely receives praise for its remarkable capabilities.

Adobe App windows in OSX can be resized by clicking and dragging on any available edge!

This is the way all application windows work in Windows and Linux as far as I know, but Apple is unique in only providing this capability from the lower-right corner of each window. I think their reason for this is to simplify their user interface and to be consistent with the lower-right “grip” being the only indicator on most windows that they can be resized. I don’t subscribe to that reasoning.

I know it’s a small detail, but this saves me a lot of trouble, especially in Photoshop when working with multiple windows that I seem to be constantly resizing. Lately I’ve found the “full-workspace window” to be a very efficient way to work on a single file in Photoshop, but until today I was apparently wasting a lot of time moving windows by the titlebar so that I could bring the bottom of the window onto the screen and, finally, adjust the window’s size via the lower-right grip.

I generally have very few good things to say about Adobe products, but this is definitely a great feature that I hope Apple will one day propagate to all windows in OSX.

Anybody that has every run an Apple computer with a mouse knows that every application on a Mac displays its menu bar (File, Edit, etc.) in the top-left of the system’s overall screen. This is in contrast with Windows and most Linux window managers that show each application’s menu bar within its own windows, even if that application employs more than one window. This difference is one of those things that most people love one way or the other religiously.

I’ve always preferred the Apple-way since it’s more efficient, especially when it comes to applications like Photoshop or Gimp that are frequently used with multiple windows actively being used in a non-maximized state.

I always assumed this difference was central to how each individual OS’s worked and managed windows. The Gnome Global Menu project seems to make it look pretty easy though. The only programs that don’t cooperate on my system are Firefox and OpenOffice. From what I understand this is due to both having developed their own OS-independent methods for generating their primary menu. (I have a fix for Firefox that I’ll blog about later. Check out the “Tiny Menu” addon.)

All you have to do is install the Global Menu packages and then add the Global Menu Panel Applet to your main menu bar. I also replaced Ubuntu’s custom menu applet with the single-icon Gnome Menu applet, placing it directly in the left corner with the Global Menu applet directly to its right. Looks just like home (on a Mac)! You might need to restart or log out/in to see the menus removed from all of the individual windows, but as you can see in the screenshot above, the Global Menu works great.

There is one free application available for renaming files (NameChanger) and there are several tutorials about using AppleScript and/or Automator.app. The DIY script and Automator options are okay for certain types of people, but the people that really need help will struggle to understand how to use these tools. What are all of the non-geek OSX users supposed to do?

Well, here’s another one of my small contributions to society. A free Automator.app-created workflow that will add the option ‘Rename Multiple Files’ to the contextual menu in Finder.app. Just select multiple files, right-click and select ‘Rename Multiple Files’ and away you go!

Here’s how to install this Rename Multiple Files tool:

1. In the Finder navigate to /Users/yourname/Library/Services/
   [if "Services" doesn't exist, create a new folder and name it likewise]
2. Download the RenameMultipleFiles.zip, extract the contents onto your desktop (double-click in OSX)  and copy the file “Rename Multiple Files.workflow” to the previously mentioned “Services” folder.
3. Open a Finder window with multiple files. Select all of the files. Right-click on the selected files. At the bottom of the contextual menu you will find an option titled “Rename Multiple Files”. (It may take a minute or two for this new option to become available on your contextual menu.)

Shortly after you click on “Rename Multiple Files” you will be presented with a small window and several options. To save a verbose explanation I have included screenshots of the options below.

This workflow was created on a Mac running OSX 10.6. It is dependent on Automator.app. It definitely works with other 10.6 machines, but if you are running some other version of OSX it may or may not work.

Please give me feedback about whether or not this is useful or if it doesn’t work at all. Thanks.

MenuMeters

I know this is a post about enhancing Apple trackpads, but first a quick note about MenuMeters. If you’re familiar with Linux you’re probably used to having a nifty system resources ‘gauge’ that provides live information about processor activity, RAM use, network activity and more. OSX comes with an application called ‘Activity Monitor’ but it’s a resource hog and doesn’t provide a simple interface that can be visible at all times.

MenuMeters adds this feature to OSX by making this data available in the main menu bar next to your wireless network status and volume control. It takes very little resources. I don’t know exactly how little, but if you can run it on a PowerBook G3 running OSX 10.3 while being able to do OTHER things, it apparently isn’t using very many resources. It’s so excellent that it should come with OSX pre-installed. The good news? Raging Menace offers MenuMeters as a free download.

SideTrack

This little bit of software is just as valuable and unassuming. SideTrack opens up that simple, one-purpose Apple trackpad and turns it into a powerful, multi-purpose device. Suddenly your trackpad is endowed with vertical scroll, horizontal scroll, the ability to set each corner of the trackpad to evoke a custom key command and more.

SideTrack isn’t free, but you can try it out for free and, if you find it useful, purchase a license for $15. Totally worth every penny. It’s definitely easiest to understand its many features by just downloading and installing it. However, these screenshots of the preference panes will tell you a lot.

Check out these excellent pieces of software at ragingmenace.com. You won’t regret it.

Once we get to that point I ask a them a few questions about how they use their personal computer. This recent situation called for compact disc booklet templates and a greeting card making application. In order to avoid complexity I rarely tell non-designers/tech geeks to give Inkscape, Scribus or the GIMP a try. What this means is finding some specialized application that makes the desired task super simple. If that isn’t available I turn to OpenOffice.

OpenOffice is surprisingly versatile and effective at the same time. There are also hidden benefits to using it, like dynamically generating letters for a small company with the power of OO’s mail merge tools or using embedded spreadsheets to create tables of data within a layout. Cool stuff that the professional-focused graphics tools leave to more specialized programs.

The end result, anyway, is that I decided to create some templates for OpenOffice. The related templates that the usual search engines pointed me to were not very good, so I thought providing these as free downloads might be helpful to some folks out there. What I have is a CD Booklet and Tray template and a Greeting Card template for OpenOffice Draw. Enjoy.

1. Compact Disc Booklet + Tray template
2. Greeting Card template

http://ghosts.nin.com

I gladly downloaded the free sample tracks to check it out. I’m not quite sure if I’ll purchase more or not. The true test is how entertaining the songs are while I’m sitting still on the interstate trying to get home from work in downtown Nashville.

It’s no secret that Mr. Reznor works on a Mac. I think in one of the boxed sets he’s even distributing the album songs in the GarageBand.app format to make it easy to create remixes. No offense, but I’d be more impressed if he offered them in Audacity format. Him distributing gBand files like that… well he might as well be on Apple’s payroll.

But let’s not be ungrateful bastards. He’s certainly one of the few popular artists today that understands how giving some of his source files away under a Creative Commons License is an excellent way to promote his cult of personality. Hats off.

With that said, finding a folder named ‘_MACOSX’ in the free download ZIP archive is still amusing. I wonder, does the Finder window look really cool when you open this free MP3 folder? Or is this just the side effect of how carefully they prep a ZIP archive for mass distribution? “Oh hey, let’s get that on the site tonight”.

[ right-click/Create Archive]

First of all, I don’t understand why the Control key is where it is on keyboards for OS’s that use it as the primary modifier key. It is probably the least ergonomic key to use (unless you have the good fortune of using a Thinkpad, since they don’t include the Windows key). Apple, for all its missteps, gets it right by making the primary modifier key easy to press in combination with other keys. Command, Control, Apple, whatever you call it, put it in a comfortable spot! That one detail almost prevented me from switching to something other than OSX. Seriously.

With that said, it’s no surprise that Apple puts the rarely-used-in-OSX Control key off to the far corners of the keyboard. As to why Apple doesn’t include an option to switch the Control/Command keys in the X11 preferences, I can only imagine.

Second, making this change isn’t for *NIX purists that like it the way it is. Don’t get pissed at me. I’m just trying to help Mac people enjoy the fruits of the Open Source community because I’m frustrated with Microsoft and Adobe (and even Apple). Their customers take a back seat to their interest in making money.

Third, let’s get started!

This is simple and if anything goes wrong, it’s easy to get back to where you started. Here’s the meat and potatoes:

1. Start the X11 application
2. In X11 go to X11/Preferences and to the Input tab. Uncheck the following settings:
   • Follow system keyboard layout
   • Enable key equivalents under X11
3. In X11 go to Applications/Terminal to open up a Terminal window
4. Type the following in the Terminal window:
   vi ~/.Xmodmap and press Enter. This will open a file named ‘.Xmodmap’ located in your home folder ‘~/’ with the text editor program called Vi. Don’t be frightened.
5. Vi is run from within the Terminal, so it won’t look much different. Press ‘a’ to switch to Vi’s Insert Mode (I think the ‘a’ stands for Append) and then type in the following text:
   ! ~/.Xmodmap
clear Mod2
clear control
keycode 63 = Control_L
keycode 67 = Control_L
add control = Control_L
6. Now press ‘esc’ or the Escape key to exit the Insert Mode and return to the Command Mode. Now type :wq and press Enter. This command tells Vi to Write (think ‘Save’) the changes you made to the file and Quit Vi itself.
7. Type xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap and press Enter to complete this process.
8. Open something in Gimpshop, Gimp, OpenOffice, Inkscape or any X11 application that you use to test if you have successfully switched to the Apple/Command key.

If you suddenly cannot get any of your X11 applications to start, you can delete the .Xmodmap text file from your home directory. To do this, open a Terminal in either the X11/terminal or the OSX Terminal.app: rm ~/.Xmodmap and press Enter. The command rm stands for ‘Remove’. Be careful with this command. There is no ‘undo’ in the command line.

This post uses information found at //extrabright blog and The University of Illinois at Chicago’s Unix 101 pages on Vi. This is my attempt to write a more concise how-to.