–Winnie the Pooh

Great product announcements in the Steve tradition have certain recurring ingredients:

• Context. Steve gives us some observations about the state of things — some trend, some emerging industry sector, some new technology. He gives not only objective facts but some unique insight that Apple has, something different from what everybody else is doing or predicting.
• Design. He then reveals the product that is Apple’s answer to the need or opportunity revealed by their insights. There may or may not be any new technologies involved, but the product makes unexpected design choices that make it different from its predecessors. The differences may lie either in creative innovations or in bold decisions to leave things out — creative simplifications, if you will.
• Partnerships. Besides innovative design, the really groundbreaking announcements involve business partnerships that no one but Apple (in particular, Steve) could have pulled off. I’m thinking of the deals with the music companies that made the iTunes Music Store possible, and the deal with Cingular (now AT&T) that made the iPhone possible.

I don’t know whether Steve himself will be presenting today. I don’t know if I will have a burning desire to own whatever product is announced. All I know is that someone (if not Steve) will be weaving a story around the above ingredients, and I’m eagerly awaiting the telling of that story.

• Clicking a message header toggles between just displaying the message header and displaying the entire message text inline.
• Long quoted passages are replaced by a “show quoted text” link that expands to show the quoted text. This, plus the inlining of message text, makes it much nicer to read message threads. The site is much more responsive and it minimizes redundant text.
• It remembers whether you prefer sorting by date or relevance.
• You can search for quoted phrases, as in underscore "instance variable".
• It does stemming, so searching for "instance variable" also finds the plural “instance variables”, and searching for write also finds “writing”.
• Now that you can use quoted phrases and specify sort order in the main UI, the “advanced” search button (or whatever it was called) has been removed.

Congratulations to Bertrand Mansion for getting the site back up, and huge, huge thanks for this invaluable resource.

UPDATE: In my excitement I didn’t notice that it isn’t live yet with recent posts, and there’s still a few months of recent archives that haven’t been brought back online yet. But there’s still lots of searchable material, and if nothing else you can try out the new UI and send feedback if you have suggestions.

My friend Yotam Gingold has just released a charmingly simple iPhone app that amuses me very much. It’s called iBooBoo:

Do you have a boo-boo? Do you need someone to kiss it and make you feel better? Let iBooBoo provide you with instant relief!

I defy anyone to download it and not immediately start looking around for ways to use it.

IMO the feature it needs most by far is the ability to record your own sound.

Need I mention the possibilities for in-app purchases?

This gave me the idea for an app that would let me enter Chinese characters on any Mac — desktop or laptop — by drawing them on my iPhone. I would have loved to use Air Mouse for this, but it doesn’t support Chinese. If I ever got around to it, I was thinking I might call my app “WriteThere”.

Well, wouldn’t you know, today I discovered HippoRemote and it blows my idea out of the water. Like Air Mouse, it lets you use the iPhone as a remote trackpad and keyboard, but unlike Air Mouse it does support Chinese input. It wasn’t obvious how to make this work, but once Albert from customer support explained it to me, it was extremely simple:

• Download HippoVNC and install it on the Mac. Normally you wouldn’t need to install a server (another advantage over Air Mouse), but you need this if you want support for international keyboards.
• In HippoRemote (on the iPhone), turn on the “Send Unicode” option and turn off the “Live Typing” option.
• When using the HippoRemote keyboard, you’ll be entering sequences of characters and hitting the Return key to send them to the computer. When you hit the Return key, it’ll go back to trackpad mode, which will be annoying if you want to enter more than one fragment of text. To avoid this, tap the “Pin” button to tell HippoRemote to stay in keyboard mode.

“Write There” might be a good exercise someday. I bet it would make a great CocoaHeads demo.

By the way, lest anyone overestimate my language skills, I barely know any Chinese. I didn’t have a practical use for Chinese input; I thought maybe I could sell it on the App Store for a little pocket money, plus it would be cool to show my Mom.

On the other hand, I just noticed I had trackbacks disabled by default in MarsEdit.

UPDATE: The Box web site has been updated with the job description, so I’ll just link to it instead of copying it here: http://www.boxwork.com/jobs.html.

I’m not involved in the actual photography part — my group sits in a back room and writes code — but just once I’d like to go on a fashion shoot and be in charge of positioning the cameras, so that I can say on my resume that I was a “model view controller”…

Often I need to spend some time working on a subsystem of classes. Typically the classes have a natural logical ordering: the main class is A, which uses abstract class B, which has concrete classes C and D, and so forth. I open these classes in their own windows and arrange them like this, with class A in the top left corner of my screen:

+----------+
| A        |
|  +----------+
|  | B        |
|  |  +----------+
|  |  | C        |
|  |  |  +----------+
+--|  |  |  D       |
   |  |  |          |
   +--|  |          |
      |  |          |
      +--|          |
         |          |
         +----------+

I find this makes it easy to jump from class to class. The lower-left corners are always visible and they’re big click targets. I like using my spatial memory to connect the position of the windows with their place in the conceptual scheme of things. This ordering also makes me feel reassured that what I’m looking at is logical and finite.

Here are some handy mouse and keyboard tips that go along with this:

• Command-Option-O opens a file in its own window.
• Command-Option-UpArrow toggles a window between the .h and the .m.
• Command-DoubleClick on a class or protocol name opens its source file.
• Command-0 (that’s the number zero) brings you back to the main project window.

I briefly tried using the favorites bar in the main Xcode window (View -> Layout -> Show Favorites Bar), but never warmed to it, maybe because it’s only in the main project window, which often has windows in front of it. I might give the favorites bar another chance someday.

The trick is to copy two sets of files from a Leopard installation to the corresponding locations on the Snow Leopard installation:

• the com directory in /System/Library/Java, and
• the eight files ending with .dylib in /usr/lib/java (four of these are regular files, the other four are symlinks; if you prefer, you can copy just the files and recreate the symlinks by hand).

That’s all.

A coworker figured most of this out. I’m not even sure how he did it. We were originally experimenting with instructions from OneSwarm.org for downgrading to Java 1.5, but that seems not to be necessary to get the Java bridge back.

Obviously if you’re a developer you can’t ship this hack with your product, but it might allow you to upgrade to Snow Leopard sooner if the only dealbreaker was the absence of the Java bridge.

Any problems, please let me know.