On MobileMe

I want to like MobileMe. I really do. The idea of having all my stuff, on my phone, anywhere with a data connection is basically awesome. MobileMe does this for $99/yr (or less, depending on where you get your subscription). Google also does this for free. But what’s the price of free? What follows is a comparison of Google Apps and MobileMe’s Desktop, Mobile, and Web experiences.

Desktop Experience

This one goes to MobileMe, simply because Mail.app works better with real IMAP email than Gmail. Gmail has conversations, but Mail.app also has that, albeit in rudimentary form – and I expect it to get better.

Mobile Experience

Again, this goes to MobileMe. See above for Mail. Google Sync for Contacts works okay, but so far Calendar.app only wants to show my main calendar, which is unacceptable. I could always just disable over-the-air sync… QED.

Web Experience

Google Apps, no contest. It’s kind of their specialty. But then again, with great desktop and mobile experiences, how often will you need this?

The trouble with MobileMe

So, overall, MobileMe wins this pretty handily. But, there’s still a lot of little things it does wrong. For example: Mac Mail.app conversations kinda suck. MobileMe doesn’t sync subscribed calendars. iCal doesn’t support natural language event creation. Overall, little issues, but they get to be annoying.

What about Bookmarks and Gallery?

MobileMe Gallery simply cannot be compared to the web experience of Flickr, Vimeo, or YouTube. Plus, with iPhoto and iMovie supporting direct upload to Flickr and YouTube respectively, and YouTube even working on iPhone OS, the integration is just as good. I don’t see using MobileMe gallery for much anytime soon.

As for Bookmarks, I mostly use Delicious. DeliciousSafari and the various iPhone Delicious clients provide a good experience – but you can never replace Safari’s in-built bookmarking functions with them. Bookmarklets and quick-hit sites just work better that way. I see these two as being complementary, not competitive.

I want a new text editor

TextMate was all the rage in 2007. But now it’s old, passe, and possibly abandonware. BBEdit is too dang expensive, TextWrangler is too limited, and SubEthaEdit is a one-trick pony. (Domain-specific editors like Xcode and Coda aren’t applicable to this discussion.)

What we really need is a new text editor. It should have:

• Leopard-style UI. ‘nuff said.
• light-but-solid core, with most functionality implemented as plugins.
• project-centric windows. projects get wrapped around version control.
• plugins that talk to and extend each other. my Web Preview plugin should work with your Django plugin and Jim-Bob’s Rails plugin.
• oh, and a nice price point. somewhere between TextMate’s $52 and Coda’s $99.

Note that when I say plugins, I mean real freaking plugins. Bundles are okay, but very limited. I want awesome Cocoa-based plugins that show me my Django app’s database schema in a HUD window, or a live preview of my page in IE, Firefox, or Safari – inside a tab or split. You know, awesome stuff like that.

thoughts? comments? you know how to get in touch.

Life Update

Been fairly busy the past week, with the switch to Ubuntu and such. I figured this is as good a time as any to start using client-side apps instead of web apps for email, feeds, and such; so that’s happening too. I’m even planning on switching from Gmail, Blogger, and Picasa once I get web hosting again. I know, I know, too many email and blog address changes. I’m going to stay this time. Unless I don’t.

Florida, Florida…

Our poor snowbird friends have to put up with 80-degree weather in February because of a massive blackout affecting 4+ million people throughout the Peninsula. Apparently, this started at FPL’s Turkey Creek plant, which has nuclear and conventional generators.

Speaking of the weather, local meteorologist Dick Fletcher, WTSP’s chief meteorologist since 1980, passed away this morning, eight days after suffering a massive stroke. The normally fierce local news competition paused today as Paul Dellegatto from WTVT and Steve Jerve from WFLA appeared on WTSP’s newscast to remember the long-time community member.

Recording Audio Streams with VLC

VLC is the Magic Bullet of digital multimedia. It plays, records, transcode, and streams CDs, DVDs, and just about every video and audio format known to man. It can convert Flash videos from YouTube into MP3 files, which can help feed the need for free music. On that note, see also Songerize, and my Greasemonkey script to download songs from that service.

This morning, it hit me: why not record streams using VLC? After a little fiddling (and a lot of searching, I finally figured out how to do it:

1. Open up VLC, then select File->Open Network Stream (or just press Ctrl+N).
2. Enter the address of your stream in the box at the bottom.
3. Check the “Stream/Save” box, then click the Settings button.
4. The “Stream Output” dialog will open. Under the Outputs group, select the “Play locally” and “File” boxes. Click the “Browse” button and select the file to save to.
5. Under the “Encapsulation” group, select the “Raw” option.
6. Under the “Transcoding options” group, check the “Audio codec” box, and select “mp3″ from the drop-down box. The default options should be fine.
7. Click “OK” in the Stream Output and Open dialogs. Your stream will start playing. VLC will convert it to MP3 format and save it to the file you selected in the background.
8. If you’d like, you can mute VLC and go get coffee or something. Unless your stream gets disconnected, it’ll keep recording.
9. To stop recording, click VLC’s stop button.
10. Your MP3 is ready to use!

You can create a batch file or script to do this automatically. I haven’t quite figured out how to do it, but I do know VLC’s command-line mode makes it possible. You can then set up a scheduled task (on Windows) or cron job (on *nix) to automate the process of recording. More on that when I figure that part out.

Windows Vista = Fail

You’d think that six years of development would allow Microsoft to write an operating system that wasn’t as completely horrible as Windows Vista. One would think that, anyway.

Alrighty, so DWM isn’t bad. In fact, I wish they’d retrofit Windows XP to support DWM. Live window previews on taskbar hover and Alt-Tab are awesome. TaskSwitchXP can be made to have sorta-kinda almost real time window preview, but it’s not really real time.

Another feature of Windows Vista that isn’t horrible is the new smart file renaming. When you rename a file, it automatically selects just the file name, not the file name with extension as on WinXP. Of course, somebody had the audacity to write an AutoHotkey script that provides the same functionality on XP, and perhaps earlier versions of Windows as well.

Really, I could care less about the other features. Security? Bah. I keep my ports closed and only download from trustworthy websites. I even clear my browser cache and cookies regularly and use the Adblock Plus Firefox Extension to prevent browser-based badness.

Improved applications? I’ve tried both IE7 and WMP11, and they don’t beat Firefox, foobar2000, and VLC media player one bit. Windows Mail is just another lame-o desktop email client, and desktop email clients are mostly pointless. I’ll give a reprieve to those of you on dial-up or using Exchange Server. Windows Photo Gallery? If I wanted a desktop image organizer, I could get it’s Windows Live cousin, which isn’t half-bad. But I don’t.

I never use Media Center on XP. Any convergence there might be is offset by the painfulness of trying to navigate that UI. It could perhaps be useful in a living room situation – but I seriously doubt that I’d even want that sort of functionality anytime soon. So, Media Center is not a good reason.

To cut to the chase, there isn’t any compelling reason for me, or most other end-users, to upgrade to Windows XP at this point. Maybe in 2009, when Vista is old news and most software that will be ported has been; perhaps then it will be. But today, 13 February 2008, there is no good reason for most people to switch. Sorry, Microsoft, you fail.

Enjoy your hug

Priceless.