July 2007
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Month July 2007

Entries 7 Total

Updated Acrobat FDF certificate

Jul 24, ’07 5:29 AM

Three months ago, we explained how to download our self-signed Acrobat certificate and use it to verify the signatures on PDF issues of MDJ and MWJ.

As it turns out, self-signed certificates are good for five years, and we started using Acrobat’s own technology to sign PDF issues five years ago last week (2002.07.17). We can’t sign any new issues with it, although it’s still valid for verifying issues we signed with it.

Today we’ve issued a new self-signed certificate, available here or from our certificates and security settings page here.

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How the technology press got broken

Jul 17, ’07 11:50 PM

If you want to know why coverage of Apple, Inc. has been almost completely clueless for most of the company’s existence, look no further than this tiff involving Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner, who criticizes David Pogue for writing reviews about Apple products when he also writes books about those products.

This is exactly what we saw a decade ago when Apple was “beleagured” – the people who actually understood the platform and the company were locked out of the discussion, dismissed as “Mac fanatics” or “Apple partisans,” while people like Quittner, who can’t even run his own magazine, dictate who can and who cannot be “trusted” on products about which he knows nothing.

Keep in mind that, per the previous link, Quittner pays his own bloggers thousands of dollars per quarter to reprint decades-old inaccurate stories trashing Steve Jobs’ compensation, yet Quittner (who does not own an iPhone) is qualified to review it and David Pogue is not because Pogue had early access to an iPhone and wrote a book about it.

This is how the technology press became not a meritocracy, but a mediocracy—by letting ignorant people lock out the knowledgeable to protect the bottom line of their fellow ignorami. After all, if Pogue wasn’t allowed to write for the New York Times, maybe Quittner could get the gig—he’s the editor of Business 2.0! That’s a Time Magazine imprint! He has to be qualified, right?

He’s certainly unfettered by potential conflicts like knowledge of the subject.

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Let’s make it “Understand the Dock Day” instead

Jul 17, ’07 3:34 PM

We’ve just finished reading today’s normal crop of a few hundred stories, blog posts, press releases, and so on—and no one has yet mentioned that today is “iCal day”, the day listed by default in iCal’s application (and Dock) icon because the program was introduced five years ago today, 2002.07.17, as part of Apple’s then-new “.Mac” services.

For some reason, this still grates on some people who can’t seem to understand that an icon is simply an image—in its own format, to be sure, but a static and unchanging bitmap that’s just like any TIFF or PNG image.

“But…but Dock icons change,” you cry plaintively. Sadly, the active voice fails you here. The icons do not change; they are changed by the application to which they belong. At any time while running, an application can tell the Dock, “Hey, use this icon for me instead of my default application icon.” That’s how you get badges in Mail and NetNewsWire, changing colors in Mailsmith, dynamic status gauges in iPulse and Activity Monitor, and the current date in iCal.

When the application is not running, there’s nothing to tell the Dock to use anything other than the static, standard icon located in the application’s bundle, so it doesn’t change in the Dock. If it really really drives you crazy, you can use the donation-ware iConiCal, a program that keeps iCal’s Dock icon updated and can even change its color from red to blue or green?

How? It changes the icons inside iCal’s application bundle. That way, when iCal updates its own Dock icon, it uses the style you prefer. If you want the current date always, iConiCal opens iCal to get the updated Dock icon, then quits iCal again while preserving the icon. No matter how you look at it, either iCal or iConiCal must execute to get the Dock icon updated.

“But…but the iPhone’s home menu always shows the correct date even if iCal isn’t running on the phone,” you cry again. First, the iPhone doesn’t run “iCal,” it runs a new iPhone-specific calendar application. Second, you don’t know that it’s not running; the iPhone may initialize it as part of normal booting.

Third and most important, the iPhone is not the Dock. Since the iPhone isn’t available to third-party developers, you don’t know how that program works or how generic its icon mechanism may be. Since the iPhone’s launcher currently only displays 16 “applications,” it’s possible that it has special-case code for the calendar—code that’s obviously missing even for the clock application, whose icon does not represent the current time even though the top of the display has the current time.

“Why can’t the Dock do the same thing?” You’re essentially asking Apple to change the Dock to have a special case for one application, and for the Dock to decide (on its own) what that application’s icon should be based on the current time. If the Dock does that, though, it really ought to be a more generic mechanism so Now Up-to-Date and Microsoft Entourage and any other application could also tell the Dock how to update its icon even when not running.

In fact, the Dock needs an internal makeover just like that. While an application can tell the Dock what icon to use anytime it’s running, no other application can get access to that icon image from the Dock. The excellent DragThing, for example, cannot display another application’s dynamic Dock icon in a DragThing dock because the Dock won’t let DragThing (or any other program) get access to another program’s current icon, much less be notified when it changes. Similarly, while any application can control the menu that appears when you Control-click (or Right-click or click-and-hold) on its Dock icon, only the Dock can display that menu—not DragThing, not any other program launcher, not even Finder.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for comprehensive Dock access, though. If other applications could have access to these same features, that would mean you don’t have to use the Dock—you could hide it permanently and use a third-party alternative. Yet from the first public descriptions of “Mac OS X” from Apple, the company has made it clear that the Dock is not optional and not replaceable. It’s a poor amalgamation of a program launcher, status center, and application menu/switcher—but Apple has affirmatively acted at every revision to make sure that you can’t do away with it without losing access to exclusive features like badges, notifications, and Dock menus.

People who killed the Dock anyway got a stick in the eye with Tiger because Dashboard is part of the Dock—kill the Dock and you kill Dashboard as well. Leopard’s new “Stacks” feature appears to be another Dock exclusive, too—keep the newly-redesigned (“now with extra ugliness!”) Dock visible at all times or do without the new feature.

It’s fine—heck, it’s expected—that Apple’s utilities won’t meet everyone’s needs. That’s why the OS provides frameworks to allow third parties to develop their own. You can even argue that there wouldn’t be nearly as many QuickTime-savvy applications out there if QuickTime Player had played movies full-screen for free before version 7.2—the capability was always part of the free QuickTime software, but QuickTime Player simply chose not to use it, and dozens of other application stepped into the void with their own unique feature sets.

You can’t do that with the Dock—Apple has steadfastly refused, for close to a decade, to allow any third-party utilities access to the information that the Dock uses to provide its unique features. That’s not concern for the user experience, that’s old-school NeXT Software politics aimed at proving their “Dock” concept was right and by God you’re going to use it whether you want to or not.

So let’s stop treating July 17 as if it’s some proof that iCal is inadequate and focus the attention where it should go—on the Dock, the program that you may not like but can’t live without, the launcher that Apple claims as superior but really knows is so defective that it will not allow third-party competition for it.

We’re not saying third-party replacements would special-case iCal and keep its icon updated every day whether iCal is open or not, but it would be nice if developers and users had that choice.

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New RSS feed testing!

Jul 16, ’07 9:13 PM

If you’re slightly adventurous and would like to test the new and improved MDJ and MWJ RSS feeds, here they are:

We’ve implemented a bunch of changes to try to make issues more accessible to subscribers (and, in enlightened self-interest, reduce the amount of time we have to spend getting them to you if E-mail fails):

  • The feeds are regular unsecured http feeds, which should solve the problems with numerous non-NetNewsWire newsreaders either refusing to read the feeds or not updating them properly. There’s absolutely no reason the old way shouldn’t work, but the fact is that in a lot of readers, it doesn’t.

  • The issues themselves, however, are still for subscribers only. The links go to the https secure site and require your user ID and password, but every reader we’ve tested can handle that (handing off to your browser if necessary). You can even read PDF issues on the iPhone!

  • Each issue’s entry includes links to the issue in both PDF and setext format, and the PDF is available both uncompressed and as a ZIP archive. This lets you retrieve any version at any time, even read the PDF version on the iPhone. The enclosure element still refers to the ZIP file – each item can have only one enclosure, and for compatibility, we’ve kept that as the ZIP-compressed PDF version. If you set your newsreader not to download enclosures automatically, you can choose which format you want on an issue-by-issue basis.

This is the first time we’ve made uncompressed PDF and setext versions available other than by E-mail, and we know a lot of you have asked for it over the years, so we’re pleased to roll it out. If you have any problems with the new feeds, please let us know through the normal channels.

The previous RSS feeds are still there, and will be maintained at least until the PDF-in-E-mail changes noted earlier are implemented. Once everything is debugged, we’ll adjust the old feeds to permanently redirect to the new ones, so those who don’t keep up won’t have to do anything – your newsreader will automagically pick up the new feed at the new place from then on.

(Or should, at least. We’ve learned that what newsreaders do and what they’re supposed to do are often two different things. But we remain optimistic.)

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MDJ on iPhone is really cool

Jul 4, ’07 3:15 PM

Well, we think so, at least. We can’t really take sharp pictures of it, but try mailing yourself a PDF issue of MDJ or MWJ, making sure you don’t compress it with Zip or StuffIt or anything else. Then read the message on iPhone – at the bottom of the page, you’ll see an attachments button that lets you open and read the PDF right there on the phone, with the proper font rendering and everything.

Frankly, this surprises us, but we’re not complaining. OK, we’re complaining about two things:

  1. iPhone’s PDF reader does not recognize hyperlinks within a PDF document. You can see that something is a link from the blue text, but tapping it does nothing.

  2. Even though MDJ is presented in two columns, iPhone’s double-tap-zoom metaphor does nothing but zoom the full page to fit the iPhone’s screen. We even tried testing an older issue of MDJ that had PDF articles defined for the text, allowing Acrobat and Acrobat Reader to follow stories across columns and pages automaticcally. No dice – iPhone’s PDF viewer knows nothing about them, so they don’t provide any advantages.

    (Ironically, we stopped including the “article” features in MDJ and MWJ in 2002 with the new design because Adobe InDesign has no way to generate them from columns and text frames on the page. InDesign has its own PDF export that does a good job in many areas, but this has been a glaring omission since version 1.0.)

We’ve always compressed MDJ and MWJ issues for delivery for a few reasons:

  • The #1 error we used to get in delivery was “mailbox full,” so naturally we want the issues to be as small as possible.

  • In the days of Mac OS 9, compression was necessary to include HFS metadata, like the file type 'PDF ' and the creator type 'CARO', necessary to allow double-clicking the file to open Acrobat.

  • When we started this 11 years ago, most people didn’t have broadband services, and those outside the US were slower than those here. Downloading big files could take a long time.

We’ve long considered ditching the compression and sending the file as MIME type "application/pdf" because Mac OS X’s “Mail” application can display uncompressed PDFs inline, but that would have left people who want compressed files without options, on top of rewriting our software to do the new thing.</P.

But now, since mail is so spammily broken to begin with, we have ZIP-compressed RSS feeds for people who want compressed files, and Apple continues to improve the experience for people using its products if we mail uncompressed PDF files. The RSS feeds are irrelevant to the iPhone – it redirects display of any RSS URL to Apple’s “reader.mac.com” Web application, but reader.mac.com cannot access or display secure RSS feeds like ours, so at present, you can’t view MDJ or MWJ RSS on the iPhone.

Therefore, starting around 1 August (2007.08.01), we’re going to change our delivery system to mail PDF versions of MDJ and MWJ without compression, as MIME type "application/pdf", encoded with Base-64. We’ll also add a new “no E-mail” type of subscription for people who prefer compressed files in RSS – when a new issue is published, we won’t send you E-mail at all, just let you find it in the RSS feed. (After all, if you want compressed files, it makes no sense to mail you an uncompressed PDF or setext version that you don’t want. If you still want those, they’re still available, on top of the RSS feeds available to all subscribers.)

We’ll announce this in MDJ and MWJ also, but since the “StuffIt file in a Binhex wrapper” format of MDJ and MWJ PDF delivery hasn’t really changed in over a decade (except to move to the “newer” StuffIt 5 archives in the late 1990s), we thought we’d give some of you a heads-up in case you have mail filters, automatic processing, or anything similar. Most of you won’t notice any difference except that PDF issues won’t need to be decompressed before viewing. In most modern mail applications, you’ll see an enclosure icon that opens the issue with a single click – and in iPhone, you can tap the enclosure to read it. The coolness factor there isn’t going to wear off for a while around here.

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Just so everyone knows

Jul 3, ’07 2:21 AM

…we’ll note that Apple has once again moved its announcement of quarterly results, this time for the third quarter of FY 2007 that ended on Saturday. Earlier this year, Apple’s investor calendar said the announcement would take place on the third Wednesday of the following month, or on 2007.07.17.

On a hunch, we looked today – and it’s been moved to 2007.07.25, the fourth Wednesday of July. Apple similarly moved the last quarter’s results back by one week.

The calendar currently has no investor dates beyond the Q3 results announcement, but we have Q4 results on our calendar for 2007.10.17, the third Wednesday following the end of Apple’s fiscal 2007. We’d bet even money that gets pushed out one week by early October.

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Tens of thousands? What tens of thousands?

Jul 2, ’07 3:35 PM

Given the previous post, it’s at least amusing to notice that Business 2.0′s “Apple 2.0″ blog has now posted about first-weekend iPhone sales, and yet the author somehow manages not to mention his own post from Saturday on the same subject, the one that has numbers he invented out of whole cloth.

Commenter “Rezzz” was not so forgetful:

“What happened to ‘tens of thousands’?”

They did sell tens of thousands. Looks like somewhere between 100 – 150 tens of thousands.

Meanwhile, DeWitt brought in a couple of millions hits to this website with that headline. Enjoy your bonus, dude.

It was perhaps unfair for us to refer to Apple 2.0 blogger Philip Elmer-DeWitt as “Elmer Bulwer-Lytton,” but MDJ had spent time on this blog in May and was not impressed. From coverage in MDJ 2007.05.02, available to MWJ readers in the secure RSS feed, discussing the stock options backdating brouhaha of the time, just after noting that the SEC conducted a large investigation and determined that Jobs was not to blame for backdating:

Misinformation 2.0

Don’t expect any of this to stop those who take great pleasure in seeing Jobs suffer. The “Apple 2.0″ blog, an effort of Business 2.0 magazine, recently noted that nearly six years ago, Fortune called Steve Jobs’s compensation “highway robbery,” prompting protests from Jobs who noted that all of his options were underwater, and therefore not worth US$872 million. Jobs wrote, “They are worth zero.”

The blog brings this up because the author of that piece from June 2001, Joe Nocera, dredged it up for last Saturday’s New York Times, and you could cut the schadenfreude with a knife. Nocera wrote, “What a delicious surprise to discover that Mr. Jobs, who had ostentatiously taken only US$1 in salary since returning to Apple in 1997, had a stock option package bigger than any ever bestowed on such well-known greed heads as Sanford I. Weill of Citigroup or Michael D. Eisner of Disney.”

According to Nocera, Jobs had options worth US$872 million at the time of the story, which made his public acceptance of a US$1 salary hypocritical, and its exposé “delicious.” Nocera wrote that Jobs “railed” about the unfair cover story, offering to sell his options to Fortune for half of their supposed US$872 million value. Jobs pointed out that since the options were underwater, “They were worth zero.” Nocera smugly adds, “That is not how options are valued, but never mind.”

Actually, you should mind, because the article in Fortune was a complete hack job, one covered in MDJ 2001.06.15. The cover said Jobs’s options were worth US$872 million, but the story inside said Fortune valued Jobs’s options at US$381 million: “We have valued his monstrous options grant at one-third the exercise price of the shares options. And, of course, we’ve included the US$90 million Gulfstream the Apple board gave him.”

Not only did Fortune publish two estimates of Jobs’s option worth on the same page that differed by half a billion dollars, Jobs was right. As MDJ has noted since at least 2001, Jobs’s options were not standard options. They could not be sold or traded, so they had no value to anyone but him. A block of options that big on the open market might reasonably be valued as worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but since they couldn’t be sold on the open market, they were worth a total of US$0 until Apple’s stock price rose above the option price.

It matters not how venomous or sarcastic Nocera gets in his smug condemnation, for the value that Fortune set was wrong in 2001 and it’s wrong now. Nocera doesn’t seem to care, though, as long as he can keep selling the same article to the mass media. As Upton Sinclair once said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”

Oh, here are some other details that the “Apple 2.0″ blog didn’t tell you in flogging this story. First, blogger Philip Elmer-DeWitt is actually the executive editor of Business 2.0 magazine, which, like Fortune is published by Time, Inc. Before joining Business 2.0, Elmer-DeWitt worked for Time for 27 years, where his work included a not-so-flattering 1998 mini-profile of Steve Jobs, and where he was science editor when sister publication Fortune ran the originally incorrect story.

Elmer-DeWitt sees his blog as a counterpoint to “fan blogs,” because he says he is “someone who loves MACs and can bring a journalist’s skepticism.” (Yes, that’s his spelling of “Macs.”) It’s too bad that Elmer-DeWitt didn’t let readers invoke their own skepticism by alerting them to the fact that he was praising a former colleague’s attempt to rehabilitate a discredited story for his own company’s publication.

Perhaps that’s because Elmer-DeWitt just got a check from Business 2.0 “in the area of US$2000 to US$2500″ for writing the number-two Business 2.0 blog in the first calendar quarter of 2007. That’s a lot of incentive to get readers, especially for a blog that spends much of its time repeating rumors and mocking fan sites that don’t share Elmer-DeWitt’s “journalist’s skepticism.” So, just to recap – claiming that underwater options that can’t be sold at all are worth hundreds of millions of dollars for six years despite plain facts is applying journalistic skepticism, but earning US$8000 to US$10,000 per year to repost items from Wired, AppleInsider, and MacDailyNews is blogging “outside the reality distortion field.” You make the call.

It’s unclear how well the whole “we’re experts” thing is working out for Business 2.0 – just before that issue of MDJ went to press, we learned that Business 2.0 lost every production file for its June 2007 issue on 23 April when its editorial system crashed, and only then did the magazine learn that its backup server hadn’t been backing anything up for at least days. They lost everything – the only way they were able to get the magazine out was that it was a monthly (not a weekly), and they had a week to reconstruct all of the art and layouts. The text of all the articles was only saved because they’d sent it to the lawyers for approval.

As the article notes, this is the magazine that annually publishes “The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business.” Perhaps some of this explain why the News Corp-owned New York Post reported last week that the magazine “is a long way from seeing any of the investments pay off,” and may wind up being folded into Fortune magazine – the same one whose completely incorrect stories about Steve Jobs got stroked by Elmer-DeWitt recently.

Maybe they’d save some money if they paid the bloggers for quality instead of traffic, as Rezzz implied.

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