Luddism

It's the time of year when one tries to deal with unfinished business. Do nasty little jobs one has been putting off. Starting with a clean slate looks so good.

One thing I have been putting off is updating the website. Just before I went to Morocco I tried to post an ad which Mellel had taken out in n+1; Dreamweaver claimed that I had no home page specified but it was not clear what it wanted in the way of a home page so I sent Johanna a 5am e-mail asking if she could upload the attached image instead. She was able to do this, but the page did not make clear that the book had not been published, simply excerpted in n+1, so I got lots of e-mails from people keen to buy the book. So here was this bit of unfinished business, cleaning up the website so that the homepage made it clear &c &c.

I kept putting this off. Today I told myself not to be an idiot. Don't be a coward. Just do it. Do it. COME on.

So I opened Dreamweaver and opened the relevant page. Placing and formatting the bit of text which was to link to n+1 was actually MORE fiddly than my worst fears, which is saying something, but after about 4 hours of trying things out, checking them in the browers and trying again there was something that looked good on all browsers. Good. So I copied the updated page to the server, and on typing in helendewitt.com got a page which had a menu and the instruction: n+1. Submit Query. No picture. Bad news.

I tinkered with the page but got nowhere. Best just to leave it, perhaps? I clicked on a menu item and got a 404 message, Page Not Found. So now the whole website was down. Johanna is once again having a look at its directories. Update, Johanna has restored it to its former state. And we will meet and clean up directories. Poor tired head. Try to be sane.

techno

Have just discovered that Wordpress lets you put equations in posts using LaTeX. The FAQ here. They don't support all LaTeX packages, so this is not an unexpected chance to get hieroglyphics into your posts via HieroTeX, but it's still a great deal.

Mellel has just released a new version, 2.2.7, with improvements to the tables (and many other features). Macheads who don't know Mellel should give it a try: Mellel works in partnership with Adobe, and it's the only wp program that gives you Illustrator-quality control over text. You can change the weight, colour and style of stroke, change the colour of fill, change the background, micromanage the baseline, change the weight, colour and style of a range of underlines, overlines and strikethroughs -- it's the only wp program that doesn't drive me berserk by thwarting me every time I have a brilliant idea. It differs from Illustrator (and, for that matter, the unspeakable Word) in being exceptionally good for multi-lingual word processing -- you can do all these thrilling things to text in Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, a vast range of languages. (Syriac. It supports Syriac.) And all this for $49 (or $99 for 5 licenses) -- which is to say that it is probably so ludicrously underpriced people underestimate it. On offer here.

herupu herupu herupu!!!!! Why Steve Jobs needs Joel Spolsky

Joel Spolsky has just posted a comparison of the Apple and Microsoft approaches to screen rendering of type, in which he says if Apple is Target Microsoft would be Wal-Mart. Weeeeellllllll -- the problem is neither is remotely like Fog Creek. If Joel ran Apple I would know where to send my couple of hundred complaints about my Mac -- and Joel, who has written about how to achieve remarkable customer service, who has more recently written on debugging as a game of inches, would actually welcome the couple of hundred complaints, and act on them, and Apple bloody Apple would have a product accessible to the telepathically challenged.

About 6 months ago Apple clawed its way up from a 4.3% market share to a 4.7% market share!!!!!!!! Achieving 16% growth!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Poor old Bill Gates would be hollow-eyed and popping Temazepam but for one little thing. All he has to do is look at what you get if you click on Kotoeri Help, seeking assistance with Japanese input, to know he is dealing with lunatics.

What you get if you click Kotoeri Help (yes, you have seen this before):



Now, not to be hasty, this is not userunfriendly. It's VERY friendly to Japanese users. It's friendly to users who are fluent in Japanese. And it's highly educational for beginners and improvers. They'll have to learn all the kanji eventually; why not start now? And it's always good to have a chance to practice the katakana -- as Katakana The Easy Way points out, students of Japanese often lag behind in their mastery of this important element of the written language.



(Would you have had the self-discipline to practice that if the Help facility had been in English? Steve Jobs knows best.)


Yes, Apple Kotoeri Help provides the novice with hours of innocent fun. And for those who want a blast from the past, there's also an online manual at the Apple website -- available for easy PDF download, it's the manual sold with the Japanese Language Kit back in 1997, when the JLK generated its very own income stream and that clinking clanking sound eased the pain of producing documentation. Now absolutely free, and you can have even more fun working out how the GUI has changed. Cheers, Apple!

And yet... And yet...

Guy Deutscher (author of The Unfolding of Language) tried to persuade me last November that I could do anything in Windows that I could do on a Mac, I should switch to a PC, and he showed me how I could type Arabic in Windows and he made it look easy. So I did actually try out a Sony Vaio, but switching between languages really wasn't as easy as it is on a Mac, and now Mellel for OS X has a new release that includes all kinds of typographical tricks previously available only in Indesign and the like -- you can change a letter's fill, change the colour, weight and style of stroke, change the colour of background, raise/lower the baseline by tiny increments (and much much much much more), all this for $49 so I don't know why the glad tidings are not being shouted from the rooftops. You can do all those things on a PC if you don't mind paying $700 or so for Indesign or Illustrator, but you still wouldn't be able to do them in Arabic or Hebrew without spending even more on add-ons, and it's all just messy and unpleasant, and soon the Sony Vaio was a roach-infested horror despite all the virus protection I thought I had installed.

And so... And so...

So it would be nice if Apple did not depend quite so heavily on the Stockholm Syndrome as the secret to customer satisfaction. It would be nice if they'd make Mr Fix-It Dictator for a Day. (Just for a day, Jobusu-san, just for a day!) Mr Fix-It:

Somehow, over the last few weeks, I've become hypercritical. I'm always looking for flaws in things, and when I find them, I become single-minded about fixing them. It's a particular frame of mind, actually, that software developers get into when they're in the final debugging phase of a new product.

(The tragic irony of it all is that this particular frame of mind has been deployed on FogBugz, a debugging program for which I have no use, rather than on OS X, which I have no way of avoiding.) Fix-It:

Over the last few weeks, I've been writing all the documentation for the next big version of FogBugz. As I write things, I try them out, either to make sure they work the way I think they should, or to get screenshots. And every hour or so, bells go off. "Wait a minute! What just happened? That's not supposed to work like that!"

(The mention of the D-word, of course, is in itself enough to drive a Mac user to drink. Something tells me Spolsky's documentation offers little of the dry humour so familiar to the unhappy Macolyte:

Because the menus and preference settings for the JLK are in Japanese, it may be difficult for a non-Japanese speaker to identify the appropriate selections to make. The steps below will identify the appropriate selections with graphical clues that allow a non-Japanese speaker to correctly select the Kana Keyboard and thereby enable one-keystroke Katakana input.

-- a philosophy Apple thought good enough for its users in 1993 and has seen no reason to change in the last 14 years. (It's the use of the word 'may', of course, that's so delicious: non-Japanese-speaking telepaths will have no trouble at all.))

Well, enough of this rant. If Lisa the wheeler dealer could persuade Steve 'It Ain't Broke' Jobs to talk to Spolsky Apple could probably make a Great Leap Forward -- not the kind of GLF that takes a 4.7% market share up to a niche-dominating 5.2%, but the kind of GLF that would turn Apple from a plucky underdog to a serious contender for the nontelepathic dollar.

Meanwhile I have written a guide to inputting Japanese in Mellel, including more general assistance with using Japanese in OS X. Yours here.