The Finder

Dear Apple: Shoot the Finder development team. Thanks.

I have switched to Path Finder as a Finder replacement. Truly the finder is one of the most debilitating pieces of software I have ever used. Nautilus on Gnome is a far superior file management system.

Software, in general

On the whole, I have found replacements for most of the Windows tools I use on a regular basis. But, as I am not made of money, I am using GIMP for Mac, and that is just clunky in the X11 environment.

Living in the browser makes my life much more tolerable than those who require the Windows environment. I haven’t got the money to buy Parallels or VMWare Fusion right now, so I am using RDC to connect to my Windows box. Slap Windows in Space #3 Fullscreen, and no one would know the difference.

Haven’t found a good Mind Map tool. And BBEdit is also muchos dineros. So Smultron is the text editor.

Usability

I rate this very high. Other than adjusting to the lack of certain keys (DEL, Pg up/dn, etc), the transition has been seamless. The trackpad is a dream and I miss being able to throw stuff around on my Dell laptops’ trackpads like I can using the one on the MacBook. I do find I leave apps hanging, as I am still adjusting to CMD-q closing the app.

Dashboard. What can I say? It’s what I need - high-level data at a glance, including the Prem Tables!

Overall

After four years waiting for a MacBook, I can say that it has been worth the wait. Solid, dependable, and slowly becoming my primary computer.

The only concern that I have is the aluminum case. I have an aluminum sensitivity, and if my hands start to peel and otherwise be in bad shape, I will have to determine a solution to that issue.

I can say that it has been transparent because I have been using Linux desktops in one form or another on an intermittent basis since 1999. When business was slow in the Fall and Winter of 2001/2002, I was the Guinea Pig in my organization to see if Linux could be a corporate replacement for Windows for all desktops and laptops.

So, when I say that the process has been transparent, you will have to realize that I have been a technical user of these desktop interfaces for a number of years. But I can say that since my first positive experiences with the Red Hat Fedora and the Ximian Gnome replacement interface, things have come a very long way.

Ubuntu 8.04 is the first real interface that seems to work predictably, efficiently, and effectively with external devices and programs that are business friendly. This is especially the case if most of the tools are Web-based, as Firefox and Opera work seamlessly. OpenOffice 2.4 can open DOCX files, and media players support most of the files I want to watch/listen to.

It prints to the home network printer.

It accesses the home file server.

I can share and synchronize files among my computers using DropBox.

Some caveats to my positive experience.

• I work mainly on the Web
• I do not play games
• I have been using Linux in various forms and editions since 1999.

If you have technically savvy friend, or really want to push and expand your knowledge of computers and highly configurable operating systems, I would definitely suggest giving Ubuntu a try on the extra computer you have lying around. My laptop is at least 3.5 years old, and not anywhere near as fast as my work laptop running XP. However, with Linux, the two are comparable in speed and performance.

Go on. Try it. I know you want to.

The harder problem is that it is hard for organizations to build on these early wins and create an ongoing culture of Web performance improvement. Stripping away the simple fixes often exposes deeper, more base problems that may not have anything to do with technology. In some cases, there is no Web performance improvement process simply because of the pressure and resource constraints that are faced.

In other cases, a deeper, more profound distrust between the IT and Business sides of the organization leads to a culture of conflict, a culture where it is almost impossible to help a company evolve and develop more advanced ways of examining the Web performance improvement process.

I have written on how Business and IT appear, on the surface, to be a mutually exclusive dichotomy in my review of Andy King’s Website Optimization. But this dichotomy only exists in those organizations where conflict between business and technology goals dominate the conversation. In an organization with more advanced Web performance improvement processes, there is a shared belief that all business units share the same goal.

So how can a company without a culture of Web performance improvement develop one?

What can an organization crushed between limited resources and demanding clients do to make sure that every aspect of their Web presence performs in an optimal way?

How can an organization where the lack of transparency and the open distrust between groups evolve to adopt an open and mutually agreed upon performance improvement process?

Experience has shown me that a strong culture of Web performance improvement is built on three pillars: Targets, Measurements, and Involvement.

Targets

Setting a Web performance improvement target is the easiest part of the process to implement. it is almost ironic that it is also the part of the process that is the most often ignored.

Any Web performance improvement process must start with a target. It is the target that defines the success of the initiative at the end of all of the effort and work.

If a Web performance improvement process does not have a target, then the process should be immediately halted. Without a target, there is no way to gauge how effective the project has been, and there is no way to measure success.

Measurements

Key to achieving any target is the ability to measure the success in achieving the target. However, before success can be measured, how to measure success must be determined. There must be clear definitions on what will be measured, how, from where, and why the measurement is important.

Defining how success will be measured ensures transparency throughout the improvement process. Allowing anyone who is involved or interested in the process to see the progress being made makes it easier to get people excited and involved in the performance improvement process.

Involvement

This is the component of the Web performance improvement process that companies have the greatest difficulty with. One of the great themes that defines the Web performance industry is the openly hostile relationships between IT and Business that exist within so many organizations. The desire to develop and ingrain a culture of Web performance improvement is lost in the turf battles between IT and Business.

If this energy could be channeled into proactive activity, the Web performance improvement process would be seen as beneficial to both IT and Business. But what this means is that there must be greater openness to involve the two parts of the organization in any Web performance improvement initiative.

Involving as many people as is relevant requires that all parts of the organization agree on how improvement will be measured, and what defines a successful Web performance improvement initiative.

Summary

Targets, Measurements, and Involvement are critical to Web performance initiatives. The highly technical nature of a Web site and the complexities of the business that this technology supports should push companies to find the simplest performance improvement process that they can. What most often occurs, however, is that these three simple process management ideas are quickly overwhelmed by time pressures, client demands, resource constraints, and internecine corporate warfare.

The blame of bad performance or memory consumption no longer lies with the browser but with the site.

Coming to the discussion from the realm of Web performance measurement, I realize that the firms I have worked with and for have not done a good job of analyzing this , and, in the name of science have tried to eliminate the variability of Web page processing from the equation.

The company I currently work for has realized that this is a gap and has released a product that measures the performance of a page in the browser.

But all of this misses the point, and goes to one of the reasons why I gave up on Chrome on my older, personal-use computer: Chrome exposes the individual load that a page places on a Web browser.

Resig highlights that browser that make use of shared resources shift the blame about poor performance out to the browser and away from the design of the page. Technologies that modern designers lean on (Flash, AJAX, etc.) all require substantially greater resource-consumption in a browser. Chrome, for good or ill, exposes this load to the user be instantiating a separate, sand-boxed process for each tab, clearing indicating which page is the culprit.

It will be interesting if designers take note of this, or ignore in pursuit of the latest shiny toy that gets released. While designers assume that all visitors run the cutting edge of machine, I can show them that a laptop that is still plenty useful is completely locked up when their page is handled in isolation.

I can say that I put Chrome through its paces, on a wide-variety of sites, from the simple to the extremely content-rich. From the mainstream, to the questionable.

This morning I migrated back to Firefox, albeit the latest Minefield/Firefox 3.1alpha.

The reasons listed below are mine. Switching back is a personal decision and everyone is likely to have their own reasons to do it, or to stay.

Advertising

I mentioned a few times during my initial use of Chrome that I was having to become used to the re-appearance of advertising in my browsing experience [here and here]. From their early release as extensions to Firefox, I have used AdBlock and AdBlock Plus to remove the annoyance and distraction of online ads from my browsing experience.

When I moved to Chrome, I had to accept that I would see ads. I mean, we were dealing with a browser distributed by one of the largest online advertising agencies. It could only be expected that they were not going to allow people to block ads out of the gate, if ever.

As the week progressed, I realized that I was finding the ads to be a distraction from my browsing experience. Ads impede my ability to find the information I need quickly.

Older Machines

My primary machine for online experiences at home is a Latitude D610. This is a 3-4 year-old laptop, with a single core. It is still far more computing power than most people actually need to enjoy the Web.

While cruising with Chrome, I found that Flash locked up the entire machine on a very regular basis. Made it unsuable. This doesn’t happen on my much more powerful Latitude D630, provided by my work. However, as I have a personal laptop, I am not going to use my work computer for my personal stuff, especially at home.

I cannot have a browser that locks up a machine when I simply close a tab. It appears that the vaunted QA division at Google overlooked the fact that people don’t all run the latest and greatest machines in the real world.

Auto-Complete

I am completely reliant on form auto-completes. Firefox has been doing this for me for a long time, and it is very handy to simply start typing and have Firefox say “Hey! This form element is called email. Here are some of the other things you have put into form elements called email.”

If you can build something as complex as the OmniBox, surely you can add form auto-completes.

The OmniBox

I hate it. I really do. I like having my search and addresses separate. I also like an address bar that remembers complete URLs (including those pesky parameters!), rather than simply the top-level domain name.

It is a cool idea, but it needs some refining, and some customer-satisfaction focus groups.

I Don’t Use Desktop-replacing Web Applications

I do almost all of my real work in desktop-installed Web applications. I have not made the migration to Web applications. I may in the future. But until then, I do not need a completely clean browsing experience. I mentioned that the battle between Chrome and Firefox will come down to the Container v. the Desktop - a web application container, or a desktop-replacing Web experience application.

In the last 48 hours, I have fallen back into the Web-desktop camp.

Summary

In the future, I will continue to use Chrome to see how newer builds advance, and how it evolves as more people begin dictating the features that should be available to it.

For my personal use, Chrome takes away too much from, and injects too much noise into, my daily Web experience to continue to use as the default browser. To quote more than a few skeptics of Chrome when it was relased - “It’s just another browser”.

I was underwhlemed by the performance, and the fact that the application completely maxxed out my dual core CPU, my 2G of RAM, and my high-speed home broadband. I do remember thinking at the time that it seemed weird to have a Desktop Client in the first place. Well, as Om Malik reports this morning, it seems that I was not alone.

After this week’s hoopla over Chrome, moving in the direction of the browser seems like a wise thing to do. But I definitely hear far more buzz over Hulu than I do for Joost on the intertubes.

Update

Michael Arrington and TechCrunch weigh into the discussion.

These applications, that on the surface seem to serve the same purpose, have taken very different paths to this point. Much has been made about Firefox growing out of the ashes of Netscape, while Chrome is the Web re-imagined.

It’s not just that.

Firefox, through the use of extensions and helper applications, has grown to become a Desktop replacement. Back when Windows for Workgroups was the primary end-user OS (and it wasn’t even an OS), Norton Desktop arrived to provide all of the tools that didn’t ship with the OS. It extended and improved on what was there, and made WFW a better place.

Firefox serves that purpose in the browser world. With its massive collections of extensions, it adds the ability to customize and modify the Web workspace. These extensions even allow the incoming content to be modified and reformatted in unique ways to suit the preferences of each individual. These features allowed the person using Firefox to feel in control, empowered.

You look at the Firefox installs of the tech elite, and no two installed versions will be configured in the same way. Firefox extends the browser into an aggregator of Web data and information customization.

But it does it at the Desktop.

Chrome is a simple container. There is (currently) no way to customize the look and feel, extend the capabilities, or modify the incoming or outgoing content. It is a simple shell designed to perform two key functions: search for content and interact with Web applications.

There are, of course, the hidden geeky functions that they have built into the app. But those don’t change what it’s core function is: request, receive, and render Web pages as quickly and efficiently as possible. Unlike Firefox’s approach, which places the app being the center of the Web, Chrome places the Web at the center of the Web.

There is no right or wrong approach. As with all things in this complicated world we are in, it depends. It depends on what you are trying to accomplish and how you want to get there.

The conflict that I see appearing over the next few months is not between IE and Firefox and Safari and Opera and Chrome. It is a conflict over what the people want from an application that they use all the time. Do they want a Web desktop or a Web container?

To resolve this, I used the PHP HTTP environment variables and the built-in function for converting IP addresses to IP numbers to create my own hit-tracker. It is a rudimentary tracking tool, but it provides me with the basic information I need to track visitors.

To begin, I wrote a simple PHP script to insert tracking data into a MySQL database. How do you do that? You use the gd features in PHP to draw an image, and insert the data into the database.

header ("Content-type: image/png");

include("dbconnect_logger.php");
$logtime = date("YmdHis");
$ipquery = sprintf("%u",ip2long($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']));

        $query2 = "INSERT into logger.blog_log values \
               ($logtime,$ipquery,'$HTTP_USER_AGENT','$HTTP_REFERER')";
        mysql_query($query2) or die("Log Insert Failed");

mysql_close($link);

$im = @ImageCreate (1, 1)
or die ("Cannot Initialize new GD image stream");
$background_color = ImageColorAllocate ($im, 224, 234, 234);
$text_color = ImageColorAllocate ($im, 233, 14, 91);

// imageline ($im,$x1,$y1,$x2,$y2,$text_color);
imageline ($im,0,0,1,2,$text_color);
imageline ($im,1,0,0,2,$text_color);

ImagePng ($im);
?>

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `blog_log`;
CREATE TABLE `blog_log` (
  `date` timestamp NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
  `ip_num` double NOT NULL default '0',
  `uagent` varchar(200) default NULL,
  `visited_page` varchar(200) NOT NULL default '',
  UNIQUE KEY `date` (`date`,`ip_num`,`visited_page`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

Data should begin flowing to your database immediately. This sample snippet of code will allow you to pull data for a selected day and list each individual hit.

$query1 = "SELECT
                bl.ip_num,
                DATE_FORMAT(bl.date,'%d/%b/%Y %H:%i:%s') AS NEW_DATE,
                bl.uagent,
                bl.visited_page
        FROM blog_log bl
        WHERE
                DATE_FORMAT(bl.date,'%Y%m%d') ='$YMD'
		and uagent not REGEXP '(.*bot.*|.*crawl.*|.*spider.*|^-$|.*slurp.*|.*walker.*|.*lwp.*|.*teoma.*|.*aggregator.*|.*reader.*|.*libwww.*)'
        ORDER BY bl.date ASC";

print "<table border=\"1\">\n";
print "<tr><td>IP</td><td>DATE</td><td>USER-AGENT</td><td>PAGE VIEWED</td></tr>";
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result1)) {
        $visitor = long2ip($row[ip_num]);
        print "<tr><td>$visitor</td><td nowrap>$row[NEW_DATE]</td><td nowrap>$row[uagent]</td><td>";

	if ($row[visited_page] == ""){
    	    print " --- </td></tr>\n";
	} else {
    	    print "<a href=\"$row[visited_page]\" target=\_blank\">$row[visited_page]</a></td></tr>\n";
	}

}

mysql_close($link);

For my own purposes, this is an extension of the Geographic IP database I created a number of years ago. This application extracts IP address information from the five IP registrars, and inserts it into a database. Using the log data collected by the tracking bug above and the lookup capabilities of the Geographic IP database, I can quickly track which countries and ISP drive the most visitors to my site, and use this for general interest purposes, as well as the ability to isolate any malicious visitors to the site.

This position was based on the assumption that the endpoint, in the form of installed applications, wouldcontinue to serve as the focus for user interactions, that these applications would be the points where data was accumulated and processed by users. This could be best described as the firehose: The end-user desktop would be at the end of a flood of data being pushed to it a never-ending flood.

Firefox and Chrome have changed all of that.

The browser has, instead, become the window through which we view and manipulate our data. It’s now ok, completely acceptable in fact, to use online applications as replacements for installed applications, stripping away a profit engine that has fed so many organizations over the years.

The endpoint has been shown to be the access point to our applications, to our data. Data is not brought and stored locally: It is stored remotely and manipulated like a marionette from afar.

While Chrome and Firefox are not perfect, they serve as powerful reminders of what the Web is, and why the browser exists. The Browser is not the end of a flod of incoming data, it is the window through which we see our online world.

While some complain that there is still an endless stream of data, we control and manipulate it. It doesn’t flood us.

1. Comes with link underlining enabled. I hate this. It’s the first think I disable in Firefox and any browser that supports disabling underlining
2. Where’s the “get your hands dirty under the hood” option list? I love the Firefox about:config list. Chrome needs this.
3. Ads. I know. There is little chance for built in ad-blocking, but it’s on my wish-list.

Otherwise, it’s good…so far. And the memory usage is, well, definitely less intrusive.

I plan to use this for a while and see what happens. I will likely find something that drives me back to Firefox eventually.

Ok, found a weirdness when you use a <li> tag in the Wordpress editor. It seems that it starts injecting <div> tags to differentiate paragraphs after you close out the list.