Want to see a demo? I have recorded a Youtube.com video of iTunes in Action (deleting files).

The previous week was quite exciting. It started with great news from the Apple keynote, like the new iPod nano (which I had just bought the same night). The new Nano requires iTunes 7, so I bit the bullet and updated my PC from iTunes 6 to version 7.0. Everything went fine. At least it seemed so…

It was during the weekend when I realized that a lot of my downloaded files oddly had vanished from my drive E. At first I thought, ok, maybe I accidentally deleted them by my own. Fine, no problem, so I downloaded the files again. Waited until download was over. Double-Checked by opening the files. Everything was fine. Guess what, the next day all of them were gone again.

As it turned out, the culprit was iTunes 7. This f*g version has a nasty bug (among lots of other issues!). By using FileMon from SysInternals to log all file operations on drive E:, I found that iTunes, just after startup, scans the folder which is set as “Music Folder” in the preferences. That’s ok so far. But here’s what not: The setting for automatic management was switched off, yet iTunes 7 didn’t care. It ignores this setting and does some strange kind of sync, which might result in files and folders getting deleted.

Back in the times of iTunes 5, I had the music folder set to “E:”. I switched off the automatic management, so the music folder (drive E:) was simply ignored. iTunes 6 behaved as expected and I just forgot about these settings. Along comes iTunes 7 which has changed this behavior. iTunes 7 always syncs the music folder (E: for me) in a very strange way: all new files and subfolders that were or will be added to this folder after the iTunes 7 installation just get deleted when iTunes starts. It’s kind of scary.

I have filed a bug report to Apple. But this behavior is so nasty and data loss might be huge. So I decided to report in my blog as well. God (Apple) help us all!

Our admins have forced each employee to set a new password. As a consequence, Thunderbird now just fails to log-in by displaying a message like “Login failed.”. The message is displayed not once, not twice, but three times! OK, I expected this to happen in some way, but I also would expect a dialog for fixing the problem, like, for example, to provide a prompt for a new password. Or at least suggest where to find a fix. And please no discussion like “It’s not Thunderbird’s fault. How should it know the IMAP error is related to the password?” Other Mail clients do. To me, Thunderbird is just dumb here. After 10 more tries and 10 minutes of my life wasted, I gave up. A sad and frustrating user experience.

I knew the answer is somewhere out there. So I took the challenge, figured out the search keywords for Google, and after 10 more minutes, I found the answer in the Thunderbird FAQ:

“I changed my IMAP password, how do I get rid of a cached password?”

The answer is actually so obvious, even my mom would have figured it out…

“In the menu, select Tools > Options…, click on Privacy, choose the Passwords tab and click View Saved Passwords. Select the site/username line you want to delete and click Remove. When done, click Close and restart Mozilla Thunderbird.”

The Luxury of Ignorance

Hilarious… I was supposed to know that Thunderbird uses a cache for IMAP passwords and that I have to remove a specific entry from it manually. (BTW, my cache has about 200 passwords, so just locating the specific one requires a serious dose of endurance.) It’s not funny, actually. This is an example of these small, flawed details that make non-geeks stay away from this otherwise great piece of software. I probably felt the same degree of frustration that Eric S. Raymond felt when he tried to configure CUPS (“The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story”).

Pursuing Quality in Software

So what’s the morale? I think we as developers need to focus a lot more on user friendliness. For starters, forget about power features — at least until the application invites new, non-technical users with a clean, simple, intuitive and supportive UI, and they are happy to stay. Here are some suggestions:

• Focus on how to adapt the software to the user’s workflow and understand his usage patterns. Specifically, this means to
• provide ways to assist the user, and
• help and guide him when an error occurs.
• Follow the Principle of Least Astonishment (aka Principle of Least Surprise).

Mac OS X Developers take the Challenge

When I switched to the Mac, I quickly figured out what I think is one of the most important competitive advantages of Mac OS X over Windows, Linux etc. It’s the simplicity in use and intuitive UI, refined to perfection by the application developers. This is, to a certain degree, a consequence of Mac OS X’s excellent Cocoa and Carbon frameworks, which enforce simple, consistent, great-looking apps. But I think, the main reason is that the users are accustomed to just such a high level of simplicity and intuitive use. Applications are appraised or dismissed merely based on this quality aspect. On Windows, users quickly give up to expect any UI consistency and design quality; on Linux nobody expects it in the first place. On Mac OS X, developers take the challenge. And users appreciate it. Actually, it’s the premise of the slogan “It just works”. For example, take a look at initiatives like Apple Design Awards or follow the reviews at VersionTracker.

private String testString = "abcd\\u5B66\\uD800\\uDF30";
int charCount = testString.length();

Java 5 introduces support for Unicode 4.0, which defines a significant number of new characters above U+FFFF (the U+ prefix signifies a valid Unicode character value as a hexadecimal number.). Thus, the 16-bit char type does no longer represent all characters!

The consequence is that a single char value can still represent a Unicode value, but only up to U+FFFF. You require a char surrogate pair to represent supplementary characters. The leading or high value of the pair is in the U+D800 through U+DBFF range; the trailing or low value is in the U+DC00 through U+DFFF range. Using surrogate pairs, programmers can represent any character in the Unicode Standard. This special use of 16-bit units is called UTF-16, and Java 5 uses it to represent Unicode 4.0 characters. The char type is now a UTF-16 code unit, not necessarily a complete Unicode character. A complete Unicode character is named code point.

For an example, in the code sample above, the (UTF-16) string contains the Gothic letter as the surrogate pair \uD800\uDF30. The pair represents a single Unicode code point, and so the character code point count of the entire string is 6 instead of 7!

To find out how many Unicode character code points are in a string, use the codePointCount() method:

private String testString = "abcd\\u5B66\\uD800\\uDF30";
int charCount = testString.length();
int characterCount = testString.codePointCount(0, charCount);
System.out.printf("character count: %d\\n", characterCount);

The output is “6”.

“If your MacBook is shutting down intermittently, please contact AppleCare for service.”

Apple has acknowledged the RSS as a hardware related defect, meaning that repair is covered by your guaranty. (Hopefully, you haven’t void it by opening your Macbook!). And as other sources as well as comments to the former blog article indicate, Apple is specifically replacing the heatsink in Macbooks suffering from the RSS. Good news, then, finally.

Update Sep, 19: MacBidouille has a story (in French) about Apple now providing specific instructions to Apple Authorized Service Providers on how to resolve the RSS. Apple also delivers a revised motherboard and a new heatsink for the repair.

So, with a little time to spare today, I’ve completed a small hack which I had on my Todo list for quite a long time. iStocks Widget is a modification (aka patch or clone) of the original Stocks widget which pulls its stock information from the international Yahoo quotes servers. So basically, you can track any stock as long as there’s a corresponding Yahoo symbol. The symbols usually carry information about the stock exchange location, like “SIE.DE” is Siemens, XETRA, Germany.

I’ve put the release at 0.1, since I’m not quite sure if the Yahoo URLs are stable. I’ve tested it against some random stocks (which all worked fine). BTW, you will notice that the intraday and weekly charts are images from Yahoo (they are not rendered via Quartz as the rest). The problem here is that 15-minute and hourly quotes are not available yet for international stocks. I think Yahoo is about to provide them when its new Yahoo Finance Charts will be announced officially.

When checking out Afloat, make sure you fully utilize its key/mouse bindings. While pressing Cmd-Ctrl use the mouse wheel to increase/decrease transparency, or move the mouse to drag the window.

iShowU is a nice tool with a focus strictly on recording. But what about enhancing the movie? Well, of course there are add-ons like OmniDazzle, Mouseposé and others that you can use during recording. These effects really show off. But I mean something for a quick post-editing, like voice-over and text boxes or bubbles.

It turned out that all tools I was longing for were already installed on my Mac, but I just haven’t been aware. First of all, GarageBand is great for adding voice-over, sound effects and background music. Put each of them into a separate track, adjust volumes, add effects (I like my voice a little deeper…). A perfect, very capable tool, easy too use. 100% Mac-like. And then Quicktime, well, the Pro edition. It has some features that make it a perfect match: text tracks and image tracks with a multitude of options, like transparency, effects and positions. The multi-track editor of Quicktime Pro is not so intuitive, but quite capable. It supports export to mp4, which produces perfect and small movies. For more fancy formats, like Flash (FLV), ffmpegX is the free tool of choice. See the posting “Flash Movie Conversion for Mac OS X” and “How to encode FLV” for an elaborate discussion.

I’ve uploaded my first Screencast to Youtube.com. It shows Quicktime Pro and how to enhance a screencast by adding text tracks and nice speech bubbles (really image tracks with a bubble exported from OmniGraffle; again, shipped with your Mac).

Quicktime Alternatives?

The alternatives to Quicktime Pro would be iMovie HD and Final Cut. Well, iMovie HD is targeted for editing DV material; one show stopper for me was the lack of support for custom dimensions, like 200 x 100. This is also true for Final Cut Express. The next issue with iMovie HD was the inferior export quality. As a result, this leaves only Final Cut Pro as a valid alternative, but it’s way too expensive for me.

Optimal Settings for Exporting Quicktime to Youtube.com

When publishing videos from Quicktime (i.e. .mov files) to Youtube.com, I had to tune the export settings. I’ve taken screenshots of the optimal settings (Photo set on Flickr.com). Without these, my uploaded videos always had some nasty artefacts caused by Youtube’s automatic conversion. (BTW, Youtube can digest a lot of video formats; it always converts them to mp4, NTSC/4, 320×240, 15fps with audio as MP3 at 22050 kHz. The video format is FLV.) But why export at all, and not just upload the .mov file? My .mov files had seperate tracks, which is fine usually, but Youtube only recognizes some of them; specifically it drops text and image tracks, and also video/sound tracks that are positioned at a specific starting time. I can collapse all tracks to just one audio and one video track by exporting to, for example, MP4.

The heat sink expands during operation and gets into contact with the sensor cable and melts the cable’s isolation. This in turn causes a short circuit and, thus, the immediate shutdown of the Macbook. As the heat sink is cooling down, the heat sink contracts to the point that it looses its contact with the cable and breaks up the short circuit. You can now boot again. Just until the processor heats up and the heat sink and the cable have contact again…

If this proves to be the reason then there might be a quick fix, specifically you would not have to exchange your mainboard or RAM.

Update: Besides being picked up by digg.com (again), the news is published by the major German Heise Newsticker (incl. 400+ comments).

Update 2: Apple officially acknowledges Macbook Random Shutdowns. See my blog article.