Buggin' My Life Away

The fine folks at Apple generally do a pretty good job of designing the programmatic interfaces, "protocols" in Objective-C speak, that the system and applications use to communicate with each other. I mean that most sincerely. Designing programmatic...

There's a lot being written about Steve's passing, but I'm afraid there's so much of it that truly misses what Steve really did for our industry. For example, Matt Yglesias asks, " Why so view? " I posted a brief comment there, but I think the point deserves...

According to Pierre , I'm too ossified to discuss this subject. On the other hand, when Pierre uses the word "usability," it's very much like the way Vizzini uses the word "inconceivable" in The Princess Bride , and I'm often moved to quote Inigo Montoya...

Brent Simmons has some thoughts on managing shared code . Those ideas are a good start, the most important being that this code needs to be under some kind of source code management tool, preferably one with good branching/merging facilities. There...

Well, that didn't take long, did it? My second post after a lengthy hiatus, and I end up on the front page of Daring Fireball . Clearly my talent for stirring the pot hasn't waned in the least over the past couple of years. I'm also amused at a number...

Over on DaringFireball, John Gruber points out an annoyance he has with icons used for "Save". Specifically, he doesn't like the idea of using a floppy disk as the icon, and he, rather snarkily, suggests using "S-a-v-e" to mean "Save". Couple of problems...

OK, so Nadyne , after posting a nice article about using PowerPoint on Mac Mojo ,  spilled the beans , so I suppose I should say something. Though, the fact that I wanted to title a blog post with, "Use the Right Tool for the Job and You won't become...

One of the things I love about this job is tracking downinteresting bugs.   It’s like readinga good who-done-it, complete with plot twists, multiple potential suspects and a fascinating array of characters.   Late last September, Craig Eisler submitted...

Seattle. Middle of January. Nothing in the sky but this huge, yellow thing. Looking at it hurts your eyes. In that context, read this transcript . "Don't put your lips on it!" Rick Currently playing in iTunes: Afternoon by the Pat Metheny Group

I've had quite a bit of positive feedback on my last post, so I thought I'd do another musical post. "Trading fours," or "trading eights," is a jazz term that refers to one or more soloists taking turns in a solo. The idea is for each musician to pick...

It's mid afternoon Saturday, July 27, 2007. The scene is Toyota Park, suburban Chicago, Illinois, home of some minor league soccer team. We're between acts during the Crossroads Guitar Festival, and Bill Murray walks out to introduce the next act. A few...

Wow. What a stretch. We shipped the bits for Office 2008 off to manufacturing back in December, and that very day I was still in the office until 10:00 that night doing some prep work for the next release of Office. Having been head down in Office 2008...

I'm surprised that I haven't hit this before at Microsoft, but I actually hit an OOF infinite loop today. For those who don't know, "OOF" is an acronym that refers to someone being out of the office. The Exchange team gives a nice run-down on the...

By now you’ve read the news .  MacBU has a new general manager .  I only found out about this via e-mail on Thursday, and, yesterday, I got a chance to meet Craig.  I’ll get to my initial impressions of Craig in a bit, but I also want to talk a bit about...

On one of the many informational, internal e-mail lists of which I am a member, someone, today, posted one of those ubiquitous "How-Do-I" requests where the solution involves some form of "your text here". Someone replied with a nice and quick answer...

In every project, there's a point where you have to stop tweaking this and touching up that little bit of behavior and focus on just fixing bugs. If you don't, then you never ship. Nadyne gave some of the details over on mac mojo . Well, we're getting...

Kinda makes ya wonder... Rick Currently playing in iTunes: Boom! Boom! by John Lee Hooker

MacWorld always has its surprises, but some of them are quite personal. For me, the surprise was the discovery, at 5:20 this morning, that a previous occupant of my hotel room had set the alarm-clock but hadn't turned off the alarm. I've been told by...

MacWorld has a decent review of BBEdit 8.5 , but it fails to mention a new feature that is of particular use to programmers. One of the features of CodeWarrior that I'd missed was the syntax highlighting that the IDE applied to symbols that were defined...

There’s been a bit of flak about the Office Open XML file format converters for Mac Office. Sheridan posted an update on MacMojo, and Schwieb weighed in regarding some of the comments that people have made. There’s quite a bit of speculation gong on,...

Somewhere in the backroads of Issaquena County, Mississippi, along the banks of the Mississippi river, McKinley Morganfield was born. Likely due to his early life so close to the Mississippi river, McKinley later came to be known as Muddy Waters. The...

My profile is Technorati Profile . Nothing to see. Move along, now. Rick

Scene: A fly-over view of Microsoft's campus focuses in on the building that houses Mac BU. The camera "flight" enters one of the offices through a window. During the fly-over, a voice-over says: New 3.0 GHz Mac Pro: $3,599.00 Two 23" Apple Cinema...

Back when I started blogging, I had a go-around with Pierre Igot. I'm not going to rehash it, but I think the best summary of the entire affair can be found here . During that discussion, I made the mistake of bringing up the concept of "opportunity...

Those of you who knew, or knew of, Michael Bartosh, might want to check this out . John Welch, over at bynkii.com is pretty passionate about it . Currently playing in iTunes: Fallen Down by Gov't Mule