This is Not a Brain Surgery

11:22 am - Apple Mail and Broken URLs

I am using Apple mail and love it. Except many people complained to me repeatedly that sometimes when I send long URLs they break into several lines and they could not click on them. Today I finally decided to investigate what's goind on.

Apple Mail sends plain text messages with the following Content-Type headers:

Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=US-ASCII;
delsp=yes;
format=flowed

This is perfectly legal, per RFC-3676. It does break long lines, but in a manner, that other mail client which undertand this format could reconstruct them back. For example if another Apple Mail is used to read the message, it looks perfectly OK:



Unfortunately, other popular clients do not understand this, as of today. Gmail:



Outlook 2003:



In examples above, I also tried to enclose the long URL in angle brackets, as recommended by some sources. This format is defined in RFC 2396, Appledix E: "Recommendations for Delimiting URI in Context". As you can see, this did not help either.

It looks like that as of right now there is no sure way to put long URLs in messages send by Apple Mail without a risk of them being broken down, when displayed by popular mail clients. Common workardound is to use services like TinyURL to map them to shorter URLs.

06:35 pm - touchscreens

After reading "Apple Touchscreen Forthcoming?" I am surprised that people think about touch screens only in context of tablets or iPods. I would not be surprised if Apple would just put touch screens on all of their laptops!

To understand why it makes sense, try the following experiment: put your hands on your laptop keyboard, as you usually do while typing and try to do two things:

1. Touch with your finger some icon on dashboard (say web browser)
2. Try to click on the same icon using touch pad or mouse

In my case, #1 was much faster and easier. Wouldn't it be nice to move windows putting finger on them and sliding them like pieces of paper on the desk? Starting apps by tapping on icons, etc.

11:30 am - external powerbook keyboard

I type pretty fast, but I have noticed that switching between different keyboards slows me down. Currently I spend most of my time on my Apple Powerbook and this is the keyboard right now I am most comfortable with. It would be cool to have very same keyboard as small external USB keyboard form factor, so I can connect it to other machines I need to do some work on. Incidentally Apples (and others) sell replacement keyboard for laptops (I have replaced mine once on warranty). It looks like this:



I wish somebody figured out how to turn this keyboard panel to full external USB keyboard like this:

03:52 pm - new Itunes RSS extensions

There is new iTunes RSS2 module definition from Apple which says:

<enclosure>
The file extension of the url attribute of this tag is used to determine if an item should appear in the Podcast directory. Supported extensions include "m4a", "mp3", "mov", "mp4", and "pdf".

08:37 pm - iTunes podcasting support

Unless you have not heard already, today new version of Apple iTunes have been released which supports podcasting. This is very exiting news for podcasting community, for their technology making a real break to surface, becoming mainstream. My colleagues and I was testing iTunes podcasting support and here are our first observations:

Good:

* Nice UI
* Option to download only last episode
* Options how many podcasts to keep
* Supports HTTP authentication on podcast download

Bad:

* Adding podcast not listed in Apple directory is not obvious: you have too look up the menu item under "Advanced" menu
* All settings are global - no per-podcast settings
* Display of item description is in non obvious place ("i" icon which in my case was scrolled past right window margin)
* When displaying podcast information, HTML is stripped. For example you can not put link there
* LINK element in Item is ignored - there is no way to open or even see to this link
* Items without enclosure tag are simply not shown. So if you have occasinal text-only item in your podcast - your readers/listeners will never see it.


To be tested:

* I have not checked if iTunes must be running in order to be able to update podcasts. I hope they do not have to.
* Still needs to be checked if they use HTTP conditional GET when fetching podcasts. It is criminal not to.

My main problem is missing links. Adam Curry's concept of podcast "show notes" won't work anymore! You can't easily put some links to resources associated with particular podcast where users can easily access them.

Decision not to show text items is dissapointing, like not permitting text in picture books. Instead of going in directions of reach text/video/audio/hyperlinks media with RSS subscriptin functionality we go back to separate photo (iPhoto RSS?), audio/video (iTunes RSS), text (Safari RSS) aggregators.

As to Apple RSS extensions, many people wrote already about them. For example Edd Dumbill published good analysis (found via Danny Ayers blog). I personally especially surprised by their decision not to use standard RSS 2 "category" element, which have "domain" attribute specifically to specify taxonomy namespace. Not using Dublin Core is also kind of ignorant.

Hopefully they would listen to what people are saying and fix things soon.

11:01 am - Apple Mail.app user UI gotchas

I am using Apple Powerbook as my primary computer, and since historically Apple was very good at user interface I do not have much to complain about. However if you design and build software for living you start to pay attention to small details most users would not normally put much thought into. After upgrading to MacOS Tiger, I have noticed couple of things in the application I use most often: Mail.app:

1. In Apple Mail coming with MacOS X "Panther" the order of fields in message composition was To, CC, Subject, BCC. But in "Tiger" release of MacOS X they changed it to: To, CC, BCC, Subject, swapping BCC and Subject fields. Of course for for heavy users of this application (like me) message composition become almost automatic with typing destination address, hitting TAB twice and typing Subject. With new Mail app, I regularly end up with subject in in BCC field. So, the lesson here is: respect your users: they took time to get used to your application and unless it is really necessary do not change keyboard and UI layout.

2. If by mistake (cased by #1) you end up typing some arbitrary word in BCC field and try to send such message, you will got cryptic error response: "Cannot send message using server yourmailservername". What happens is that the mail server interprets a single word in BCC field as local mailbox name, verifies if it is present and if there is no such mailbox, it gives appropriate error message. However developers of Apple Mail application chose to hide actual error message from user (probably afraid to confuse him with technical lingo) and show generic one. Now user is left with impression that there is a some problem with his mail server settings or connectivity, not with his message contents. (Of course showing mail server error message is not only solution for this problem. Another would be to use VRFY command of SMTP protocol to verify all destination addresses prior to submitting the message).

02:06 pm - iChat over Rendezvous presence management

I am continuing to study what protocols iChat is using. ( Today I looked at iChat over Rendezvous. )

11:21 pm - Apple's little dirty secret (that is UPnP)

Tonight I was debugging with help of a friend my iChat video/audio connectivity through a firewall and we noticed that it talks UPnP. This fact is not mentioned anywhere on Apple site. Even in documents such as this, port 1900 (SSDP protocol which iChat actually uses) is missing.

I think, the reasons why they do not advertise support for UPnP are purely political. If you search on Internet for "Apple" and "UPnP" you will find dosens of articles where people explain that UPnP is Microsoft-specific crap and Apple have Rendezvous which does the same thing but better. They wrong on many points here: First, while initiated by Microsoft, UPnP forum now consists of 696 members, which include names like 3COM, CISCO, IBM, AOL, Intel. For example UGD Protocol used by iChat lists as authors people from Intel and CISCO, and none from Microsoft. Second, most important, is that Rendezvous AFAIK does not address firewall and NAT issues.

So, great news is that iChat supports UPnP and was able to discover UPnP daemon running on Linksys wireless firewall/router with SVEASOFT firmware. In successfully established dynamic NAT mapping for SIP protocol (port 5060), but failed to establish one for RTP/RTCP (iChat uses port range 16384-16403 for them). So SIP connection went through OK, but video/audio stream connection failed. Once we had set up a static port forwarding for RTP/RTCP, everything worked like a charm.

09:58 pm - Installing Firewall Builder on MacOS X 10.3 (Panther)

If you are trying to install Firewall Builder on MacOS X 10.3 please read further for some hints. This is just informal note, if you have any problems you should consult documentation on the official site.

First of all you need fresh version of Fink. Just download and install binary package (it requires X-Code tools installed). MacOS X 10.3 support in Fink is fairly fresh and you need to install some updates. To do this use: 'fink selfupdate-rsync' followed by 'fink update-all'. Now 'fink --version' should show something like:

/Users/lord/tmp> fink --version
Package manager version: 0.17.4
Distribution version: 0.6.2.cvs

Downloading the file "fwbuilder-1.1.2.tar.gz" failed.

(1)      Give up
(2)      Retry the same mirror
(3)      Retry another mirror
(4)      Retry using next mirror set "sourceforge"

How do you want to proceed? [1]

07:09 pm - MacOS X on VMWare

VMWare is very useful and versatile software. I am using it every day to run my MacOS X on top of it:

I am wondering if it worth upgrading to version 4.

01:19 am - iTunes RSS feeds

Do not miss iTunes Music Store RSS Feed Generator. I must say, technologically, nowadays Apple doing a lot of things right.