Save as

August 8th, 2012

Disks used to be slow, and saving all changes made to disk was untenable. The solution was to force the user to explicitly save, and we all got used to manually saving every 5 minutes.

Now, especially with SSDs, saving every single change as it’s made is viable, and so Apple are pushing ahead with that paradigm: what is on screen, is what’s in the document.

This is a pretty big change of paradigm from the traditional model, and change is hard. But it makes a lot of sense.

However, that means ‘save as’ doesn’t do what’s expected. In OS X Lion if you want to make changes to a document without losing the original, you have to ‘duplicate’ (which is the menu option that’s replaced ‘save as’), and then make your changes. This completely makes sense if there’s no need to ‘save’ anymore; if you don’t want to change this copy of the document, make a new copy to make your changes in.

This year, in Mountain Lion, Apple added back a semi-secret ‘save as’ command, and there was much rejoicing. But then everyone realised it doesn’t have the old behaviour, and the howling increased.

But how could it have the old behaviour? There’s no staging of changes that your making on screen, before they’re committed to disk – that abstraction has been taken away. As soon as you start changing a document, those changes are committed. If you want to go back, you have to revert to the old version (and there’s a menu option to do that). Selecting ‘save as’ doesn’t pull those changes back off the disk; that would be confusing.

I think the daft thing Apple did was adding ‘save as’, as if it’s different to ‘duplicate’, especially since it doesn’t work like ‘save as’ did in the past.

Many are framing this as a ‘consumer-focused’ change; poor consumers can’t understand the save model, and are used to their iOS and Android devices that don’t have ‘save’. I don’t think this is the case at all, and it’s knee-jerk reaction to change. The fact is, hardware has matured to the point where we don’t have to worry about some stuff we used to worry about.

I just created my first open source project

August 5th, 2012

It’s a python script to turn a taskpaper text file into XML. And it’s hosted on github

Then that XML can be filtered/sorted/whatever and transformed into HTML, using XSLT, (which just so happens to be the first thing I learned at my job.)

I save my todo list in a taskpaper file, which I edit in VIM using the taskpaper.vim plugin.

The plan is to have my computer email me each day, with all my next actions.

Oscar’s first six months

August 5th, 2012

The first 6 months of Oscar’s life. Read the rest of this entry »

Playing with The Tardis

August 4th, 2012

Matthew’s brother had The Tardis visit for his wedding renewal. Here’s some pics of the fun.

More wedding pics will follow soon… Read the rest of this entry »

DIY Panoramic Head

August 4th, 2012

I’ve been trying to figure out how to make interactive panoramas for the web. One of the problems is capturing the images.

I have a tripod and fisheye lens, so I was most of the way to shooting perfect panos, but you get parallax issues. As you rotate the camera its perspective changes; it’s position is moving in a circle, so you can see past stuff in one shot that you couldn’t in another. That causes glitches in the stitched-together panorama.

You can buy a head to help you shoot perfect panoramas, or even get a robotic one that does the whole thing for you. I’m too tight for that, so I made one out of wood and leftover pieces of Ikea furniture.

It has 3 holes for the camera, allowing me to point the camera up, down or straight. By using up and down positions, I can get a fairly good vertical field of view from my lowly non-fullframe camera. Read the rest of this entry »

Impressions of the Olympic Flame passing through Hertford

July 29th, 2012

These three pictures perfectly capture our trip into Hertford for the Olympic Flame Relay. Read the rest of this entry »

Spring

July 25th, 2012
Spring
Spring

Mummy and Oscar enjoying the Spring at Cousin Andrew and Pip’s wedding.

The wedding was lovely, and we enjoyed taking some pictures in the grounds, with the flowers.

Daddy practiced using Aperture’s brushes to balance out the shadows, and wants to show off this picture.

Dark Knight Rises soundtrack

July 13th, 2012

I’ve been listening to bits of the soundtrack for Dark Knight Rises over the last couple of days. It’s really good. It’s very familiar from Dark Knight’s soundtrack, but more aggressive and soaring.

Batman Begins had a fairly restrained soundtrack, reflecting Bruce Wayne searching for Batman’s identity. Dark Knight felt more complete, and introduced Joker’s uncertainty. Dark Knight Rises takes that solidification of Batman’s identity a step further, embodying Gotham’s Dark Knight.

I found Dark Knight’s soundtrack left me wanting. The aggressive tracks ended just as they felt like they were going to get going. Dark Knight Rises brings that conclusion.

Bane’s influence is good. Joker gave the soundtrack a reckless, unsettling feel. Bane brings a solidity, and sometimes military precision.

If the soundtracks reflect the progression of the movies, the final installments of Nolan’s Batman trilogy is going to be awesome.

Tiny Wings 2

July 11th, 2012

This is the best teaser trailer I’ve ever seen.

Almost home

June 28th, 2012

We’ve had a relaxing holiday, mostly chilling by the pool and eating. We think Oscar loved it. Everyone we met loved meeting Oscar. Apparently his name is very Spanish. Swimming was good fun.

We’re on the flight home (actually we’ll have landed by the time this post posts). Out the window is the moon; it’s the bright spot in the picture. Caroline saw how low it looks and asked if we’re flying as high as the moon?

We found out how high we are (38000 ft) and worked out that that’s about one 33000th of the way there. So, nearly.