Solipsism Gradient

John Gruber affirms a conviction I’ve long held, namely that “clickthrough” is usually a bad idea in Mac OS X applications. In the process, he goes into interesting detail about the Mac’s emphasis on the frontmost window, and how this differs from Microsoft’s window-centric approach.

The concept of the frontmost (or active) application is absolutely essential to understanding how to use a Mac. The frontmost application controls the menu bar and handles all keyboard input, including command key shortcuts. The concept of the frontmost window is related and similarly important. You can click on background windows (thus giving rise to the potential for click-through), but that’s it – everything else you can do with your computer is directed at the frontmost window of the active application…

More insightful articles on the Apple Music Store…

Erik J. Barzeski lists “the ‘little things’ the iTunes Music Store does right”.

Tim Bray comments on technical details of Apple’s use of URIs and XML.

Jon Rentzsch seems to have deduced how Apple is handling the micropayments problem for credit card orders. Bill Bumgarner has more insights.

Michael Tsai links to several more articles and comments.

Here are reactions to the Apple Music Store. I’ll update this post a few times today, as more stuff comes in.

Adam Curry (who lives in Amsterdam) also wants the store to work outside the US. So does Ben Hammersley (UK). So does Dan Hon (Scotland). Joi Ito (Japan) has to trick the system every time – it seems that they didn’t really consider the case of people living outside the US but having a credit card with a US billing address.

Tom Negrino bought a song and points out that it’s marked “purchased by: Tom Negrino”.

Bill Bumgarner comments that an already purchased song can’t be downloaded again, making backups mandatory. He liked most everything else, though, and points out that extending the service to other countries will require complex separate negotiations for each one, as I had suspected. And he starts an important new trend: recommending songs via iTunes URLs. I haven’t figured out how he gets those URLs, though…

Jeremy Zawodny would like Apple to figure out his tastes from his existing music library. Sounds like an excellent idea.

Well, as everyone already posted, the Apple Music announcement is out. Here are some initial impressions.

iTunes 4 is slick and the music store works well – at least the browsing/previewing part. So far only US residents can buy music; it remains to be seen whether this is due to legal complications with music licensing or to prevent credit card fraud (foreign cards can’t be checked online, it seems). Either way, it may be some time before this restriction is lifted, unfortunately.

The music store, supposedly, has over 200K songs at present. Even so, there are significant holes in the lineup. I spent about 3 hours browsing and, while I found many old friends, nearly as many are among the missing… my tastes are, admittedly, somewhat unorthodox. Of course, they’re working on expanding the list.

I’m doubtful about prices. I checked several dozen albums I already own and they were all within the $10-12 price range; adding $1 for a reasonable-quality blank CD (blanks cost from $0.50 to $2 in Brazil) puts an album in the exact price range I’d normally pay for them in the US. On one hand, the store-bought CDs have liner notes, jewel cases, and so forth; on the other hand, downloading is much easier and previewing all songs is a big plus. Unfortunately, many albums I checked were “partial albums”, meaning that you have to buy each song individually; at $0.99 for a song, that’s less attractive.

It remains to be seen how this will work for newly issued music. Can any artist just e-mail Apple and publish stuff, or do the “Big Five” labels have a monopoly on what appears in the music store? Initial public reaction seems to be quite positive; let’s see what the artists say.

I’ve been running this for a few days now. It seems about as stable as the previous version – I get about one crash per day. However, speed and compatibility seem improved. I’ve never seen any sense in forms auto-fill and similar automations, so I’m keeping this off. In fact, I wish the autocompletion in the URL field were less aggressive; I often delete trailing characters in the URL only to have Safari put them back a fraction of a second before I hit Return. This often happens several times in a row; IMHO the correct way would be for the user to explicitly accept the completion by hitting Tab, which I believe is the standard.

The hot feature are of course the browser tabs. I’ve never used this before in other browsers and was quite skeptical. However, tabs in Safari turn out to be surprisingly useful in certain circumstances. For instance, I set up a “Comics” folder on my Bookmarks Bar with bookmarks to all comics I read daily; command-click on the folder name, and all comics are opened in the same window, one to a tab.

On the other hand, I also have several other bookmark groups on the bar which I definitely don’t want to open as a tab group under any circumstances – especially as some of them are rather large. As Safari previously required the user to press command before opening a bookmark from a popup menu in a new window (other browsers test the command key at mouse-up time instead), the first couple of days had me constantly opening dozens of unwanted tabs at the same time, requiring immediate closing of the window and sometimes even force-quitting.

I also wish that Safari were a little more consistent in checking for the command and shift key signals to indicate a new tab or new window. As it is, directly opening a bookmark from a popup menu in a new tab is now impossible; you have to generate a new tab with command-T and then open the bookmark there. Holding command down while selecting an URL from the History menu opens no new tab either. I hope this is just an oversight…

As expected, reactions to the new Safari are mostly positive. Here’s a great comment from Bill Palmer:

…if this is still beta, then I’m a giraffe.

…Somehow, after all those years of watching Microsoft use Explorer to slowly, nastily, illegally choke the life out of Netscape on both platforms, Apple manages to blow Explorer off the face of the Mac platform in a matter of months…with a product that’s not even finished yet?

…Something tells me that deep in the dark recesses of his mind, Steve Jobs had this all planned out five years ago when he made the original Internet Explorer deal with Microsoft in the first place. Now, Steve gets to kick back and watch Microsoft squirm, as he lounges around at the pool and maybe buys a record company or two…

Grupo de interessados abriu um site para pedir um “recall” generalizado de iMacs G3 e displays da Apple, que aparentemente queimam a placa analógica com facilidade. Quem estiver afetado por este problema, deve ir lá ver como proceder.

Disclaimer pessoal: na minha família há dois iMacs G3, com 3 e 2 anos de uso, funcionando sem problemas…

Two authorities on wireless networking – Adam Engst of Tidbits fame and Glenn Fleishman of 802.11b/Wi-Fi News have released The Wireless Network Starter Kit, which focuses on both Mac and Windows wireless.

Now they also have an Airport weblog up:

As Apple introduces its AirPort Extreme update to its wireless networking system, we thought it was time to launch an Apple AirPort-specific Weblog that would cover news related to using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other wireless devices under the Mac OS operating system. AirPort is the center of the universe, but other wireless technologies spin around it.

Adam and Glenn are great writers and all-around nice guys. If you use any 802.11x or BlueTooth equipment, or are considering doing so, check this out.

Glenn Fleishman posts more details about Apple’s recently-launched Airport Extreme (802.11g) wireless networking hardware. Thanks Glenn!