NSLog();

Question: How many times a day do you brush your teeth?

My Answer: Twice, at least. Once when I wake up (ewwwww) and once before bed. Occasionally I forget the "before bed" part, which necessitates an immediate brushing in the morning. Ewwww!

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

I'm fed up right now. Fed up. My choices:

• Switch to another blogging package.
• Remove almost every index from my site.
• Deal with it.

By "deal with it" I mean the ever-increasing time it takes to do anything on this site. My Computing: Mac category archive page - stripped of everything but the titles and links - takes about 15 seconds to rebuild.

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I consider myself to be an advanced computer user, and certainly an advanced Mac user. Here now are two lovely pieces of UI that have recently earned the title "the most annoying thing I've seen today." Perhaps I saw both at 7am, but regardless, they're what I feel are good examples of bad UI.

Since when has the cancel button ever been the blue, pulsing one on the left? Since when has it ever ignored the escape key? If I choose to reset Safari from the menu by mistake, I sure as hell don't want to hear a beep when I hit the escape key! At the very least simply make neither button the default button. Jee whiz!

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Okay, so my opinion of Addictive Fishing dropped a few notches when I tried to view some of their tips.

Grrrrrrrr.

Question: Do you leave anonymous comments? If you run a blog, do you allow anonymous comments?

My Answer: I sign my name (and email address) to everything I have to say. If it's worth saying, it's worth signing. Words without a method of contact for further discussion are nearly as worthless as no words at all. I allow anonymous comments currently, but I'm tempted to turn them off. They tend, in my experiences, to offer very little value. They're dead ends.

The discussions at Whitespace are some of the best I've seen, and while he writes less frequently (and more cogently) than I do, he also disallows anonymous comments.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Just a bookmark for myself: NSBezierPath Arrows. Says Alastair:

One question that has popped-up on Apple's cocoa-dev mailing list a couple of times is how to put arrows on the ends of lines. Some operating systems have built-in support for arrows, but Cocoa and Core Graphics, in common with their PostScript and PDF roots, do not.

He's solved that for us, I suppose. Thanks, Alastair!

Or so sez this article. Hooey, I say. Software development has yet to conquer the worlds of robotics, true AI, speech synthesis and recognition, language translation. While software is easier to build these days, it's also more difficult - and until software can create software (at a user's direction), we've got that as another signpost on the long road towards "the end of software innovation." The kids asking "are we there yet?" are just gonna have to hold it for awhile.

Computer science is a new field, and science itself has existed since man asked the first curious question. Innovation in science is far from being dead and while software development may be a bit routine, so is the scientific method. It's the method of discovery. Writing a for loop won't yield life's great secrets, but writing a for loop in a language you just invented may help us conquer the world of artificial intelligence.

The early jumps in any field are bound to be seen as large. Man discovers that the sun is the center of the solar system: big news! Man discovers the temperature of the sun? Not so big in comparison. A bunch of metal and plastic suddenly displays a controllable cursor? Big! The Web? Big. My RSS aggregator? Just built on what came before, but no less important in context than knowing the temperature of the sun.

What is innovative software? Before you discovered it, you did not feel that you were missing out; there was no obvious void. However, after you discover it, its use becomes so second-nature that you wonder how you lived without it.

The author must not get out much.

Question: Do you celebrate Valentine's Day? Or does your woman make you?

My Answer: I'm of the opinion that you shouldn't need a special reason to act extra special, but I'm also a fan of the excuse. After all, sappy every day is just sappy. It's good to have a day to crank it up a notch and get away with it. 🙂

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

So here ya go: the final PulpFiction icon. We took some suggestions on the wording, bumped up the vibrancy, and added a half-tone per some suggestions from the previous version.

What do you think? We're very pleased. Development on PulpFiction is in full swing as some tail ends are tied on Rock Star. We're squeezin' 'em out, baby!

Rock Star is nearly complete (we hope to release next Tuesday), but in the meantime I thought I'd kick off a little contest. Let's call it the "Give Rock Star Some Makeup" contest.

Most of the Rock Star interface is a bunch of TIFFs, so contestants will simply need to submit a folder full-of-TIFFs for consideration. We'll dump them into our copy of the game and check 'em out. Contest rules:

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Looking for a bigger idiot than Robert Scoble^*? Look no further than Paul Thurrott who, unlike Scoble, actually is an idiot. The comments here don't make him an idiot, but they're easily poked with sticks:

Although iTunes integrates easily with the award-winning iPod, it doesn't support any of the hundreds of other portable audio players on the market, nor does it support Microsoft's pervasive Windows Media Audio (WMA) format, which most other music stores use.

Despite these changes, the PC-based competition still handily beats iPhoto.

In the PC world, we finally have decent and even superior alternatives to iMovie 4.

I love iDVD and wish something as nice was available on the PC side. However, the PC side does have slightly less elegant but somewhat more full-featured products.

I'm not a musician, so I question the value of including an application such as GarageBand in iLife '04.

Uhm, yeah.

^* Robert knows I pick on him not out of spite or disdain but because he can take it and dish it out as well. Plus, I'm still waiting for that gift he promised me. 🙂

Question: Have you made a GarageBand song yet?

My Answer: I have goofed around like everyone else, but I've yet to approach making anything even resembling "a song."

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

José makes a funny:

Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him…

…a super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.

Question: What is your favorite kind of syrup?

My Answer: Triple Berry - raspberry, blueberry, blackberry. Mmmm that stuff is good!

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Basecamp launched today. It still looks interesting as I begin using it. They've got some issues with text formatting (sometimes I want a * to be a *, dammit, and I have yet to successfully mix *lists with *bold* text). I'd like to create a different look per project, to assign different leads per-project, and to have all of the things work. Some things that don't work for some of my peers: the RSS feeds and the iCal feeds.

But it's amazing that they have RSS feeds and iCal feeds! Wow! Very nice.

Basecamp is a hosted solution, and given our relatively small size here at FSS (four people, about eight products), the $19/mo plan (with up to ten projects) looks great. We'll use that. I am still not sure whether I'd rather have an installable copy (they offer those for a negotiable price) - there are pros and cons to each approach. I don't really want to have to deal with maintaining the software, yet $19/month is a bit to much to pay for something you can accomplish nearly a well with email, IM, and CVS.