Google Chrome Beta

Google's finally released a beta version of their browser for the Mac. I'm surprised at how impressive I'm finding it. Here are some initial observations:

• "Reopen Closed Tab"

  Google Chrome allows you to reopen the last tab you closed, which is an insanely useful feature I don't seem to be able to live without anymore, and a big reason I keep using Firefox. It's a deal-breaker.

  

• Saves your session

  Chrome allows you to reopen your tabs and windows from the last session, just like in Firefox.



• Username memory

  Another Firefox fave is that is reliably remembers my form data without having to save my passwords. Safari never does this quite right for me, but Google Chrome nails it.

  

• Uses the Mac OS X Keychain to store passwords

  If you did want to use Chrome to store your passwords, it'll do so using Mac OS X's native Keychain mechanism, which I greatly prefer to Firefox's app-based mechanism.

• Nice looking, native looking appearance

  I like the way Google Chrome looks, and it uses the same rendering engine as Safari, so it tends to render pages better than Firefox.

• URL completion based on text inside the string (a la Firefox's "Awesome Bar")

  Chrome has the ability to suggest a URL even when you type in a part of the URL that occurs in its middle. I use this every day to get to my Wordpress admin page by simply typing "wp" in Firefox.

• Uses the native Mac OS X spellchecker

  Chrome, like Safari, uses the native spellchecker, making it better integrated with the OS than Firefox.

• No Snow Leopard Text Substitutions

  Snow Leopard brought with it Text Substitutions — handy for filling in usernames and password, and something I was really looking forward  to using. But non-Cocoa applications must be written to take advantage of them. Safari has them; Firefox does not. Nor does Chrome. Bummer.

  

• Text entry doesn't take key commands (bold, ital.) like it does in FF

  Firefox still wins at text entry, particularly when composing my blog posts. Firefox allows for Mac OS X key-commands for bolding (command-b) and italicizing (command-i) text. Chrome, like Safari, currently lacks this functionality. A minor nit, sure, but something I always note as an area in which Firefox is more native in behavior than Safari.

• Nice looking developer tools

  Chrome's developer tools look to be on par with Safari's. To get something comparable in Firefox you need to install Firefly. I prefer the native tools if I can get 'em.

  

• When opening a new tab via a link in the current tab, the new tab opens directly to the right of the current tab

  Oddly, this behavior mimics what I've seen on the iPhone. I don't really like it there, and I'm pretty sure I won't like it in Chrome either.

• You can hold shift while opening/closing a new tab to watch the animation in slow motion

  On a purely gee-whiz note, Chrome lets you watch tab animations in slow motion by initiating them while holding the shift key, just like the Mac OS X Finder and Dock do.

• Fast! Wicked fast

  Chrome seems to be about on par with Safari in terms of launch and load speeds. Which is to say, fast. Very fast.

• Cold, Cruel Irony

  Finally, for some odd reason, the page Chrome consistently has trouble with is my Gmail. I know, I know, it's beta, but really.

  

When testing out a new browser there are a handful of features I look for first. In particular, I'm addicted to Firefox's ability to save window and tab sessions at quit, to undo the closing of an individual tab directly after the fact, and to remember my usernames on login pages without having to save my passwords. It's also essential for any browser to be able to handle the plethora of web-based forms and apps I use on a regular basis, apps such as the Wordpress backend I'm using to post this article, for instance. Finally, I look for features that I miss in Firefox. These are features that are generally present in Safari, things like native look and feel, speed, and Keychain integration. I suppose my ideal browser is a combination of Firefox and Safari, so that's generally what I'm looking for when testing them out.

With its unique ability to treat each tab and window as a separate process, Google Chrome takes an innovative approach to a web browser while still employing the best features of both Safari and Firefox. Many of the things that make me staunchly stick to Firefox — saved sessions, the ability to undo a closed tab — are present, as are many of the features that make me wish I could use Safari — native good looks, speed, keychain integration. There's still a lot missing from this beta. Bookmarks in particular are half-baked, lacking the ability, for instance, to open a group of bookmarks in tabs. And after using Firefox for the past few years, there may be extensions from its vast plugin ecosystem I may find myself unable to live without. Nevertheless, once mature, Google Chrome looks to be a strong contender for my primary browser. There's a lot here to like, and this is only a beta. The Mac Google Chrome team should be very proud.

My Tech of the Decade

As is the norm for this time of year, the web's full of top ten lists. And the portion of the web I read on a regular basis is naming their top ten tech items of the decade. In that spirit I thought I'd post about the most significant piece of technology from my decade, the one thing that, more than any other, shaped my life for the past ten years. Looking back now I realize that there's only one thing that really qualifies: Mac OS X.

I began seriously using computers late in life. It wasn't until graduate school that I even owned one. In 1998 I got my first computer, a beige G3. The original G3. It ran Mac OS 9, of course, because that's all there was, but I loved it, and it's on this computer that I really cut my systems teeth. It was the beginning of what would later become my career in systems.

A few years later I got my first real systems job at an art school in New York City. In the interview I claimed that there was "no Mac problem I couldn't fix," confident in my knowledge of the simple Mac OS. Little did I know there were major changes on the horizon.

At that job there was a QuickTime Streaming Server under my purview. It ran Mac OS X Server 1.0 and provided me my first experience with what would eventually become Mac OS X. It was very strange looking, had UNIX shell access, and was not like any Mac I was used to using. I can't say I ever quite fully understood that system, but it did give me a good deal of advanced experience, a chance to learn about what was coming. It was like that Terminator arm that Cyberdyne finds that leads to the rise of Skynet and the end of the world. I have to admit, I found it terrifying.

When Mac OS X 10.0 finally came out and I began poking around its internals, that fear crystallized. This was an entirely new animal, far more complex and mysterious than my simple, easy-to-manage Mac OS 9. Suddenly I had our UNIX sysadmin knocking on my door, wanting to look at it, trying to show my how to use the command-line. I would have none of it. "Sure, the command-line is useful," I'd say, "but it's not the Mac way."

Nonetheless, as the new platform progressed I found myself forced to learn more and more about it. And the more I learned, the more I realized some things. For one, it turned out I really liked Mac OS X. Here was a system that, while infinitely more complex than its predecessor, was infinitely more powerful as well. I also realized that, though it was challenging, I was capable of handling the new OS, and capable of learning far more than I ever realized. But, perhaps most importantly, I discovered that I liked learning about Mac OS X. For the first time I realized that I liked systems work in and of itself. That realization, for me, was life changing.

As time went on, the OS became increasingly sophisticated, and I grew more confident in my abilities along with it (these days I'm even pretty proficient in the command-line). Before long I was doing lectures on the OS and had solidified a career in systems administration.

It's now ten years later, and the OS is fully mature, advanced even. And I'm still doing systems administration and finding it fascinating. It's a trend that doesn't seem to have an end in sight.

These days I work for a prominent New York museum and my job involves far less Mac administration and far more programming. I've built a web app and even learned how to program certain video hardware as well as the mysteries and intricacies of serial data. It's all been on-the-job training, learning on the fly. But without those formative experiences with Mac OS X I doubt I'd ever have had the confidence to do what I'm doing now. Mac OS X taught me that I was good with technology, that I enjoyed it, and that my capacity for learning was far greater than I ever realized. These were powerful discoveries that have led me to where I am in life. So I just wanted to acknowledge, here, at the end of the decade, my admiration and affection toward this amazing piece of technology.

A Home Page To Nowhere

I very much appreciate Firefox's ability to save and restore my window and tab settings every time I quit and relaunch the app. It's one of my favorite things about Firefox.

But I seem to remember that there was once a way to enable this feature while also having Firefox open new blank windows, that is, empty windows with no web page loaded. I believe this was an independent setting in Firefox 2, but now the only place I see such a setting is in the startup behavior, and I'll be damned if I'm going to turn off my session restore behavior.

By default, Firefox 3 opens all new windows with your homepage. If you try to leave this setting blank, Firefox 3 will use its own branded Google search page. But there is a way to tell Firefox to make your home page an empty one. Instead of using a URL in the Home Page field of the Main preferences tab, use about:blank. By doing so you're telling Firefox that a blank page is your home page, and thence onward Firefox will open all new windows empty, blank, bare as white paper. And that is just great.

If you're like me, you don't need to see your home page every time you open a new window. In fact, there's no page I want to see every time I open a new window. It seems like a goofy default. I wish the Firefox devs would either bring back the preference to open new windows sans content or change the default to a blank page the way it is with new tabs. It just makes more sense.

Until they do, though, I'll be setting my homepage to nowhere.

Software Update Downloader

There are at least a few folks who are less than happy with Apple's decision to remove the option to download and keep updates from the Software Update application in Snow Leopard. I count myself among them.

Though the option may be gone from the GUI, however, it still exists in the command line version. Rob Griffiths solution is to use the command:

softwareupdate -d

There are a couple problems with this. The first is that the command, as listed in Mr. Griffiths article, doesn't do anything, at least not when I run it. From what I can tell the command requires the -a flag. So if you want it to actually work, it should look like:

softwareupdate -d -a

This will download everything you don't already have to a directory that the Software Update app can see (/Library/Updates). Now we're off to a more promising start.

The other problem with this method is that it doesn't offer a great deal of things you normally get with the GUI. In particular, as Pierre Igot points out, you don't get a progress indicator. Which really blows, I agree.

You also don't get prompted to install the updates once downloading has finished. To that end, I've written a little Automator Service. The service, when launched from any Services menu in any app, will prompt you to continue with this confirmation box:

Once you click OK, the download will begin. When the download is complete, the service will copy the new updates to an Updates folder at the top level your home account (~/Updates) for safe keeping.

Once copying has finished, the Software Update app will launch and ask you if you want to install the updates you just downloaded. Just install as normal. Let Software Update do its business.

In the end everything will get installed and you'll be left with copies of all the updates in your home account for later use, all with only a single download.

While I can't really offer a progress bar, I like this better than the alternatives. It more closely approximates the old "Install and Keep" Software Update method than having to go and open the Terminal and do all that stuff as individual steps. And it's almost as user-friendly, being activated from a drop-down menu, just like Software Update usually is.

So here it is. The Software Update Download service:

Software Update Download Service

Download it, unstuff it and put it in ~/Library/Services. You should be able to launch it from the Services menu in any application.

A minor disclaimer: this service has mostly worked well for me, but there was one instance in which it seems to have had troubles. In particular, it seemed to choke on the latest iWork '09 updates. This may have been a fluke, or it may have had something to do with that particular update. I honestly don't know. But if you have troubles, let me know in the comments of this article. I'll do my best to figure out what's wrong as I'm using this in my own workflow. But consider this a beta at best; it's been through minimal testing.

Also, you should be able to open the workflow up in Automator and make adjustments to the behavior if you so please. Feel free to do so and let me know about it in the comments.

Enjoy!

Archives: Redux

My recent Archives article was met with some controversy and debate, which is great. I love controversy and debate, and a terrific discussion ensued. That discussion has led me to think a bit harder on my archive plan, and I'd like to follow up on the matter with some of the specifics of said plan, and expand on some of the ideas touched on therein.

It's Personal

In the Archives post I basically said I'd be archiving all my "non-essential data" to hard drives and reserving optical media archives for only the most essential archives. I should first point out that what I am talking about here is my personal data. This is not necessarily a method I'd use at work or for a client. Archive methods should be specific to the needs of the situation.

The Future

One of my rationales for using hard drives was that hard drives are more likely than optical to be accessible in 10 years with the equipment of the day. It's this particular idea that received a great deal of criticism, and I'm starting to see why.

Just a few weeks ago I had occasion to archive some museum kiosks that ran from some very old PowerMacs. Luckily, these PowerMacs were just barely of the era when ATA drives were starting to be used as internal drives on Macs. Getting the data off these systems was fairly straightforward. I simply hooked PowerMacs' the ATA drives up to a firewire case and archived the data to DMG. Shortly thereafter, however, I wanted to perform a similar process with a slightly earlier vintage PowerMac. This machine, however, contained a SCSI drive. And finding a way to access and archive this drive proved almost impossible without going to extreme lengths and making obscure hardware purchases. Had there been some kind of optical archive of these systems, I would have almost certainly been able to pull a backup using today's equipment.

I'm not sure what the future of optical media is. Until recently, I was pretty convinced it was not long for this world and would surely be displaced as a distribution medium by the web. But after thinking on the comments to that article, and talking to people way smarter than me on such matters, I realize I may be wrong. And if that's the case, optical will be more likely to be readable than hard drives ten years in the future. But whatever the case, this is certainly true for media from ten years ago. You're more likely to be able to read ten year old optical media than you are hard drives of that era.

Non-Essential Data

That said, I'd like to clarify the "non-essential data" qualifier I tossed in in the article. To be clear, I'm not completely eschewing optical media for my archives. What the article represented was my shift from optical as my only form of backup to hard drives as a significant if not primary form of data backup and archive.

To get even more specific, in the past I archived everything to optical media. But with the huge amounts of data I now collect, that's not really so practical anymore, nor is it necessary. So these days the bulk of my data — large, non-essential data, things like ripped DVDs, video captures from tape, software installers, and data with a shelf life (i.e. that is only useful for a period of time or that relies on old versions of software or hardware) etc. — will be archived to hard drive. This will allow easy storage and retrieval. And it should last long enough. The idea is that this data isn't forever data. It's stuff I want to keep around for a while, but if I haven't needed it in ten years, I probably won't ever need it again.

More important data — of which there's really not that much, but stuff like big video projects (sans captured media), photos, my websites, contacts, stuff that would really kill me to lose — I'll be burning to optical. That way I have double backups of it (I'll also keep it in the hard drive archive), and I'll have it on a more robust medium that may have a better chance of being readable than hard drives in the future.

So what's really going on here, for me, is a prioritization of my data backups that's reflected in my archive procedures. With this prioritization, I can now rely much more heavily on hard drives as an archive medium. Using hard drives I can back up and access a lot more stuff with much greater ease and speed. Doing this allows me to use optical media only for the most important data. But make no mistake: optical will still be an important component in my backup strategy.

Live Archive

I wanted to also take a minute to mention one way hard drives are somewhat future-proof and useful as a true archive, and this is the idea of a live, rolling archive.

In the lab where I used to work we kept — or tried  to keep — a long-term archive of all student work that was accessible to incoming students so that they could look at and benefit from the work of their predecessors. Our students made all sorts of work, from web projects to video and animation projects to installations. And their work was initially being archived to all manner of media, from tape media to optical. There was no standard. By the time I got involved there were projects going back ten or fifteen years, and it was becoming clear that, no matter what medium we used today, we'd need to re-archive everything every so often as data access techniques and hardware evolved. I believe that, in a case like this, where the archive is constantly growing and reaches back well over ten years, but to which access is always required, the concept of the hard-drive-as-archive-medium is a sound one. The implementation would be fairly simple in concept: everything — the entire archive — is kept on a hard drive to which the community has access. As the archive grows, say every few years, it is transferred to larger storage. As storage standards change, it is transferred to the latest greatest medium of the day. Of course, redundant backups are also kept of the entire archive. But since this data is constantly being re-archived, hard drives — or whatever replaces them in the future — make for a sensible way to have a rolling, live archive, and reduce the need for more permanent solutions like optical. Perhaps Chucky, in the comments to Archives, put it best:

"In other words, hard drive archival demands cycling your backups over time to new hard drives with fresh magnetic media and evolving HD interfaces."

I guess the overarching lesson here, if there is one, is that your archive method should reflect the specifics of your situation; there is no one archive method for everyone. The corollary to that, for me, is that hard drives can (and will) now be a significant part of my archive method.