Goodbye Steve Jobs
Oct 06, 2011
I didn't know Steve Jobs, but I definitely feel an emotional connection because of how much he affected my life. As a middle-school kid in the mid-eighties, I learned BASIC on a Sinclair ZX-81, which attached to a black & white TV, used audio cassettes for storage, and came with 1K of RAM. We had the 16K RAM expansion pack. It was a piece of garbage, but it was fun to play with.
I knew people who had Apple IIs and Commodores, and I had used TRS-80s in computer labs. None of them were particularly impressive. My dad and I knew we would eventually have to get a real computer, and we were planning to get a Coleco Adam.
Then the Mac came out. (We weren't into football; I never saw the Superbowl ad. We learned about the Mac from the computer magazines we subscribed to.) It was love at first sight. It was obvious that this was how computers should be.
But an original Mac cost a boatload of money: $2495 (over $5000 today). My parents said we'd get a real computer when I started high school. So we passed on the original Mac, and the Mac 512, and the Mac XL ($3995 in 1985, over $8000 today). When I started high school in 1987, we bought a Mac Plus ($2599 in 1986, but I think about $1800 when we bought it in 1987).
For me it's been Macs ever since then. The darkest days, of course, were in the mid nineties. Especially for me: I graduated from college and got a job in 1995. At work I had to use Windows—Windows 3.1 at first, and then Windows 95, both disastrous, tasteless imitations. (Of course Steve wasn't at Apple anymore, but he had built something so good that Microsoft could not match it, no matter how much profit they made or how much market share they swallowed.) Worse, at that time it looked like Apple might not survive, and the future would be dominated by Windows. Even the lowest low point, Mac OS 8, was still so much better than the alternative that I vowed to go down with the sinking ship, among the last stragglers holding onto the last Macs.
But the ship didn't sink, and the rest is legendary.
Perhaps we shouldn't attribute the original Mac so entirely to Steve. There was a whole talented team behind it, much like the Apple of today (smaller, of course). But Steve definitely was the one who built Apple into a position where it could create the Mac, and he was the demanding, critical presence that made the Mac so good. By founding NEXT, he also kept himself in a position to push the computer industry forward even after he was forced out from Apple. And that enabled him to engineer Apple's comeback. I hope that Apple will maintain Steve's ideals and perfectionism for many years to come.
PermalinkMy history with Apple products
Oct 06, 2011
To illustrate the effect Steve Jobs has had on my life, here are the Apple hardware products I’ve had over the years.
My parents bought a Macintosh Plus for the family when I started high school. I think someone in my family used this Mac for almost 10 years. We bought it with a 10MB hard disk and an ImageWriter II printer.
When I went off to college in 1990, I got a Macintosh LC, with a color monitor. Around this time, my dad got a PowerBook 100, while my mom and my (younger) sister continued to use the Mac Plus.
I upgraded in my senior year of college (1994) to a Macintosh LC III. I kept this as my home computer for two more years after college, even while I was forced to use Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 at work.
In 1998, after more than 2 years of working full time, I knew I would be going to graduate school, and wouldn’t have to continue using Windows. That—plus the money I was earning—freed me up to start buying higher-end computers. At that time, the G3 Tower was the best you could buy.
In 2000 I got married, and around that time my wife bought an Indigo iMac. Ever since then we’ve tried to maintain a 1:1 or higher ratio of computers to family members.
Also in 2000, I was starting to work on my research and was using the computer intensively almost every waking hour. It was time to shift to a faster upgrade cycle. I sold my G3 and bought a PowerMac G4. I also bought an Apple 17-inch monitor, and have been an aficionado of big monitors ever since.
After a while it became clear that we needed a portable computer in the family. I still needed the desktop for my serious work, but it was too much for both of us to be tied to our desks all the time. So we handed the iMac off to my Mom and bought a white iBook, in 2002 I think. It became my wife’s main computer, but I would use it when giving presentations, particularly when I went on the job market in 2004.
When I started as a professor in 2004, I used my startup research funding to buy a PowerMac G5, along with a 23-inch Cinema Display. We also bought two iPods: the last FireWire iPod (the iPod Photo) for me and a pink iPod Mini for my wife. I still held onto the PowerMac G4 as my home computer.
In 2006 my wife upgraded to the first MacBook, together with a Mighty Mouse. I continued to borrow her computer for presentations.
In 2007 we got the original iPhone, for which I happily paid $599. I ditched my PowerMac G4 for a 15-inch MacBook Pro, and started using it as my main computer at both home and work. At home I hooked it into my 23-inch Cinema Display. At work I bought the 30-inch Cinema Display, which continues to wow people to this day. I kept the PowerMac G5 in my office to run background tasks, and even tried to use it as a server. (That didn’t work out.) We also got an AirPort Extreme at home.
In 2008 I upgraded to the iPhone 3G, and my wife took the original iPhone. My wife upgraded to a unibody MacBook, handing her old one down to her dad.
In 2009 we bought a Mac Mini as a home server, hooking it up to our TV and a Drobo. Also, my existing MacBook Pro turned out to be kind of a lemon, requiring multiple display and logic board replacements. Eventually the Apple Store just gave up on trying to repair it and handed me a brand new unibody MacBook Pro as a warranty replacement.
In 2010 I upgraded to the iPhone 4, handing my 3G over to my father-in-law. I also bought a Magic Mouse.
In 2011, my wife’s original iPhone stopped working, so my wife upgraded to an iPhone 4.Permalink
My parents bought a Macintosh Plus for the family when I started high school. I think someone in my family used this Mac for almost 10 years. We bought it with a 10MB hard disk and an ImageWriter II printer.
When I went off to college in 1990, I got a Macintosh LC, with a color monitor. Around this time, my dad got a PowerBook 100, while my mom and my (younger) sister continued to use the Mac Plus.
I upgraded in my senior year of college (1994) to a Macintosh LC III. I kept this as my home computer for two more years after college, even while I was forced to use Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 at work.
In 1998, after more than 2 years of working full time, I knew I would be going to graduate school, and wouldn’t have to continue using Windows. That—plus the money I was earning—freed me up to start buying higher-end computers. At that time, the G3 Tower was the best you could buy.
In 2000 I got married, and around that time my wife bought an Indigo iMac. Ever since then we’ve tried to maintain a 1:1 or higher ratio of computers to family members.
Also in 2000, I was starting to work on my research and was using the computer intensively almost every waking hour. It was time to shift to a faster upgrade cycle. I sold my G3 and bought a PowerMac G4. I also bought an Apple 17-inch monitor, and have been an aficionado of big monitors ever since.
After a while it became clear that we needed a portable computer in the family. I still needed the desktop for my serious work, but it was too much for both of us to be tied to our desks all the time. So we handed the iMac off to my Mom and bought a white iBook, in 2002 I think. It became my wife’s main computer, but I would use it when giving presentations, particularly when I went on the job market in 2004.
When I started as a professor in 2004, I used my startup research funding to buy a PowerMac G5, along with a 23-inch Cinema Display. We also bought two iPods: the last FireWire iPod (the iPod Photo) for me and a pink iPod Mini for my wife. I still held onto the PowerMac G4 as my home computer.
In 2006 my wife upgraded to the first MacBook, together with a Mighty Mouse. I continued to borrow her computer for presentations.
In 2007 we got the original iPhone, for which I happily paid $599. I ditched my PowerMac G4 for a 15-inch MacBook Pro, and started using it as my main computer at both home and work. At home I hooked it into my 23-inch Cinema Display. At work I bought the 30-inch Cinema Display, which continues to wow people to this day. I kept the PowerMac G5 in my office to run background tasks, and even tried to use it as a server. (That didn’t work out.) We also got an AirPort Extreme at home.
In 2008 I upgraded to the iPhone 3G, and my wife took the original iPhone. My wife upgraded to a unibody MacBook, handing her old one down to her dad.
In 2009 we bought a Mac Mini as a home server, hooking it up to our TV and a Drobo. Also, my existing MacBook Pro turned out to be kind of a lemon, requiring multiple display and logic board replacements. Eventually the Apple Store just gave up on trying to repair it and handed me a brand new unibody MacBook Pro as a warranty replacement.
In 2010 I upgraded to the iPhone 4, handing my 3G over to my father-in-law. I also bought a Magic Mouse.
In 2011, my wife’s original iPhone stopped working, so my wife upgraded to an iPhone 4.Permalink
For PDF presentations on Mac, use Skim
Aug 03, 2011
Neither Adobe Reader nor Apple Preview does a good job with PDF presentations. There is a free, open-source program called Skim which is much better. Compared to Apple Preview, it doesn't default into slideshow mode, doesn't display a grey navigation bar over your slides, and works well with most presentation remotes. Compared to Adobe Reader, it does disable the screen saver and auto-sleep during a presentation, doesn't display the stupid hand cursor, and uses Apple's superior font rendering. It also has lots of other features for reading and annotating PDFs, but I really only use it for presentations.Permalink
Why haven't I upgraded to OS X Lion yet?
Aug 01, 2011
Dropbox doesn’t work properly on Lion yet! Based on this Dropbox Forum thread, the Droboxers are working hard on an update, but without much success yet. The thread is full of nasty-sounding, up-to-the-minute bug reports from users who have installed the public beta. Dropbox is mission-critical for me, as you might gather from my blog post singing its praises. So until the new Dropbox client gets out of beta, I am unable to upgrade to OS X Lion.
Updated 9/9/2011: Dropbox finally released their Lion-compatible update a couple of weeks ago, just in time for me to install Lion before going on vacation. It’s been working well.
Updated 10/13/2011: Apple released version 10.7.2 of Lion yesterday. Now I finally feel comfortable installing Lion on my family’s other computers. In particular, it looks like Apple has fixed some of the nasty bugs in Safari.Permalink
Updated 9/9/2011: Dropbox finally released their Lion-compatible update a couple of weeks ago, just in time for me to install Lion before going on vacation. It’s been working well.
Updated 10/13/2011: Apple released version 10.7.2 of Lion yesterday. Now I finally feel comfortable installing Lion on my family’s other computers. In particular, it looks like Apple has fixed some of the nasty bugs in Safari.Permalink
Going paperless
Oct 10, 2008
I recently bought a scanner and have “gone paperless” both at home and at the office. The way I have things set up, I have full text searchable PDF files of every paper document that passes through my hands. It’s working out pretty well, and I wanted to share how I do it. I scan each document as it comes in, using the Fujitsu ScanSnap 300M. The ScanSnap creates a PDF image file in a location I set up ahead of time, so each time I scan a document I only have to press one button. Periodically, I run a batch script in Adobe Acrobat Pro to recognize the text inside these files, and create fully text-searchable PDFs in another location. Finally, I use Yep, a shareware PDF “shoebox” program, to tag the files and ultimately to view them. Since the search function in Yep makes use of Apple’s Spotlight, searching the full text of thousands of PDF files is very fast.
It’s great that the one-touch feature lets you set everything up just once, and then scan through documents at the scanner without having to fiddle with things on the computer. Unfortunately, the ScanSnap Manager insists on jumping to the foreground for every single page. So, for example, if you are scanning a 15-page document and want to browse the web or get some other work done in the meantime, the ScanSnap Manager window will pop up 15 times, blocking your view of your work and intercepting your mouse clicks (since the foreground window has mouse focus).
Here’s some free advice for the folks developing ScanSnap Manager. Keep ScanSnap Manager in the background! Since I have already told the program what I want it to do, I don’t need further notification unless something goes wrong. Even when something goes wrong, don’t make ScanSnap Manager jump to the foreground. In the Mac world, when your software program has an issue that needs my attention, it should bounce its Dock icon, and then wait for me to call it to the foreground.
I think Acrobat Pro is a poorly-designed program in general, but that is a blog post for another day. However, I am very happy with the performance of its optical character recognition. For augmenting scanned documents with searchable text, Acrobat Pro is more than satisfactory.
I use Yep. (Update 7/29/2011: I am now using Yojimbo, from Bare Bones Software, to organize my scanned files, rather than Yep.) Yep, from Ironic Software can handle thousands of files (I have over 2700 right now), and organizes them by tags. Given such a large number of documents, there’s no way I could possibly tag them by hand, so I use Yep’s Auto-Tag feature. It generates a set of tags for each document based on the contents. It displays the most common tags in a blog-like “tag cloud.” Not surprisingly, my last name and my wife’s last name are the largest tags in the cloud for my scanned documents. When you click on one tag in the cloud, focus is restricted to documents with that tag, and the entire cloud is recalculated based on the focus set.
Auto-tagging is a great idea, but the implementation leaves a lot of room for improvement. The tags often have little to do with the document contents, and look more like a random sample of words rather than words that appear often or occupy important positions. It is rather mysterious that Yep generates only a few tags for each document, even long documents. For example, the 87-page Declaration of Restrictions for the condominium complex where I live has just thirteen tags, including “reference,” “bill,” and “Smith,” but not including “San Diego,” “condominium,” “restrictions,” “building,” or “plan.” Whatever algorithm Yep is using (I could not find any documentation on it), it is not very helpful. It would be much more useful for Yep to treat every word in the document as a potential tag, unless it’s on the excluded list. Sure, each document could have many tags, but the tag cloud helps keep the user’s focus on the most common tags.
So tags hold a lot of potential, but for now I mainly use the full text search. If I want to find my dog’s rabies vaccination certificate, I just search for “rabies vaccination,” and Yep almost instantaneously finds 6 documents—all of them relevant. Note that Yep does not recognize “rabies” and “vaccination” as tags in any of these documents.
Scanning
The scanner I use is the Fujitsu ScanSnap S300M, which is a tiny sheetfed scanner. It folds up to about the size of a footlong submarine sandwich. It is a duplex scanner, which means even if you are scanning a double-sided document you only have to feed it through once. The ScanSnap Manager software, although it has some annoying aspects that I’ll describe below, is set up for “one touch” operation. You set up your preferences once, of how you want your documents scanned and where you want them saved. Then for each document all you have to do is feed it into the scanner and press the button.It’s great that the one-touch feature lets you set everything up just once, and then scan through documents at the scanner without having to fiddle with things on the computer. Unfortunately, the ScanSnap Manager insists on jumping to the foreground for every single page. So, for example, if you are scanning a 15-page document and want to browse the web or get some other work done in the meantime, the ScanSnap Manager window will pop up 15 times, blocking your view of your work and intercepting your mouse clicks (since the foreground window has mouse focus).
Here’s some free advice for the folks developing ScanSnap Manager. Keep ScanSnap Manager in the background! Since I have already told the program what I want it to do, I don’t need further notification unless something goes wrong. Even when something goes wrong, don’t make ScanSnap Manager jump to the foreground. In the Mac world, when your software program has an issue that needs my attention, it should bounce its Dock icon, and then wait for me to call it to the foreground.
Reading
ScanSnap turns my documents into PDF image files. In order to be able to search the text inside one of these files, I use Adobe Acrobat Pro to recognize the text and embed it into the file. Specifically, I use the “Batch Processing” feature to run a macro with the following steps: “Recognize Text Using OCR,” with the options “PDF Output Style: Searchable Image” and “Downsample: Lowest (600 dpi);” and then “Embed All Page Thumbnails.” The files created by this batch script look just like the originals, except they contain fully searchable and selectable text.I think Acrobat Pro is a poorly-designed program in general, but that is a blog post for another day. However, I am very happy with the performance of its optical character recognition. For augmenting scanned documents with searchable text, Acrobat Pro is more than satisfactory.
Organizing
To keep track of these files,Auto-tagging is a great idea, but the implementation leaves a lot of room for improvement. The tags often have little to do with the document contents, and look more like a random sample of words rather than words that appear often or occupy important positions. It is rather mysterious that Yep generates only a few tags for each document, even long documents. For example, the 87-page Declaration of Restrictions for the condominium complex where I live has just thirteen tags, including “reference,” “bill,” and “Smith,” but not including “San Diego,” “condominium,” “restrictions,” “building,” or “plan.” Whatever algorithm Yep is using (I could not find any documentation on it), it is not very helpful. It would be much more useful for Yep to treat every word in the document as a potential tag, unless it’s on the excluded list. Sure, each document could have many tags, but the tag cloud helps keep the user’s focus on the most common tags.
So tags hold a lot of potential, but for now I mainly use the full text search. If I want to find my dog’s rabies vaccination certificate, I just search for “rabies vaccination,” and Yep almost instantaneously finds 6 documents—all of them relevant. Note that Yep does not recognize “rabies” and “vaccination” as tags in any of these documents.
Summary
- The Fujitsu ScanSnap S300M is a great little scanner, but its software needs more work
- Adobe Acrobat Pro does a good job of recognizing text in a scanned document, and making text-searchable PDF files
- Yep is a convenient way to keep track of scanned documents, but it needs more sensible auto-tagging
Software I use
Jun 21, 2008
I’m planning to blog occasionally about Mac software that I use in the course of my work. To get started, though, I’ll simply list the main software programs that I use professionally, divided by whether I use them for research purposes or only for general purposes. Within each category, they are organized from greatest use to least use.
Research
Research
- Safari (Apple)
- TeXShop (open source)
- TeXLive (open source)
- Preview (Apple)
- Keynote (Apple)
- BibDesk (open source)
- Mathematica (Wolfram)
- Skim (open source) (Update 7/29/2011: Added)
- OmniGraffle Pro (Omni Group)
- Illustrator (Adobe)
- Mail (Apple)
- iCal (Apple)
- Things (Cultured Code)
- Address Book (Apple)
- RapidWeaver (Realmac)
- CSSEdit (MacRabbit)
- Transmit (Panic)
- Acrobat Pro (Adobe)
- Numbers (Apple)
- OmniOutliner Pro (Omni Group)
- Pages (Apple)