Call me when I can do this on an iPad…

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When evaluating submissions to the Mac App store, you really should check to see if a limited-functionality app also happens to include a limited-creativity ripoff of one of your own icons. Like Screen Grabber, which made a few light edits to your Grab app icon.

Note that this was not one of those “let’s stuff the store with crap on opening day” apps. No, this one was approved two days ago.

WTF?

The Mac App store listing for one of your featured apps says “You must be at least 17 years old to download this app. Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes”.

The app is YummySoup, a cookbook.

[Update: wow, what a scam! $59.99 for a front-end to Google’s free translate service. Way to curate those apps, Apple!]

[Update: steaming pile of app.]

Lots of shallow, borderline-functional apps, many with undeclared dependencies. For instance, take Translate, which claims to offer translation between 55 different languages for $2.99. The only requirement listed is Mac OS X 10.6.6, and the app size is 1.2 MB.

Translation: it’s a front-end to Google’s free online translation service, useless to anyone who’s offline, and pointless for anyone who knows how to operate a web browser. Instant five-star review, of course.

The UI for the store is taken from the iPhone app store, so it suffers from the same lack of searchability and scalability. Very, very limited information on each app, which is significant because they’re not running in a safe little sandbox like an iPhone; this stuff has full access to your hard drive and home network, opening up all sorts of unhappy possibilities.

Pricing is all over the map as well, like iKana, an obvious port of an iPhone app with limited functionality, for the low, low price of $14.99. And, once again, Apple demonstrates their cluelessness by prominently featuring a list of the top-grossing apps, something that has no value to app buyers.

Expect to see a lot more lazy iPhone ports with ambitious pricing, undeclared dependencies, and random keywords to game the clumsy search system. And maybe a few decent applications that you will find out about elsewhere, and would have bought directly from them before today…

[Update: what inept clod wrote this application? Select a large category, like “Utilities”. Click “See all”. Set sort-by to “Name”. Scroll halfway down the page. Click on an app. Click on the back button. You are now halfway down a page that is sorted by release date. Congratulations on not even getting basic navigation right, Apple.]

For a slightly-early birthday present to myself, as part of a post-Thanksgiving sale I bought myself an OWC Data Doubler w/ 240GB SSD. After making three full backups of my laptop, I installed it, and have been enjoying it quite a bit. This kit installs the SSD as a second drive, replacing the optical, allowing you to use it in addition to the standard drive, which in my case is a 500GB Seagate hybrid. I’ve set up the SSD as the boot drive, with the 500GB as /Users/Shared, and moved my iTunes, iPhoto, and Aperture libraries there, as well as my big VMware images and an 80GB Windows partition.

[side note: the Seagate hybrid drives do provide a small-but-visible improvement in boot/launch performance, but the bulk of your data doesn’t gain any benefit from it, and software updates erase the speed boost until the drive adjusts to the new usage pattern. Dual-boot doesn’t help, either. An easy upgrade, but not a big one, IMHO.]

Good:

• Straightforward installation. There was only one finicky bit where OWC's detailed instructions didn't quite match reality, which just required a little gentle fiddling to get the cable out of the way.
• Boots faster. Much.
• All applications launch faster, especially the ones that do annoying things like maintain their own font caches. Resource-intensive apps (pronounced "Photoshop") also get a nice speed boost for many operations, especially when I'm working with 24 megapixel raw images.
• Apple's gratuitous uncached preview icons render acceptably fast now. Honestly, I got so sick of delays caused by scanning large files to generate custom icons that I turned it off a long time ago (except the magic Dock view of the Downloads folder, which you can't disable it for).
• SuperDuper incremental backups are ~4x faster. 10-15% of this comes from not having to scan the 160GB of stuff that's now on a separate drive, but most of it is due to not seeking around on the disk to see what's changed. I've actually switched my backups from a fast FireWire800 enclosure to a portable USB2 drive, and I still save a lot of time.
• A little better battery life, a little less heat. The hard drive stays spun down most of the time unless I have iTunes running.
• External USB DVD drives work fine for ripping, burning, and OS installation.

Bad:

• Apple's DVD Player app refuses to launch at all unless an internal DVD drive is present; external drives aren't acceptable (unless there's also an internal, in which case you can cheerfully use both, and even have them set to different regions). VLC is a poor substitute. You can get it to work with external drives... by editing the binary. Seriously, you replace all instances of "Internal" with "External" in this file:
  /System/Library/Frameworks/DVDPlayback.framework/Versions/A/DVDPlayback
• Time Machine backups don't pick up the second drive. Neither does SuperDuper, so I added a one-line script to my SuperDuper config that does:
  rsync -v -‍-delete -‍-exclude .Spotlight-V100
      -‍-exclude .Trashes -‍-exclude .fseventsd
      /Users/Shared/ /Volumes/Back2/
• Snow Leopard seems to have lost the ability to reliably specify the mount location of a second drive. In previous releases, you could put the UUID or label into /etc/fstab and it worked. Now that file only accepts device names, which are generated dynamically on boot. This works if only two drives are present at boot time, since the boot drive will always get disk0, but having an external drive connected could result in a surprise.
• (obvious) Can't watch actual DVDs without carrying around an external drive.

So, file this little experiment under “expensive but worth it”. I do watch DVDs on my laptop, but only at home or in hotels, so the external drive isn’t a daily-carry accessory. The SSD has a Sandforce chipset and 7% over-provisioning, and is less than half full, so there’s no sign of performance degradation, and I don’t expect any. Aperture supports multiple libraries, so I can edit fresh material on the SSD, then move it to the hard drive when I’m done with it. Honestly, unless Apple releases MacBook Pro models that wil take more than 8GB of RAM, I really see no need to buy a new one for quite a while.

One of the few things that Safari 5 does not give you a way to avoid or clear is HTML5 local storage. This is separate from the setting for HTML5 local database storage, and deleting it is necessary not only for avoiding things like the new evercookies that sites are starting to use (such as polldaddy), but also sites like meebo who use it to store large chunks of custom Javascript locally.

Fortunately, there’s nothing obscure about how it’s stored, and the method for stopping a particular site from ever using it again is easy.

To clear out the local storage, exit Safari and run:

rm -rf ~/Library/Safari/LocalStorage/http*

(don’t delete everything, since Safari Extensions store their settings here as well)

To prevent a particular site from using local storage ever again (say, samy.pl, home of and test site for evercookies), exit Safari and run these two commands:

cp /dev/null ~/Library/Safari/LocalStorage/http_samy.pl_0.localstorage
chmod 0 ~/Library/Safari/LocalStorage/http_samy.pl_0.localstorage

To see what a site is storing on your machine (all on one line):

sqlite3 ~/Library/Safari/LocalStorage/http_samy.pl_0.localstorage
    "select * from ItemTable"

The best solution would be a small script to whitelist the few domains you’re willing to allow persistent storage from, and nuke the rest whenever they show up. Safari caches these Sqlite databases in memory during a session, so you need to restart the browser to really clear them.

My several-times-a-week routine is now:

1. Reset Safari menu (clear history, reset top sites, remove webpage preview images, empty the cache, clear the downloads window, remove saved names and passwords, remove all other autofill form text, close all safari windows).
2. Exit Safari.
3. Clear all non-whitelisted cookies with a custom script.
4. Clear all non-whitelisted local storage with a custom script.
5. (all Flash local storage was already permanently disabled, which has only ever broken one site's functionality (Indiemapper))

Note that it’s also easy to change the data sites are stuffing into local storage. The results could be whimsical or malicious, depending on how intelligent the web developer was.

On a related note, the HTML5 local database storage is in ~/Library/Safari/Databases, if you’ve allowed any sites to use it. I keep it turned off, myself.

That is, “people who are currently taking their first class in basic tech support”.

Me: “Hey, Apple, in Ping’s user profile display, song titles that contain apostrophes are cut off at the apostrophe, so that Don’t stand so close to me comes out as Don.”

Them: “I see you have written in with a concern about Ping and word recognition.”

Me: “Um, no; let me break it down into a nice numbered list for you.”

Them: “To resolve this issue, I suggest you uninstall and re-install iTunes. I have consulted with another Agent, and we have found that this is the best solution for this issue.”

Me: “…or I could wait 24 hours for Apple to fix the problem on their end, which they just did.”

“Uninstall and reinstall”, the fuck-off-and-die of customer service.

I thought you said that accounting rules required you to charge for iPod Touch software updates. So why is it that the big iOS 4.0 update showed up for free for me?

Not that I’m complaining, you understand. Perhaps if iOS 4.0 makes my iTouch more iuseful, I’ll eventually be persuaded to ibuy an iPad, a device that hasn’t yet caught my ifancy.