[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.]

I hate blogfights, so here’s a picture of a pretty girl in a bikini.

more...

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.

Recettear has sold over 100,000 copies. Both the original developers and the English localizers deserve every penny.

Average age of the members of Morning Musume yesterday: 21.

Today: 17.

Distribution: 24, 22, 21, 21, 17, 14, 13, 12, 12.

This does not look like a recipe for success to me. The four oldest girls have been in the group for more than seven years, and will have to bend over backwards to not crush the little girls on stage and in public appearances. They know all their lines and dance steps by heart, they have legions of devoted fans who will not be happy if they get less spotlight time, and the competition is much fiercer than it was even a few years ago. It was bad enough when AKB48 and Idoling were poaching their fans, but Girls Generation has been a massive success in Japan recently, making the local talent look like, well, terrible dancers in funny-looking outfits.

A werewolf in a dress? Of course she’s an engineer!

Sadly, engineering goggles currently look stupid on worgen, and it takes a long time to reach the point where you can build your own flying machine, but a wolf’s gotta have dreams.

Chapter one is finally beginning.

Of all the things to adopt from other games, the unskippable, uninterruptible cutscene that advances the “story” with wretched dialog and worse voice acting was a poor choice. I pay to play your game, not watch NPCs run a third-rate school play.

#1 offender: the final quest line in Vashj’ir to unlock the dungeon. Poorly conceived, poorly written, poorly implemented, confusing, and way too fucking long.

#2 would be the multiple Indiana Jones “homages” (ripoffs) in Uldum, which are not even a little bit as cool as you seem to think they are. The only reason they don’t make #1 on the list is because they’re broken up into several different quests, and sometimes you actually get to participate instead of just watch.

Honestly, if you’d spent less time scripting these abominations, you’d have had more time to make sure that all the other quests actually worked, especially the way-too-many vehicle quests with mechanics that you’ll only ever use once. You might even have been able to write some original story and dialog instead of relying on an endless stream of really lame pop-culture references. I’m sorry, but when a shaman tells me to “check out the big brain on Braddock”, I don’t laugh, I wince.