Disclaimer: If you do not have your recovery key, or if you have lost your passphrase, this post will not help you. Sorry.

So, just for kicks, say you did not backup your Mac for a couple of weeks. Further, let’s say that, being shrewd about security, you turned on full disk encryption on your Mac. This was me, Wednesday, deciding to upgrade to OS X 10.7.2, knowing full well that I had skipped the last weekends scheduled SuperDuper! backup. Foolish and foolhearty, I know. I found out exactly how foolish it was when my precious MacBook Pro began to exhibit progressively stranger behavior as the day went on. Thursday morning, it would not boot at all, and would power off after unlocking the FileVault encrypted drive.

So, no problem, I have a clone, which, true, is a couple weeks old, but I thought I could just boot off of that and copy the newer data off my failed OS X install. A plan which would have worked perfectly if I had not encrypted the drive. I could see my internal disk when booted off the clone drive, but I could find no way to unlock the disk to get to the data. Disk Utility showed the internal drive as being present and fine, but the one partition on it was marked as “unknown”, since it was not unlocked at boot time.

Luckily, Disk Utility has a command line version called diskutil, with more options and fine grained control. However, the command that I needed called for knowing the UUID of the disk, which I did not have. The command diskutil ca list will show you the UUID, sometimes, but I could not see the UUID of the logical volume of the disk I needed, I could only see the UUID of the physical volume (Incidentally, for more information on the new volume manager, check out the Ars Technica Lion review covering Core Storage here.) I’m not sure what the rules are governing how and why diskutil will show the UUID, but I could not see the internal drive’s UUID when booted from the clone. Without the UUID, I could not get to my data.

So, I booted off the Lion recovery partition by holding down ⌘ R after pressing the power button. After booting up, I opened the Terminal and typed diskutil cs list. Now we were getting somewhere.

Logical Volume B15D4021-F519-4F7B-9B78-D4001361BA32 B15D4021-F519-4F7B-9B44444001361BA32

The recovery partition was able to see the logical volume, but it was locked. To unlock the volume, I entered this command:

diskutil cs unlockVolume B15D4021-F519-4F7B-9B78-D4001361BA32 -stdinpassphrase

The diskutil command prompted me for my passphrase, unlocked the disk, and mounted it under /Volumes. The next trick was actually getting the data off the disk and onto my external disk. The recovery environment is very bare bones, there was no intention of using it as a file manager. The easiest thing to do was to rsync my home directory over to my clone disk. Since rsync is not available in the recovery manager, I used the version from my cloned disk, so the command looked something like this:

/Volumes/Flux/usr/bin/rsync -avz /Volumes/Prime/Users/Me/ /Volumes/Flux/Users/Me

Where Flux is the name of my clone, and Prime is the name of my internal drive.

This effectively cloned only my home directory, saving the source code, college papers, photographs, and everything else I’ve collected in the two weeks since the last backup. Next, I booted off of my clone drive again, verified that my important stuff was there, including a few pictures I took yesterday morning, and used Disk Utility to wipe my internal drive. Finally, I started SuperDuper! on the clone, and tried to copy the good image back to the internal disk.

Just then the internal drive failed. My problem was not with the 10.7.2 update, it was with the spinning rust inside my Mac. It seems I retrieved the data off of the internal drive just in time.

Most release notes are so dull. A cut and paste list of code changes, new features, and fixed bugs. Go2 version 1.3 certainly contains it’s share of fixes and enhancements, but this is Farmdog, so Go2’s release notes are more of a story.

1.3 began development shortly after 1.2 was released. 1.2 was solid, so I thought I’d turn my attention to the user interface, and add a feature that I’ve been wanting for a long time, the ability to organize my bookmarks with smart folders. However, The existing interface of Go2 was going to need a major overhaul for smart folders to make any sense, so I went to work refining and expanding the main window. It would be wrong not to mention that I’ve drawn inspiration from both Twitter and Sparrow, not to mention LittleSnapper.

Along the way I found a few annoying bugs that were present in 1.2 that I’ve now fixed in 1.3. For example, the “Add Bookmark” and “Edit Bookmark” dialogs are now using the same panel, where before they used two different panels. Little things like that led to duplication of code, which invariably leads to mistakes. I also experimented with ideas, some of which led to some great improvements. One of which was a new bookmark wizard. The wizard was, in my opinion, very nice. It walked you through creating a bookmark one step at a time, asking first for the protocol scheme, then the host, and then the path, and optionally a username and password combination. It was all nicely animated, and I loved it.

Then, someone who knows far better than I said “When you think to your self, ‘I should make a wizard’, slap yourself and then dont”. He was right, Go2 is a professional’s tool, professionals that I’m marketing to don’t need a wizard, they need speed and tools that don’t make them think. So, I took his advice and instead added the ability for Go2 to pre-populate the new bookmark field if it finds a URL in your clipboard. So, if you copy a URL from someone else, switch to Go2 and hit Command-N, the URL you just copied will be there. It works great, and its a feature that Go2 would not have had if it were not for the wizard.

Next were the smart folders, and the outline view that they live in. I used an open source project to build the outline view, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. However, it did take a lot of work and several versions before it finally turned out right. I won’t get into all the details here, but the smart folders almost drove me nuts.

Another feature that was far more difficult than it should have been was the center information button. The function of the button was not hard, but I spent weeks getting the look of it just right. I finally was able to use an icon that one of my awesome beta testers created for me, and it couldn’t be more perfect. I probably went through fifteen iterations of that button.

Come to think of it, the addition of buttons has been something that I have tried to avoid at all costs. I really hope I’ve hit just the right balance of usability and aesthetic appeal.

Towards what I was thinking should have been the end of the beta cycle, I simply became overloaded with things to do. I talk about it at length in my article The Experiment, but in June Farmdog went on hiatus until I finish my Masters degree at Iowa State. I put away the code, and focused on my family, my day job, and my classwork, and took a break from development for a few months. I miss developing on a regular basis, but this is a necessity. Last month, I learned that Apple was going to require all App Store applications to be sandboxed. I had some time, I knew Go2 1.3 was nearly complete, so I once again dug out Xcode and decided to ship 1.3.

I knew from before that Go2 ran fine on 10.7, but what I did not expect was that my reliance on one third party tool, ShortcutRecorder, was going to cause me so much pain. Xcode 4 does not allow Interface Builder plugins, so I spent several days getting all the right pieces in all the right places so Go2 would compile cleanly. Lesson learned, no more frameworks, it’s write it myself or it doesn’t ship. The next version of Go2 will not have ShortcutRecorder.

Despite the initial problems with compiling Go2 on Lion, Go2 is now updated, clean, and runs great. I’ve fixed the bugs that were preventing me from shipping it earlier. I’ve been using it at home and at work for months now, and I’m happy to ship it. Go2 is sandboxed, so its data now lives in ~/Library/Containers/com.farmdog.go2/data. If you want to integrate Go2 with Quicksilver (which is what I do), export the bookmarks for Spotlight indexing, and have Quicksilver index ~/Library/Containers/com.farmdog.go2/Data/Documents/Go2Data. Works like a charm.

I do not expect any problems with the new release, but if you see any, please let me know and I’ll be happy to do my best to make it right. I am still in school for another three semesters, and Farmdog is still officially on hiatus, but I’ll be adding small fixes here and there to Go2 as I have time.

The final lesson I’ve learned from 1.3 is to stop making major changes in minor point releases. 1.3 will be the last such release, point releases beginning with 1.4 will be very minor changes, with any new features or major modifications being worked into version 2.0.

I hope you enjoy Go2 version 1.3, and I truly hope it makes your day just a little bit easier.

Thank you.

Others have already said so much about Steve Jobs stepping down as the CEO of Apple that I had serious doubts about adding my voice to the existing cacophony. Others have written so much, and surely so much more will be over the next few days. I had doubts, but I have this to say:

Apple is a reflection of Steve Jobs, a reflection of his aesthetic taste, his preference for design, and his uncompromising demand for quality in everything bearing the Apple logo. This dedication to creating the best polarized the tech community into a group of a few who understood his passion, and a much larger group of detractors who love to point out each and every misstep Apple has taken. Steve Jobs is the best because he would accept nothing less. Not from himself, not from those he worked with, and not from the products his company created.

This is good.

To be uncompromising today means going against the tide, it means pushing boulders up hill. It means ignoring everyone else who says that what you are trying to do is impossible, that you ask too much, that you should simply not care. American industry outside of Apple seems perfectly content to punch a clock, make a paycheck, and watch the hours drone by till the weekend comes and they can drown their atrophied ambitions in alcohol. That is not my job. No skin off my back. Two tears in a bucket.

Mac OS X drew me to Apple because of its Unix core. Since then, I have studied psychology, design, typography, and am now earning a masters degree in the Human Computer Interaction. I do not think it hyperbole to say that Apple, in a way, affected my life. More than anything, what I have learned from watching Apple for the past decade is that not only is it OK to strive for excellence, it is in this striving that you find success.

Half-ass is not good enough.

Those who do not care will always surround you, those who will try to belittle you and find fault in anything you do. Do not let them drag you down. Stand out, believe, care, and bring a Mac to work.

So, thank you Steve. Thank you for making your life a story that we can look up to. Thank you for creating, building, failing, believing, and succeeding.

Every so often I get the inkling to make this site more than what it is. Since 2008 I’ve been writing fairly regularly here about whatever comes to mind, and in doing so I’ve covered several topics. I’ve written about Android and Mac geekery, success and failure in Mac development, business, psychology, systems administration, personal stories, and memories. More than anything, I have tried to inspire others, and sometimes, if I’m very, very lucky, I succeed.

From time to time something I’ve written gets linked to by someone unexpected, and sometimes I get linked to because I’ve emailed someone to show them the site. These spikes in readers tells me that what I write can be interesting, at least part of the time, but the pattern is haphazard. Probably as haphazard and random as the topics I’ve covered. I think that this range of topics is what discourages readers from returning to jonathanbuys.com, at least outside of those that know me personally.

For a long time, I simply did not care how many people read the site. I did not collect statistics or hit counts, and the only metric I had for measuring the popularity (or lack thereof) of the site was email and Twitter responses. Lately though I’ve been wondering why I keep the site at all, if not for people to read it. Part of me wants to answer that the easy way and say that it is simply a developers journal, a place to rant about whatever my latest complaint is about this language or that syntax. That’s not the truth though. If it were, the main topic of the site would be development, and it is clearly not. Another reason is to maintain a sort of “online resume” for potential job offers. Keeping an online persona for employers is an interesting idea, and I would certainly not be against anyone looking through the site to try to get to know me better, but as a sole purpose I think the online resume could be done better in a different format. A much older reason I had for keeping the site was just to practice writing. An idea worth exploring.

To be able to write coherently, you must first be able to organize your thoughts, feelings, and emotions. In the 37 Signals book “Getting Real”, the authors say to hire the better writer, because good writing is the sign of an organized mind. Writing is exercise for the mind. If watching TV is eating potato chips, writing is lifting weights. However, writing for practice does not mean that you have to share. If practicing writing was my only motivation, I would have no need for a website. A personal journal would do. So, why do I keep publishing? Why do I keep working on the site?

Mostly, its hope. I will be deep, bare-bones honest with you here. It is hope that maybe, just maybe, the site will turn into something more, or lead to something more. I publish here because I hope that something I love to do, writing, can lead to opportunities I cannot foresee. I write here for the same reasons I started Farmdog, the same reasons I went back to grad school… hope. Still, hope and $2.02 will get you a medium cup of coffee at Smokey Row. It is not enough to hope. To make anything real you must take action. To take action, you need direction, to have direction, you must have a plan. Me, I’m a planner.

Going back to the idea of writing being the sign of an organized mind, I honestly did not know how this article was going to end until I started writing it. In the writing, my mind worked through the reasoning and logic, aligning things I knew into a cohesive story. A story that starts being more focused on the topics I write about, and thinking more about the reader than myself. I don’t know how I’m going to say I’m writing to be a writer without sounding like an asshole, but I’m going to do my best.

The Motorola ATRIX 4G is technology released before its time. At first glance, it seems like any other Android phone with impressive technical specs and questionable user interface decisions, but the phone as a phone is not the interesting part of this device.

The phone can be docked to what appears to be a notebook, and used as an (almost) full-fledged computer. Motorola (soon to be Google?) calls this a “webtop application”, and packages a version of Firefox. I would call this technology an early preview of whats to come.

The iPhone changed the mobile phone market. It proved how much a small mobile device could do. Before the iPhone mobile applications were horrible, slow, and expensive. I remember it costing $2.99 per month to play Pac-Man. The disruption caused by the iPhone is still being felt as the market continues to adjust, and innovation continues to leap forward. As the phones become more powerful and more capable, the role of the desktop computer will continue to decrease. Eventually, the big boxes will only be useful to developers and movie makers. The role that they played will be replaced by our phones.

On my desk, as on many others, sits my MacBook Pro (clamshell mode, in a BookArc, if you were interested), a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and my iPhone in a dock. How long will it be until the MacBook is no longer needed? How long until all I need is to drop the phone in the dock, my monitor springs to life, and I start working the same as I always have?

As a short sidebar, touch based interfaces are wonderful, but I believe that there will be a place for the tactile response of a physical keyboard for a long time to come.

A brief look at the history of computers shows a steadily declining physical size, and a steadily increasing amount of power. I do not believe that this trend shows any sign of slowing. For example, recent research by IBM shows great promise in increasing the amount of, and reliability of, local flash storage. How long will it be until both the raw computational power and local storage in a phone both match what is available in a notebook computer?

The form factor of a notebook computer is a good trade off. There is ample screen resolution, and a full sized keyboard for serious work, and it is portable enough so you can comfortably sit on your couch to get things done. However, it does not pass the pocket test. That is, you can’t fit one in your pocket… unless you have freakishly large pockets. But, what about a notebook sized device with a keyboard, monitor, and touchpad that you could slide your phone into like you load a CD now? What if you could take that same phone and dock it on your desk to use as your main desktop computer. What if you could bring it with you anywhere, and have everything with you, anywhere you had a pocket?

The ATRIX is clearly a step in that direction, but it is too little, too soon. The ATRIX is more of a curiosity than a real consumer device that people would be expected to use on a daily basis. I explored one at a local BestBuy for a while, and found the user interface to be laggy, slow to respond to mouse events. It felt like using old emulation software. I can not imagine why anyone would choose to use the device as it is, the hardware is simply not ready. However, slow hardware is a temporary problem. The ATRIX is a glimpse of the future.

My daughter had an ear infection. A common occurrence in children, so I brought her down to our local doctors office. The doctor took one look at her ear and knew what needed to be done. He wrote out a prescription, gave me a few instructions, and sent me on my way. I then had two choices, I could drive the twenty miles into the city to get her prescription filled by Walgreens, or I could drive seven miles over to the next town to see if the local pharmacy could take care of it. I decided on the shorter trip.

Walking into the pharmacy in the next town I felt a bit like McFly in Back to the Future. The front of the store is segregated by a few short isles of various ointments and creams, heartburn treatment and special insoles for shoes. Towards the center of the store is a small cafe serving soda and malts. The pharmacy is at the back of the store, adorned by relics of its past: an antique cash register, mortar and pestle, weights and scales, and an assortment of glass bottles that once contained the popular medicines of their times.

I walked to the counter and asked the teenager if they could fill the prescription. She looked at the slip and the doctor’s scrawl, asked if I had been there before, and went to ask the advice of the woman in the back. She soon returned and said that it would be just a few moments, and that the other woman was working on the prescription now. I walked around the shop a bit longer, taking note of the blood pressure testing machine and the variety of bandages on the shelf, and was soon called to the counter by the woman who had prepared the medicine.

After I paid the copay, I told her how glad I was that the little pharmacy was there. She smiled, said thank you, and then did something unexpected. She said, that since I have children, and that children sometimes got sick in the middle of the night, that she would give me both her home phone and her cell phone numbers on the back of her business card.

The woman was both the pharmacist and the owner of the little corner store, and the great-granddaughter of the man who opened the store over one hundred years ago. On the drive home I reflected on the choice I had made to visit the small town instead of the city, and it occurred to me what a difference in quality of service there was. Not only was the smaller store closer, I came away with more than expected. I could have easily lost two hours driving to the city, and had little to no interaction with the people mixing the medicine. The transaction could have been dry and remote, but was instead warm and personal. It felt good to know who I was dealing with, that they had a concern for the welfare of my children, and that I was supporting the local community.

Chain stores have increasingly replaced the small town, family owned store, and that is a shame. People stand to gain so much more by shopping locally. I now have the pharmacists home and cell numbers on our family bulletin board at home, and an assurance that I could call anytime, day or night. The personal touch she added to our business today is the essence of personal quality.

The venerable BBEdit recently received a big upgrade, and looks poised to attract users of TextMate, which, by all accounts, has been abandoned by its developer. I tried to love BBEdit, but it always felt like trying on someone else’s clothes. They might look good, but that does not mean the clothes will be comfortable for you. Recent conversations about text editors on Build and Analyze led me to rethink my position, and examine in more detail how I came to choose MacVim.

Several years ago, I was sitting with a contractor as he installed a new firewall on our network. He was explaining to me how Unix systems relied on text files, and how all Unix systems came with a text editor named vi. I asked, in my ignorance, why anyone should bother using such ancient technology, when a modern graphical text editor was available. Pragmatically, he replied that someday I would be connected to a server through SSH or telnet and the only way to edit a file would be with vi. I took his advice to heart, and I am glad I did.

Over the years as I have dug deeper and deeper into Unix (and later Linux) systems, I accumulated a few of my favorite vi tricks which I kept in an exrc file. I had complicated macros that would do things like building the skeleton of a shell script, or insert a comment with my name and email address, or the current date. OK, maybe it was not that complicated, but every time I hit the mapped key combo, I smiled. I learned to navigate to an exact line in a file, to yank and paste text, and generally how to get along with the only text editor I could be sure was on each and every server I was responsible for. I did not realize it at the time, but I was building up valuable expertise, and, it seems, more importantly, a type of muscle memory.

In the past, I always kept my work on the servers separate from my “work” I did on my Mac. My Mac was a hobby, but work was important. When TextMate appeared, I downloaded a copy to use for building web sites. I enjoyed TextMate, but there was never love. Love takes time, frustration, and understanding. Love was what I was building at work with vi. I simply did not understand it at the time.

In fact, for many years I kept the attitude that vi was not a modern text editor. It was simply a tool for work and that on a Mac I should be able to use a graphical text editor that did lots of fancy tricks. It was not until this summer, after years of building my vi knowledge on the server that I decided to use vi for a Python programming course on my Mac. I downloaded a copy of MacVim, spent a few days configuring it the way I liked it, and, for what feels like the first time, felt completely comfortable in my text editor.

I had already overcome the biggest obstacle to vi: the learning curve. Slowly, over years of use, I had become fluent in one of the most powerful text editors available.

I will not go into the details of how to configure MacVim, there are several articles for that already. If you are interested, I keep my MacVim configuration in GitHub. What I will say is that taking the time to learn the basics of vi, and taking a few days, maybe a week, to find the magic combination of plugins and configurations that work for you, is worth the effort. MacVim is like a gateway drug. Once you get used to using it, you might find yourself attempting to navigate a new email in Mail with vi key bindings.

I am still learning new things with MacVim. There are precious few tricks that another editor can do that MacVim cannot. However, choosing MacVim is akin to choosing a partner to share your life. The more you put into the relationship, the more you get out of it. In any relationship, over time you become aware of the others shortcomings, but if the relationship is healthy, those shortcomings are very easy to overlook. If you spend serious time in text, it behooves you to spend serious time learning your tools.

MacVim is actively developed, has a dedicated community, is easily extendible, and can fly through the biggest text files with ease. However, it does take time to understand, and I will not try to tell you that the commands you use to control MacVim are intuitive or “easy”. Nothing worth doing is ever easy.

OS X Lion is a big step forward in personal computing, and, over the next few years, we are going to see a lot of our preconceptions about how computers work begin to melt away. Apple is setting a high bar for themselves and their developers. Lion is an ambitious release with ambitious goals that are going to take some time to actually come to fruition. However, as futuristic as Lion is, Mission Control feels like a step back.

One of the best features of the Mac since 10.3 been Exposé. Exposé became a part of my workflow so easily that I came to rely on it just by muscle memory. Exposé was always one of the gems of OS X that highlighted how different the mental model of using the computer was when compared to Windows. Unfortunately, with Lion, Apple decided to cut way back on the features that were available in Exposé and mash it together with Spaces. Spaces are Apple’s implementation of multiple desktops, a feature that UNIX and Linux desktops of had for decades. Spaces before 10.7 was fairly good, but I rarely used it.

One situation when I would use Spaces is during server patching. When patching servers it would not be unusual to have 20 or even 30 different terminal windows open at the same time, as well as a chat window, Mail, and Safari. With that many windows open at the same time I would use Exposé to keep track of them all, and I would use Spaces to keep all of the different terminal groups in their own space. On Snow Leopard and before you could activate Spaces, and then drag windows back and forth between Spaces even if you weren’t actually on the desktop that was active at the time. It didn’t matter, they were all equal.

Then, using Spaces’ 10,000 ft. view, you could see all of your Spaces, and all of your overlapping windows. It is interesting to note that this core functionality has not changed in Mission Control. Mission Control does still let you see all Spaces and all overlapping windows in them. In Exposé, the magic was that you could then hit the key command for Exposé and inside of each one of the Spaces, in real time, the windows would all zoom out into Exposé in each of their Spaces to give you a full view of every window in every space that you had opened. Exposé allowed you to drag-and-drop your individual windows between Spaces and watch as the windows in the new space automatically resized and rearranged to make room for the new arrival.

Mission control is almost Exposé; it does give you the ability to see different application windows, but what it takes away is the elegance of Exposé. Instead of a set of miniaturized windows, each a small, live updating thumbnail, mission control overlaps windows from the same application. Worse, applications windows overlap in the order they were used, which is wrong. If you think about it, when you are going into Exposé, you don’t want to see the application window you just used, you want to see the window that was active before you began using the window that you are currently in. I have always used Exposé to switch between tasks, not to switch between applications.

Also gone from Mission Control is the live nature of Spaces. You can only interact with the space you are currently in, you cannot interact with any other open space, except to switch to that space. That is a step back, no matter how you look at.

I can understand why some things needed to change and Spaces. In Lion, the three finger swipe gesture between Spaces would not have worked with Snow Leopard’s implementation of Spaces. With Snow Leopard, Spaces occupied a two-dimensional graph, both horizontal and vertical. Spaces could be either up or down, or left or right. In Lion, Spaces are only horizontal. This works because the best way to move between Spaces is the three finger swipe from left to right, or from right to left. On Snow Leopard Spaces, to be able to use gestures, you would also have to be able to recognize a three finger swipe up for the space above, and a three finger swipe down for the space below. In Lion, those gestures are already accounted for. Not to say that it could not work, but I could see users becoming easily disoriented as to which space they were in, and which way they should be swiping. With Mission Control, when you reach the end of available Spaces, the desktop bounces slightly, a move clearly reminiscent of iOS. However, what does not make sense to me why Apple decided to change Exposé in a way that is clearly inferior.

With that being said, I love the three-finger swipe gesture to activate Mission Control, but I do wish I could see the full Exposé. I find myself using Spaces a more now than I ever did before. I do not use them as additional desktops but I do always have a space open for iCal, another for iTunes, and maybe another for mail. It’s good to see improvements in Spaces, but it is unfortunate the improvements had to come the cost of the most sophisticated window management system on any platform.

Since writing Keyboard Driven Safari I’ve updated my list of extensions that make Safari my browser of choice.

• Shut Up
• YouTube5
• uTube
• Incognito
• Beautifier
• [Optimize Legibility][7]

  update: Optimize Legibility seems to have some performance issues. My Thanks to Dominic Evans for pointing this out.

• Beautipedia
• Type-To-Navigate
• Invisible Status Bar

The combination of shutup.css, YouTube5, and uTube makes for a great experience viewing videos on YouTube. No comments, a very nicely centered layout, and high-quality 720p h.264 video. Beautifier and Optimize Legibility are both very small, and insert some simple css into each page to enhance typography and font rendering for a better reading experience on sites that may not think of these things on their own.

When reading a Wikipedia article on my MacBook, the experience is similar to using Instapaper on my iPad, thanks to Beautipedia. Absolutely gorgeous. I’m not entirely sure I need Incognito, but the idea of being tracked by some gigantic, faceless corporate entity just feels wrong. Incognito blocks Google Adsense and Google Analytics, as well as Facebook tracking.

The next two extensions are new to the list: Type-To-Navigate and Invisible Status Bar, both by Daniel Bergey. Type-To-Navigate lets me type the characters in a link, and hit the return key to “click” the link. Previous to installing this extension, I would use the Safari “find” feature to quickly find a specific link on a page, and then click on the link with the mouse. Type-To-Navigate removes two steps from the process, and the results are fantastic.

Invisible Status Bar borrows from Chrome, and allows me to hide the status bar, while still being able to hover over a link to see the full URL. Very nice to have when reading through long text, and deciding if a link is worth following or not.

The last extension I use is the fantastic 1Password. 1Password is the one of the first three apps I install on a new Mac, and the first I install on a new iOS device.

Dropped from the list is Google Search Cleanup. I’ve switched most of my search to DuckDuckGo, thanks to outstanding keyboard navigation (it supports vi keyboard bindings for navigation). DuckDuckGo is a very small operation taking on giants, I can’t help but root for the underdog.

I have some issues with the design of Lotus Notes. I’m a relatively new user, I started using Notes in 2006, and at the time we were using 6.5 on Windows. I’ve since upgraded to 8.5.2 on Mac OS X.

The very first thing that strikes me is the default “new mail sound” on the Mac:

Now, imagine hearing that sound several times a day. I eventually got tired of having my Mac muted, and copied the new mail sound out of Mail.app and into Lotus Notes. Here is how it sounds now:

Much better. The original sounds like a carousel at a carnival or something. I would love to hear the rational behind that sound.

Secondly, there are preferences. Lots and lots of preferences, spread all over the place. Each day I start Notes at work, and someone will send me a link to a web site. I’ll click on that link, and each day an error will pop up saying “Unable to launch program”. I click “OK”, and then remember that I need to set my default browser in the Notes preferences. That is not a design issue, that is just buggy software. The design issue here is where I need to go to find the preference to change the default web browser.

On a Mac, all well designed applications’ preferences can be opened by pressing the key combination “Command + ,”. Notes also recognizes that key combo, but only opens a subset of the available preferences called “User Preferences”. The User Preferences are also available under a submenu named “Preferences” under the main Lotus Notes menu. In addition to the User Preferences, there are also menu options for Toolbar Preferences and Status Bar Preferences. Each menu option opens up a similar looking window with a plethora of options for changing different aspects of Notes’ appearance or functionality. None of the options change the default browser.

Under the “File” menu, where only functions relevant to the currently opened document should appear, there are four more menus leading to submenus for additional preferences: Application, Replication, Locations, and Instant Messaging. Under the Locations menu, there is a submenu option to “Manage Locations”. This opens a new tab in front of the mail applications tab in the main window of Lotus Notes. Double-clicking on “Online” opens up a third tab with options defining how my Lotus Notes client connects to the Lotus Notes server. This tab has sub-tabs. The fourth sub-tab over is labeled “Internet Browser”. Clicking on this tab shows a screen with one option for choosing the web browser. Double clicking on the name of the browser, or clicking on the edit button towards the top left hand corner of the locations tab will show a drop down menu. Clicking on the drop down menu does not drop down a menu, but opens up another window where I can then choose the default browser. Then, I need to click “Save & Close”, close the Locations tab, and then I’ll be able to click on the link.

This is completely unnecessary. Mac OS X keeps the default browser settings, so all an external application needs to do is pass a URL to OS X (via the NSFileManager class, if you are into Obj-C), and the OS will launch the appropriate application to handle the protocol.

This doesn’t even begin to get into other standard Mac practices like pressing Command-N to start a new email (Notes tries to create a new application?), the lack of spotlight integration, or the fact that none of the controls are standard controls. No syncing with Address Book or iCal, and the text fields do not inherit the standard NSTextField or NSTextView functionality. The UI is literally surrounded by buttons. Lotus Notes is a very powerful application, but all I want to do is check my email and calendar. Every now and again I use it to send a time-off request.

I understand that Notes has a long history, and I understand that it is a cross-platform application. I’ve also read the paper(pdf) on the redesign of Notes, and commend the team on bringing Notes this far. However, I believe the application has a long way to go, assuming a goal of Lotus Notes is to be a viable mail application on Mac OS X, and not just what the company forces the user to use.

I’m willing to help in any way I can.