Praetorian Update: May 2007

4 days overdue this month, but here we are.

To all people who are also developing for OS X, this may give some insight. I had gotten some emails of developers asking about the whole UI design and how it all works under the hood. Being a designer that also knows technique, I happily show some things that helped me a lot. Grab some coffee (or hot cocoa) and follow along in the exciting world of Mac UI design.

On the Mac, Apple is the leading party for developers to look at because they define the ‘rules’ - more than often, Apple comes with nice interface ’standards’ that the aging years-old interface guidelines do not include. An example are the now ubiquitous ‘HUD’ panels. Black and transparent and known best as ‘the iPhoto adjust palettes’, Apple introduced then, and developers followed suit. If it comes to other things that spice up interfaces across the board, it’s not a bad thing to just go rummaging around the insides of the interface. F-Script Anywhere is just built for this.

As an example (and request), I will take the dark search box in Praetorian. Most OS X search boxes have the same look; the black loupe, grey or black text on a white round beveled text field. There is an obvious class whose documentation is worth looking at, namely NSTextField. You can define a lot of parameters on the NSTextField, but it’s much more fun to take a look at how Apple does it. Time to whip out Aperture, the dark interface-toting chunk of UI goodness for RAW workflows and other photography work.

Apple does some nice things here. They have made some custom classes for this, subclassing NSTextField and doing a really nice job making it all consistent. The same goes for the sometimes stingy NSTableViews - take a look at how people do it. There’s Google Code, the Mailing Lists, Cocoadev and open-source projects. Shiira, as I mentioned before, has an excellent open-source framework for HUD panels and everything that goes with it (also with a custom implementation of a black NSTableView). Apart from documentation, what is done in practice is often an excellent way to know how the experts do it, and where you can innovate or, even better, know what’s not worth your time.

Now, all this talking about interfaces could make you curious why another application I make, like iSight Expert, is very ‘conventional’; a unified interface with many features reminiscent of other Apple apps serving similar functions. That’s because it’s a very straightforward application oriented towards a casual purpose. People don’t use just -that- app, it would be a desktop citizen every now and then. Praetorian is a very primary app, it is a workplace that is prominent and serves an abstract purpose. When it comes to something so abstract and touching on the technological side of computers, it can scare your non-expert potential customers. A custom interface with unique features will help overcome a lot of the problems such applications are inherently confronted with.

This custom interface is not only appealing, it incites curiosity and if it’s not too involved and complex-looking (like Praetorian), most users will be interested. It’s important to lower the bar when it comes to giving users control over their network and taking steps in securing their assets. Now, if it’s made easy, I am all the happier.

And that’s what UI design is all about. You need to find and embrace conventions, because users will be able to use their intuition. You can use or create the many standard third-party buttons and interface graphics because they are in the public domain and free to download, often with sample code. There are many things you can communicate with the interface and it’s graphics, and (especially on the Mac platform) for users, it’s the biggest part of the program. Arguably, functionality is the most important thing to a user; but it’s the interface that lets him gauge the functionality beneath.

In line with Leopard, I am doing a lot of work preparing application interfaces and graphics for the true resolution independence by system scale factor and redoing icons (or making totally new graphics) for the higher resolutions. Since I am a student, I’m happy to help out a lot of projects with this exciting time were are entering. Expect more details on this on the Cocoia Main site very soon.

General annoyances.

You know, I actually made my first real own lolcat. It’s at the end of this post.

I study at an Art Academy, here in the Netherlands. I am sure that gives you a very glamorous idea of how things would look, stylish and thoughtful design and all - but I have to disappoint you. Take a look at this.

First of all, it’s not just Arial Black we are using here. This facade actually cut plates of metal with a laser, for a lot of money, and out of a major list of typefaces, went to great lengths to pick… Arial Black? And what’s up with the CAPITALS? It’s absolutely horrid and disgraceful for any Art Academy. Because I hate it so much, I made a list of reasons why I hate it;

And, the most important reason of all…

Also, notice the beautiful dislocated inner negative space of the ‘R’. I have found many to agree with my opinion that this should be torn off the building overnight. I happily quote the most influential figure amongst them;

Isn’t this hilarious?

OK, it only affects some older Macs, but a lot of people still use iBooks. I hope they didn’t find this because I told them to put a firmware password on there ;).

Via waffle; Open Firmware Password not recognized when beginning with capital “U”. (apple.com)

I do find this incredible. I mean, I really have to think quite hard how you are going about things if you manage to create a password scheme that can produce such bugs. It’s all the more important to know that you can bypass firmware passwords by changing memory configuration - something quite effortless on most portables these days. That goes for EFI and OpenFirmware.

On an unrelated side note, RSS reader icons with jet fighters flying over kick ass.

Timezones 1.5 preview.

Here is a little preview of the 3d functionality (read: eye candy) of Timezones 1.5, in production and slated for June. All buyers reading this know that they are eligible for the beta and will all get the basic upgrade for free. Of course, there will be extra content for the willing. Extra themes, alternate layouts…

So stay tuned, more sneak peeks soon.

Edit: Now with actual live demo.

You really, really want to use this yourself to appreciate it as much. It’s totally awesome.

Minor tweaks, looking forward…

Okay Timezones users, regular blog readers and others; I think we’re gearing up for a great 1.1 release of Timezones in a few weeks, with hopefully the Praetorian beta-ready by the time I specified in April. There were some nice words on the icon on MacThemes and Aidemac (and some hits from other customization forums - thanks for holding up the copyright policy, guys, appreciate it) so I think it can do with a few tweaks to finalize it’s appearance. It seems (hard to notice on low-contrast displays) that the shadows are slightly cut, and the perspective of the images might do better with a different distortion angle. So you can look forward to that with the other tweaks and new themes that Timezones will see.

Timezones 1.1, by the way, will feature the disk image art you’ve all missed (I was doing it erroneously so you guys missed some nice, nice graphics. Ah well, coming up later), some more solid icons, extra timezones (because, unlike many people think, there aren’t just 24 time zones) and the themes are surely something to look forward to. It’s price tag will also see an ‘update’ - we are going from three to four dollars per personalized copy.

Regarding the website, before I am launching Main, I want to appeal to the people buying, so I got that online as a priority. Take a look at the elegant new ‘buying’ page;

I look forward to releasing Cocoia Main and the work I did with various developers on icons and interfaces. My own work too, of course, and everything I wanted to share with the world for a long time. It’s going to be an exciting time.

Tired of Preview’s icon? Well, I was.

It’s one of those applications that you’ll always find in your dock on OS X; Preview. What does it do? Well, it gives you a way to check out a series of images and do lightweight modifications like cropping and rotating, all for low ‘cost’ (system resources). Needless to say, if it’s an app that will be around a lot, you’ll see it’s icon a lot. In Quicksilver, I see it all the time. It’s always in my dock; I thought, if you can’t live without it, then at least give it a place in your dock instead of always having it inactive on the right. Anyway, I got extremely annoyed with it’s default icon of a happy child on the beach with a sort of eyeglass. The application Mimiphoto makes it easy to put your own image below the eyeglass, so I took Magritte’s ‘Ceci N’est Pas une Pipe’, kind of turning it into a self-referencing ‘Ceci n’est pas un Preview’.

However, I didn’t like it still. First of all, it’s not clean at all, I disliked it in 32 pixels and below (icon sizes that require special care and pixel-pushing for clear images) and well, I started looking for replacements. I swear, once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. I don’t like that damn loupe, eyeglass, whatever you want to call it. It’s stupid. So I made a new metaphor for previewing. Here you go, free for personal use. It’s got it’s own small webpage, a DMG download, and very clear terms stating no commercial use and attribution. If you want to be an ass and use it on your website or whatever anyway, I’ll just take the icon down. I’m that much of an asshole. Of course, you’ll also be in legal trouble.

But I trust my loyal readers to just enjoy this, adhere to my terms, and respect the extreme amount of time that went into it (this lamp doesn’t exist, I just made it up along the way) and provide feedback. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it and having it done now.

Portmap. You fiend.

Portmap, a UNIX daemon made to supposedly make it easier for everyone to find out what ports services are listening on, seems to be dead essential in ad-hoc Ethernet-to-Ethernet networking with a static IP. I always give my home boxes IP’s in the strictly forbidden IP range 10.x.x.x (I’d be better off taking 192.168.x.x) and connect them with a CAT5E cable (for gigabit speeds or at least half of it) whenever I feel like it. I was dumbfounded to find that two Macbooks, one my own and one out of the box, will simply completely drown in an ocean of confusion when the daemon isn’t running on the serving system.

The context-sensitive autoconfigurator for network settings in OS X didn’t like it at all. I also have strict rules against named (the DNS server), bonjour (zeroconf) and I let in AFP with a temporary rule. No catch. The connecting party couldn’t find services, and the link refused to establish in most cases (i.e. jumping from self-assigned 144. addresses to my own 10.x range). I could disable the firewall. OK, still nothing. Obviously, this isn’t related to my nazi ipfw configuration. Could it be that I have stopped some services from running in the first place? Yup. I had portmap disabled. Bonjour was fired up and restricted with ipfw because Aperture throws a fit without it running (Read: it gives an error message with the rather descriptive text: “Error. 2.“.), which is a bit insane as I haven’t found it to be a nice enough app to go share my photo collection over the network with bonjour, which iPhoto does for free.

Nearing the end of this rant, it’s obvious what I am telling. Hardening always gives you trouble to get into your own computer. You know, that really the way I like it. But I don’t consider acquiring a link a real security issue, so I’ll have to fix this. Strangely, whatever security measure I took in the how-to’s I served, did not affect these problems. Rather, it was the portmap daemon that ships with OS X that seems to be much more essential to it’s networking than I thought. I’ll look into this, because portmap has it’s history, especially with RHEL. I don’t know what those guys in Cupertino were thinking when they were soldering in portmap with liquid steel, but I’d rather just run without a whole lot of services.

All walks of life.

Yeah, I am getting truckloads of visitors. And the funny thing is, with nice webserver log analytics, you can see what kind of people. First of all, I want to say hi to that loyal NetNewsWire subscriber that downloads my feeds from the US Courts. It had me freaking out when I first found it, but when I looked into it and saw you are using NetNewsWire to read my blog, I thought that was pretty innocent. My blog’s innocent too, right?

And hello to people from the Navy, the Air Force, the Army! Always nice to see you around. And Apple, Pixar, Sony, NEC, Cisco, you guys honour me with your visits. Oh yes, if the Washington Post feels like publishing anything about me, don’t hesitate to contact me. I saw you dropping by. There are also some visitors from a certain adult site that whose name I won’t mention here (Google Hell and all).

I must say, I haven’t named the big part yet. This month, I’ve had visits of companies that honoured me a lot. I think I’ve seen a significant amount of visitors from Redmond, too. How strange! It keeps stacking up. I hope you enjoy the iPod tools. Or are you all here for the ‘Mac Hacker’ badges, perhaps? Feeling like a discount on icon design since, well, I guess, Microsoft or Apple do count as ‘developers’? Really into hardening your OS X? Whatever the reason, please read on. It’s going to be an exciting month full of rounding up school projects and releasing more of my own creations.

Staff pick!

Ended up on MacNN, the MacReviewCast and some other sites, and now an Apple.com iTunes+iPod staff pick! I am very honoured. Let’s put it up here for history’s sake. I feel like the day I was featured as a daily deviation on deviantART!

Very cool. I’ll update the website soon, with all these honorary mentions. Keep providing input via MacUpdate, and iusethis (I love this site) and here, of course.

Europe falls into ashes of unity today.

The European Union. Benefactor, malevolent. In my country, like the French, we have voted off a European Constitution. Even before that even came into the public discussion, I was very active in another part of the EU legislation; software patents. It was a close call, but the proposals were all swept clean of the table. Eventually, we haven’t made idiotic legislation for software patenting and it turned out all the better.

The European Constitution allows more power to the EU congress; an entity that has shown itself to be sensitive to lobbying, prone to mass expenditure (like moving to Straßburg every now and then, slurping up millions just because, well, people love to just move the entire congress over the continent every now and then) and well-versed in overseeing the most important matters in national cases.

Lately, with the PR campaign that is meant to facilitate a general feeling of helplessness and fear for the most minute minority of our populace, it’s become a much more scary regulatory organ pushing for continent-wide regulation of data retention (you email, your browsing behaviour, and more), radio-frequency chip enabled biometric passports, mandatory ID-checks, centralized databases of genetic, biometric, and private information and more scary things. It’s in a race to becoming the US Congress for Europe. Only worse.

And today, Sarkozy takes presidency in France. He is an absolute fan of the European Union, and he won’t poll the French population for such matters again. Germany, now under conservationist Merckel, will also bend in any way the EU wants. And us? The progressive Dutch? Ah, our government has been conservative since ages. We’re in Afghanistan, we’ve been in Iraq - hell, we are the only participating country in the war in Iraq that did not launch an investigation into the absence of WMD’s. Progressive? Think again.

it’s astonishing to see the Western world of politics heave in wave after wave of conservative political reform that regresses us in our rights and privileges. I see the gap between immigrants and native citizens of countries widen, poverty increasing, education falling into a state of profit-driven farms that put out students with no real skills. The world we are making is an alienating place, where there is an unspoken and unseen fear between all human beings. The collective feeling of only being able to march in one line, and keep strict tabs on your left and right neighbors. We’ll continue aggravating ourself until the bubble collapses; the incredible overload of wealth draining away.

As it stands now, countries like India and China grow so rapid that in the time you have read this, there were about 40 new human beings born. We won’t be able to sustain our growth. Have you ever imagined how the collapse of humanity would look like? I am starting to ponder about it. When will the breaking point come, where oil and food becomes too expensive and all countries, worldwide, will run into struggles. If you analyze our history, you will see war is one of the most likely scenario’s.

Perhaps one day a more progressive race will land on our globe and look over the scattered remains of our society and sketch out the outline of a race that outgrew itself.