Guy in the Hat

Xfile Review

If its developer is to be believed, Xfile is some sort of magical application: “The standard setter,” “1/100 the size of comparable products” and “by far the fastest file browser.” How does Xfile manage these amazing feats? Let’s take a look, shall we?

The first thing we notice about the application is a familiar file-manager scheme: a source list of folders on the left (in this case, every folder of the drive in a heirarchy) and a list of the folder contents on the right. The text of this right-hand view is fairly tiny, so we may be tempted to change it. And that’s when we realize:

There’s no View menu.

Well, that’s weird, but I’m sure it’s in the Preferences, right?

There are no Preferences.

And the reason behind the small size of Xfile begins to become oh-so-painfully clear.

There are no features in this application.

We scan furiously across the window, through the menus, and into the documentation; surely there is more to this app than a window with two views! But we search in vain.

Maybe the developer’s site will help us! Surely it can explain why all icons are either a generic white “file” of blue “folder.” Or why all dot files are forcibly displayed, or why there is no search of any kind. And it must be able to explain why we can’t assign shortcuts to folders we want or open the app at anywhere other than Home. Of course it can tell us why there is no installer, and we had to move the framework to the proper place manually.

Aha, a FAQ! And I was getting worried there for a second. Let’s see…

“Q. Why doesn’t Xfile include the functionality of Xfind and Xscan? It would be a lot more convenient with search capabilities in the same program.

A. Because it’s bad design. The design you speak of will only be optimal for precisely the situation you have in mind. Keep the programs separate and they’re more flexible. Besides, smaller more finite bodies of code mean more rugged bug-free crash-proof programs. The difference in how one works with these programs is almost non-existent.”

Oh, so the $50 file manager doesn’t include a basic function of every other file manager because it’s “more flexible” that way. Makes perfect sense. And I bet it saves space, too.

“Q. How can I get Xfile to open at other than my home directory?

A. Xfile is a ‘Cocoa document-based application’, even though it doesn’t edit documents per se. Put the directory you’re after on a command line in a shell script. Xfile will always open new windows at the directories dropped on its Dock icon: drop one and see. This also works interchangeably with Xfind and Xscan.”

Silly me, I forgot to write a shell script just to open the directory I wanted on startup. Thank goodness Rixstep saved space in the application by not programming this in!

“Q. I’d like to add my favourite applications to the Xfile menu. How do I do that?

A. You don’t have to. The system automatically knows where all applications are at all times. You never need to supply a full path to an application, nor do you need to suffix the ‘app’ extension. Just use the ‘Open’ sheet in Xfile and put in the name of your application in the second field. If AOL users can type keywords instead of clicking links, you can do the same.”

Oh, so I just had to enter every folder and file name manually instead of having the software keep track of what I use the most? Why didn’t I just think of that in the first place?

“Q. I can’t drop files from the Finder onto Xfile.

A. This is by design. You can do it the other way around, as Xfile must export the common file dragging format. But the Xfile message to the Finder is otherwise clear: ‘hands off!’”

Oh, Rixstep. You’re always looking out for the customer’s desire to fight your personal battles against the Finder for you. How considerate.

“Q. Can I turn off display of hidden files? Can’t you mark them in a different colour?

A. There are no hidden files in Xfile. The program is counting on you to be intelligent and to use discretion. Live up to its expectations. They’re not in a different colour because they’re not really hidden - they’re only hidden in the Finder.”

Because allowing people to hide dot files insults their intelligence.

And finally, the question of all questions:

“Q. How can you make the Xfile System programs so compact?

A. That’s classified. We could tell you, but then we’d have to kill you. We’re selling something valuable here, Bubba - we’re not about to give it or the secrets away.”

How is that app so small? It’s still a mystery.

I could go on and on about the interface’s usability flaws or how the testimonies on the websites lack sources, but ultimately, reviewing Xfile is like catching smoke. There’s no substance at all to this application. It’s a window with two fixed views for files and nothing else. By design.

Buy it now for $50, or for $90 you can also get all those other apps that were complimentarily downloaded to your computer when you tried out Xfile. Distinguishable icons not included. Users with Gmail, .mac, or anything that isn’t strictly plain text need not apply.

Quicksilver and Text Clippings

Sorry if everyone already knows this, but I use it all the time, and I’ve never seen it mentioned online.

Text clippings are those files you get by dragging selected text into the Finder.

You can drop them in text windows to “paste” the contents, and since the file name is the content, they make nice little reminders or notes in file form.

If you need a writing surface just to create a text clipping quickly (even opening TextEdit seems counterintuitive—why not just save a file?), Quicksilver has you covered. Hit the period key, type, and press tab.

Boom, text clipping. You can drag and drop it where you like. As a bonus, if your text is formatted like a url, it generates a webloc file (which you can double-click to launch the website) instead.

Yet More MacHeist

Simone Manganelli replies to my last post about MacHeist (I promise this is the last post I make about this).

This is the crux of the issue:

“As with the music industry and the movie industry, I think the middleman should be cut out of the equation. The MacHeist organizers are completely superfluous.”

I’m sure many developers completely agree (in fact, if blog posts are any indication, most indie developers—those who weren’t in MacHesit, anyway—agreed last year). But that really isn’t your or their problem. The developers who participate in MacHeist sell their software every day of the week without a middle man. So they see some value in MacHeist, even if you don’t.

I think most people approach this issue as “would I personally make a deal with MacHest in the same situation?” But that will never matter unless you actually did make a deal. The only people who criticized MacHeist (Gus Mueller, John Gruber, Paul Kafasis, et al.) were those who didn’t participate. If you want to see the opinion of a developer who did, Oliver Breidenbach defends MacHeist in this Mac DevCenter post (be sure to read the comments).

Also, Wil Shipley is always right. It is a fact.

More MacHeist

Friend of the blog Simone Manganelli disagrees with my pro-MacHeist stance:

“Millions of people across the country buy gas for much higher prices than we’ve ever seen. (Some parts of the country have gas that costs upwards of $4/gallon.) And the oil companies reap billions of dollars every week. Sure, people know how much they’re paying for the gas, but does that mean that it’s right for the oil companies to rape consumers and the Earth for obscene profits?”

Oil is a false analogy (as is rape). Mac developers aren’t like gas customers at all. The oil companies are an oligopoly. You must buy gas from them. Mac developers have a wealth of choices in selling their products. They don’t even need a third party at all, unless you count Paypal, which keeps the customer’s credit card information. Yet the developers choose to use MacHeist, not in the same way that I am forced to choose Shell or Chevron but in a deliberate decision that is weighed against all of the other ways in which they can make money from their products.

“Or to take it from the opposite perspective, is it right for movie studios to retain the copyright of a work which someone else created, and then give them 4 pennies for every $20 DVD that they sell? The content creators went into that deal with their eyes wide open. Does that make it right?”

Actually, the movie studios are breaking their deal, in which the writers agreed to take less money from those sales only to be paid back later (which the studios are refusing to do). This is another false analogy because MacHeist did not break their contract with the developers and they aren’t making money off of the developer’s work in any way that the developer did not agree to (which the studios are doing to the writers with broadcasting on the web without paying them).

“So why should the Mac community tolerate a campaign that gives pennies on the dollar to each participating developer?”

Because that’s what they agreed to. Saying that MacHeist is exploitation is like saying that downloading creative commons music is piracy. It really doesn’t matter if you think it’s fair or not. It isn’t your decision to make because it isn’t your intellectual property, end of story.

Rixstep Hates MacHesit (This is Me Being Surprised)

The things I cover are overlapping. Chalk it up to the echo-chamber/hivemind, I guess (or maybe Rick Downes is reading this blog).

Rixstep calls MacHeist MacScam (I see what you did there), and spends an article bashing it because of the whole Malcor fake hacker incident.

This is ironic for several reasons. First of all, Rixstep came out in support of Malcor when it was generally assumed not to be a PR stunt. So hacking is great but promotions are just a step too far, gentlemen. Second, Rixstep cites Gus Mueller and John Gruber as sources that were criticizing MacHeist last year. Apparently, other prominent Mac bloggers/developers are fanboys and “Landed Gentry” when you disagree with them but experts in their field when you need sources to make you look smart.

MacHeist didn’t break the law, and no matter how much they offend Gus, they aren’t giving developers any less money than they agreed to. It’s that simple. Anyone who says different is insulting the intelligence of the participating developers and the Mac community at large. If MacHeist was so terrible to the developers or its promotional schemes were so unscrupulous, it wouldn’t be around because it would have no applications and no members. But it does.

If you still have doubts, use this general rule: the opposite of what Rick Downes says is probably the truth.

Fake

So Warbrain was right all along. Malcor, the hacker after Mac fanboys who mysteriously never got taken off of Google’s servers has been exposed as “PR Stunt” by Apple Matters (the latest site that was supposedly hacked), who decided making their software and hosting look insecure wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Of course, it was getting fairly obvious there toward the end, and Malcor even put up a weak rebuttal to those suspicions:

“Theory #3: It’s all a giant publicity stunt.

This theory’s been tossed around since day one, and to give it credit, it’s a fairly clever attempt at discrediting me. After all, if everyone thinks this is fake, and all credit is being taken by someone else, I’d have no more incentive to keep on with my attack, right?

Wrong. See, here’s the problem. I’m not an attention whore. My goal is to take down Mac fanbois, and the very activity alone provides me with endless pleasure, so yes, expect another very soon.

The most prevalent of these accusations was from ‘Norway’s #1 Mac Portal’, Mac1. First off, isn’t being Norway’s #1 Mac portal basically the equivalent of winning a fingerpainting contest in kindergarten? Anyway, this site that I never heard of before comes out of the woodwork with ‘hardcore evidence’ (meaning absolutely nothing except an accusation) that MacHeist is behind these ‘fake hacks’… then their story makes it to the front page of digg. Um, who’s the one doing the publicity stunt here??”

And here’s Apple Matters:

“I am literally shaking right now because I did not fully understand the impact of this, so lesson learnt. Again, Apple Matters, running on expression engine was in no way hacked. It was a joke publicity stunt that I thought would be funny to attract attention.”

Dear reader, you cannot see me (this being the internet, of course), but I am laughing so hard right now…

Update: MacHeist was behind this, in case it wasn’t already obvious. Everyone is sorry.

KotOR: a Case Study

tl;dr alert:

People often ask why nobody plays video games on the Mac. This is a post for those people.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic has been out for a very long time (Sidenote: The sequel to KotOR is still not out on the Mac and probably never will be). But I did not start playing it until very recently because the game was originally released before the advent of Intel Macs and it was completely unplayable on my Macbook. Also, the Universal Binary, though available, is still not out of beta. Apple announced Intel in 2005, right? Just checking. This situation really isn’t Aspyr’s fault, since they don’t control what Apple does with its new hardware, but this isn’t a post about why Aspyr sucks. It’s a post about why playing KotOR on the Mac sucks.

This next point is also Apple’s fault: even with Universal Binary, I have to run the game with lowest settings to avoid slowdown. The Macbook, though a very expensive laptop, has an integrated graphics chip rather than a graphics card. Apparently, in Apple’s mind, professionals are the only people who ever play video games on their computers, and therefore the privilege of a graphics card is only available if you get a Macbook Pro for an additional $1,500 dollars or so. That’s right, a grand and a half over an already high-end laptop just to play games with decent settings.

Next, a general video game problem that’s exacerbated by the obscurity of Macs: no-cd cracks. Seriously, people. This is 2007. I shouldn’t have to carry a DVD around with me because some big company feels that it somehow prevents piracy. Imagine if Photoshop required you to insert its CD every time you used it. KotOR actually required me to copy every file on the DVD onto my hard drive in order to play. It’s as if they’re mocking me, saying “we’re making it obvious that you don’t actually need files from the DVD to play, but we’re still forcing you to put it in.” Fortunately for Windows users, cracks to disable the check for discs on the game’s launch are widely available. But since Mac games are much rarer, it’s almost impossible to find no-cd cracks. So you just have to carry around the discs like an idiot.

Now we get to the crashes. And before I get emails about how the beta status of the Universal KotOR makes crashes a-ok, rest assured that all of these issues were also present when I tested them on the latest PPC version, which is not in beta. These issues are based on personal experience only.

Area loading crash: On Taris, about one of every three loading screens would crash on me when moving from area to area. I was literally saving the game before going through every single door, reloading after the inevitable crashes to roll the dice again. There is no excuse for this, and there is no fix available. Some areas would crash on every try unless I went to another area, came back, and tried the same door again. Sometimes they continued to crash every time. A misplaced quicksave inside a building with only one exit and a consistent crash on leaving resulted in an unplayable game. In rare cases, some areas outside of Taris would never load, such as the Tatooine swoop track.

Freezing: Dantooine has many flaws, one of which Aspyr fully admits to. Whenever I tried to move on the grassland areas, my character would freeze in place, and sometimes zoom into the distance as if I were holding onto the forward movement key. Other times the character would simply move in the wrong direction and then get stuck in place. Aspyr advises via their bug-tacking system to try editing an ini file or using a tip from the Inside Mac Games fourms that involves launching the game from OpenGL Profiler, one of the Mac OS X Developer Tools. Neither helped as far as I could tell.

Crash on Save: This set of crashes was separate from the area loading crashes and occurred mostly on Tatooine. They were particularly bad, as I could not load my savegames at all without crashing the entire application. I tried removing PARTYTABLE.res from my save folder (the file that seemed to be causing the problem). This let me load my game, but I was missing everything in that file, including quests and party members. But I could move a few feet, save, put the file back in, and everything would load up fine. But then the crashing started again, and this solution stopped working. After a lot of mucking around, I found that moving some of the files from the savegame’s folder to a different savegame would let me open my save from that game. I would have to redo this after every crash.

Ridiculous Artifacts: This one isn’t really a crash, but on every world but Taris so far, there have been huge and ridiculous visual artifacts that slow down gameplay. Sometimes they’re a web of random lines. Sometimes a plane of light blocks the player’s view completely. Sometimes there just aren’t textures where there should be.

Well, there you have it. Mac users don’t play games often because the games on the Mac suck hard. People often look at this issue from the wrong angle (“Why don’t publishers make games for the Mac?”), but the truth is that there would be a better market for Mac games if Mac users had any incentive to play them.

Ihnatko Blogs Again

So Andy Ihnatko, perhaps the greatest technology columnist of our time, has a new public-yet-secret blog that’s currently in the testing phase (no, I won’t give you the url—let’s just say if you can’t figure it out you deserve to wait). This is intended to replace his current blog setup here.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, he’s moving to a Wordpress installation for a reason: it’s easy, configurable, and accessible anywhere, which means more blog posts for the world to enjoy. I can’t really complain, since each post he makes brings us one step closer to universal understanding.

But I am sad to see that “powered by GLORIOUS AppleScript” badge disappear. Indeed, there are no words aside from a lone “GLORIOUS” to describe the sheer triumph of geekery that is blogging software written entirely in AppleScript. When people used to ask me why they should listen to Andy Ihnatko and not Generic Pundit #593, I needed only to point to that badge and watch the tears of joy stream down their cheeks as they think of all the cruel, wasted years they spent without the guidance of the great mutton-choppioed man.

But maybe I’ve been wrong this whole time. Maybe it isn’t the tools he uses but the words he says that make a man glorious. And that man is Andy Ihnatko. GLORIOUS.

Pages Redundancy

I really like the new thin Pages toolbar. It has a lot of functionality that was awkwardly stuck in inspectors in the iWork ‘06 version (and that addition alone makes Pages feel like a true Word replacement for my needs). But some aspects of it just confuse me.

Say I want to make a selection of text bold. I can click the little “a” character popup menu and select “Emphasis”:



Or, I could choose “Bold” from the popup menu in the font section of the toolbar:



Finally, I can just click the “B” on yet another section of the toolbar:

So what’s going on here? That’s three toolbar selections that do exactly the same thing. I’d much prefer some breathing room between all of those tiny widgets.

Magic on a Mac

I haven’t played Magic: the Gathering for a long time, but while I did, it always irked me that there were no real solutions for playing online from a Mac.

In order to help reconcile this situation, I’ve posted a tutorial in this forum on how to download and install Mindless Automation, a free application that runs in X11 and connects to the popular Apprentice client for Windows.

It’s by no means pretty, but if you want to play Magic online and don’t like the thought of paying for Windows, a copy of Parallels, and Wizards of the Coast’s MtG Online client, this is the way to go.