Blue Sky On Mars

Thoughts on Building Software Products
May 17, 2005

Now running Tiger

by Kevin Dangoor

I finally got everything set up yesterday and installed Tiger. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to move my 10.3 installation to an external drive, so that I can continue to use that to make Panther builds of Zesty News. CCC is very easy and did the job with just a couple of clicks. The only trouble I had with it was that a bunch of my folders were owned by root in the clone. Once I chowned them, all was well.

The Tiger install was painless. RSS in Safari is nicely done, I don’t hate the new Mail interface as much as many people (I’ve even decided to switch from Thunderbird to Mail to try out the Spotlight integration), and Dashboard is nice. Overall, a good upgrade and I’m looking forward to seeing what new apps people come up with to take advantage of Core Data and other under the hood features.

I’m impressed by Apple ripping apart the old, long-entrenched initd and crond and putting launchd in their place. That was very good thinking, and Tiger definitely boots faster as a result. Not that I boot much, but it’s still nice when I do need to boot.

Waiting a couple of weeks to install also gave me the benefit of not being totally out on the bleeding edge. 10.4.1 was already waiting in Software Update when it fired up.

By the way, thanks to the couple of people out there who bought Tiger via one of my Amazon links.

May 17, 2005

I don’t want your cat to interrupt my work

by Kevin Dangoor

I love cats as much as the next guy, but a new cat picture posted on a blog is not a good reason to interrupt my current train of thought. Right now, I’m writing this little article. If a box popped up saying “3 new blog postings” or “SomeSite: Here’s my cat”, that would derail this sentence as I’m writing it and take a few seconds to shift back and forth between the trains of thought.

Most feed reading programs have taken many cues from email programs, and that includes some kind of popup that shows you that new items have arrived. Is it really that important to see the items right now? Unnecessary distractions can weigh down your productivity.

I prefer to conciously decide “I’m going to take a look and see what’s going on in the world”, and then actively open up my news program. I don’t have popup notification on my mail program, because even email can wait a little while.

For this reason, Zesty News doesn’t have a new item notification feature yet. It just hasn’t been a priority for me. if people start asking, I’ll certainly add a notification feature.

I’d be curious to hear from others who do use the popup notification feature from other newsreaders.

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