Haven’t been writing much here since I’ve actually been productively working on stuff.
Pictures, for example, is a photo browser into which I’ve loaded all of my online pictures; I can take notes that go into a database and display with the picture. Still got a bunch of work to do on it.
I also migrated all my websites over to Linux (Red Hat, server) and back to OSX. Notes on the Linux install are here. This was a learning experience. What I discovered is that Linux works nearly identically to OSX for serving web pages, except nothing is configured quite right by default. The mail server, for example, is configured so that when you turn it on it doesn’t accept mail from the outside world. Easy to change this – just edit a text file – but you must first discover what needs to be changed. Plus, every utility has a little bit different way of configuring, when (it seems to me) they could all use the same basic structure, be easy to learn, and still be powerful for experienced users.
OSX on the other hand, comes set up so that when you turn on application, it’s ready to go with the most likely settings already set properly. The default is the obvious. They still have problems with making configuration standard across applications, but it’s getting closer. I’m pleased to discover that Apple has UI people who know what they’re doing both in the OSX user area, and down in the Unix basement.