Let's Talk About That Icon

It's pretty fucking terrible. It's so bad that I don't even care that the software runs faster than before (and it does). The improved responsiveness? Taken a backseat to shame. Ping? HOST UNREACHABLE. It's an embarrassment to use or to be seen using. Here are two pieces of shitty MS clipart that my wife found in Office 2007 in less than 45 seconds:

If these two crazy kids tried to get shitty on cheap woodworking glue and Mad Dog 20/20 one weekend and "made an oopsie", you'd get something that looks a lot like that icon.

Oh, and here's a serious question: why are the window controls vertical? Chewbacca lives on Endor! It does not make sense! Stylistically and conceptually the whole thing feels clumsy and a bit like an attempt to get "in your face."

Almost every damned widget is A) yet again custom to iTunes, not the OS; B) different than it was before. They're almost all universally ugly. Things that should be buttons are just sort of decal looking sections of the screen and a lot of stuff has tremendously crappy bezels for no real reason.

Is There Anything They Did Right?

The speaker management window is a tremendous improvement?

I think I like this hybrid cover art view they're pushing for column based browsing.

You Like Third Party Library Servers?

Too bad. iTunes 10 has munged with the DAAP protocol (which, admittedly, is Apple's protocol, so it's their right) and broken 3rd party DAAP servers. So, your Drobo, your Synology DiskStation, your Netgear ReadyNAS, and those Western Digital disks that support streaming music? They're all basically going to need firmware updates when the someone figures out what to patch or change in MT-DAAP (or Firefly, if you prefer) to make it work again; you can make a pretty safe bet that Apple won't rev the protocol back to help fix this problem.

Final Thoughts

I have to believe that someone, somewhere is laboring away on music library management software that isn't encumbered by goofy widgets and ridiculous business decisions. It's probably not coming from the Linux camp (see: Rhythmbox, Banshee, Amarok, Clementine, & Guayadeque for an idea of where they're reinventing the wheel). Songbird is wrapped in XUL interface hell (never mind technical backend "iffiness"). I think iTunes has been the dominant player in this space (at least in OS X) for so long that no one even bothers trying anymore.

Sigh…

A small bit of background first: I'm using Snow Leopard and I'm unwilling to deal with the vagaries of less-than-native clients. This means that I'm not using ported Unix apps. So no Gnews, newspost, Pan, Pine, Slrn, or Tin. Those are right out.

This left me with a list cobbled together from MacUpdate:

• Unison, $24.95 from Panic
• Nemo, $14.95 from Malcom Mac
• MacSoup, $20.00 from Stefan Haller
• Pineapple News, free from Allen Brunson
• Xnntp, free from EDV Consulting
• Hogwasher, $49.00 from Asar
• OSXNews, free from Anurodh Pokharel
• MT-NewsWatcher, Donation requested, from Simon Fraser
• MaxNews, $20 from MaxProg

I had intended this to be a marginally comprehensive review of my time using these clients, but I barely got into the account setup with most of them, if I installed them at all. Here's how it broke down…

Unison looks like crap; It hasn't been updated in since 2-26-08, and it has quirks under Leopard and Snow Leopard that I'm just not prepared to deal with. It feels dated, by which I mean it doesn't look good by modern Aqua standards; it also uses multiple windows to manage a lot of it's information. It feels like it's really based around the filesharing on Usenet, instead of being a general-purpose NNTP reader, which led me to uninstall it within five minutes. It's probably the worst looking Panic application (but one of the better looking ones in this list), which is unusual for a company who is often considered the vanguard of independent Mac development.

Nemo? So much promise. So god damned buggy. Poorly translated. Unfortunately priced given the wide-ranging nature of the bugs. These are fixable (and the price would be reasonable otherwise), but the simple fact of the matter is that this client is an example of how not to use cocoa frameworks. Didn't even make it to "use" because once it littered the root of my hard drive with empty files, I trashed it.

UPDATE

The Malcom-Mac site is down for "scheduled maintenance" and the developer of Nemo has stated his desire to squash these outstanding bugs and polish his software. I'll revisit this in a few months time.

MacSoup? No idea. It asked me to create a "settings file" to create a new database for news and mail. Obviously doesn't get what "native" client means. Looks like it's using old quickdraw calls to render the UI. Never set up accounts in it.

Pineapple News is free but the custom icons look extremely janky compared to the "standard" icons they're replacing. After setting up accounts it just hurt to use. It's visually grating on the eyes.

Xnntp has an installer. Aint no damned reason for that. It's a bloody NNTP reader. It doesn't need to create system files. OS X uses the application bundle format for a reason.

Hogwasher looks like an old Hotwire¹ client that someone stripped the filesharing out of and glued NNTP support to. It costs a lot of money (and maybe it took a lot of time to develop) but it's just god damned unusable. Trashed within minutes.

OSXnews looks awful too. Probably works better than Nemo, but has a distinct level of spit and polish missing. Never even got to setting up my newsgroup account. The author stated in July of 2007 that he was working on version 3. I wrote this in October of 2009, just to

I cannot stress how terrible the experience with MT-NewsWatcher was. It is basically an old Classic Mac application that has been updated just enough to sort-of run under OS X. It took a while to do anything, and it might be the worst looking of all of these clients. Apparently, Classic Mac OS users love it because it still looks and works like a Classic Mac application. Just so we're clear, I fucking hated the Classic Mac OS.

MaxNews was downloaded, but at this point I gave up and just installed the Thunderbird 3 beta. Is it a little overkill? Yes. Is it a little bloated? Yes. But it just works, and it works well.

So what happened? I think that a few options are plausible: these developers date to a different era, with different development mores and means. They may think that people still using NNTP don't care about their clients looking or working like complete shit, or they may think that because NNTP and Usenet as a whole date to an era where people would just roll their own GUIs or slap some shit together in curses and call it a Usenet client, they can still get away with that sort of behavior and worse still, get away with charing money for it.

So, am I being a bit of a snobby dick and trashing developers hard work?
Yes, I am.

But when the honorable mention you give to Thunderbird 3 (which is in beta right now, and more usable than anything else I listed) is the best thing you have to say about Mac OS X NNTP clients, the whole damned situation is in a sad sorry state of affairs. And if you're going to ask me to pay money for something, you'd better give me something worth paying money for. So this attempt to review these clients has ended in abortive failure, and concession to get by with the least worst option available.

Through MacZot

• Audiobook Builder
  This came with some sort of bundle that I purchased, and apparently I kept no records of it. I never used it, and I don't know that I'd ever want to, but I did technically pay for it.
• Disco
  Somehow Austin motherfucking Sarner horn-swaggled me again and took $10 of my money to contribute towards his inability to get a fucking hair cut. What was I thinking? Why did I buy this when Burn does all of this shit for free using the same publicly available OS X frameworks and with none of the lame bullshit UI?
• Hawkeye, rooSwitch, KIT (now called Together)
  Hawkeye suffers from one a pretty common problem in OS X, in that it wraps open source software in a cocoa front-end and then charges you money for it. Since I don't give a fuck about DVD mastering, it was an unused license. rooSwitch swaps preferences. Neat trick, but useless for me. However, in that same bundle I got Together (then called K.I.T., or Keep It Together), which has actually been a pretty handy tool for sorting and managing the sheer volume of incidental fluff I seem to invariably accumulate.
• Data Guardian
  This seemed handy at the time, worked and looked like shit when I paid for it, and now I cannot get the insanely over-complicated license manager on the site to recognize that I ever paid for it. High regret over the money I wasted on this Epic Fail application.
• Direct Mail!
  Came in another bundle (maybe the one with Audiobook Builder?) and it's another application which does something I just don't give a fuck about.

For Work

• Mocha MacX TN5250
  Purchased in my former life as an AS400 operator, I only regret that I never got my boss to comp back the $25 that I spent on this. It made absolutely every single night where I had to dial into work while on call so much easier. I haven't needed it for almost 5 years, but I'd still use it again if I had to connect to another AS400.

For Myself

• Acquisition
  God, who pays for file sharing? The developer (David Watanabe) is sort of an asshole, my license was constantly corrupted/lost/missing whenever the software was upgraded, and in retrospect, paying money to pirate shit is pretty fucking brazen. This was $25 I'd like back.
• Catalog
  And here we come to the first application which Austin motherfucking Sarner used to bilk me out of my cash. I had a library of about 200 burned DVDs to archive, and this app was the cheapest at the time. I paid for it, and like, 6 months later the last update was released and that was that. Buggy, featureless, slow, and unstable, this application alone is grounds for me to fight every single member of The Delicious Generation to the death.
• SKEdit
  Sean Kelly made software so usable that Apple hired him. While this has been supplanted by TextMate and CSSEdit in my work flow, I have no regrets over this. I used it often and it had the best remote site editing available at the time.
• XyleScope
  This application is awesome, but a lot of the functionality I needed has since been replicated (and extended) in the equally awesome CSSEdit, which I already had a license for. I keep it around for the occasional use when CSSEdit falls down on the job (maybe twice a year?) but overall it's just gathering the digital equivalent of dust (bitrot?).

What's the take away? I guess if you walk away from this knowing that Austin Sarner is a sack of crap, that MacZot pushes a lot of really mediocre shit with the occasional gem mixed in with the turd nuggets, and that sometimes even good software gets replaced by better software, then you got the message.

I had been working on something similar, though admittedly much, much less details when this dropped. My interest in this was strictly personal, as I've been bitten by Austin Motherfucking Sarner twice now: I am a recovering license holder for Catalog and Disco.

Oh sure, when these apps were launching there was fanfare and banners and near-daily blog updates about the status of them… and the promises! Oh, the promises that were made to get my small amount of hard earned money. But where are the updates, bug fixes, or new versions of these simple apps? If they're abandoned, is there any notice that they're now orphans?

What really kills me about all of this is that there is a bounty of Mac developers who are producing amazingly well designed applications (that don't shit all over the human interface guidelines) at an astounding pace. Everything Panic puts out is quality, TextMate rocks my face off, and CSSEdit is still the best style-sheet tool in OS X for the billionth year in a row.

--

Venting aside, I know that this generation specifically can produce talented, focused, creative software developers who are interested in writing good software, not in offering engineering services without actually being a trained engineer*.

SKEdit is a wonderfully usable product, with regular updates, and a caring developer, and Sean Kelly is in the same age bracket as Austin and Phil Ryu; but no one ever lumps him in with them. Is it his lack of shameless self promotion (MacHeist, Disco, AppZapper, etc)?

Is it his ability to stick to a single project, and see it through to completion, or his talent for actually listening to what his customers want in the next version of SKEdit? Is he excluded for not spending his time on a flashy seizure inducing website or complicated marketing campaign? Maybe it's just because he's not a complete bag of douche like Phil Ryu is proving himself to be?

--

Oh, how I long to hear the rebuttals that the Douchebag Generation developers are going to wallpaper their blog-o-trons with. I suspect that when they are finally written, they too will have fancy shmancy custom designs, highlighting the subtle contrast between the babyshit green and pock-marked "too much Indian food" black in their endlessly spewing rivers of bullshit.

*As of this evening, Austin Sarner's self-named site offers "human interface design and engineering". As the friend of a number of real engineers (mechanical, electrical, computer, etc), I take umbrage on their behalf as "engineer" is a term that denotes serious andstrenuous training, study, and at least a modicum of testing before one earns the right to slap it willy-nilly on their resume.

Engineers build things that people depend on, not fluff people discard 4 months later.