Sucking less, on a budget

i(Doesn't)Sync

I've been looking for a new cellphone with bluetooth and AIM support. Verizon's only bluetooth offering (Motorola v710) is ass: Verizon disabled the serial bluetooth feature, forcing you to use USB, and there's no AIM support. In this day and age, that's pretty sad. I checked at&t wireless and they had two pretty cool bluetooth phones (Nokia 6820 and Motorola v505), but a quick check of the iSync devices site shows that neither are supported. Go Apple. It's days like this that make me unhappy to be a mac guy.

Road to 0.8.2

I've been insanely busy of late and have let the plans for 082 idle. Hopefully this week we can get back on track, there are a lot of good fixes on tap. For those interested, we're waiting for two specific fixes, check bug 261393 for details.

As soon as we get those two things fixed, we'll spin a release candidate for l10n to start working with. From that point it shouldn't take long. Geoff says he was going to work on the bookmark bug this weekend. We need to find more info on the focus bug since the fix doesn't work for Camino. Any helpers on both bugs would be appreciated.

As an aside, Logic7 looks much nicer in person. The manual simply does not do it justice. It makes it seem much more complicated than it is, in addition to leaving out certain nice features such as the dragging to loop like in GB (complained about in a previous entry). That's only mentioned in the "Late Breaking News" document, but is most definately present. The Mactch-EQ and Sculpture plug-ins alone are worth the price of admission. Add in Apple Loops, a tool to create your own loops, and much more and you've got a real sweet deal.

If you're a student or teacher, the educational discount for Logic7Pro is $500 and for Logic7 Express is $150 (both half price). At those prices, you should beg, borrow, and pimp out your sister to scrape up the money.

A -> B and not C

I've been doing a lot of reading about Logic7 Pro and Express. I'm looking for something more "pro" than GarageBand and was close to moving to Ableton's Live when FruitCo announced the Logic7 upgrade. The ability to import GB files as well as support for apple loops seems really enticing. There are some things I've noticed that aren't covered anywhere:

• GB looks like a polished gem, the UI has a nice splash of useful color and is very easy to use and navigate. Logic7, otoh, looks like it was designed by a spastic 11 year-old. All the dialogs are dark gray. Elements that are attractive in GB are downright ugly in Logic. This is illustrated to the extreme by the included manual describing how to use Logic7 for GB users. The side-by-side screenshots are a joke.
• One feature missing from both GB and Live is the ability to "freeze" a track, bouncing all audio and realtime effects into a frozen track to reduce cpu load. You can then later "unfreeze" the track to continue to tweak parameters. Great for those of us w/out 2.5GHz G5's. However, the manualy notes that this feature is only available in Pro, not Express. It is not mentioned on the comparison chart. You'd think that this would be exactly the kind of feature that non-pros, the ones without high end hardware, would require. Guess Apple doesn't agree.
• While I haven't used Logic7 yet, the manual's description of its UI for looping seems antiquated. In GB you can just drag any sound clip to the right to have it loop an arbitrary number of times. Logic7 just loops forever until it hits another clip, so if you want it to stop, you have to go and manually insert a blank clip. Bizarro. Also the looped clips are shown in an ugly (you guessed it) gray color rather than the same color of the clip. Just one more opportunity to look bad, I guess.

I'm going to an Apple training (read: marketing) session this week, hoping to learn more. I admit the only reason I'm giving Logic7 the time of day is because it's from the fruit. No wonder everyone uses Safari. I should know better, by now, shouldn't I?

EDIT:The spec page for LogicExpress7 mentions freezing at the top. Odd then that the getting started document would call it out as specifically not being in Express. *shrug* I'll hopefully find out on Thursday when I go to the PR event.

Looped

It's cool to see Apple providing .Mac customers a sampling of their jamPacks for GB and Logic7. 300MB is nothing to sneeze at, but then again, it doesn't translate into that many loops.

My question, though, is how do i get to these new loops from the loop browser? I can't find anywhere to put them where GB actually sees them. If i have to manually drag them in from the Finder, they're useless to me. Thanks, I think?

EDIT: I found the answer while digging around for more info on Logic. Guess it makes sense, some documentation on the .Mac site would have been nice.

Where's Dogbert?

The Program team feels that one of their "lessons learned" for 2004 is that obscure project code names are counter productive. So for 2005 they've decided to universally go with descriptive project names.

Welcome to my own personal hell. I feel like I just walked into a Dilbert cartoon.

Guess that's where the money goes

For those watching football this weekend, you may have noticed that Candlestick Park (formerly 3-Com Park) has been renamed to Monster Park. This is not a reference to Monster.com, the job/resume website, but Monster Cable, purveyors of overpriced A/V cables and interconnects. I guess we now know just how much profit they're making on their snake-oil.

Landed a patch from Geoff on the Camino trunk that removes the 16-tab limit, adding a menu to choose tabs that aren't visible. We have some better solutions up our sleeve for managing a large number of tabs, keep watching.

We are planning a 0.8.2 to pick up a number of small, but very useful, patches. Most notably will be the addition of importing separators from Mozilla/Firefox bookmarks and cmd-up/down to scroll through a webpage. Expect this release in about a week or so. When we get close, we'll spin a candidate build for testing, I'll keep you posted.