Brad Choate's blog

Lets talk about a variety of Mac OS X software called Input Managers.

In brief, an Input Manager is software that can affect other running applications. The original intent of Input Managers was to provide a means for customizing the operation of the keyboard and/or mouse to support things like locale-specific input behavior (treating keyboard input differently for different languages or regions) and software that aids handicapped individuals. The name “Input Manager” is thus appropriate for these intended uses. (Read more about Text Input Management.)

However, it wasn’t long before Mac developers found this to be a useful way to graft additional functionality into other applications. There are several OS X software products out there that are input managers which have little to do with input management (Inquisitor, 1Password, Chax are three that I use today). These products are typically unstable in nature, since they often times rely on undocumented aspects of the “host” application. But when they work, they can add real useful functionality to other programs.

The downside to Input Managers is that it is a tempting means for rogue software to exploit. One such example is the “Oompa-Loompa” trojan which surfaced about two years ago. This was a download that supposedly contained pre-release screen shots of OS X 10.5. It masqueraded the installation program as an image file, and when the unsuspecting user tries to view the file, it installs itself into the user’s “Input Managers” folder. It then can access any application that is run and affects iChat in particular, so that it tries to spread to others in your iChat contact list.

One of the changes in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) was in how OS X dealt with Input Managers. The early rumors were that Leopard wouldn’t permit them to run at all. But after release, Leopard did run Input Managers, but only those that are installed in the system-wide “/Library/InputManagers” folder.

The distinction is this: before Leopard, if a user runs software that tries to install an Input Manager, there is nothing to stop it from installing one that is local to that user’s account (installing it to the “/Users/username/Library/InputManagers” folder). With Leopard, installation of an Input Manager requires system-administration rights (so the user is prompted to authenticate to permit the installation), and the Input Manager is installed to the “/Library/InputManagers” folder.

The authentication requirement is the key and is a welcome change. There should be some kind of barrier to install software of this nature. BUT, it is wrong for Input Managers to only be installable in a system-wide fashion.

Before Leopard, I always— always— installed Input Managers for my own account only. By doing so, I could always login as another user to disable them. Remember— by their nature, they are less stable, and can cause applications to crash. A common request of developers when reporting bugs in their programs is to disable any third-party Input Manager software to see if it resolves the problem at hand. I could do that by logging in under a different account before Leopard, but now I cannot.

Personally, I would have preferred that user-specific Input Managers were still supported, but also require an administrator’s password to install. So, you would have a path, perhaps like “/Library/InputManagers/Users/username”, which may even be symlinked to “/Users/username/InputManagers”. I think this is a better option, than requiring Input Managers to be activated for all users of that machine.

Hopefully a later update or release of OS X will address this and restore the option of user-level Input Managers.

Netflix.com has this option to watch a selection of their movies through your browser. Assuming your browser is running on Windows, as they require Windows Media DRM to play it.

But their promotional graphic (pictured here) shows it running on a black MacBook.

They doctored the thing of course, placing a still frame over the display, covering the portion that has the built-in camera and all evidence of the ‘MacBook’ imprinted at the bottom of the display. But you can make out the key layout, the size of the trackpad, and even the infrared receiver on the front-right side. It’s definitely a MacBook.

Now, it’s not impossible to get those videos on a MacBook. You can do it if you’re running Windows under Parallels or VM Fusion. Performance is fine, even at full resolution. But I seriously doubt they expect their average customer to do that!

The new empty trash confirmation dialog in Leopard.

But… I’m using Time Machine. There is an undo! This seems contradictory.

Also, the window grab action includes the huge drop shadow Leopard puts on focused windows. Is that necessary?

Just wondering how long it will take for someone to restore the rounded edges that have always been on the Mac menu bar.

From Tiger:

From Leopard:

Update: Not long.

I suspect Vonage doesn’t want Mint.com to recommend existing customers to switch to a cheaper plan, but hey, you save $117 a year if you do!

I played through the Halo 3 campaign at the 'Normal' difficulty to start with. I typically play normal and sometimes even easy when playing games these days... I just don't have the time and patience anymore. But the normal difficulty was actually pretty easy, and left me wanting more. Besides, I finished the campaign in probably 8 hours, which seems really short for a $60 game. I know, I know... multiplayer. But still.

So here’s a hodge-podge of additional thoughts after using an iPhone for a day or two.

About the Speakers

I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me sooner, but the iPhone is the first iPod ever to have built-in stereo speakers. That’s pretty significant. It means you can see and hear your videos and music from this device without needing any headphones. I think I had just assumed the speaker would only be useful for the iPhone ‘speaker phone’ option, and wouldn’t really be good enough for playing music. But the quality is actually pretty good. I wonder how many other portable music/video devices are in that category?

Matching Socks

The iPhone fits fine in iPod socks. Yes, I own a pair of iPod socks. And I feel less silly today about buying them. They’re much cheaper than the $30 or $40 cases made for the iPhone. They also cover the whole thing in case you are worried about scratches, etc.

Headphones and the Built-in Mic

The built-in microphone in the iPhone earphones is genius. And also genius that you can click and double-click it to pause and advance music (although I wish you could rewind as well). The microphone also makes it possible to know which side is the right-side earpiece without having to hunt for the ‘R’ on the earpiece.

With these headphones it becomes possible to listen to your music and receive calls without ever pulling out your phone. So if you see someone chatting while they appear to be listening to their iPod, they’re not crazy… they probably have an iPhone tucked in their pocket some place. Of course, if you see they have no microphone on their headphones, then maybe they are just crazy.

No Wheel

I can’t tell you how many iPhone mockups we’ve seen over the years on the Internet. You can find scads of them by doing an image search. Most of these incorporated some variation on the iPod click-wheel control. Even the ones that had a full-surface touch-screen; they still had some kind of click-wheel shown on-screen. Some transparent overlay that you could use to control the music being played.

Yet, the iPhone has no click-wheel control anywhere.

Yes, the click-wheel was revolutionary (heh) for the iPod, but the iPhone is capable of much more responsive and reactive UI. Finger scrolling left and right using Coverflow is a far more realistic and appealing interface that scrolling over a list of items. Even for lists, it’s far more natural to slide up or down through them than to rotate some kind of semi-transparent wheel that may be obscuring your view while you’re using it. I’m sure Apple experimented with prototypes that used such an interface, but in the end, decided to throw that patented feature out the window because it wasn’t best suited for this device.

Nonetheless, this was a brave move— to abandon a user interaction that had been so well embraced by their users for something entirely different. That’s what “Think different” is all about though. And Apple doesn’t let history interfere with innovation.

Third Party Applications

Finally, I think Apple has a plan for the next step in supporting third-party applications on the iPhone: Widgets. The current solution— running web-based applications— is a poor substitution for local applications that don’t require a net connection to use. Widgets are basically also web-based applications; they do have access to run local services though. And Apple can sandbox them further if they wanted to.

Several of the iPhone applications are in fact widgets on Mac OS X. Stocks, Weather, Calculator (reskinned for the iPhone), Google Maps— these are all widgets you can run on OS X today. The other front-door applications are probably also developed as widgets. The bottom applications— “Phone”, “Mail”, “Safari” and “iPod” are probably not widgets, but actual Cocoa-developed applications (MobileMail.app as some have found already).

Full-blown third-party applications on the iPhone would awesome, but I’ll take third-party widgets as a runner-up. There are thousands of these available today. Not all of them would run well on an iPhone though. They’ll have to be tweaked to support the resolution of the device of course. But many would run well without many changes at all. I’ll bet that by the time Leopard rolls out, we’ll be hearing support for third party widgets on the iPhone. At least, I hope so. I really want the BART widget on my phone.

Update: Georgia would very much like the Dictionary/Thesaurus widget. I would also like the Wikipedia, Translation and Flight Tracker widgets. And why not some game widgets-- like Tile for instance. Or a multi-touch Tetris widget, where you slide falling pieces into place with your fingers?

iPhone Halo Effect

Much has been written about the iPod halo effect, and how Apple computer sales have been affected by the success of the iPod. I imagine they will be even more affected by sales of the iPhone. Sure, an iPhone works with a PC, but that isn’t an ideal counterpart. Mac OS X is the big brother to the flavor of OS X running on the iPhone, and will always be a better match as a host to the iPhone than Windows.

Well, I did buy an iPhone after all. My Verizon contract was up, it’s a few days from my birthday— all the rationalization I needed was already there, so Apple, you got me. Again.

I drove up to the local mall at 6:30 PM and found a pretty long line for the Apple store. I heard they had 500 units in stock, so I decided to wait. But they were very well prepared, and the line moved very quickly. I was out of the store by 7 PM (my apologies to those that waited all day or even overnight in some cases). With my purchase in hand, I went home to try out the activation.

But, as some have found, it didn’t go so smoothly. My problem turned out to be that I was transferring a number from another service. Apparently there were some issues there and I had to return to the mall to work through them with an AT&T rep. That took longer than buying the phone itself. In the end, we managed to activate the account.

The phone is now set up and functional and I’ve had a chance to play with it. First impressions and thoughts…

• Love the UI, the shape and feel of the device.
• Love the WiFi support, Safari, Google Maps, YouTube, Mail. All the built-in apps function very well. Honestly, having Google Maps everywhere I go is a killer app for this thing. I just wish it supported GPS as well (any bets on how long until an iPhone accessory surfaces to add GPS?).
• For some reason I can’t find the one video I uploaded to YouTube. I can find it from my computer, but not using the YouTube search option on the iPhone.
• Concerned about the EDGE connectivity and throughput. Most places I frequent have WiFi now, but everywhere else I will likely be using EDGE (on my commute, etc.) and that will probably be painful from what I’ve read. But I love that the data plan is unlimited use, so I don’t have to worry about watching my usage. It’s nice that the phone will choose WiFi over EDGE if it can, and it’s not something you have to select— it just uses the best connection available.
• Confused that I can’t select a music track for a ringtone. Although I can see the business reasons why not; the ringtone market is pretty lucrative, but really… it’s silly that this isn’t possible. This is a music player after all. I also can’t select a music track as the sound for an alarm.
• I’ve had a few hiccups from doing multiple things at a time. Such as playing music and using Google Maps. It just returned to the main menu all of a sudden and the music stopped playing. Some sort of soft reset? Software problems that are bound to be fixed, but a little annoying naturally.
• I’m intrigued by the choice of a “Safari” label for the browser. Most devices would label that as “Web”. It has occurred to me that the iPhone is perhaps the reason Safari was made in the first place.
• I’m really happy to see support for viewing attachments in Mail. I just noticed that it doesn’t support playing .wav audio attachments which is a shame, since that’s how Vonage sends voice mail notifications.
• It’s nice that iPhone syncs with the phone to grab pictures you’ve taken. I no longer have to email photos from my wireless phone to keep a copy of them. My old phone, a piece of garbage from LG, only had room for 60 low-res, pictures. And it was a tedious experience to offload those images. Navigate to the photo gallery; choose to email photo; select contact; send; navigate to outbox; delete the sent message; navigate to gallery; delete the picture. Repeat that a few dozen times and you’ll see why I started to be very selective in the mobile pictures I took.
• Looking forward to the web-based services that will spring up for the iPhone (and some have already).
• Looking forward to support for full-blown third-party iPhone applications.
• Worried I might get mugged for carrying this around in public.

And… I bought one for Georgia. Because I love her that much.

I must pause a moment from this Movable Type 4 busyness to say that, as of today, Georgia and I have been married for 15 years. No, we’re not that old, we just married young.

In that time, we have produced three little Choate-lings, lived in 4 states (which border 3 coasts), bought and sold 2 houses, and held (between us!) 16 jobs.

Never a dull moment. I can honestly say the honeymoon hasn’t ended. Looking forward to the next 15.