Clone Wars.

Saturday 26 July, 2008

It was inevitable really — IBM PC clones built to run OS X, such as that built by pystar — and yet there is still a fundamental issue with this solution.

“Another company is preparing to sell Intel-based computers that can run Apple Inc.‘s Mac OS X. But unlike a Florida clone maker that’s been sued by Apple, Open Tech Inc. won’t pre-install the operating system on its machines.”

Yes, they can run OS X Leopard (or Tiger). Yes, it even gives a very similar, almost identical experience. But OS X alone doesn’t make a Mac.

Design Emporium.

It’s the sum of all parts, from large multi-touch track pads on the mac books through the specific selection of base hardware such as motherboard reference design and choice of components. Windows XP (and to a lesser extent) Vista, along with a number of UNIX-ish platforms such as Ubuntu or Fedora have tended to obfuscate compatibility and reliability in component choice over recent years.

Today, it is possible to select almost any type of processor and mate it with a compatible mainboard, some ram, a random graphics card and a hard-drive of some description and you’ll be able to run Windows at the very least, with just about any other Linux derivative also working right-out-of-the-box. But that’s really not how a macbook or mac pro are built.

Components and reference designs are often tuned to suit each other. Something that was done to quite some degree early on in the development of both IBM and HP (Compaq) hardware (as an example) a few years ago. If you supported such hardware seven-or-so years ago, it was not at all uncommon to see very non-standard hardware in use by all the big name brands. Sure, one paid more for it (sometimes a great deal more) but ultimately that resulted in a better, more reliable product.

Clones R Us.

Fast forward back-to-the-future, and most IBM clones are built from off-the-shelf hardware. IBM’s are now in fact built by Chinese giant Lenovo. Customised hardware is still used in the Server realm, but far less often in PC clones. They are no longer built to survive, but rather to suit a market that demands the absolutely-lowest-price. Reliability and compatibility are no longer major watch-words.

Today’s Macs do actually share a lot of similarities with their clone brethren. The same graphics cards, the same hard-drives.. even the same CPUs. The switch to Intel was always going to be a smart one as high levels of component production is assured. It was considered foolish by many so-called Mac experts, surely it would fail. That is obviously not the case, sales are soaring.

This very machine I wrote this article on, can run (and has) run OS X. Indeed a number of clones can. However after observing my partner use her Mac Book, and having the (all too brief) opportunity to use it myself, it’s clear they are not just an ordinary clone. They have been built under an entirely different design philosophy. Macs are built with select components rigorously tested to ensure optimal co-habitation and reliability. Just as brand name PC’s were, years ago.

The Art of War.

Ultimately then, the philosophies can be best expressed as follows: Mac’s empower. Clones duplicate.

And so, the Pystar or Open Tech might well run Mac OS X — and run it just fine — but they are not a Mac. They use non-authorised modified code to bypass operating system constraints that keep OS X Mac only. And that is seldom noted in the push to sell these products. Buying one of those systems means almost no support, on a platform that has an unsupported Operating System (despite what they tell you) that may cease to function at any time.

You are not buying a Mac clone. You are buying a PC clone that just happens to run OS X. It’s not a 1:1 copy, it’s just a cheap, hacked and broken facsimile. Before I used a mac book, I would have suggested that a hacked clone was “almost as good as the real thing”. They are not. There is a difference.

The claims by Pystar and Open Tech that these systems are legally able to run OS X is a joke. They use published hacks to bypass code in the OS X builds. I am no lawyer, but that is still a direct violation of the EULA [section F] which forbids reverse engineering (or tampering with) any code that is not already published under an Open Source licence.

“.. you may not copy,decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, modify, or create derivative works of the Apple Software or any part thereof.”

That’s a legal view, of course, which is open to interpretation and potential legal challenge. But that really isn’t the point. That which makes a Mac stand out from every other PC clone is the entire package. From OS to hardware to support — a Mac is more than just the operating system it runs. It is the sum of it’s parts.

And that is something these cloners simply do not get. In turn, neither will their duped customers, who will continue to buy these systems under false belief.

Get Qurli.

Wednesday 23 July, 2008

See, the thing with short URI services like tinyurl is that they have this habit of going off-line when you least expect it. Sure, they have some nice features like stat counters and baubles and little bells that go bing, but at the end of the day, sometimes simple is better.

Sometimes, all you want is the link — not the full tactical assault required to go get it. What to do? Well, there are some advantages to the do-it-yourself model, like self-hosting. Namely that it’s my ass roasting over hot coals if it goes down. Having masses of (dv) horsepower, which has this frustrating habit of simply not going down, also helps. :)

Thus, with sod all fanfare, and a reasonably low care factor, I humbly present Qurli, a svelte, quotable, simple and blindingly fast URL shortening service. Long URLs suck. Embrace the axe.

I originally built this URI shortening service (pronounced “curly”) for me. A handy place to horde all those annoying, potentially throw-away 400+ character URIs that I just don’t want clogging up del.icio.us or The Lab bookmarks.

Then I realised, why not just share the love? So I have.

Please be aware the service is still ‘very beta’ — just like the fishstick, there is distinct chance it might not end well.

Leisure Suit. ∗

Friday 27 June, 2008

Looking for inspiration in all the wrong places. Sometimes it’s easier to point towards others’ content, rather than create my own.

It’s cheating — I have to come clean. I need to:

• write everything for me — not just for you.
• write with genuine passion — not with vague abandon.
• stop accepting close enough — it’s right or not at all.
• hold myself accountable to my content — it needs conviction.
• understand my limitations — then work to move beyond them.

Writing great content isn’t easy. It takes passion, energy and faith. Not in the sense of the Good Lord, Mohammed or Vishnu, rather in that I truly understand the fundamentals of the subject I speak of — and a conviction to see it through, no matter the risk.

I’m a geek. I should write about geeky subjects and how and where geeky things have relevance — I have shied away from that topic for fear it will bore. The challenge is to turn that into something people simply cannot wait to read.

You’re not reading this because I am trying to be someone else. You’re reading it because of me. You wouldn’t be here otherwise. It should inspire, challenge or excite. That commitment demands I respect the reader and deliver content worthy of consideration in return.

Thanks for listening.

Black Ops.

Thursday 19 June, 2008

The boffins at Atomic Ninja Labs are occasionally called upon to assist others with design and project work as well as bang spanners on personal side projects — this is a rough journal, or store-house as it were of recent creative designs, experiments and more-or-less stable code.

The lab boffins are not-for-hire, however may consider contributing to projects that take their fancy. Shiny toys and devices that go bing may tempt the monkeys out from The Lab.

Presenting in no particular order, the whirlwind sixty-second tour (frequent course language and nudity not included):

Recent design work.

Amateur Neurotica — a simple blue design, with a focus on clear serif-based typography. Text sizes are intentionally beefed up for legibility and to help accentuate white space.

Atomic Ninja Labs — home base and test-centre for crazy caffeine obsessed boffins. Designed to be an easily read source of news, views and generally crazed talk.

101 Fun uses for XML.

Shortwave Search — a Firefox search plugin for Shaun Inman’s fantastic Shortwave javascript powered bookmarklet and command driven meta-search tool.

Got Qurli?

Get Qurli — a simple, fast and friendly service to turn stupidly long and unmanageable URLs into svelte short links. Spreading the ‘curly’ love, one link at a time.

If you have comments to make on the above, or would like to engage a boffin in discussion over pretty much any project or pretence, please do make contact using the form below.

If you prefer to drive email (and who doesn’t) try the make contact link in the footer below.

Thank you and goodnight.

Neurotic Design.

Sunday 15 June, 2008

I was recently given a tough challenge. Design a layout — something I am still quite unskilled at — for my partners brand new blog. I was given a rough sketch, a moderately simple brief (two column layout) and a degree of flexibility in how I interpreted it.

First hurdle? Typography. My partner is a budding author and as such I wanted the design to focus attention on the content. San-serifs were out, which meant finding a good serif that was easy on the eye. It eventually came down to a choice between Palatino and Georgia, neither of which are particularly stunning when viewed at 9, 10 or even 12 pixels.

Solution? Make it bigger. Much bigger. Typically that isn’t the first (or best) answer to a styling issue and yet, somehow, it just works. Sizes are defined in EMs, but body text is equivalent to ~14px and post headings a whopping 19px. Both give the body text a clear, carefree feel with a moderate amount of typeface styling actually being visible, making it a bit of a joy to build.

The design is comment free, yet there is easy access to the feedback form — encouraging more thoughtful responses — and, overall, I am pretty happy with the result. It’s also pleasing in that the final result matches the original sketch quite closely. Perhaps I have indeed remained true to my partners simple, yet elegant request. The comments so far is that I have.

Amusingly, my partner is as nervous about her re-invigorated launch into the blogosphere as I am in how well the design will be received in return. Design really isn’t my forte, but I am pleased on how it all turned out (it validated on first pass, no less) and how much I learned in the process.

Embiggen.

Thursday 08 May, 2008

Ever have the feeling that something isn’t quite right? Like when Uncle Jim invites you to sit on his lap as he has a “surprise” for you — you know innately that there is just something wrong with that picture.

In that “something is strangely wrong” vein, here are two closely cropped example images taken from this website, a few moments apart.

fig.1 — before.

fig.2 — after.

The same site, two different text sizes. The image in fig.1 represents what IE6, IE7, FF2 and Safari 3 (tested so far) all decide is “the” size, in this case paragraph text is set to 62.5% to make EM calculations far less taxing.

It’s not just here either, in spite of my sometimes suspect code¹. Half of the Internet appears to have been up-sized. And the aberration appears to be strongest, if not a little random in EM based designs — which as any good designer will tell you is “the” sizing methodology to use for bullet-proof layouts.

So here we have yet another divergence in web “standards”. Only it doesn’t always strike. Not exactly the easiest issue to resolve.

Right now Firefox 3 users must feel like they’re viewing the internet through the bottom of a beer glass. Depending on CSS markup used, it may be larger than life. Not that that is a bad thing, given page zooming finally works. It’s just yet another different thing that has to be considered.

So, hold on to your hats ladies and gentlemen. Firefox 3 is set to up the bling and bring us a fresher, bigger Internet — but perhaps just like Uncle Jim, not quite the way we might have expected.

¹ The Lab actually validates, a rare occurrence in these parts.

Invention.

Thursday 24 April, 2008

Welcome to The Lab.

Atomic Ninja Labs has been the most crazy-insane, frustrating and eye-opening development I’ve done in quite some time. It’s a radical shift away from my previous experiences and represents an entirely new, fresh approach to blogging.

Gone is the re-blogging. Gone is the hard-to-handle and clumsy Wordpress interface. Say hello to Textpattern, a fresh new design, dynamic content spanning code, design, full on nerdery and piles of experimentation. All scratch built in XHTML CSS and is liberated by Textile.

So, lets rip the cover off the lab manual and see what is hiding underneath.

Structure.

The design uses the EM measure where possible, rather than px. That means it should scale (up and down) reasonably well without too much borkage, and should also display correctly in most modern standards based browsers. It wasn’t an easy or familiar choice, and it took reading Dan Cederholm’s book Bullet Proof Web Design to convince me. However.. I feel as though the design just works better as a result.

The content features include a rolling link list, full articles and lab notes. The later will cover projects and efforts this author is involved in, whereas the former will track interesting and or relevant resources elsewhere on the web¹. The design has been built to present content clearly, a minimalist “simple” brief.

Images and media are served from the Amazon Web Services S3, an ideal, stable platform to serve static media and content that helps reduce load on the (dv) server.

Typography.

The fonts used for The Lab include common cross-platform fonts such as Verdana, Geneva and Helvetica (in order of preference) for body text with Impact used for navigation bar. The logo sports Sonora Medium Italic — for something a little different I’ve deployed P22 Atomica for some of the symbols.

It’s often difficult to find a balance between using common fonts and something more unique, as there really isn’t any strong alternative to using image replacement, which is seldom efficient or portable. The decision was made to focus on content rather than cosmetics and as such the numbers of fonts used have been kept to an absolute minimum and the design should thus look very similar across a number of platforms.

Painted Canvas.

Whilst the colours might feel a little familiar, they’re actually a whole new set. The background #F5F5D5, which has been variously described to me as “fawn” or “khaki” was only actually chosen towards the end² of the design process after nearly two months of rejecting numerous other (similar and not so) colours. Given the original design goals, I think the softer colours and minimal pallet use helps illustrate a simple, clean look.

You can view the complete set at COLOURlovers.

There is a lot more going on here and I’m pretty excited about what the future holds — which I fully intend to cover over the next few weeks — but as a beginners guide to the lab, it’s a start. Feel free to have a wander around the lab. There are a small number of experiments that might quite be ready for prime time yet and rest assured I’ll be working on those.

Finally, you will have noticed that there is only one advertising spot, site wide. That is by design. I can’t go into too much detail right now, but if you’d like to know more, please do make contact to see what can be worked out.

Now it’s over to you. I’d love to hear what you think — be it conversation over the design elements, things you like (dislike?) or even simply reports of any breakage, feel free to click on the contact link below.

¹ Actually sharing the love, not just mindlessly re-blogging it.

² A happy accident with the colour chooser in the Gimp.