Why did you find it infuriating, as I do? Because you have to uncheck it every. bloody. damn. time you shut down or reboot. If you don’t, then whatever programs you had running when you shut down will “helpfully” be loaded right the hell back into RAM when you boot again.

Apparently, someone at Apple made the decision that we want our programs to reload every time we reboot, and to hell with what we think about it — because there is no way to override this checkbox setting.

There is no preference to change it.

There is no way to make it go away.

If you forget to click that checkbox on shutdown, your programs will all reload the next time you boot.

Those of us who use silicon pigs such as Adobe’s suite find this setting not merely irritating, but positively infuriating, since it adds several minutes to your system boot time.

There have been several solutions offered to deal with this. I check periodically to see if there’s been progress made. The last time I looked, I stumbled across a series of AppleScripts written by Victor Andreoni that essentially send tell commands to the Finder, ordering a shutdown and clicking the checkbox for you.

In reading his discussion of his methods, I saw that he’d found a default setting, TALLogoutSavesState, that apparently controls whether your programs reload on boot or not. Unfortunately changing that setting to 0 is not persistent; it’s rewritten to 1 on each boot. What that means is that it’s a short-lived pleasure; next time you boot your system, yep, the goddamned programs load up again.

His AppleScript solution is suitable, I think — but there’s a principle in play here, and I’ll be hell if I let my Mac tell me what to do. So in Googling for more information, I learned a couple of other things, and fired up Automator, and did this.

Description and a link to zipped files follow.

The first item in the Automator workflow is self-explanatory; you want to exit your programs gracefully before shutting down. You’re not out to kill your machine; you just want it to behave like it used to.

The second item is a pair of calls to a shell script. Basically, this is how you issue direct commands to your OSX install, without having to use the GUI. The first call is to delete (rm) a file in your home directory, contained in the Library — Preferences — ByHost folder path. (By default, your Library folder is hidden under OSX.7, probably to keep you from touching the bare wiring.)

The file that’s being removed is a preference list which stores information on what programs are running at the time the command is issued. Each program has an index entry, as well as notations for whatever document windows might be loaded. The * is a global variable character, necessary because between the words “com.apple.loginwindow.” and “.plist” there is a hexadecimal string that’s variable from system to system, and probably boot to boot. The * wildcard basically says “look for anything with this stuff at the beginning and end, and containing anything in between.”

Deleting this file will purge the system’s list of whatever might have been running when you run the workflow. It does not affect the login items you might have set for yourself, either by right-clicking their icons in the Dock and selecting Options > Open at Login, or by specifying them as login items under your Users & Groups control panel.

The second line tells the system to set the “open at login” variable to 0, effectively disabling it entirely before shutdown. I don’t know for certain that it’s necessary to do this, but I figure overkill is better than annoyance.

Finally, there’s an Applescript that tells the Finder to shut down the system. This happens immediately after all the programs have exited, without that dialog box coming up and asking you if you’re sure. It just shuts your system down immediately, without further discussion. (Essentially, this is the same as how it used to be when you’d hold down the option key and select Shut Down from the Finder menu.)

I’ve saved the workflow as both a plain workflow script, so you can see what it does for yourself, and as an application if you decide you trust me. Put it on your Dock and use it to shut your Mac down until Apple comes to its senses and realizes that not all of us have SSDs, and that sometimes we have a damned good reason for not wanting all previously running programs to load the next time we boot.

Download the package here. It’s 280 K. Go in peace.

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What else I have is all the text entered in a handwriting typeface called “Journal”. The problem with it is one endemic to all handwriting typefaces — the baseline is far too regular and the strokes too consistent for it to really look like handwriting.

One way to deal with that would be to hand-set the baseline shift and stroke attributes of each character, but I do not have that kind of time. Another way would be to create a nice OTF set that uses discretionary items to create variable text effects; but again, I don’t have the time to do that either.

What I do have, though, is a Mac, and AppleScript. Oh, and quite some experience writing code in a previous life.

That was how I was able to produce the results you see below in a nicely automatic fashion.

The script follows.

-- This script changes the baseline offset, stroke width, and color tint
-- of any type set in the "Journal" typeface to randomized values, giving
-- the text a much more organic look and feel.

-- Written by Warren Ockrassa, http://indigestible.nightwares.com/
-- Free to use, modify and distribute, but I'd prefer attribution.

-- Note that this script can take quite a while to execute with larger
-- or more complex files.

set theItem to 0

set theItem to choose file with prompt "Select a CS5 InDesign document to modify..."

if theItem is not equal to 0 then

 tell application "Adobe InDesign CS5"

  open theItem

  tell active document

   -- Determine how many text frames we need to change

   set myFrames to the number of text frames

   if myFrames is not equal to 0 then

    set theFrame to 1

    repeat until theFrame > myFrames

     set myText to text frame theFrame
     set myFont to applied font of character 1 of myText as string

     -- Check to make sure we're only modifying text frames
     -- that have been set in the "Journal" typeface

     if word 1 of myFont is "Journal" then

      repeat with thisCharacter in (characters of myText)

       -- Randomize the values of baseline shift, stroke, and tint

       set baselineShift to ((random number from -5 to 5) / 10)
       set strokeWeight to (((random number 10)) / 100)
       set myTint to (100 - (random number 10))
       set fillColor to fill color of thisCharacter
       set baseline shift of thisCharacter to baselineShift
       set stroke color of thisCharacter to fillColor
       set stroke weight of thisCharacter to strokeWeight
       set fill tint of thisCharacter to myTint
       set stroke tint of thisCharacter to myTint

      end repeat

     end if

     set theFrame to (theFrame + 1)

    end repeat

   end if

  end tell

 end tell

 beep
 display dialog "Modifications finished!" buttons {"Groovy!"} default button 1

else

 display dialog "Operation cancelled" buttons {"OK"} default button 1

end if

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I’m not entirely sure where this trend toward minimalism is coming from, though Pages may have a lot to do with it; it’s a lovely portable layout program, but as such it offers a featureset that’s usually too elaborate for straight-up text crunching. It’s essentially Pages (the desktop program) or MS Word adapted to a touchscreen environment. Thus many of its functions, such as auto-formatting, are either unnecessary most of the time, or downright invasive. (I don’t usually want auto-bulleted lists, for instance.)

To this we can add Pages’ somewhat clunky file handling interface. Its organization of multiple files (such as chapters) is essentially nonexistent; if you’re a writer like I am in terms of mechanics, you don’t write out long works in one single, linear document. Rather, you use a program such as the outstanding DevonNote to organize your chapters into individual files, contained within folders. This is — for me, at least — a far better way to break down a book-in-progress into manageable sections. Switching back and forth among these chapters in DevonNote is simplicity. It’s much harder to do with the desktop version of Pages (or Word), and even more frustrating on the iPad Pages.

Many software developers have been working to fill the need for a simple text editor that exists primarily to let you compose on the iPad without having to muck around with too much formatting, without having to worry about storage and retrieval on desktop machines, and with the ability to organize your work into a bite-sized, sensible set of files and folders. Some apps provide sync to Google Docs, others to proprietary servers, and still more to cloud systems such as MobileMe and Dropbox. Some have obligatory network reliance — you effectively can’t work if you’re not in range of a wireless net or don’t have a 3G iPad — and others offer a little too much of a distraction-free environment in that they lack real organizational control such as nested folders within folders. Most of them seem to have most of the features I want in a portable writing environment, but only one seems to combine them all into a single, coherent package.

I came across Notebooks sometime in early August. I was looking for an iPad text editor that presented me with an environment similar to DevonNote, which is the only desktop program I use for writing. (Layout and formatting happen in InDesign. Word and any other similar DTP program always strikes me as a poor hack, neither a workable text editor nor a layout environment.) After looking over the iTunes reviews and comparing it with other apps, usually by blog comments, I decided to take the plunge and put out the $9 for Notebooks.**

It wasn’t a choice I regretted. The initial setup took some time, mostly spent in choosing a decent iPad screen typeface (I settled on Verdana), getting the colors on par with what I wanted (a simple color background that looks like cream-laid paper with black, 20-point text, though I have made a couple of woodgrain background patterns for it), and setting up my sync (Notebooks supports both MobileMe and Dropbox, with desktop sync available wirelessly via the free Apple server SyncDocs or by iTunes’ file sharing). This took me all of twenty minutes or so to do. After that I was up and running.

The biggest single hurdle to typing on the iPad is its quirky autocorrect. I’ve read of one writing app that disables the function when it’s running, though Notebooks doesn’t do that just yet. The next biggest hurdle is the glass screen; if you’re a touch-typist, iPad will take some getting used to. (Irony: the home keys on the screen have little graphical notches on them, even though you can’t feel them. On the plus side, the iPad keyboard is full width in landscape orientation.) Finally, iPad’s default keyboard doesn’t have arrow cursor keys; you have to tap on the screen to place the cursor where you want. Also, dragging to select large blocks of text becomes tedious very quickly.

Thus the iPad, while overall a nice device to use, still needs a few more iterations to its UI before it’s really as comfortable to write on as a typical desktop text editor; but that hasn’t stopped me from writing hundreds of thousands of words on it already, virtually all of them in Notebooks, including this blog entry.

Notebooks, like all writing apps for iPad (except Pages), does not allow you to format your text as you might in other programs. There is no option for bold or italic, for instance, and you can’t change typefaces in selected areas of a document. This is because Apple hasn’t released an API for RTF editing, which means iOS developers would have no option (presently) but to write their own. Plausible, but difficult and costly in terms of dev time.

The app includes some nice little extras, such as the capacity to create password-protected “hidden” files (which are not invisible in your sync items, by the way), a live character count for the file you’re editing, the ability to get a word count on a file you’re not editing, a display that lets you choose a columnar or full-screen format for the editing interface, the ability to rename files, options to set individual file choices for colors and typeface, and a few other gadgets and goodies.

Notebooks can read — but not edit — a pretty decent variety of formats. I know it can read PDF, RTF, and HTML, and the newest release includes a “sketch” feature that allows you to create somewhat rudimentary image files in PNG format.

All of these functions are useful, but where Notebooks really shines is in its editing and file-organizing capabilities. Notebooks uses a folder/file interface for organizing your work. You certainly don’t have to use it, but the app is really optimized for this approach. Documents containing more than 40,000 words or so start to show a little lag when you’re typing; and anyway, that’s not how I write. My method, as I mentioned, is to break down books into individual chapter files contained within a folder.

This system organizes well on the iPad, and when you sync your files you discover that it’s maintained in the structure. That is, if you have a “notebook” called Novel Draft 1 and it has files in it called Chapter 1, Chapter 2 and so on, your synced items will include a folder called Novel Draft 1, with your files named Chapter 1.txt, Chapter 2.txt, etc. Changes you make to the synced files on your desktop get written across to Notebooks when you sync, and vice versa.

Notebooks will recognize .txt files created in other programs. Copy the files to your Notebooks sync folder, and it’ll pick them up. You can edit them normally in Notebooks, with the changes synced back. Notebooks does not require you to sync, nor does it do it on its own; you choose when to run the sync, and you aren’t limited to a default method. If you have files in Dropbox and on a desktop machine somewhere, you can sync to both locations.

The long and short of it is this. If you’re looking for a word cruncher which is more or less “distraction-free” after initial setup, and particularly if you like to break your work down into chunks of folders and documents, Notebooks is already a good choice. Add to it the range of editing and export features and its ability to work with several different kinds of file sync, and you’ve got a pretty damn well-rounded writer’s app that works well in conjunction with the full feature suite you find in your desktop programs. For $9, it’s by far the best iPad app purchase I’ve made, and it is the one app I use most often on my machine.

==

* There’s irony to be found in this rush for a distraction-free program that’s intended to be used by people who are often in cafes or similarly bustling environments, but I don’t think it’s worth a full-blown rant at the inherent silliness of the demand. For an optimally distraction-free writing environment, get a pen and paper, a pair of earplugs, and a closet.

** Another mini-rant: just how asinine is it to be willing to spend $500 and up for a portable computer, then balk at an app that costs more than two or three bucks? Get a sense of perspective, folks.

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Which was also an exercise in oy gevalt. Sure, everything gets backed up — except whatever music, videos and iBooks you might have had on it — you have to put them back on by hand. Gigantic pain in the ass.

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For starters, yes, it’s basically a big iPhone or iTouch. That’s been the biggest derisive comment levied against the iPad, but if you’ve ever actually used an iPhone, you can see right away what’s wrong with it as a criticism. The iPhone is not a cellular phone and it’s not a smartphone. It’s a pocket computer with GPS, a compass, a triaxial accelerometer and two different kinds of wireless networking (three if you include telephony, four if you count SMS/MMS). About the only thing you can’t do with an iPhone is print from it directly or connect USB devices such as a DVD or external hard drive.

Calling the iPad a large iPhone, then, isn’t an insult; it’s a comment on its functionality. Think of all the iPhone’s strengths, then quadruple your screen real estate.

The iPad is essentially a netbook without a keyboard. Well, it has a keyboard, but it’s software based and onscreen (unless you get the docking keyboard), but that makes it only a little less functional. Also you’re not harnessed to a mouse or one of the many damnable variations on a trackpad.

The touchscreen takes about 3.2 picoseconds to get used to. A current iPad ad assures us that we “already know how to use it”, and that’s actually true. I saw an untutored kid of 17 learn everything he needed to know about the UI in less than half an hour — and prior to that he’d been Windows only. It really is that transparent.

The machine is instant-on in nature, because unless something genuinely surprising happens you never reboot it or shut it down. It just goes into “sleep” mode. So when you hit the home button or the power button, the display lights up instantly and basically awaits your command. Not bad at all, compared to how long it takes even a fast netbook to wake up.

This is not a full-blown desktop machine in a screen, nor is it precisely a netbook. Touch typists in particular will find the surfaceless keyboard to be exasperating, at least at first, and the autocorrection on the text entry is as bizarre as the one on the iPhone, with little popup “suggestions” that, as often as not, are half wrong. With any luck OS 4.0 will address at least some of this.

For connectivity the wifi ought to be fine if you happen to live somewhere that’s crawling with hotspots. I don’t, which means I have to use MyWi on my jailbroken iPhone to have connectivity to the world at large — something neither Apple nor AT&T would be happy to know about. I’m okay with that for two reasons: One, it’s my phone and I believe I have the right to install any damn software I want onto a device I own; and two, I’m paying AT&T $30 per month for an unlimited data plan. That AT&T and I might disagree on the meaning of “unlimited” is hardly my fault. The US is the only major industrialized nation that has iPhones without data tethering, and that omission is due solely and exclusively to AT&T’s policies. So to hell with the rules on both fronts.

What that means in practice is that I use the iPhone as a kind of wireless modem-cum-access point. It works. The 3G network gives me data download rates around 160 K/sec, with bursts higher than 200 K from time to time. Not wifi speed, but still plenty fast for most of my needs. There’s no reason for me to think a 3G iPad would be any faster.

As far as apps go, yes, most of them are still engineered for the iPhone. Native iPad apps are being developed — and with the news that Apple shifted some 2 million pads in the first 60 days, I rather expect more will be coming along. Some are already pre-ported to work on either platform (such as pCalc), but most run in a little rectangle that does nothing more than remind you of what it really means to have quadruple the screen space. You can expand them to fill the screen, but they end up a bit crunchy at the edges if you do that.

For someone like me, whose avocation is commercial art, the iPad is pretty decent. There are some pretty good drawing apps out there already, and I look forward to the day when someone releases a truly competent vector drawing app for iPad.

Does iPad multitask? Well, not yet (another 4.0 enhancement). A fairer question is: Do you? Probably not, unless you’re both ambidextrous and capable of focusing your attention on at least two different things at the same moment. Hint: Cognitive science doesn’t back you up on the second claim. While iPad, like iPhone, is modal — you work on only one task at a time — that’s a fine distinction, probably a little too fine to stand as a real argument against either device.

The best decent argument I’ve seen against the Apple mobile platform in general is that it doesn’t support Flash. Some people really seem to need that, and maybe they do; but I’ve been using Flash blockers on my desktop browsers for a long time, so basically I don’t miss it anyway. Of course that’s just me.

So while the iPad still has some growing to do, I think it’s a solid start; if you’re looking to kit out a college student, for instance, you could do a lot worse than a combo of iPad and desktop system.

Also, for what it’s worth, this entire post was composed on the iPad, in the Safari browser, through the WordPress back end interface. No special apps required. Not too shabby for something that’s “just a big iPhone”.

It ain’t perfect, but it don’t suck.

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Spirit (re-)jailbroke 3.1.3, and Cydia and Rock remembered all the JB apps I’d installed — even the for-pay ones — which is spectacularly nice, thank you very much; and benm.at provided a working AT&T tethering hack. (Which I don’t think you need to JB for, but I did anyway, cause that’s how I roll, mah niggaz.)

On the upside, I can connect pretty much anywhere now, even if my torrents are functional only on an as-needed basis. Also, I got Categories back, because an iPhone without folders is just plain tarded.

On the downside, my cable provider’s net access is hosed — again — so without my 3G coverage,* I’d be totally dark right now. My tethered iPhone is slow, but Tango Foxtrot. 60K/sec is far superior to 0K/sec.

Look. Tin cans and string are a lot of fun when you’re six. I expect a bit better from an ISP that I’m paying $160 a month for. I think I’ve just about had it with NPG.

I think I’m okay. It seems that I wasn’t the only gmail user to have some account-cracking issues a while back, but I suppose time will be the real test on this one. If you start getting mysterious random links to obscure porn sites or Canadian pharmacies from me, please let me know right away. Especially if it’s porn. (Be sure to write down the URL and send it along. For, you know, more thorough investigation. Because we all know how rare porn is on the internet. That’s why so many men spend so much time, every day … investigating it.)

==

* On an unlimited data plan I’m paying for, AT&T, so why the flaming hell are we (the US) the only major industrialized nation that doesn’t have iPhone tethering? Hmm? Can’t figure out how to meter it? Here’s a hint for you. Look up the definition of unlimited sometime. Fuckwads.

You wanna know what makes teen boys into crackers and phreaks? Bullshit rules like this. That’s what.

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I’m not sure exactly where the weak link is. Because it’s just people whom I’ve contacted directly from my gmail account via their web interface, it could be that someone managed to crack my password there. (I’ve changed it.)

The other possibility is that some nasty cretin slipped malware onto my iPhone. I have a 3GS that’s jailbroken — and yes, I changed the root password immediately — but I have no way to know for sure that some of the recent installs to substrate stuff was actually entirely safe.

What makes me wonder about the source is simple. My Mail settings on the iPhone Settings applet have been hidden — vanished — disappeared. No idea where they went or what made them go away, but it’s interesting, because that’s where the passwords are stored.

So I’m in the process now of restoring the iPhone to get it back to its original uncracked state, which is going to be a massive pain in the arse to handle, and I think it goes without saying that I won’t be redoing the jailbreak.

Most of what I wanted from jailbreaking will be available with OS 4.0 anyway, so on balance I don’t suppose it’s too great a loss.

Meanwhile, those of you who’ve been spammed and linked here to find out WTF was going on, again, I apologize.

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I also have a Mac Mini, and it’s wirelessly connected to my home network. This means that, in theory, the Mini and the Xbox can talk to each other.

This is actually possible in practice. The least expensive solution (free) is to install the BitTorrent client Vuze — formerly Azureus — on your Mac, and use its media server to host out files to your Xbox. There are a few problems with that solution, though:

1. Vuze only works with files you’ve added (or received) as torrents;
2. It seems to lose track of files in large folders (that is, if you have 200 files in a torrent folder, it’ll host out maybe 20 or so);
3. It mis-orders torrents (the first torrent may actually be listed as the fifth or some such);
4. It’s Java-based, which means it eats chip like you would not believe to keep running. Like 40% or more.

So that wasn’t all that great for me, and I poked around a bit until I found a little program called Playback. This is a very-low overhead media server that turns your Mac into a source for “legitimate” media streaming as far as the Xbox is concerned — like Vuze — but unlike Vuze, Playback doesn’t hog system resources.

It streams fast, is very configurable, and even lets you choose what folders and other sources you want to share out to your media system. It can handle a lot of video formats, and seems to serve things very well, even when the system it’s streaming from is otherwise quite occupied.

It’s shareware, but the full price is US$15, and that’s a bargain when you contrast its cost against buying a Media Center PC.

I’m pretty happy with Playback — a lot happier than I was with Vuze — and if you’re looking to do something similar yourself, well, give it a try.

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Okay, so, well. My machine is jailbroken, and has a multitasker in it. It’s about 5% more convenient than it used to be. If I uninistalled the multitasker, frankly, I’d barely notice. I use Orbit almost every time I trigger my phone. Multitasker? Hardly ever.

What things, precisely, do you detractors want to multitask on iPhone, or on iPad, that you think you’ll be missing? Endgadget was whining about how they want to play videos while IMing. That is not multitasking; that is attention-switching.

What multitasking things do you do now, with a desktop system, that you think you need to have on iPhone, with its little screen (video and IM on the same 320x240? Come on), or that you believe you’ll be missing on iPad?

Play your cards. Show your faces. Put up, or shut up.

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