Sander's Weblog

Apple says: “Apple will support Microsoft Windows 7 (Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate) with Boot Camp in Mac OS X Snow Leopard before the end of the year. This support will require a software update to Boot Camp.”

My VMWare VM is running Windows 7 on the Boot Camp partition, but I’m waiting for this new version of Boot Camp so I can boot Windows 7 directly on the metal. It’s the end of the year. Where’s my update?

An interesting post landed this past Monday about the Public Beta of Microsoft Entourage. Entourage is Microsoft’s Mac equivalent of Outlook, the mail client that comes with Microsoft Office and connects to their Exchange groupware server.

The post is interesting for a couple of reasons. First of all, Entourage has been using WebDAV to access Exchange, which is very communications intensive and for all practical purposes makes it a second class citizen among Exchange clients. With this beta, Entourage fully adopts Exchange Web Services.

This is a great step forward for Entourage: it will improve its Exchange support and hopefully bring it much closer to the integration level offered by Outlook on Windows.

What’s also interesting is that the Exchange Web Services API seems to be documented and available for integration by third parties. Perhaps this is a good integration point for clients like Thunderbird and Evolution. It looks like their Exchange plugins are still using WebDAV.

For some time, any time I downloaded a Microsoft Office document in Safari, the browser appended an extra filename extension to the saved download, which turned the Office Document into an Office Template. A Word Document gets a .dot suffix, a Powerpoint slide show gets .pot, and an Excel spreadsheet gets .xla, which turns it into an add-in library which is really not what that file is.  Devastating? No. Annoying? For sure yes. Life is too short to have to munge file name extensions all the time, and this is a Mac, right, so stuff should just work. 

Fortunately, a Google trip across some web forums leads to the cause of the problem, which in itself is an interesting illustration about how intricate even Personal Computers have become, and how easy it is to break something.   (more…)

I finally took time to read Will Shipley’s impassionate 2005 post about unit testing and why he doesn’t do it. He’s of course exaggerating for effect and the post is best taken in together with BBum’s excellent follow-up where he argues that unit testing made a huge amount of sense for his project, but may be less relevant for software that directly interacts with users.

Unit testing serves to define and enforce the interface that a piece of code presents to the outside world, which makes most sense (and makes a whole lot of sense) when the user of the code is itself a program. Hence: libraries, Frameworks (oh wait, they are also teh suck) and the like. Having a comprehensive set of unit tests gives the folks who have to work with your code confidence in its quality, and gives you liberty to change stuff under the hood as you see fit, with no fear (ok, less fear) of breaking the confidence the other folks have.

Unit tests don’t find bugs. They ensure that there is no unpredictable behavior (bugs) in the bits they test, but they are not as good at finding new bugs that you didn’t know were there. That’s still up to other techniques like exploratory testing that Will likes so much better. Perhaps Unit Testing is incorrectly named, and we should be talking about Unit Verification.

In the past month we have seen the annual Macworld trade show. I spent a day on the show floor, and it is kind of devolving into iPodworld. The big news of course was the iPhone, revealed well ahead of schedule and not universally well received. I want one, but critics point out that the marketplace is very crowded, the technology moves very fast and while the iPhone looks very glam and sexy in the US marketplace, other regions like Japan are already way ahead of where Apple will be six months from now. I think there is a big difference between the phone market and the PC market, where Apple has operated so far. In the PC marketplace, there is virtually no competition. There is one monopolist, Microsoft, who has the marketplace locked up and dictates progress or lack thereof. Then there is Apple, which is trying to carve out a niche for itself in this Microsoft-owned arena, and does so with some success by creating compelling products that play strongly in some areas (media, the home) which allows them to largely ignore the areas where Microsoft is most deeply entrenched (cubicle land, etc.).

In mobile phones, the situation is entirely different. There is no market incumbent that stifles innovation, but a host of players who compete on a fairly level playing field. There’s Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Nokia, LG, Samsung, Siemens, Pantech, Sagem, RIM, Palm, … and those are just the players operating in North America. They are responsible for an incessant cavalcade of flip phones, smart phones, camera phones, music phones, even phones on which you can make and receive calls. The existence of several local markets across the world—the USA, Japan, every European country—with their own culture, requirements and local phone companies allows for a regional variation in phone features, so technologies can mature on a relatively small scale. There is actual competition in this market, which fosters actual choice for the consumer and makes it much more interesting to watch than the PC market. Seeing Apple enter this melee is even more interesting.

Bill Gates flew off the handle, and no one was there to stop him. Many bits have been spilled over the utterly uncritical interview in Newsweek, and it has been soundly refuted. ‘Nuff said.

Apple’s new I’m a Mac, I’m a PC ad pokes fun at what is supposed to be a Security feature in Vista: the fact you have to approve certain actions taken by programs running on Vista that could change or reconfigure your PC. I haven’t used Vista myself but, as John Welch noted in Information Week, Vista doesn’t actually tell you what it is trying to have you approve, and approving doesn’t require anything in the way of authentication. It’s just an ‘Allow, Cancel’ dialog box that anyone who walks up to your PC could click. Any other OS at least requires you to enter your password when authenticating for potentially PC-altering stuff. The ad is the best one yet in the Mac vs. PC series.