A couple of weeks ago I did a little write up of my favorite features from Surround SCM 2008.1. Unfortunately, afterward I kept getting requests from the TestTrack guys about when I was going to do the same thing for that product. Seriously, night and day, just question after question.

Well, not really, but I’m sure they thought about it. Maybe they forgot to send an email.

Or call.

They never call.

*Sigh*

Anyhow, I had been planning on doing it when the next significant release came out. That all changed this morning.

Jeff and I were talking about the whole single vs. double space after period boondoggle when he mentioned the new TestTrack release, version 2008.1.1. Typically I don’t think much about bugfix releases unless there is some bug that is really annoying me. He claimed, however, that there were two new features in this one. Feeling skeptical I fired up the client to have him show me what had been added.

Oh sweet mother of all that is good in the world hallelujah. I knew these things were coming but I didn’t know it was going to happen now. It’s kind of like finding out that Easter has been moved to today and that the Easter Bunny has left you a basket containing a BMW.

Here is what the defect overview tab looked like before. Notice that the description section has all the line breaks removed making it hard to read for text with lots of paragraphs.

He is what it looks like with the brand new “Show Line Breaks” checkbox checked. That is so much better I can hardly explain it.

The other feature is similar and can be found on the Workflow tab. If you have lots of automation rules set up (which you should) this list can get littered with System Comment items making it hard to see the stuff that a real flesh and blood person did.

But if you uncheck the “Show System Comments” checkbox you get just the actions from the living.

At this point I could feel the eyes water up a bit, but I had to keep my composure since I had someone standing over my shoulder. You know how it is, I’ve to go protect the street cred and all. I’ll leave it at that, there’s really nothing else to be said. Go download 2008.1.1 right now and improve your life. You owe it to yourself.

Hello world.

Sorry for the big old gap between posts. On March 2nd my son decided to go and be born so I’ve been out. Then after I was out I came back only I needed then more time to recover from being out. It’s a vicious cycle I know, but the good news is that life is returning to normal. Bad news is that the new normal involves being up from midnight to 3am.

The new guy is only three and a half years younger than his older sister but it was interesting to see the technology improvements that the hospital had put in place since she was born.

Listen, having the second kid was way less stressful than having the first. Plus, once my wife was all hopped up on goofballs there really wasn’t much to do for several hours other than sit around and wait. So, when you couple the complete lack of, “Oh sweet god I’m going to be dad, I don’t know how to be a dad, I have to teach her how to ride a bike, how do you teach a kid to ride a bike, etc” anxiety with general boredom I ended up with time on my hands to scope out the technology improvements.

The most obvious improvement was the availability of “free” wi-fi that I’m sure was being billed to my insurance company on a per-bit basis. That made me happy that I brought the notebook along, although it figured it would be a slow news day. The other big one was that they let you use cell phones in the rooms now. Apparently all the equipment that would explode when in the presence of a cell signal has been mothballed. Or perhaps there never was any exploding equipment. It could have all been a ruse by the $12 a day hospital in-room phone lobbyists.

Also, since there was no one I needed call, and I had already read the entire internet, I managed to watch more closely the computer that they were keeping all the chart information on. It was both modern and throwback at the same time. It was modern in that it was networked to all the other workstations on the floor and summary information was being rotated on plasma TV’s hanging in the hallway by the nurses’ station. It was throwback because it was most definitely running on some version of Unix with a Motif-based GUI.

That’s right, no fancy Web 2.0 UI here. In fact, watching the doctors and nurses use it I would best describe it as “Needing a lot of clicks.”

(And that’s putting it nicely.)

I’m usually all for the elegant user interfaces, but at the same time, the thing worked flawlessly and that’s really what you want from medical software. DOCTYPEs and Javascript and IE7 and Firefox and Cocoa and that stuff is all well and good but so long as the system allows the doctors to do all the right doctor-y stuff who cares. I’m sure the next time they’ll have upgraded to holographic doctors and levitating beds but I suspect that old Motif UI will still be there. Unless of course a holographic doctor can’t type or use a mouse. At that point I’m stuck for ideas. Good idea for a patent though, “System by which holographic doctors can interact with legacy Unix user input/output devices.” Hmm, now that I think of it, with a little polish I’ll bet I could get some venture capital for that. Um, yeah, I gotta go and, well, do some stuff.

So amid the news coming of Macworld the new version of Office for the Mac was finally shipped by Microsoft. A few days ago a big box filled with all our upgrade versions was delivered to our CIO who, without me needing to ask for it, threw one to me the second I walked into his office.
Now my relationship with Office for the Mac is long and already detailed but I was very much looking forward to the upgrade for three reasons.

1. Entourage 2004 just never worked for me. I couldn’t schedule meetings correctly, it would barf all over itself all the time, the whole thing was a complete disaster. Even if it wouldn’t be feature complete when compared against Outlook I had nowhere to go but up.
2. Word 2004 had some screwy tool bars that for whatever reason just bugged me.
3. It was slow because of the Rosetta translation for the Intel chips.

I am very happy to report that all three of my main complaints have been addressed in this version. Entourage now does work for me, just like it used to for everyone else here in the office. The ability to schedule alone is worth the price of admission especially since Apple decided to let the meeting entry UI of the Leopard iCal marinate in a bowl of liquid mouse clicking stupid before they shipped it.

I know other folks in-house haven’t seen huge speed gains but given my nearly daily usage of Word on massive documents I can definitely tell a difference. The crazy Word toolbars are gone but I suspect that those got swept away in the more modern, and dare I say shiny look, that the entire Office suite got. And that’s really the punch line of the whole upgrade. Yes it is now Intel native, yes it is better looking, but that’s about it for compelling new features. I realize that there are only so many things you can do an office productivity suite at this point but I would have figured that in four years we would have had more than a whole bunch of new layout templates that no one uses anyhow.

Oh, and Entourage still uses the DAV interface to communicate with Exchange. Four years they’ve had to port over the communications code from Outlook. I’ve got the feeling that is a political problem though since all the MacBU people I’ve ever met are more than bright enough to handle that task.

One last thing, for you Mac Surround SCM users out there, the rather controversial move to ditch VBA in favor of AppleScript has yielded dividends. Jeff has written a couple AppleScripts that bring Word document differencing to Surround SCM.

Think of it as our little gift to you, even if the gift is one of those “Man that would really useful for me and if it happens to help out the rest of the world then that would be okey dokey too” types.

So from my last post I got a comment from Jonathan to basically do his homework for him. To make life easier for you the reader here’s the comment:

So can you give me a full analysis on Word vs. Pages? I’ve considered buying Pages, but I’m not sure if it’s the right thing to do.

Comment by Jonathan — October 19, 2007 @ 7:06 pm

Fear not poor Jonathan, I am here to light the way with my first ever Word vs. Pages totally subjective review. Oh and science has no place here, this will just be a lot of observations and screenshots. It’s best not to ask for things like say, evidence, just accepting on blind faith will make this all go a lot more smoothly.

Starting with my all-time favorite, the Blank Template, Pages looks like this in its default view:

Word? Looks pretty much the same save for the lack of a unified toolbar:

Even though the Word toolbars are annoying as all get out I’m not going to ding them for that. The Word 2008 release is coming in January and from the screenshots I’ve seen this has been fixed. I also feel bad for the Word team at Microsoft. They have this product that has always sold well for them and then Apple goes and changes their processors to Intel AND does so in a manner that anything written in CodeWarrior becomes a huge pain to port. I wonder if Apple poured sugar in their gas tanks too or if they thought that this was enough.

Now Word has this little view tab thingie in the lower left hand corner which changes how the main editing window is displayed:

Choosing the first one gives the default view and the third one shows the full page view. The second one gives this outline view:

I’ve never used the outline view and much to my surprise there was a fourth view, the notebook view. Clicking on it either creates a new document or it transmogrifies your current document into a notebook one.

Considering I had no idea what this was going to do I chose the new document option.

Look at that, it looks like lined paper from a notebook. I guess you’d use this for taking notes or something. Like if you were in class and you weren’t playing with IM/Facebook/MySpace.

Now Pages really only has two modes, normal and page layout. (i.e. The one to create things like newsletters that most people never choose.) You can’t flip back and forth between these two though. The only time you get to choose is when you create the document:

Now I’m a man with a newsletter writer tool in need of a newsletter:

One of the features of Word that I do use a great deal is the change tracking and commenting. You get to it by clicking these icons in the toolbar.

The icons in Pages are so close to the Word ones that you’d think they were separated at birth:

Pages then highlights your edits in this gutter on the left hand side with arrows pointing back into the main text.

I think I generally like how this is done but I’ll admit that I am a little surprised that the changes and comment boxes are square. It seems like Apple generally likes to make things like this a little bubbly.

In contrast this feature in Word is my mortal enemy. No matter how many times I do it I get my inline comment view, which looks a great deal like Pages’ version, into a situation that looks like this:

with all the changes showing up at the bottom of the window:

Then I have to mess around looking for how to change it because I never bother to write it down or take notes or do anything reasonable like that. I’m pretty sure that you have change to full page view to get it to work like I want, only when I did it today:

Figures. I guess that kinda sums everything up though doesn’t it.

In addition to the Macbook Pro where I do all my daily work I have a Dell workstation that for the last couple of years has been running Window 2003 Server. Over the course of the last few months he’s started flaking out on me, to the point where I was never really sure what I was going to get when I used it.

To be fair, it really isn’t the right hardware for Windows 2003. (For instance the hard drive has always run like a pig because it really isn’t a server machine.) But I kept having this feeling that whenever I would turn my back the screensaver would switch over to a giant middle finger pointing at me.

I could never catch him in the act though. Each time I spun around and yelled “Ah ha! Now I’ve got you!” all I would see would a picture of some forest or a planet or something. I’ve gotta admit, while his performance was barely better than some of those losers on American Idol he was a wily one.

Anyhow, the time had come to start anew so I nuked Windows 2003 and put on, yep you guessed, Windows Vista.

A blog wouldn’t be a blog without moaning and complaining so here, I’ll get this out of my system fast:

1. When an install sits on 27% for about a half hour, that’s not good. Luckily I had some outside confirmation that this kind of thing would happen. I think the exact words were “Yeah, it takes freaking forever to install.”

2. Those little security dialog warning popup do-dad’s are pretty annoying, but not because they happen all the time. What’s crazy is the whole screen going black except for this little dialog. As someone who remembers the old Linux days of “Don’t mess with the refresh rate lest your monitor will burst into flames” having a screen go instantly black is a jarring experience.

3. The thing talks to you like HAL from 2001. No seriously, I came into work and noticed this little icon on the login screen:

My first thought was, “What does that do? Let’s click it without thinking through my actions to find out.” Why is it software tends to turn off the higher level reasoning in your brain? I mean, if someone walked up to me and asked, “Does this look infected?” you can take it to the bank that I’m not going to go in for a closer look. Yet an unknown button that could do anything from making me a bacon sandwich to ending all life as we know it gets clicked with nary a thought.

Turns out if you click it Vista starts talking to you in the name of accessibility. To bad they didn’t spring for James Earl Jones to do the voice over instead of some psycho killer computer voice.

But, all that being said, here’s the thing…

I find that I actually LIKE Windows Vista.

Now, before everyone falls all to pieces on me let me explain. My biggest beef with XP was that whenever I would switch back and forth from the Mac to Windows it felt like I was taking a step backwards. The XP interface wasn’t as nice, things seemed to be kind of dull in comparison to shininess of OS X. With Vista’s Aero Glass interface that feeling that I’m taking a step back to something more primitive kind of goes away. (But not completely, I mean it is still Windows right? Snark. Woo hoo! I’ve still got it baby!)

Now, I’m not saying that I prefer Vista over OS X, let’s not start talking crazy here. But, the new eye candy certainly helps. Of course all this could really mean is that I have brain of a chimpanzee and that I would be enamored by anything reflective.

*Eyes reader suspiciously*

First monkey comment and I swear I’ll fling poop at you. Wait, oh crap. (Ha! Ba dum ching!)

A while back Steve Jobs gave a commencement address at Stanford University telling the students how he had become a multi-bazillionaire by dropping out of college. Just the sort of thing that you want to tell a crowd of parents that have been spending $30k a year for the past four years.

During the speech though he did talk about how he took a calligraphy course after he dropped out which gave him a love for all things fonts. It would be cool to say that what I’m about to show you is because I too love fonts, but I really just wanted our tools to match the look of the fonts in Xcode.

So by default, out of the box, TestTrack and Surround SCM kinda look like this:

Surround SCM before (click to enlarge):

TestTrack before (click to enlarge):

This is really perfectly fine, but if we want them to look a little more like Xcode we need to make them look like this:

Surround SCM after (click to enlarge):

TestTrack after (click to enlarge):

The magic to do this is to send me a million dollars and I’ll send you a special build. (Give me a break, I made the mistake of graduating from college which apparently torpedoes my chance of becoming a Jobs-like multi-bazillionaire. I’ve gotta make up it somehow.)

(Seriously though, sending me the money really will make this happen.)

Short of that, the way to change the font is to edit your ~/Library/Preferences/com.trolltech.plist file and add/change the Qt.font string key to this:

Lucida Grande,11,-1,5,50,0,0,0,0,0

Save and restart the TestTrack or Surround SCM clients and you should be good to go.

After months and months and months of work Surround SCM 5.0 and TestTrack 7.6 have shipped. You can download them, you can buy them, you can buy two, and they make lovely Christmas presents. This ends the shameless corporate plug.

Speaking of being hungry (yeah, well, sometimes transitions just aren’t that smooth) the other day I called and ordered a pizza for takeout from a local pizza place. When I got there they looked me up in the computer, I paid for the pie, and then they said it was still in the oven and would be out in a couple of minutes. Ten minutes later the guy behind the counter begins searching through the oven and the pizza boxes. I know already this isn’t going to be good.

The counter guy goes and gets the pizza making guy who confirm that they did indeed make the pizza but that it is nowhere to be found. The pizza making guy asks the very poignant question:

“How do you just lose a pizza?”

Another round of searching resulted in nothing, nothing except a very obvious look of fear on the faces of the counter guy and the pizza making guy. They both come up to me and say, very apologetically, the my pizza was indeed made, but that the pizza delivery guy took it by mistake when the counter guy should have had it to give to me. The pizza making guy said he’d make a new one right quick and it would be ready in seven minutes.

Now it’s my turn to talk, I wait just a second to let the drama build, stand up from my chair and in my best “I’m the customer and you darned better well treat me like the king unless your idea of king more resembles King Louis XVI then I’d just as soon pass” voice:

“That’s alright guys, I used to work in a pizza and I know how it goes.”

This does three things for me.

1. I get to see the looks of relief come over the counter guy and pizza making guy’s faces. This of course is quickly followed by them changing expressions to the more devious “Should we slash the pizza driver guy’s tires or just dump a vat of sauce on his head” face.

2. I get a handful of free pizza coupons for my trouble and the fact that I didn’t yell and jump around like a crazed baboon.

3. I get seven more minutes to watch the counter guy answer phones and type feverishly into the pizza order taking computer.

Now, item #3 doesn’t seem like a great benefit, but what it did was it took me on a trip down memory lane to my days in the pizza business. Back in those days our “computer” was really a dumb terminal connected to some dumb mainframe somewhere. Unlike this pizza place though I was a hybrid, I was both the counter guy and the pizza making guy. You could say I was the counter-pizza making guy, except well, I was actually for making pizza. All right, that was my last French Revolution joke, I swear on Robespierre’s severed head. Ooops.

Anyhow, I remember when taking orders over the phone you had to steer the customer in a direction that the computer could handle because the user interface had a very specific order that it wanted things entered in.

It broke down like this:

Quantity + crust type + size + half and half or full + specialty type + toppings + coupons.

Which basically means if someone called you up and said:

Customer: “Um, yeah, I want one supreme, but only on half with the other half being triple anchovies, on the pan crust in the medium size and I have a coupon that says here it will cost me $4.99.”

That meant you had to work it backwards into the format the computer liked. A pain, for sure, and you got real good an interrupting people like this:

Customer: “Um, yeah, I want one supreme…”

Me: “What type of crust?”

Customer: “Err, uh, pan I suppose. But I only want that on half…”

Me: “What size?”

Customer: “Um medium I guess.”

You get the idea. That system more or less worked until you got to the coupon stage where no matter how you prepped the customer the whole thing fell apart. Way up at the corporate level it was decided that you needed to enter the coupon code for a given coupon so that they could track the effectiveness of different advertising campaigns. I suppose its purpose was to tell them that a coupon for a $4.99 pizza did better than a coupon for a $5.99 pizza. What it worked out to in the field was a dozen or so screens of coupons codes that weren’t listed as numbers or something easy to find but rather a helpful “description”:

MedHalfSupXAnch - 4.99

Sacre bleu! It took forever to track down the right code, when it happened to be in the system, and forever when you had some guy holding on the phone and three other phones ringing is not a good thing. To solve the problem we all just kept calculators next to the terminals and would subtract the amount of the coupon from the regular price and then add that value into the computer as a discount, not a coupon. The end result was the customers were happy, the phones got answered, and the corporate guys didn’t get their fine tuned data telling them that people prefer cheaper over more expensive when it comes to pizza.

I’d say it was a win situation for everyone, except for the corporate guy. But at the end of the day he drove home in a BMW and I drove home smelling like anchovies so I wasn’t going to feel too sorry for him. To finish a theme, it was exactly like the common man standing up to the aristocracy in 18th century France. Well except using a calculator isn’t exactly the same as The Enlightenment and being starved out in western Europe doesn’t quite map to a part time job in western Ohio. But other than that it was exactly the same. Sort of.