Ask Different Chat - 2012-02-09 (page 1 of 2)

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12:01 AM

iOS 5.1 is off-topic, Lion 10.7.4 is off-topic. Due to NDA for both.

anything less than that. Well, pretty obvious.

Nathan Greenstein

@daviesgeek Current prereleases of Lion and iOS are off topic.

We aren't reopening questions from before. See meta.apple.stackexchange.com/questions/580/…

12:54 AM

0

Q: Icon not showing in applications on OSX

I just re-installed Firefox, but the thumbnail is not showing in the dock applications folder. The icon DOES show both in dock and in finder. I have tried to re-install Firefox again but without success. Any advice?

osx application

^^^^ OSX GUI is on-topic for us over at Unix and Linux, but not something we have much expertise on, maybe an Apple denizen can shed some light on this question

Nathan Greenstein

@Gilles Yep, that's been handled on Ask Different before :)

0

A: Icon not showing in applications on OSX

This is a result of one of OS X's security features. This icon is shown to tell you that the program is potentially unsafe because you haven't opened it yet and it was downloaded from the Internet. The first time you open the app, you'll see a security dialog that says, "App Name" is an applica...

Part of the security stuff, but seems like a strange addition to me.

Most people just notice the bad icon and think that there's a problem

@NathanGreenstein aha, thanks

What might be a good place to put this blog post?

you could try the SU blog

1:20 AM

@NathanGreenstein Ok, thanks

@Moshe FWIW, what I've read is that Normal mode should be the norm whever you're thinking, reading, or doing but actively entering text. Most of your time writing something isn't spent pounding on the keyboard, for reasonably complex documents, so ESC back to normal mode whenever you aren't inputting. This applies to new writing, but goes double for editing.

1:47 AM

@DanielBeck I forgot -- if one has enough rep here, creating an account on SU starts with 101 rep, which means one can participate in meta.SU and upvote.

2:42 AM

@Moshe I'm surprised at the lack of mention of append mode.

Well, insert mode, but the append key.

Insert, append, and overwrite are different modes, no?

(OK, I use TextWrangler almost exclusively, but I've been trying to teach myself vim to see what all the excitement is about)

No, there is no 'append' mode. And overwrite is called replace.

But getting into insert mode via any of aAciIoO is a tutorial all on its own.

this is why I should stick to TextWrangler :-)

Or TextMate, or Chocolat, or Sublime Text, or Xcode, or TextEdit!

No, just TextWrangler. The others are all inferior.

2:53 AM

I really do love vim, and will always have more to learn.

But of course many great people use them.

:(

For the record, I use all of those minus TextMate.

(I can do a Jason too)

So what's so great about vim? (Honest question; I'm trying to get excited about it)

I love a powerful regex engine, but it's intense enough programming that I like having a separate box to craft my searching in

Do a Jason?

I suspect you mean a Kyle :P

Post things that are absolutely clear to people reading the conversation later

2:57 AM

Ahhhh yes. A me indeed.

There are no edit indicators on mobile chat.

:-)

What is this "mobile" of which you speak?

iPhone.

I've heard rumors of this iOS. Not having any cell phone myself, I'm out of the loop.

Of course I use Lion, so that's almost the same thing, right?

The things I like about vim:
Feature Rich (coloring, auto bracket/tag matching, highly extensible). It fast, an it runs pretty much everywhere.

Even on an iPad.

That is a plus, if you use an iPad.

Is it an app, or through terminal?

2:59 AM

App

Cool.

I've always been able to SSH somewhere and use vim.

I suppose emacs could never get onto iOS because it's an interpreter.

Because its an OS.

Such a shame that it doesn't have a good text editor in it.

It's LISP, which means it's everything.

except a good text editor

3:00 AM

Interpreted is fine. Interpreted from external sources (read: Internet) is not.

That's right, they changed that.

Yuuup

2 hours later…

5:22 AM

I just got an iPad 1 running iOS 3.2!!!!

6 hours later…

10:58 AM

Oh my, we really have a tag called [poo-storm] !?

11:41 AM

@stuffe Only on meta

There was some discussion earlier of whether the unicode character 💩 could be included in the tag, and the conclusion was that it sadly could not.

This community hardly needs one, but I can think of a lot of other sites where a [here-we-go-again] tag would be useful.

I "roll eyes" one is often handy.

I don't see the unicode on my Opera/XP rig here, just get the square box with the code in. Is it the one with the smily face like on iOS Emoji? That thing always makes me laugh.

Ask Different Blog

12:03 PM

Ask Different Blog: Graphics Editor Shootout: GIMP vs Photoshop vs Pixelmator

Nathan Greenstein on February 09, 2012

As someone who dabbles in both photography and graphic design, I spend a lot of time in graphics-oriented apps. There are several leading apps in this category, and this comparison is meant to help you chose which one is the best for you.

The free one. GIMP is free, open source, and cross platform. It has a reasonably good feature set, but doesn’t perform particularly admirably and has a user experience that is decidedly un-Mac-like. GIMP is free.

The big one. Photoshop has been around for a long time, and is the industry standard. Photoshop is the archetypical ‘professional’ …

12:21 PM

@JasonSalaz this is something that vi/vim users smugly say, but it has no bearing in reality. emacs is great at editing text, and I've yet to see an example of something that vi can do that emacs can't

1 hour later…

1:27 PM

@KyleCronin If you count "accomplish task x in fewer than n keystrokes", there is a lot vi can do that emacs can't. If you count "fit onto a disk with n mb of free space", vi can and emacs can't. On the other hand, in terms of features, there are certainly things emacs can do and vi can't. But emacs certainly has a bigger disk footprint and some commands are much longer to type.

1:41 PM

I used VI a lot when it was important for me to shave time off a task. That was in work though, and I would never dream of bringing it's use into my hobbiest computing environment. Textedit does me well.

stuffe.net/2011/09/in-defence-of-inefficiency

I enjoy perl-compatible regular expressions (how many oxymora does that phrase contain?) and don't care for the appearance of TextEdit, so I find TextWrangler to be more enjoyable for me to use for hobbyist programming and home use. I also use it to write text for work projects. But that's just my odd tastes.

2:42 PM

@Daniel I'm honestly curious, are there some good examples of this?

@Daniel most of the time I use TextWrangler's big brother, BBEdit

both have great HTML and Perl support

(though I don't code much in either, I think I remember you saying you do a lot in Perl)

wow, it's been over a year since TW was updated in the MAS

@KyleCronin Not being much of a user of either, I'm hard-pressed to come up with a working example, but that sure was my impression while trying to teach myself both of them.

here's hoping Jason has some good examples

@KyleCronin, why were most of the questions in the Town Hall from users who don't have enough reputation on Ask Different to vote in the election? George Edison has 115, Michael Mrozek has 101, Shog9 has 101. I thought the point of the town hall was for voters to ask questions of the candidates, but most questions came from people ineligible to vote.

I understand Rebecca Chernoff was asking as a proxy for Nathan, and at 148 rep, it is reasonable to think she might be eligible to vote before the election ends.

2:58 PM

Shog is an employee, and Michael and George are mods on other sites that frequently hang out in the TL

OK, but they still won't be voting in the AD election, I assume.

probably not

even kiamlaluno is mostly active on other sites

and is a SO mod

OK, but he's got >1K rep here; that's a legitimate member of the community.

true

the town halls are announced network-wide, and there are some people that like to go to all of them

But with a limited time window, it would have been nice to have more room for questions from, well, community members.

3:00 PM

I've been thinking a lot about that

I wish we could have eligibility to vote in the election as a prerequisite to talk in the town hall -- anyone can read, of course.

most of the candidates spend a lot of time in the AD chat, and as such any voter can come in here any time and ask you questions

or just talk to you

sure, but it really slanted the sort of questions we all fielded.

oh definitely

I think that, in some ways, the town halls are almost meant for SE and outsiders

as opposed to members of our community

If a presidential debate had mostly questions from people from other countries, it would be a very different event.

3:02 PM

true

though I think Ask Different is a bit... different than the other SE sites

most of them view themselves as part of a larger network

(i.e. us states in the united states)

whereas I've always maintained that Ask Different is mostly independent

this is evident in things like when we close or migrate questions - I don't close a question as a duplicate merely because it exists elsewhere on the network

and I prefer not to ship people off to other sites if the subject matter is on-topic here, even if only marginally

2 hours later…

4:49 PM

@KyleCronin "smugly". I've never used emacs, so I'm simply repeating the joke that I hear from other people.

that's what I suspected

I have used emacs, and find that I type more characters to get the same thing done in emacs than in vi, but I'm so hooked on TextWrangler that I find both of them not particularly friendly environments for me.

The fact that emacs advertises it's ability to render a butterfly ascii art, a game of tetris, irc clients, mpd clients, etc. etc. etc. and not text editor improvements doesn't really hurt (help?) either.

I even think that there's an audio editing extension out there somewhere

no idea how that would work though

5:07 PM

Transcript is up on meta

woots

blink

Hi Diago

Howdy

good morning all

I'm having flashbacks to a Stallman "presentation" (rant) on emacs that I had the misfortune to attend.

5:32 PM

From what I understand, many rants are only that.

huh

-3

A: 2012 Moderator Election - Town Hall Chat Digest

Shog9 asked: What tiny thing on Apple.SE makes you smile or has caught you off guard? Jason Salaz answered: Makes me smile: When it's called Ask Different. bmike answered: I really like how the discussion can get into the tiny things about a piece of software - the SO/SE way of running a...

Nice vote score.

yeah, bad question all around

unfortunately it doesn't actually reflect on Shog9. Just Tim Stone.

Poor Tim Stone. :P

Bad question, and yet in some ways the most revealing and most "AD centric". (Going from memory here--might be easily disproven.)

it doesn't appear that he's an employee... I wonder why he's the one that has to put the digests together?

He isn't? Huh.

Perhaps a volunteer to the Area 51 process long ago? And has just kind of done it ever since?

Actually, elections pre-date Area 51 by a mile, so that likely does not explain it either.

┐('～`；)┌

5:45 PM

@JasonSalaz no rep on meta posts anyway, so it only shows up in a total if he runs for AD mod

Yeah, I know. I'm still an "attribution" geek.

The first step is admitting the problem. ;)

Well, he gets all the upvotes for the questions he didn't write also.

@jaberg I ADMIT NOTHING! YOU CAN'T PROVE ANYTHING!

erm, excuse my caps lock.

@Daniel Touché.

I'd hope there are more of those, Jason.

5:48 PM

(Takes screen shot and files it away)

O_O

wtf?

Actually, it's pretty close to zero. Interesting.

So here's my random AD/SE musing for today: "Can a question that is completely answered in one line ever be a "good" question?"

Sure.

Yes

5:49 PM

If it's grade 1 math.

Is your question a good question?

There are a lot of one-line answers :-)

(But are they complete?)

My question is a ransom musing. I didn't post it.

@jaberg Sure you did. Right there

And I like @stuffe's modifier.

But was thinking in terms of AD, not elementary school.

It's a great question for chat.

5:51 PM

That would be a better question than a lot of yesterdays

TOPIC OF THE DAY!

Your topic of the day yesterday was good. I hoped more people would weigh in, though.

My thoughts are as follows. For the most part, the answer is "no" because any question answered so simply is likely one that the OP could have readily discovered with a reasonable level of research BUT, a one-line answer to a complex question may be the true measure of genius and expertise on the part of the answering party.

Most of you guys use grown up names not stupid false identities ;)

hey, I'll go back to being hotlegzgurl19 if it makes you happy.

I'd vote for that :)

5:53 PM

yeah, but what if @ArgyleMarionette weighed in?

I'm going to look at the next set of questions when my next "repping" opportunity arrives and see if I can justifibly 1 setence answer them

(switching gears for a moment) Picked up a Mommy Blogger as a Twitter follower. Note to self, open the valve on the firehose of profanity.

@stuffe I just use half a grownup name. But there's no interesting backstory. Lile stuff.

(Why did I *know* that remark was gonna get starred—one second after hitting "send".)
"

My first nom de plume was "forsa", which some people mixed up with the Italian "forza" as in Ferarri fans

It was in fact Turkish for Galley Slave.

I would usually just leave it at that if asked, without adding the perfectly innocent "it was the name of a boat I stayed on once"

5:58 PM

FYI, specific question that sparked my meditation: apple.stackexchange.com/q/39827/11791

Not a terribly interesting question, but non-trivial.

I would hazard a guess that a user who cannot find that out, might not know the meaning of "~"

A question answered by a dense one-liner shell script could be a good one.

Good point @stuffe, I'll edit.

And willl likely be using the finder not terminal

6:00 PM

@stuffe +1

Also is ~/library hidden by default these days?

Also a good point regarding Lion.

@stuffe Yes

So, in this instance, the answer remains "no" ;)

But it's a good one.

No, in this instance the question doesn't apply, because a one-line answer doesn't answer the question. See the original question.

s/Applications Support/Application Support/

I'm afraid we all answered incorrectly to @NathanGreenstein 's question. The right answer was "I'd launch an inquisition into who didn't vote for me or who had ever downvoted my posts and ban them from the site."

6:07 PM

@jaberg See below:

4

A: Weather widget in notification center of iOS5

Considering that the iPod/iPhone Weather app has never existed on the iPad, the answer to this is an extremely simple, and extremely disappointing: "Nope".

I was going to simply answer that question with "Nope", but I saved a little bit of face by providing some history.

Beating me to my own edits now. I see how this is going to be. ;)

@Daniel Technically my answer is consistent with this approach :)

well, you said "no massive power splurge"

It looks like @bmike read "Meta Stack Overflow" and reacted with "Meta Ask Different" like stüffé originally did. -> meta.apple.stackexchange.com/a/1076/1346

@JasonSalaz I was going to suggest a straight "Yes" or "no" could work, but would sound abrupt.

6:13 PM

@jaberg The rep is all yours

you toned it right there tho

I didn't know if you were still here, so I wanted the corrections filed. Sorry if you were working on it.

Daniel, I appreciate the assist. I was getting there, but using more words--most of them that were in the box when notice of your edit appeared. I accept your edit.

I'm not sure about @bmikes answer, I think it could read either way depending on who is reading it. Mine, however, was flat out wrong. Minus points for cardinal sin of not reading the question.

@stuffe Given the frantic appearance of the TH chat (I didn't attend, but read the unedited "transcript" yesterday) I think you can be absolved of this particular sin.

6:16 PM

It was crazy intense.

And I would have accepted "No" as a valid answer to the question.

@jaberg Not really, I didn't even have the pressure of responding in real time!

I'm even taking into account the fact that you didn't respond in real time.

It was messy, and as I said yesterday in some ways painful, to read.

I replied to the questions in order before reading the transcript in full after, then I did the last question on final thoughts.

Shogs first question was so disrespectful, that just wasn;t taking things seriously.

2

The fact that it was out so fast before Rebecca could even set the agenda almost, you just know that it was in his clipboard.

From an insider, I would have taken the question as a gentle warmup. From an outsider, it came off as a put down.

6:21 PM

FedEx has arrived--brb

@Daniel I had a similar reaction to yours.

If Jason has asked it, for instance, I'd take it as "what do you like about this site"

Re-reading the transcript always makes me feel really good. The inter-user linking and referencing and what not really shows the strength of this community's bond.

I wish I was there to answer and have it seen by him

I would (in hindsight, of course, easier to be witty there) probably have gone with something like "Saving the best questions till last I see :)"

@JasonSalaz We never do that here

Not one bit.

58 rep until I have 5 digit network-wide rep.

Wheeeeeeee

.....eeee

6:27 PM

Is it just me, or have the questions in the last 2 days been, well, not much to get stuck into?

@JasonSalaz The World Wide Web was created on the precursor to Mac OS X, and HyperCard was an amazing Apple product, so if we hyperlink well, it's in our ecosystem.

5

@stuffe Do you mean that the questions in the last 2 days have been "light"?

They come and they go

Q: Why does iTunes continuously reset play count to zero. A: It's broken.

It's broken. Best. One. Sentence. Answer.

darn it, I've got to actually work now. later.

6:29 PM

Yeah, a lot of first time questions that are borderline OK

wow, that was confusing

I just saw Daniel's icon "fall off", and "drop in" at the same time.

And immediately after those animations finished in tandem, then his icon was squeezed out/over by stüffé's...

I meant to screenshot it, and just couldn't react in time, even though it wasn't going very fast.

Push over a bit, there's plenty of room :)

Indeed, and even multiple rows.

@stuffe I get that. I'm just wondering what people expect the answer is going to be.

Chaos, confusion, disorder. My work here is done. Time for the commute home. Might be on later

6:35 PM

Have a safe and relaxing commute.

So goes the umlaut.

@JasonSalaz Nice!!

Ok, so as I said earlier, I got an iPad 1.

I saw

I knew that an iPad was awesome, but apparently I underestimated its awesomeness.

It is awesome!!!!

Even for being an iPad 1

millions and millions of users, can't be wrong.

It is a bit slow running iOS 5

Compared to an iPad 2

6:48 PM

Well yeah.

However, I can't complain. It was a gift

A4 -> A5 was no small bump.

I knew the processor was different, but I didn't know how big.

And since I wasn't in the world of iOS, I had no idea

;)

@JasonSalaz I did read and answer assuming it was meta Apple, but the fourth time I read the question - I went back to make sure my answers fit for both.

6:54 PM

Hello @bmike

It's important for mods here to be active on both the meta for Ask Different and the main meta. The main meta is where most of the site overview gets chatted - so if our mods aren't there reading and commenting, we'll be seen as even more backwards and "soft".

Definitely.

It is really nice to ask a question on meta and get an answer within hours.

I'll be on the watch for that - you can be sure I'll poke at comments that continue to express doubts about our site...

It shows that Nathan and Kyle really care about this site.

@bmike Are you referring to one of my questions?

@daviesgeek I still struggle along with a 1G iPad myself. I think I can hold out for the next rev.

6:57 PM

Well, I got it as a gift (you probably already saw that), so I can't complain.

In the next Moderator election I intend to run on a Backwards and Soft ticket.

2

And in all reality, it will probably be my Mom's more than mine.

@jaberg ;-)

@jaberg You may have less than 2 more months to wait.

@daviesgeek no - not at all - I would have commented or pinged you with a link. Should I be looking for one of your questions now?

@JasonSalaz Okay, in the next, next election then.

6:58 PM

@jaberg That was in reference to the next iPad / your iPad 3 and holding out for the next rev.

@JasonSalaz Do elections get triggered by site growth in addition to annually?

@bmike no

@daviesgeek After much deliberation, my mom opted for the "devil she knew" and chose a MacBook Air for email and web browsing. But your mom should be very pleased and it's even better as a gift.

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