Pixar’s latest short film. I’m so proud and honoured to be working with such an amazing group of people.

Thanks to several evil friends of mine, I started to take an interest in photography at the end of last year. I’ve always wanted to have a “real” camera instead of a point and shoot, so at the start of 2010, I bit the bullet and bought myself a Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1, usually just called The GF1 amongst the camera geeks.

I tossed up between the GF1 and the then-just-released Canon EOS 550D (a.k.a. the Rebel T2i in the USA) for a long time. I figured that getting a compact camera would make me tote it around a lot more, and after ten months of using it, I think I was right. I recently went to a wedding in Sydney, and I literally kept the camera in my suit pocket instead of having to lug it around strapped to my body or neck. I definitely wouldn’t be able to do that with a Canon or Nikon DSLR. The camera’s so small with the kit 20mm f/1.7 lens that I stopped using the UV filter with it, because I didn’t like the 2-3mm that the filter added to the camera depth. Here’s a size comparison of the Nikon D3000 vs the GF1.

(Image stolen from dpreview.com’s review.)

I won’t write up a comprehensive review of the GF1 here; other sites have done that, in much more depth than I can be bothered to go into. If you’re after a good review, the three articles that swayed me to the GF1 in the end were DPreview’s review, and Craig Mod’s GF1 photo field test article and video tests. What follows is my own impressions and experiences of using the camera. The one-sentence summary: the GF1 perfect for a DSLR newbie like me, the micro four-thirds lens system it uses looks like it has enough legs that your lens investments will be good for the future, and learning photography with the GF1 is great and deserves a Unicode snowman: ☃.

The reason you want the camera is to use the 20mm f/1.7 lens. For the non-photography geeks, that means that it’s not a zoom lens, i.e. you can’t zoom in and out with it, and the f/1.7 means that it can take pretty good shots in low light without a flash. All the reviews of it are right: that lens is what makes the camera so fantastic. Do not even bother with 14-45mm kit lens. The 20mm lens is fast enough that you can shoot with it at night, and the focal length’s versatile enough to take both close-up/portrait shots (whee food porn), and swing out a bit wider for landscape photos or group photos. It’s no wide-angle nor zoom and it’s not a super-fast f/1.4, but it’s versatile enough and so tiny that you will end up using it almost all the time. It feels weird to get a DSLR and only have one lens for it, but the pancake 20mm lens is so damn good that it’s all you really need. The only thing it really can’t do at all is go super-zoomalicious, for wildlife/distance shots.

The 20mm non-zoom (a.k.a. “prime”) lens has another advantage: it teaches you to compose. Despite all the technology and all the geek speak, photography is ultimately about your composition skills. Prime lenses force you to move around to find the perfect framing for the shot you’re trying to do; I think learning with a prime lens moves your composition skills along much faster than it would if you were using a standard zoom lens. If you’re a photography beginner, like me, shoot with a prime. It’s a totally different experience than shooting with a zoom, and you learn a lot more. Plus, primes are cheap: the Canon 50mm f/1.8 is USD$100, and Canon’s near top-of-the-line 50mm f/1.4 is USD$350. The Canon 35mm f/2, for something that’s similar in focal length to the Panasonic 20mm prime, is USD$300. (You need to multiply the 20mm by 2 to convert between micro four-thirds and 35mm framing, so the actual focal length of the 20mm in traditional camera speak is 20mm*2=40mm.)

After playing it for a few months, you realise that the GF1 is a fun camera to use. The combination of the 20mm prime lens, the super-fast focus, the size, and the great UI design just begs you to take pictures with it. You feel like you’re wielding a real camera rather than a toy: one that wants you to shoot with it. It’s not imposing like a bigger DSLR so it doesn’t feel like the camera is with you all the time, but it’s not so small that you feel like you’re just snipping super-casually with something that’s cheap. And did I mention the excellent UI? It’s excellent. The better controls are a good reason to get the GF1 over its rivals, the Olympus EP series.

One big bonus: I’ve found that the full-auto mode (“iAuto” as Panasonic brands it) very rarely gets stuff wrong. This is useful if you hand the camera over to someone else who doesn’t know how to use DSLRs so that they can take a picture of you… or, like me, if you just don’t know quite what aperture/shutter speeds to use for the particular shot you’re taking. The full-auto just adds to the joy of using it. I usually shoot in full-auto or aperture priority mode, but honestly, I could probably shoot on full-auto mode all the time. I can’t recall a single occasion where it didn’t guess f/1.7 or a landscape correctly.

Do follow DPreview and Craig Mod’s advice and shoot RAW, not JPEG. Honestly, I’d prefer to shoot JPEG if I could, but RAW lets you turn some bad shots into good shots. I use it because gives you a second chance, not because I want to maximise picture quality. Here’s one photo that was accidentally taken with the wrong settings: I had the camera on full-manual mode, and didn’t realise that the shutter speed and ISO settings were totally incorrect.

However, since I shot it in RAW, I could lift up the exposure up two stops, pulled up the shadows and pulled down the highlights, and here’s the result:

Seriously, that’s just frickin’ amazing. Sure, that photo might not be super-awesome: it’s a little grainy, and it looks a bit post-processed if you squint right, but it’s still a photo of a precious memory that I wouldn’t have otherwise had, and you know what? That photo’s just fine. If I shot JPEG, I would’ve had no choice but to throw it away. RAW’s a small pain in the arse since the file sizes are far bigger and you need to wait a long time for your computer to do the RAW processing if you’ve taken hundreds of photos, but boy, it’s worth it.

I did finally buy a wide-angle lens for the GF1—the Olympus 9-18mm f/4-5.6—and have been using it a lot for landscape shots. I bought the Olympus 9-18mm over the Panasonic 7-14 f/4.0 because it was cheaper, and also smaller. I figured that if I was getting a GF1, it was because I wanted something compact, so I wanted to keep the lenses as small as possible. (Otherwise, if you don’t care about size, then a full-blown Canon or Nikon DSLR would probably serve you much better.) I’ve always wanted a wide-angle lens from the first day that I asked “how do those real estate agents make those rooms look so bloody large?”, so now I have one, woohoo. The next lens on my shopping will probably be the Panasonic 45-200mm. (Never mind the quality, feel the price!) Here’s a shot taken with the Olympus 9-18mm; click through to see the original picture on Flickr.

The main thing that I wish for in a future version of the camera would be image stabilisation. Panasonic follow the Canon path and put image stabilisation in the lens, rather than in the body. I think Olympus made the right decision by putting image stabilisation in the body for their compact DSLRs; you can keep the lenses smaller that way, and you then get image stabilisation with all your lenses instead of the ones that only support it explicitly, e.g. the 20mm f/1.7 prime doesn’t have image stabilision, boo. In-body image stabilisation just seems more in-line with the size reduction goal for micro four-thirds cameras. I’d love to get my hands on an Olympus EP for a week and shoot with the 20mm to see if image stabilisation makes a difference when it’s dark and the environment is starting to challenge the f/1.7 speeds.

The only other thing I wish for would be a better sensor. The GF1’s great up to ISO 800: at ISO 1600+, it starts getting grainy. 1600 is acceptable, and you can do wondrous things with the modern noise reduction algorithms that are in Lightroom if you really need to save a shot. Shoot at ISO 3200+ though, and it’s just too grainy. This is the main advantage that more traditional DSLRs have: their larger sensors are simply better than the GF1’s. I’ve seen shots taken with a Nikon D50 at ISO 6400 in the dark because a slower f/4 lens was being used, and bam, the shot comes out fine. Don’t even try to compare this thing to a Canon 5D Mk II. The GF1 just can’t do high ISO. Here’s an ISO 3200 shot, which is just starting to get a little too grainy. It’s fine for Facebook-sized images, but if you click through to the original, you’ll see it’s noisy.

But y’know, despite the two nitpicks above, the GF1 is a fine camera, and the 20mm f/1.7 lens is an amazing do-it-all lens that’s absolutely perfect to learn with. There’s really nothing else out there like it except for the Olympus EP range (the EP-1, EP-2 and EPL-1), which you should definitely consider, but get it with the 20mm f/1.7 lens if you do. I’ve had a total blast learning photography with the GF1, and I’ve captured hundreds of memories in the past year that made the investment completely worthwhile. I don’t think I’m at the point yet where I feel like I need another camera yet, but it feels good knowing that the micro four-thirds format will be around for a while so that I can use my existing lenses with future cameras I buy. If you’re interested in learning photography, the GF1 is a fantastic starting point.

Update: Thom Hogan did a comparison between the most popular mirrorless cameras: the Olympus E-PL1, the Panasonic GF1, Samsung NX100, and Sony NEX-5. It’s written for people who know photography rather than for novices, but basically, the GF1 came out on top, with the E-PL1 being recommended if you can live with the worse screen and the far worse UI. That’s pretty much exactly my opinion, too.

Thanks to several evil friends of mine, I started to take an interest in photography at the end of last year. I’ve always wanted to have a “real” camera instead of a point and shoot, so at the start of 2010, I bit the bullet and bought myself a Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1, usually just called The GF1 amongst the camera geeks.

I tossed up between the GF1 and the then-just-released Canon EOS 550D (a.k.a. the Rebel T2i in the USA) for a long time. I figured that getting a compact camera would make me tote it around a lot more, and after ten months of using it, I think I was right. I recently went to a wedding in Sydney, and I literally kept the camera in my suit pocket instead of having to lug it around strapped to my body or neck. I definitely wouldn’t be able to do that with a Canon or Nikon DSLR. The camera’s so small with the kit 20mm f/1.7 lens that I stopped using the UV filter with it, because I didn’t like the 2-3mm that the filter added to the camera depth. Here’s a size comparison of the Nikon D3000 vs the GF1.

(Image stolen from dpreview.com’s review.)

I won’t write up a comprehensive review of the GF1 here; other sites have done that, in much more depth than I can be bothered to go into. If you’re after a good review, the three articles that swayed me to the GF1 in the end were DPreview’s review, and Craig Mod’s GF1 photo field test article and video tests. What follows is my own impressions and experiences of using the camera. The one-sentence summary: the GF1 perfect for a DSLR newbie like me, the micro four-thirds lens system it uses looks like it has enough legs that your lens investments will be good for the future, and learning photography with the GF1 is great and deserves a Unicode snowman: ☃.

The reason you want the camera is to use the 20mm f/1.7 lens. For the non-photography geeks, that means that it’s not a zoom lens, i.e. you can’t zoom in and out with it, and the f/1.7 means that it can take pretty good shots in low light without a flash. All the reviews of it are right: that lens is what makes the camera so fantastic. Do not even bother with 14-45mm kit lens. The 20mm lens is fast enough that you can shoot with it at night, and the focal length’s versatile enough to take both close-up/portrait shots (whee food porn), and swing out a bit wider for landscape photos or group photos. It’s no wide-angle nor zoom and it’s not a super-fast f/1.4, but it’s versatile enough and so tiny that you will end up using it almost all the time. It feels weird to get a DSLR and only have one lens for it, but the pancake 20mm lens is so damn good that it’s all you really need. The only thing it really can’t do at all is go super-zoomalicious, for wildlife/distance shots.

The 20mm non-zoom (a.k.a. “prime”) lens has another advantage: it teaches you to compose. Despite all the technology and all the geek speak, photography is ultimately about your composition skills. Prime lenses force you to move around to find the perfect framing for the shot you’re trying to do; I think learning with a prime lens moves your composition skills along much faster than it would if you were using a standard zoom lens. If you’re a photography beginner, like me, shoot with a prime. It’s a totally different experience than shooting with a zoom, and you learn a lot more. Plus, primes are cheap: the Canon 50mm f/1.8 is USD$100, and Canon’s near top-of-the-line 50mm f/1.4 is USD$350. The Canon 35mm f/2, for something that’s similar in focal length to the Panasonic 20mm prime, is USD$300. (You need to multiply the 20mm by 2 to convert between micro four-thirds and 35mm framing, so the actual focal length of the 20mm in traditional camera speak is 20mm*2=40mm.)

After playing it for a few months, you realise that the GF1 is a fun camera to use. The combination of the 20mm prime lens, the super-fast focus, the size, and the great UI design just begs you to take pictures with it. You feel like you’re wielding a real camera rather than a toy: one that wants you to shoot with it. It’s not imposing like a bigger DSLR so it doesn’t feel like the camera is with you all the time, but it’s not so small that you feel like you’re just snipping super-casually with something that’s cheap. And did I mention the excellent UI? It’s excellent. The better controls are a good reason to get the GF1 over its rivals, the Olympus EP series.

One big bonus: I’ve found that the full-auto mode (“iAuto” as Panasonic brands it) very rarely gets stuff wrong. This is useful if you hand the camera over to someone else who doesn’t know how to use DSLRs so that they can take a picture of you… or, like me, if you just don’t know quite what aperture/shutter speeds to use for the particular shot you’re taking. The full-auto just adds to the joy of using it. I usually shoot in full-auto or aperture priority mode, but honestly, I could probably shoot on full-auto mode all the time. I can’t recall a single occasion where it didn’t guess f/1.7 or a landscape correctly.

Do follow DPreview and Craig Mod’s advice and shoot RAW, not JPEG. Honestly, I’d prefer to shoot JPEG if I could, but RAW lets you turn some bad shots into good shots. I use it because gives you a second chance, not because I want to maximise picture quality. Here’s one photo that was accidentally taken with the wrong settings: I had the camera on full-manual mode, and didn’t realise that the shutter speed and ISO settings were totally incorrect.

However, since I shot it in RAW, I could lift up the exposure up two stops, pulled up the shadows and pulled down the highlights, and here’s the result:

Seriously, that’s just frickin’ amazing. Sure, that photo might not be super-awesome: it’s a little grainy, and it looks a bit post-processed if you squint right, but it’s still a photo of a precious memory that I wouldn’t have otherwise had, and you know what? That photo’s just fine. If I shot JPEG, I would’ve had no choice but to throw it away. RAW’s a small pain in the arse since the file sizes are far bigger and you need to wait a long time for your computer to do the RAW processing if you’ve taken hundreds of photos, but boy, it’s worth it.

I did finally buy a wide-angle lens for the GF1—the Olympus 9-18mm f/4-5.6—and have been using it a lot for landscape shots. I bought the Olympus 9-18mm over the Panasonic 7-14 f/4.0 because it was cheaper, and also smaller. I figured that if I was getting a GF1, it was because I wanted something compact, so I wanted to keep the lenses as small as possible. (Otherwise, if you don’t care about size, then a full-blown Canon or Nikon DSLR would probably serve you much better.) I’ve always wanted a wide-angle lens from the first day that I asked “how do those real estate agents make those rooms look so bloody large?”, so now I have one, woohoo. The next lens on my shopping will probably be the Panasonic 45-200mm. (Never mind the quality, feel the price!) Here’s a shot taken with the Olympus 9-18mm; click through to see the original picture on Flickr.

The main thing that I wish for in a future version of the camera would be image stabilisation. Panasonic follow the Canon path and put image stabilisation in the lens, rather than in the body. I think Olympus made the right decision by putting image stabilisation in the body for their compact DSLRs; you can keep the lenses smaller that way, and you then get image stabilisation with all your lenses instead of the ones that only support it explicitly, e.g. the 20mm f/1.7 prime doesn’t have image stabilision, boo. In-body image stabilisation just seems more in-line with the size reduction goal for micro four-thirds cameras. I’d love to get my hands on an Olympus EP for a week and shoot with the 20mm to see if image stabilisation makes a difference when it’s dark and the environment is starting to challenge the f/1.7 speeds.

The only other thing I wish for would be a better sensor. The GF1’s great up to ISO 800: at ISO 1600+, it starts getting grainy. 1600 is acceptable, and you can do wondrous things with the modern noise reduction algorithms that are in Lightroom if you really need to save a shot. Shoot at ISO 3200+ though, and it’s just too grainy. This is the main advantage that more traditional DSLRs have: their larger sensors are simply better than the GF1’s. I’ve seen shots taken with a Nikon D50 at ISO 6400 in the dark because a slower f/4 lens was being used, and bam, the shot comes out fine. Don’t even try to compare this thing to a Canon 5D Mk II. The GF1 just can’t do high ISO. Here’s an ISO 3200 shot, which is just starting to get a little too grainy. It’s fine for Facebook-sized images, but if you click through to the original, you’ll see it’s noisy.

But y’know, despite the two nitpicks above, the GF1 is a fine camera, and the 20mm f/1.7 lens is an amazing do-it-all lens that’s absolutely perfect to learn with. There’s really nothing else out there like it except for the Olympus EP range (the EP-1, EP-2 and EPL-1), which you should definitely consider, but get it with the 20mm f/1.7 lens if you do. I’ve had a total blast learning photography with the GF1, and I’ve captured hundreds of memories in the past year that made the investment completely worthwhile. I don’t think I’m at the point yet where I feel like I need another camera yet, but it feels good knowing that the micro four-thirds format will be around for a while so that I can use my existing lenses with future cameras I buy. If you’re interested in learning photography, the GF1 is a fantastic starting point.

Update: Thom Hogan did a comparison between the most popular mirrorless cameras: the Olympus E-PL1, the Panasonic GF1, Samsung NX100, and Sony NEX-5. It’s written for people who know photography rather than for novices, but basically, the GF1 came out on top, with the E-PL1 being recommended if you can live with the worse screen and the far worse UI. That’s pretty much exactly my opinion, too.

Filesystems are fundamental things for computer systems: after all, you need to store your data somewhere, somehow. Modern operating systems largely use the same concepts for filesystems: a file’s just a bucket that holds some bytes, and files are organised into directories, which can be hierarchical. Some fancier filesystems keep track of file versions and have record-based I/O, and many filesystems now have multiple streams and extended attributes. However, filesystem organisation ideas have stayed largely the same over the past few decades.

I’d argue that the most important stuff on your machine is your data. There are designated places to put this data. On Windows, all the most important stuff on my computer should really live in C:\Documents and Settings\Andre Pang\My Documents. In practice, because of lax permissions, almost everyone I know doesn’t store their documents there: they splatter it over a bunch of random directories hanging off C:\, resulting in a giant lovely mess of directories where some are owned by applications and the system, and some are owned by the user.

Mac OS X is better, but only because I have discipline: /Users/andrep is where I put my stuff. However, I’ve seen plenty of Mac users have data and personal folders hanging off their root directory. I’m pretty sure that my parents have no idea that /Users/your-name-here is where you are meant to put your stuff, and to this day, I’m not quite sure where my dad keeps all his important documents on his Mac. I hope it’s in ~/Documents, but if not, can I blame him? (UNIX only gets this right because it enforces permissions on you. Try saving to / and it won’t work. If you argue that this is a good thing, you’re missing the point of this entire article.)

One OS that actually got this pretty much correct was classic Mac OS: all system stuff went into the System folder (which all the Cool Kids named “System ƒ”, of course). The entire system essentials were contained in just two files: System, and Finder, and you could even copy those files to any floppy disk and make a bootable disk (wow, imagine that). The entire rest of the filesystem was yours: with the exception of the System folder, you organised the file system as you pleased, rather than the filesystem enforcing a hierarchy on you. The stark difference in filesystem organisation between classic Mac OS and Mac OS X is largely due to a user-centric approach for Mac OS from the ground-up, whereas Mac OS X had to carry all its UNIX weight with it, so it had to compromise and use a more traditionally organised computer filesystem.

As an example, in Mac OS X, if you want to delete Photoshop’s preferences, you delete the ~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Photoshop.plist file. Or; maybe you should call it the Bibliothèque folder in France (because that’s what it’s displayed as in the Finder if you switch to French)… and why isn’t the Preferences folder name localised too, and what mere mortal is going to understand why it’s called com.adobe.Photoshop.plist? On a technical level, I completely understand why the Photoshop preferences file is in the ~/Library/Preferences/ directory. But at a user experience level, this is a giant step backwards from Mac OS, where you simply went to the System folder and you trashed the Adobe Photoshop Preferences file there. How is this progress?

I think the fundamental problem is that Windows Explorer, Finder, Nautilus and all the other file managers in the world are designed, by definition, to browse the filesystem. However, what we really want is an abstraction level for users that hides the filesystem from them, and only shows them relevant material, organised in a way that’s sensible for them. The main “file managers” on desktop OSs (Finder and Windows Explorer) should be operating at an abstraction level above the filesystem. The operating system should figure out where to put files on a technical (i.e. filesystem) level, but the filesystem hierarchy should be completely abstracted so that a user doesn’t even realise their stuff is going into /Users/joebloggs.

iTunes and iPhoto are an example of what I’m advocating, because they deal with all the file management for you. You don’t need to worry where your music is or how your photos are organised on the filesystem: you just know about songs and photos. There’s no reason why this can’t work for other types of documents too, and there’s no reason why such an abstracted view of the filesystem can’t work on a systemwide basis. It’s time for the operating system to completely abstract out the filesystem from the user experience, and to turn our main interaction with our documents—i.e. the Finder, Windows Explorer et al—into something that abstracts away the geek details to a sensible view of the documents that are important to us.

One modern operating system has already done this: iOS. iOS is remarkable for being an OS that I often forget is a full-fledged UNIX at its heart. In the iOS user experience, the notion of files is completely gone: the only filenames you ever see are usually email attachments. You think about things as photos, notes, voice memos, mail, and media; not files. I’d argue that this is a huge reason that users find an iPhone and iPad much more simple than a “real” computer: the OS organises the files for them, so they don’t have to think that a computer deals with files. A computer deal with photos and music instead.

There are problems with the iOS approach: the enforced sandboxing per app means that you can’t share files between apps, which is one of the most powerful (and useful) aspects of desktop operating systems. This is a surmountable goal, though, and I don’t think it’d be a difficult task to store documents that can be shared between apps. After all, it’s what desktop OSs do today: the main challenge is in presenting a view of the files that are sensible for the user. I don’t think we can—nor should—banish files, since we still need to serialise all of a document’s data into a form that’s easily transportable. However, a file manager should be metadata-centric and display document titles, keywords, and tags rather than filenames. For many documents, you can derive a filename from its metadata that you can then use to transport the file around.

We’ve tried making the filesystem more amenable to a better user experience by adding features such as extended attributes (think Mac OS type/creator information), and querying and indexing features, ala BFS. However, with the additional complexity of issues such as display names (i.e. localisation), requiring directory hierarchies that should remain invisible to users, and the simple but massive baggage of supporting traditional filesystem structures (/bin/ and /lib/ aren’t going away anytime soon, and make good technical sense), I don’t think we can shoehorn a filesystem browser anymore into something that’s friendly for users. We need a filesystem abstraction layer that’s system-wide. iOS has proven that it can be done. With Apple’s relentless progress march and willingness to change system APIs, Linux’s innovation in the filesystem arena and experimentation with the desktop computing metaphor, and Microsoft’s ambitious plans for Windows 8, maybe we can achieve this sometime in the next decade.

Filesystems are fundamental things for computer systems: after all, you need to store your data somewhere, somehow. Modern operating systems largely use the same concepts for filesystems: a file’s just a bucket that holds some bytes, and files are organised into directories, which can be hierarchical. Some fancier filesystems keep track of file versions and have record-based I/O, and many filesystems now have multiple streams and extended attributes. However, filesystem organisation ideas have stayed largely the same over the past few decades.

I’d argue that the most important stuff on your machine is your data. There are designated places to put this data. On Windows, all the most important stuff on my computer should really live in C:\Documents and Settings\Andre Pang\My Documents. In practice, because of lax permissions, almost everyone I know doesn’t store their documents there: they splatter it over a bunch of random directories hanging off C:\, resulting in a giant lovely mess of directories where some are owned by applications and the system, and some are owned by the user.

Mac OS X is better, but only because I have discipline: /Users/andrep is where I put my stuff. However, I’ve seen plenty of Mac users have data and personal folders hanging off their root directory. I’m pretty sure that my parents have no idea that /Users/your-name-here is where you are meant to put your stuff, and to this day, I’m not quite sure where my dad keeps all his important documents on his Mac. I hope it’s in ~/Documents, but if not, can I blame him? (UNIX only gets this right because it enforces permissions on you. Try saving to / and it won’t work. If you argue that this is a good thing, you’re missing the point of this entire article.)

One OS that actually got this pretty much correct was classic Mac OS: all system stuff went into the System folder (which all the Cool Kids named “System ƒ”, of course). The entire system essentials were contained in just two files: System, and Finder, and you could even copy those files to any floppy disk and make a bootable disk (wow, imagine that). The entire rest of the filesystem was yours: with the exception of the System folder, you organised the file system as you pleased, rather than the filesystem enforcing a hierarchy on you. The stark difference in filesystem organisation between classic Mac OS and Mac OS X is largely due to a user-centric approach for Mac OS from the ground-up, whereas Mac OS X had to carry all its UNIX weight with it, so it had to compromise and use a more traditionally organised computer filesystem.

As an example, in Mac OS X, if you want to delete Photoshop’s preferences, you delete the ~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Photoshop.plist file. Or; maybe you should call it the Bibliothèque folder in France (because that’s what it’s displayed as in the Finder if you switch to French)… and why isn’t the Preferences folder name localised too, and what mere mortal is going to understand why it’s called com.adobe.Photoshop.plist? On a technical level, I completely understand why the Photoshop preferences file is in the ~/Library/Preferences/ directory. But at a user experience level, this is a giant step backwards from Mac OS, where you simply went to the System folder and you trashed the Adobe Photoshop Preferences file there. How is this progress?

I think the fundamental problem is that Windows Explorer, Finder, Nautilus and all the other file managers in the world are designed, by definition, to browse the filesystem. However, what we really want is an abstraction level for users that hides the filesystem from them, and only shows them relevant material, organised in a way that’s sensible for them. The main “file managers” on desktop OSs (Finder and Windows Explorer) should be operating at an abstraction level above the filesystem. The operating system should figure out where to put files on a technical (i.e. filesystem) level, but the filesystem hierarchy should be completely abstracted so that a user doesn’t even realise their stuff is going into /Users/joebloggs.

iTunes and iPhoto are an example of what I’m advocating, because they deal with all the file management for you. You don’t need to worry where your music is or how your photos are organised on the filesystem: you just know about songs and photos. There’s no reason why this can’t work for other types of documents too, and there’s no reason why such an abstracted view of the filesystem can’t work on a systemwide basis. It’s time for the operating system to completely abstract out the filesystem from the user experience, and to turn our main interaction with our documents—i.e. the Finder, Windows Explorer et al—into something that abstracts away the geek details to a sensible view of the documents that are important to us.

One modern operating system has already done this: iOS. iOS is remarkable for being an OS that I often forget is a full-fledged UNIX at its heart. In the iOS user experience, the notion of files is completely gone: the only filenames you ever see are usually email attachments. You think about things as photos, notes, voice memos, mail, and media; not files. I’d argue that this is a huge reason that users find an iPhone and iPad much more simple than a “real” computer: the OS organises the files for them, so they don’t have to think that a computer deals with files. A computer deal with photos and music instead.

There are problems with the iOS approach: the enforced sandboxing per app means that you can’t share files between apps, which is one of the most powerful (and useful) aspects of desktop operating systems. This is a surmountable goal, though, and I don’t think it’d be a difficult task to store documents that can be shared between apps. After all, it’s what desktop OSs do today: the main challenge is in presenting a view of the files that are sensible for the user. I don’t think we can—nor should—banish files, since we still need to serialise all of a document’s data into a form that’s easily transportable. However, a file manager should be metadata-centric and display document titles, keywords, and tags rather than filenames. For many documents, you can derive a filename from its metadata that you can then use to transport the file around.

We’ve tried making the filesystem more amenable to a better user experience by adding features such as extended attributes (think Mac OS type/creator information), and querying and indexing features, ala BFS. However, with the additional complexity of issues such as display names (i.e. localisation), requiring directory hierarchies that should remain invisible to users, and the simple but massive baggage of supporting traditional filesystem structures (/bin/ and /lib/ aren’t going away anytime soon, and make good technical sense), I don’t think we can shoehorn a filesystem browser anymore into something that’s friendly for users. We need a filesystem abstraction layer that’s system-wide. iOS has proven that it can be done. With Apple’s relentless progress march and willingness to change system APIs, Linux’s innovation in the filesystem arena and experimentation with the desktop computing metaphor, and Microsoft’s ambitious plans for Windows 8, maybe we can achieve this sometime in the next decade.

As GLaDOS would say, It’s been a long time. How have you been?

I was invited a few weeks ago to keynote at /dev/world 2010, a conference for Mac developers in Australia. It was my first-ever keynote, and you know, inspirational talks turn out to be kinda harder to give than technical talks. For those who didn’t attend, the talk intended to address the two most frequent questions I get asked about Pixar (“how did you get there?” and “what do you, uhh, actually do?”), and provide some insight into Pixar’s culture.

Two videos that I referred to in the talk and I think are an absolute must-see—whether you’re an engineer, CEO, manager, designer, artist or otherwise—are

• Ed Catmull’s talk at Stanford Business School: Keep Your Crises Small (~40 minutes, minus question time)
• Randy Nelson’s Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age (~10 minutes)

They complement Steve Jobs’s amazing commencement speech at Stanford in 2005. The number of insightful, genuine sound bites you can take away from those three talks are off the charts.

For all those who attended my keynote, I hope it was worthwhile. Thank you to everyone in the audience for giving me such a warm reception and for making me feel back at home, and thank you to the AUC for putting on a great conference.

Also, new website look, oooooo. It almost looks like it was made after 2000. Hopefully this will mean more regular updates on my blog than once per decade. I guess we’ll find out!

As GLaDOS would say, It’s been a long time. How have you been?

I was invited a few weeks ago to keynote at /dev/world 2010, a conference for Mac developers in Australia. It was my first-ever keynote, and you know, inspirational talks turn out to be kinda harder to give than technical talks. For those who didn’t attend, the talk intended to address the two most frequent questions I get asked about Pixar (“how did you get there?” and “what do you, uhh, actually do?”), and provide some insight into Pixar’s culture.

Two videos that I referred to in the talk and I think are an absolute must-see—whether you’re an engineer, CEO, manager, designer, artist or otherwise—are

• Ed Catmull’s talk at Stanford Business School: Keep Your Crises Small (~40 minutes, minus question time)
• Randy Nelson’s Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age (~10 minutes)

They complement Steve Jobs’s amazing commencement speech at Stanford in 2005. The number of insightful, genuine sound bites you can take away from those three talks are off the charts.

For all those who attended my keynote, I hope it was worthwhile. Thank you to everyone in the audience for giving me such a warm reception and for making me feel back at home, and thank you to the AUC for putting on a great conference.

Also, new website look, oooooo. It almost looks like it was made after 2000. Hopefully this will mean more regular updates on my blog than once per decade. I guess we’ll find out!

I feel like there’s been four stages to my life. The first stage was being a youngling at primary school: I don’t remember much from there except that I fantasised about handball being an olympic sport. The second stage was the PC demoscene, where I grew interested in many things that I love today about computing: art, music, and my first experience with a community and culture that you could love and immerse yourself in. The third stage was my twenties: an introduction to university, Linux, coding, the Mac, Haskell, research conferences, industry conferences, the working life, and balancing it all with healthy doses of relaxation, food and the beautiful world that Sydney had to offer. The fourth stage was tearing myself away from that fairly sheltered life and my emotional base, and moving to San Francisco.

I’ve been here for six months. It’s felt like two years. It has been a truly wonderful experience: making new friends, learning a new culture that’s both significantly but subtly different, and doing it all without my family nearby, who’ve been my anchor and support for the past three decades. Part of the motivation was proving to myself that I could make it on my own: prove myself worthy in the eyes of my peers, be social enough to make genuine friends here who I cared about and who cared about me, living on my own and simply paying the rent. Part of the motivation was to shake things up from a cruisy life in Sydney and experience new things. I’m glad to report that the experiment’s going pretty well so far.

San Francisco is a city of immense contrast. For every stupid hipster who thinks that owning a Prius absolves them of their environmental debt to society, there are remarkable individuals who understand and challenge the daunting realism of politics, lobbying, energy, transformity and limits to growth. For every poser upstart get-rich-quick guy chasing after VC funding for Facebook apps, there are the quiet anonymous developers at Apple, Google, and startups you’ve never heard of who work on all the amazing technologies that the entire world takes for granted today. The Tenderloin, so unpleasant to walk through, has some of the very best restaurants and bars that the city has to offer. The nouveau shiny high-rises of South Beach contrast with the destitute run-down feel of western SoMa, only a few blocks away.

It’s a make-or-break city: rents are insanely high despite the rent control laws, and there’s no lower-middle class population here because either you’re flying high, or you’re not flying at all. It’s natural selection in action: either you keep up with the pack and continue being successful, or you fall and become left behind. And so, in contrast to the relaxed lifestyle of Sydney, San Francisco is full of ambition. While it lacks the non-stop pace of New York or the late-night industry of Detroit and Chicago, the people here want to change the world, and they have the innovation, the smarts and the determination to do so.

The tech industry here is simply amazing. Despite being here for half a year, I’m still floored when I go to a party and every person I meet there ends up being a Web designer, or a coder, or a sysadmin, or a DBA, or a network engineer, or a manager of a bunch of coders, or a VC funding a tech company, or a lawyer or accountant or marketing or PR person working for a tech company, or a level designer or artist working for a games company. Even the girls. It boggles me. It’s like the entire Bay Area simply exists to build software and iPhones and tech solutions. I was truly daunted in the first few months to find out that everyone around me was, well, just like me. A few months ago, I was at my favourite little tea shop in San Francisco decompressing and minding my own business, when three people sat down next to me and started talking about VGA BIOS exploits. (Turns out that they work for VMware.) I mean, seriously?

I wouldn’t say that I’m totally acclimated to the Bay Area yet, and perhaps I never will be. Visiting Australia just a month ago reminded me just how different the two cities are in their lifestyles. People are always doing something in San Francisco: there’s so many interesting people there that you feel like need to divide your time between groups, let alone having time to yourself. Even the serious introverts there are out on most schoolnights. The people here are always switched on; even at a party, there’s an air of networking going on and the feeling of opportunities to be seized. You almost always end up talking shop at any event, because people here are defined by what they do: one of the very first questions you’re usually asked is “Where do you work?” or “What do you do for a living?”. In Sydney, asking that question so soon would just be a little bit weird. You usually save that for far later in the conversation, when you’re running out of things to say to the pretty girl to try to hook up with her. (And don’t even get me started about the American dating scene.)

And so, for all the wonderful parks, bars, tacos, restaurants, pirate shops and museums of the city; the incredible beauty and varied terrain of the North Bay; the charm and chilled suburbia of North Berkeley in the East; and the innovation and serenity of Silicon Valley just south, I still miss Sydney and the culture I grew up with for twenty years. I don’t mean that in a yearning way or mean to imply that San Francisco is somehow inadequate, because it rocks: I’m having a wonderful time experiencing new things, and it was the right decision to move here. This is where I should be at this stage in my life. Sydney will always be where my heart is, but right now, San Francisco is home, and it’s as fantastic as I hoped it would be.

I feel like there’s been four stages to my life. The first stage was being a youngling at primary school: I don’t remember much from there except that I fantasised about handball being an olympic sport. The second stage was the PC demoscene, where I grew interested in many things that I love today about computing: art, music, and my first experience with a community and culture that you could love and immerse yourself in. The third stage was my twenties: an introduction to university, Linux, coding, the Mac, Haskell, research conferences, industry conferences, the working life, and balancing it all with healthy doses of relaxation, food and the beautiful world that Sydney had to offer. The fourth stage was tearing myself away from that fairly sheltered life and my emotional base, and moving to San Francisco.

I’ve been here for six months. It’s felt like two years. It has been a truly wonderful experience: making new friends, learning a new culture that’s both significantly but subtly different, and doing it all without my family nearby, who’ve been my anchor and support for the past three decades. Part of the motivation was proving to myself that I could make it on my own: prove myself worthy in the eyes of my peers, be social enough to make genuine friends here who I cared about and who cared about me, living on my own and simply paying the rent. Part of the motivation was to shake things up from a cruisy life in Sydney and experience new things. I’m glad to report that the experiment’s going pretty well so far.

San Francisco is a city of immense contrast. For every stupid hipster who thinks that owning a Prius absolves them of their environmental debt to society, there are remarkable individuals who understand and challenge the daunting realism of politics, lobbying, energy, transformity and limits to growth. For every poser upstart get-rich-quick guy chasing after VC funding for Facebook apps, there are the quiet anonymous developers at Apple, Google, and startups you’ve never heard of who work on all the amazing technologies that the entire world takes for granted today. The Tenderloin, so unpleasant to walk through, has some of the very best restaurants and bars that the city has to offer. The nouveau shiny high-rises of South Beach contrast with the destitute run-down feel of western SoMa, only a few blocks away.

It’s a make-or-break city: rents are insanely high despite the rent control laws, and there’s no lower-middle class population here because either you’re flying high, or you’re not flying at all. It’s natural selection in action: either you keep up with the pack and continue being successful, or you fall and become left behind. And so, in contrast to the relaxed lifestyle of Sydney, San Francisco is full of ambition. While it lacks the non-stop pace of New York or the late-night industry of Detroit and Chicago, the people here want to change the world, and they have the innovation, the smarts and the determination to do so.

The tech industry here is simply amazing. Despite being here for half a year, I’m still floored when I go to a party and every person I meet there ends up being a Web designer, or a coder, or a sysadmin, or a DBA, or a network engineer, or a manager of a bunch of coders, or a VC funding a tech company, or a lawyer or accountant or marketing or PR person working for a tech company, or a level designer or artist working for a games company. Even the girls. It boggles me. It’s like the entire Bay Area simply exists to build software and iPhones and tech solutions. I was truly daunted in the first few months to find out that everyone around me was, well, just like me. A few months ago, I was at my favourite little tea shop in San Francisco decompressing and minding my own business, when three people sat down next to me and started talking about VGA BIOS exploits. (Turns out that they work for VMware.) I mean, seriously?

I wouldn’t say that I’m totally acclimated to the Bay Area yet, and perhaps I never will be. Visiting Australia just a month ago reminded me just how different the two cities are in their lifestyles. People are always doing something in San Francisco: there’s so many interesting people there that you feel like need to divide your time between groups, let alone having time to yourself. Even the serious introverts there are out on most schoolnights. The people here are always switched on; even at a party, there’s an air of networking going on and the feeling of opportunities to be seized. You almost always end up talking shop at any event, because people here are defined by what they do: one of the very first questions you’re usually asked is “Where do you work?” or “What do you do for a living?”. In Sydney, asking that question so soon would just be a little bit weird. You usually save that for far later in the conversation, when you’re running out of things to say to the pretty girl to try to hook up with her. (And don’t even get me started about the American dating scene.)

And so, for all the wonderful parks, bars, tacos, restaurants, pirate shops and museums of the city; the incredible beauty and varied terrain of the North Bay; the charm and chilled suburbia of North Berkeley in the East; and the innovation and serenity of Silicon Valley just south, I still miss Sydney and the culture I grew up with for twenty years. I don’t mean that in a yearning way or mean to imply that San Francisco is somehow inadequate, because it rocks: I’m having a wonderful time experiencing new things, and it was the right decision to move here. This is where I should be at this stage in my life. Sydney will always be where my heart is, but right now, San Francisco is home, and it’s as fantastic as I hoped it would be.

Just before I left Sydney, I gave one last talk at the revived Sydney Cocoaheads user group about Objective-C Internals. It’s similar to the presentation that I gave at fp-syd a few months ago about Objective-C and Mac OS X programming, but was tailored for a Mac audience rather than a functional programming audience. As a result, the Cocoaheads talk has a lot more detail on the object model, memory layout, and how message-sending works, and less info on higher-order messaging and language features (e.g. I didn’t talk about categories at all.)

If you’re a Mac coder, hopefully you’ll find something new in there. As always, drop me an email if you have any questions!

P.S. For all the voyeurs out there, the San Francisco move & Pixar are both going great! More news on that soon, too.

Just before I left Sydney, I gave one last talk at the revived Sydney Cocoaheads user group about Objective-C Internals. It’s similar to the presentation that I gave at fp-syd a few months ago about Objective-C and Mac OS X programming, but was tailored for a Mac audience rather than a functional programming audience. As a result, the Cocoaheads talk has a lot more detail on the object model, memory layout, and how message-sending works, and less info on higher-order messaging and language features (e.g. I didn’t talk about categories at all.)

If you’re a Mac coder, hopefully you’ll find something new in there. As always, drop me an email if you have any questions!

P.S. For all the voyeurs out there, the San Francisco move & Pixar are both going great! More news on that soon, too.

I think my current plan of being self-employed is arguably working out pretty well. I get to work on RapidWeaver and LittleSnapper, two kick-ass products with a ton of users who love it. I’m friends with the lovely baristas and staff at my local café, where I normally work during the day. However, nothing beats taking a weekday off to chill out at my favourite café in Sydney, perhaps catching some waves at Bondi Beach and then playing some tennis afterwards, only to put my head down and code at night when the distractions are minimal. Life, as they say, is pretty peachy.

So, just before my 30th birthday, it was with both great apprehension and excitement that I made the decision to give up my current lifestyle and my current job. In five days, I move from the comfort of Sydney to magnificent San Francisco, to start work for a company that I’ve loved so much ever since I was a kid: Pixar.

To say that this was not where I expected to be in my life is quite an understatement. I was always the guy who thought that things would fall into place if he found the right girl, and that career would work itself out later. I fell in love hard when I was 21, was about this close to deciding to get married when I was 26, and when things went south, it took countless numbers of D&M talks with my close friends (thank you thank you thank you), another wonderful relationship with one of the most amazing people I know, and over three years to truly recover. I spent weeks in self-reflection pondering what life was about, what the day-to-day drudgery meant, and what I had accomplished during my second decade on Earth while so many of my friends were growing by leaps and bounds in their own relationships.

Meanwhile, my career was working out just fine. I worked on one project that will hopefully have the success it deserves with the release of Firefox 3.1 and perhaps take the lead in the important area of open-standards video on the Web. I’ve worked on other projects that are all tremendous successes in their respective markets, and along the way, I made a ton of genuine friends in the demoscene, Haskell, Linux and Mac OS X communities. Nonetheless, I still felt that I failed to meet my own expectations, since I’d never considered my career to be a measure of success. Despite the fantastic lifestyle that working remotely for Realmac afforded me, I was still restless, and still felt incomplete in my personal life.

Last year, I travelled a lot, not as a means of escapism, but because I had a ton of conferences to hit, and also wanted to visit some of my best friends who were now overseas. As I hopped from the UK to the USA to Singapore, I spent a lot of time alone, as travel does to you, and reflected on life. One day, I spent eight hours by myself in my favourite tea lounge in San Francisco, mixing feelings about the past decade and all its ups and downs: perhaps my expectations were too high, or perhaps I concentrated too much on things that would simply work themselves out. By the time I returned to Australia’s beautiful shores in December, I was exhausted from too much reflection, too much living out of a duffel bag on the road for months, and too much melancholy from thinking about the past and too much searching without answers.

However, something else happened in those months of travel: all of those worries slowly felt more and more like experience. I figured that, hey, my third decade was looming; either I start my thirties by continuing to be subtly haunted by those worries of the past decade, or I could treat those worries as learning experiences and forge a new outlook that relished any challenges the future could bring. As Steve Jobs says, “sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.” And so, just as I started to feel happy when I finally returned home, Pixar came knocking. I flew to San Francisco just a few days after arriving back in Sydney from months of travel; it would be my last trip for 2008. I did the interview thing, and a week later when I was back again in Sydney to wind down for Christmas, I got The Phone Call. When would I be able to move to San Francisco to start work there?

I thought hard about my current lifestyle of cafés and working remotely, and how I loved working at a small company like Realmac where I was directly responsible for the welfare of a much-loved application. I anguished over all the friends I had made in Australia and how much I’d miss them, and how much I’d miss my family. I thought about how I made my life here: how I went to school here, University here, met all my lovers here, and how this was, well, home. In the end, though, how could I turn down the opportunity of a lifetime, working at a company that married art and science so perfectly, and inspires so much love & passion in everyone? (Also, I hear there’s a lot of hot Asian-American girls in San Francisco.)

There’s no moral to this story: it just is, and I thought it needed telling while I still had the guts to tell it. So, as of next Wednesday, I leave my wonderful memories here to explore life in a new city. I’ve traditionally used this blog to communicate my thoughts on computing and technology, but I’ve always admired and enjoyed reading other people’s blogs that were much more personal (without being totally emo). Hopefully I’ll transform this blog a little to have a far more personal feel, so I can keep in touch with all the people I know & love around the world; thank you all for being a part of my life and enriching and defining me. See you on the other side of the Pacific!

I think my current plan of being self-employed is arguably working out pretty well. I get to work on RapidWeaver and LittleSnapper, two kick-ass products with a ton of users who love it. I’m friends with the lovely baristas and staff at my local café, where I normally work during the day. However, nothing beats taking a weekday off to chill out at my favourite café in Sydney, perhaps catching some waves at Bondi Beach and then playing some tennis afterwards, only to put my head down and code at night when the distractions are minimal. Life, as they say, is pretty peachy.

So, just before my 30th birthday, it was with both great apprehension and excitement that I made the decision to give up my current lifestyle and my current job. In five days, I move from the comfort of Sydney to magnificent San Francisco, to start work for a company that I’ve loved so much ever since I was a kid: Pixar.

To say that this was not where I expected to be in my life is quite an understatement. I was always the guy who thought that things would fall into place if he found the right girl, and that career would work itself out later. I fell in love hard when I was 21, was about this close to deciding to get married when I was 26, and when things went south, it took countless numbers of D&M talks with my close friends (thank you thank you thank you), another wonderful relationship with one of the most amazing people I know, and over three years to truly recover. I spent weeks in self-reflection pondering what life was about, what the day-to-day drudgery meant, and what I had accomplished during my second decade on Earth while so many of my friends were growing by leaps and bounds in their own relationships.

Meanwhile, my career was working out just fine. I worked on one project that will hopefully have the success it deserves with the release of Firefox 3.1 and perhaps take the lead in the important area of open-standards video on the Web. I’ve worked on other projects that are all tremendous successes in their respective markets, and along the way, I made a ton of genuine friends in the demoscene, Haskell, Linux and Mac OS X communities. Nonetheless, I still felt that I failed to meet my own expectations, since I’d never considered my career to be a measure of success. Despite the fantastic lifestyle that working remotely for Realmac afforded me, I was still restless, and still felt incomplete in my personal life.

Last year, I travelled a lot, not as a means of escapism, but because I had a ton of conferences to hit, and also wanted to visit some of my best friends who were now overseas. As I hopped from the UK to the USA to Singapore, I spent a lot of time alone, as travel does to you, and reflected on life. One day, I spent eight hours by myself in my favourite tea lounge in San Francisco, mixing feelings about the past decade and all its ups and downs: perhaps my expectations were too high, or perhaps I concentrated too much on things that would simply work themselves out. By the time I returned to Australia’s beautiful shores in December, I was exhausted from too much reflection, too much living out of a duffel bag on the road for months, and too much melancholy from thinking about the past and too much searching without answers.

However, something else happened in those months of travel: all of those worries slowly felt more and more like experience. I figured that, hey, my third decade was looming; either I start my thirties by continuing to be subtly haunted by those worries of the past decade, or I could treat those worries as learning experiences and forge a new outlook that relished any challenges the future could bring. As Steve Jobs says, “sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.” And so, just as I started to feel happy when I finally returned home, Pixar came knocking. I flew to San Francisco just a few days after arriving back in Sydney from months of travel; it would be my last trip for 2008. I did the interview thing, and a week later when I was back again in Sydney to wind down for Christmas, I got The Phone Call. When would I be able to move to San Francisco to start work there?

I thought hard about my current lifestyle of cafés and working remotely, and how I loved working at a small company like Realmac where I was directly responsible for the welfare of a much-loved application. I anguished over all the friends I had made in Australia and how much I’d miss them, and how much I’d miss my family. I thought about how I made my life here: how I went to school here, University here, met all my lovers here, and how this was, well, home. In the end, though, how could I turn down the opportunity of a lifetime, working at a company that married art and science so perfectly, and inspires so much love & passion in everyone? (Also, I hear there’s a lot of hot Asian-American girls in San Francisco.)

There’s no moral to this story: it just is, and I thought it needed telling while I still had the guts to tell it. So, as of next Wednesday, I leave my wonderful memories here to explore life in a new city. I’ve traditionally used this blog to communicate my thoughts on computing and technology, but I’ve always admired and enjoyed reading other people’s blogs that were much more personal (without being totally emo). Hopefully I’ll transform this blog a little to have a far more personal feel, so I can keep in touch with all the people I know & love around the world; thank you all for being a part of my life and enriching and defining me. See you on the other side of the Pacific!

Quite often, you may have simple setter methods that need to do a just a tiny bit of work before or after setting an instance variable. For example, maybe you need to redraw something after setting the property of an object. So, instead of writing this:

[self setBackgroundColor:[NSColor blueColor]]; [view setBackgroundColor:[NSColor blueColor]];

You’d probably want to move the relevant code to your -setBackgroundColor: accessor instead:

- (void)setBackgroundColor:(NSColor*)color { // Assuming that _backgroundColor is the ivar you want to set if(_backgroundColor != color) { [_backgroundColor release]; _backgroundColor = [color retain]; // Update the view's background color to reflect the change [view setBackgroundColor:_backgroundColor]; } }

Then you can simply call -setBackgroundColor: and expect it all to work nicely:

// -setBackgroundColor: updates the view's background color // automatically now [self setBackgroundColor:[NSColor blueColor]];

(You could use Key-Value Observing to do this, but I generally avoid KVO for simple intra-class property dependencies like this. I don’t think the overhead of maintaining all the KVC dependencies and KVO-related methods is worth the cost.)

Of course, the above method requires that you write all that stupid boilerplate memory management code in the accessor. Instead of doing that, I tend to declare a private _backgroundColor property in the class, @synthesize a method for the private property, and then use the private property’s generated accessors instead:

@interface MyClass () // Declare a _private_ _backgroundColor property (thus the underscore // in front, and why it's declared in a class continuation rather than // in the public header) @property (copy, setter=_setBackgroundColor:) NSColor* _backgroundColor; @end // @implementation MyClass @synthesize _backgroundColor; - (NSColor*)backgroundColor { return [self _backgroundColor]; } - (void)setBackgroundColor:(NSColor*)color { // Use the private property to set the background colour, so it // handles the memory management bollocks [self _setBackgroundColor:color]; [view setBackgroundColor:[self _backgroundColor]]; } ... @end

With that technique, it’s possible to completely directly setting ivars, and thus avoid -retain and -release altogether. (You’ll still need to use -autorelease at various times, of course, but that’s reasonably rare.) We have some source code files that are well over 2000 lines of code without a single explicit [_ivar retain]; or [_ivar release]; call thanks to this technique. (Yeah, 2000 lines is also large and the class needs refactoring, but that’s another story.)

Of course, you could just use garbage collection which avoids 99% of the need for this bollocks:

- (void)setBackgroundColor:(NSColor*)color { // Yay GC! self->_backgroundColor = color; [view setBackgroundColor:self->_backgroundColor]; }

But plenty of us don’t have that luxury yet. (iPhone, ahem.)

Quite often, you may have simple setter methods that need to do a just a tiny bit of work before or after setting an instance variable. For example, maybe you need to redraw something after setting the property of an object. So, instead of writing this:

[self setBackgroundColor:[NSColor blueColor]]; [view setBackgroundColor:[NSColor blueColor]];

You’d probably want to move the relevant code to your -setBackgroundColor: accessor instead:

- (void)setBackgroundColor:(NSColor*)color { // Assuming that _backgroundColor is the ivar you want to set if(_backgroundColor != color) { [_backgroundColor release]; _backgroundColor = [color retain]; // Update the view's background color to reflect the change [view setBackgroundColor:_backgroundColor]; } }

Then you can simply call -setBackgroundColor: and expect it all to work nicely:

// -setBackgroundColor: updates the view's background color // automatically now [self setBackgroundColor:[NSColor blueColor]];

(You could use Key-Value Observing to do this, but I generally avoid KVO for simple intra-class property dependencies like this. I don’t think the overhead of maintaining all the KVC dependencies and KVO-related methods is worth the cost.)

Of course, the above method requires that you write all that stupid boilerplate memory management code in the accessor. Instead of doing that, I tend to declare a private _backgroundColor property in the class, @synthesize a method for the private property, and then use the private property’s generated accessors instead:

[@interface](https://micro.blog/interface) MyClass () // Declare a _private_ _backgroundColor property (thus the underscore // in front, and why it's declared in a class continuation rather than // in the public header) [@property](https://micro.blog/property) (copy, setter=_setBackgroundColor:) NSColor* _backgroundColor; @end // @implementation MyClass @synthesize _backgroundColor; - (NSColor*)backgroundColor { return [self _backgroundColor]; } - (void)setBackgroundColor:(NSColor*)color { // Use the private property to set the background colour, so it // handles the memory management bollocks [self _setBackgroundColor:color]; [view setBackgroundColor:[self _backgroundColor]]; } ... @end

With that technique, it’s possible to completely directly setting ivars, and thus avoid -retain and -release altogether. (You’ll still need to use -autorelease at various times, of course, but that’s reasonably rare.) We have some source code files that are well over 2000 lines of code without a single explicit [_ivar retain]; or [_ivar release]; call thanks to this technique. (Yeah, 2000 lines is also large and the class needs refactoring, but that’s another story.)

Of course, you could just use garbage collection which avoids 99% of the need for this bollocks:

- (void)setBackgroundColor:(NSColor*)color { // Yay GC! self->_backgroundColor = color; [view setBackgroundColor:self->_backgroundColor]; }

But plenty of us don’t have that luxury yet. (iPhone, ahem.)

For the UNIX users out there who use the git revision control system with the oldskool less pager, try adding the following to your ~/.gitconfig file:

[core]
    # search for core.pager in
    # <http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-config.html>
    # to see why we use this convoluted syntax
    pager = less -$LESS -SFRX -SR +'/^---'

That’ll launch less with three options set:

• -S: chops long lines rather than folding them (personal preference),
• -R: permits ANSI colour escape sequences so that git’s diff colouring still works, and
• +'/^---': sets the default search regex to ^--- (find --- at the beginning of the line), so that you can easily skip to the next file in your pager with the n key.

The last one’s the handy tip. I browse commits using git diff before committing them, and like being able to jump quickly back and forth between files. Alas, since less is a dumb pager and doesn’t understand the semantics of diff patches, we simply set the find regex to ^---, which does what we want.

Of course, feel free to change the options to your heart’s content. See the less(1) manpage for the gory details.

As the comment in the configuration file says, you’ll need to use the convoluted less -$LESS -SFRX prefix due to interesting git behaviour with the LESS environment variable:

Note that git sets the LESS environment variable to FRSX if it is unset when it runs the pager. One can change these settings by setting the LESS variable to some other value. Alternately, these settings can be overridden on a project or global basis by setting the core.pager option. Setting core.pager has no affect on the LESS environment variable behaviour above, so if you want to override git’s default settings this way, you need to be explicit. For example, to disable the S option in a backward compatible manner, set core.pager to "less -+$LESS -FRX". This will be passed to the shell by git, which will translate the final command to "LESS=FRSX less -+FRSX -FRX".

(And sure, I could switch to using a different pager, but I’ve been using less for more than a decade. Yep, I know all about Emacs & Vim’s diff-mode and Changes.app. It’s hard to break old habits.)

For the UNIX users out there who use the git revision control system with the oldskool less pager, try adding the following to your ~/.gitconfig file:

[core]
    # search for core.pager in
    # <http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-config.html>
    # to see why we use this convoluted syntax
    pager = less -$LESS -SFRX -SR +'/^---'

That’ll launch less with three options set:

• -S: chops long lines rather than folding them (personal preference),
• -R: permits ANSI colour escape sequences so that git’s diff colouring still works, and
• +'/^---': sets the default search regex to ^--- (find --- at the beginning of the line), so that you can easily skip to the next file in your pager with the n key.

The last one’s the handy tip. I browse commits using git diff before committing them, and like being able to jump quickly back and forth between files. Alas, since less is a dumb pager and doesn’t understand the semantics of diff patches, we simply set the find regex to ^---, which does what we want.

Of course, feel free to change the options to your heart’s content. See the less(1) manpage for the gory details.

As the comment in the configuration file says, you’ll need to use the convoluted less -$LESS -SFRX prefix due to interesting git behaviour with the LESS environment variable:

Note that git sets the LESS environment variable to FRSX if it is unset when it runs the pager. One can change these settings by setting the LESS variable to some other value. Alternately, these settings can be overridden on a project or global basis by setting the core.pager option. Setting core.pager has no affect on the LESS environment variable behaviour above, so if you want to override git’s default settings this way, you need to be explicit. For example, to disable the S option in a backward compatible manner, set core.pager to "less -+$LESS -FRX". This will be passed to the shell by git, which will translate the final command to "LESS=FRSX less -+FRSX -FRX".

(And sure, I could switch to using a different pager, but I’ve been using less for more than a decade. Yep, I know all about Emacs & Vim’s diff-mode and Changes.app. It’s hard to break old habits.)

Four little announcements, all of them Mac-related:

First, myself and my comrades at Realmac Software are very proud to announce the release of LittleSnapper 1.0, our swiss-army-knife picture, screenshot and website organisation utility thingamijiggo. We’ve all worked hard on this for the past few months and sweated over a ton of details to try to make it a polished user experience and be a joy to use; we hope you agree. (You would not believe how long we spent figuring out how the blur and highlighting tools should work before they became their final incarnations, or how much pain was involved when we decided to add FTP and SFTP¹ support late in the development cycle.) If you’re a Mac user, give it a whirl; it’s a hard program to describe because it has a lot of different workflows, but between the quick annotation tools, easy Web sharing with QuickSnapper/Flickr/SFTP¹, website DOM snapping, and the iPhoto-like forget-about-what-folder-you-need-to-put-your-picture-in snapshot management, I’m sure you’ll find something useful for you in there. Hopefully our hard work can make life just a little easier for you!

¹ FTP must die.

I blogged earlier that I was speaking at MacDev 2009 in April, but didn’t mention exactly what I was talking about. Well, the talk abstract’s up now:

One reason for Mac OS X’s success is Objective-C, combining the dynamism of a scripting language with the performance of a compiled language. However, how does Objective-C work its magic and what principles is it based upon? In this session, we explore the inner workings of the Objective-C runtime, and see how a little knowledge about programming language foundations—such as lambda calculus and type theory—can go a long way to tackling difficult topics in Cocoa such as error handling and concurrency. We’ll cover a broad range of areas such as garbage collection, blocks, and data structure design, with a focus on practical tips and techniques that can immediately improve your own code’s quality and maintainability.

So, two sections: first, low-level hackery of the Objective-C runtime. Second, a different kind of low-level hackery, and one that’s arguably far more important: understanding the essence of computation and programming languages, and why I fell in love with both Haskell & Objective-C, two languages at completely opposite ends of the planet.

I’d like to point out that while the MacDev registration fee seems fairly expensive at £399, keep in mind that covers your accommodation and also meals, which easily covers £100-£150. Scotty’s done a lot of organising so that you don’t have to. There’s also a Christmas special on at the moment where a few applications are included in the registration price; check the MacDev 2009 website for details.

If you’re an imsoniac and are having trouble sleeping, you’ll hopefully enjoy a recent Late Night Cocoa episode where I talk to Scotty about Garbage Collection. (Actually, you probably won’t enjoy it so much after you find out exactly how -retain & -release are implemented under-the-hood. The words CFBag and “lock” should hopefully scare you enough.) It’s a bit of a long episode at over an hour and a quarter long, but next time I’ll say “um” a bit less which should shorten it to about half an hour. Have fun. And use GC! (LittleSnapper and RapidWeaver both aren’t GC yet, but you bet your ass they will be for the next major versions.)

I’ve had a pretty long exodus away from the fp-syd user group since I was off getting drunk overseas for about four months. That, of course, meant that somehow my brain was rather misplaced when I arrived back in Sydney, so I decided to give a talk at fp-syd upon my return… on the same day that LittleSnapper 1.0 was due to be released, leaving pretty much no margin for error. Oops. I’ll glad to say that the gusto prevailed, and that both the talk seemed to go OK (well, I wasn’t booed off the stage anyway), and LittleSnapper was released on time. (Just; thanks Alan and Danny!) My talk there was similar to the one I gave at Galois in Portland earlier this year: a whirlwind tour of the Objective-C programming language and Mac OS X technologies for a functional programming audience. In particular:

• basics of the runtime system,
• higher-order messaging and its analogy to higher-order functions in functional languages,
• some details on the engineering marvel that is the Objective-C garbage collector, and
• (updated!) information on Blocks, LLVM and Clang, and a wee tiny bit of info on Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL.

I’ve updated the talk with a few extra slides, since Apple have made a little more information to the public now. (In particular, brief information on Blocks, Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL.) Enjoy all!

Four little announcements, all of them Mac-related:

First, myself and my comrades at Realmac Software are very proud to announce the release of LittleSnapper 1.0, our swiss-army-knife picture, screenshot and website organisation utility thingamijiggo. We’ve all worked hard on this for the past few months and sweated over a ton of details to try to make it a polished user experience and be a joy to use; we hope you agree. (You would not believe how long we spent figuring out how the blur and highlighting tools should work before they became their final incarnations, or how much pain was involved when we decided to add FTP and SFTP¹ support late in the development cycle.) If you’re a Mac user, give it a whirl; it’s a hard program to describe because it has a lot of different workflows, but between the quick annotation tools, easy Web sharing with QuickSnapper/Flickr/SFTP¹, website DOM snapping, and the iPhoto-like forget-about-what-folder-you-need-to-put-your-picture-in snapshot management, I’m sure you’ll find something useful for you in there. Hopefully our hard work can make life just a little easier for you!

¹ FTP must die.

I blogged earlier that I was speaking at MacDev 2009 in April, but didn’t mention exactly what I was talking about. Well, the talk abstract’s up now:

One reason for Mac OS X’s success is Objective-C, combining the dynamism of a scripting language with the performance of a compiled language. However, how does Objective-C work its magic and what principles is it based upon? In this session, we explore the inner workings of the Objective-C runtime, and see how a little knowledge about programming language foundations—such as lambda calculus and type theory—can go a long way to tackling difficult topics in Cocoa such as error handling and concurrency. We’ll cover a broad range of areas such as garbage collection, blocks, and data structure design, with a focus on practical tips and techniques that can immediately improve your own code’s quality and maintainability.

So, two sections: first, low-level hackery of the Objective-C runtime. Second, a different kind of low-level hackery, and one that’s arguably far more important: understanding the essence of computation and programming languages, and why I fell in love with both Haskell & Objective-C, two languages at completely opposite ends of the planet.

I’d like to point out that while the MacDev registration fee seems fairly expensive at £399, keep in mind that covers your accommodation and also meals, which easily covers £100-£150. Scotty’s done a lot of organising so that you don’t have to. There’s also a Christmas special on at the moment where a few applications are included in the registration price; check the MacDev 2009 website for details.

If you’re an imsoniac and are having trouble sleeping, you’ll hopefully enjoy a recent Late Night Cocoa episode where I talk to Scotty about Garbage Collection. (Actually, you probably won’t enjoy it so much after you find out exactly how -retain & -release are implemented under-the-hood. The words CFBag and “lock” should hopefully scare you enough.) It’s a bit of a long episode at over an hour and a quarter long, but next time I’ll say “um” a bit less which should shorten it to about half an hour. Have fun. And use GC! (LittleSnapper and RapidWeaver both aren’t GC yet, but you bet your ass they will be for the next major versions.)

I’ve had a pretty long exodus away from the fp-syd user group since I was off getting drunk overseas for about four months. That, of course, meant that somehow my brain was rather misplaced when I arrived back in Sydney, so I decided to give a talk at fp-syd upon my return… on the same day that LittleSnapper 1.0 was due to be released, leaving pretty much no margin for error. Oops. I’ll glad to say that the gusto prevailed, and that both the talk seemed to go OK (well, I wasn’t booed off the stage anyway), and LittleSnapper was released on time. (Just; thanks Alan and Danny!) My talk there was similar to the one I gave at Galois in Portland earlier this year: a whirlwind tour of the Objective-C programming language and Mac OS X technologies for a functional programming audience. In particular:

• basics of the runtime system,
• higher-order messaging and its analogy to higher-order functions in functional languages,
• some details on the engineering marvel that is the Objective-C garbage collector, and
• (updated!) information on Blocks, LLVM and Clang, and a wee tiny bit of info on Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL.

I’ve updated the talk with a few extra slides, since Apple have made a little more information to the public now. (In particular, brief information on Blocks, Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL.) Enjoy all!

A website named Neat Little Mac Apps is not the kind of place you’d expect to find an interview with a operating systems and filesystems hacker. Nevertheless, one of their podcasts was just that: an interview with UNIX and BSD legend Marshall Kirk McKusick. (He has his own Wikipedia page; he must be famous!)

There’s some great stuff in there, including the origin of the BSD daemon (Pixar, would you believe? Or, well, Lucasarts at the time…), and a great story about how a bug was introduced into the 4.2 BSD version of the pervasive UNIX diff utility. Marshall’s full of energy, and it’s a great interview; it’s a little amusing to see the stark contrast between the interviewer and McKusick, both of whom have rather different definitions of what constitutes an operating system.