Demian's Blog

Check out this interesting video of Steve Jobs being interviewed in 1990 just after he had moved to NEXT. Here he sets out the computing landscape for the next 20 years and accurately predicts what we take for granted today:

• a computer in every home
• portable computers
• the revolution of email
• the internet
• wireless networking
• data in the cloud

But more interestingly, he describes the work done at NEXT completing the next generation ‘computing platform’, a robust software system that would allow developers to create software in 1/4 of the time typically required.  Of course what he’s referring to is Cocoa, the software framework that powers the majority of mobile software in 2011.  The object oriented principles pioneered at NEXT, based on Alan Kay’s SmallTalk, became Objective-C which went on to influence generations of programming languages.  The Cocoa class hierarchy we use today is still largely unchanged in terms of structure from its first release in 1989.

Apple’s 1987 Knowledge Navigator, Only One Month Late Unbelievable.

I spent ages combing the web for a decent ERD tool for the Mac, and for some time resigned to using dbwrench, a java binary the provides decent but limited functionality and is free of charge.

The choice of tools for ERD work is much narrower than what’s available on Linux or the PC, where something like DBDesigner 4 is fantastic and can handle pretty much any job you throw at it.

Then finally I stumbled across SQLEditor and I have to say it’s excellent.  It has a sharp and clean GUI with the attention to detail you’d expect from a first rate Mac app.  However there is a price tag, $79, and after years of being able to depend on high quality apps that are available for free, I have to say paying such a price takes some getting used to.  In this case I think it’s totally worth it and would recommend this tool for any Mac-based software developer.

NB: As phpMyAdmin has collapsed in recent versions, you might also be looking for a decent MySQL client, Sequel Pro is the clear leader.

If you’re managing your photos with iPhoto, it’s only a matter of time before you need to deal with multiple iPhoto libraries.  As the 10 megapixel image format becomes the norm, importing a new batch of photos to your computer now requires some extra planning to be able to handle the huge storage requirements.

The challenge

Loading large libraries can be slow, unless you upgrade your disk to an SSD, and also backing up can be painful if you stick to one monolithic library.  If you do have an SSD machine the disk will be quite a bit smaller than the 500 GB you might have become used to, so space will be precious.

10-15 GB is quickly and easily reached in terms of library size, and as long as you keep it less than 16 GB you can always do a quick backup on a dedicated USB key, at the time of writing one of these goes for around £24.

But how to you create and manage multiple libraries?  If you are stuck with a monolithic monster, how can you move some of your iPhoto events to another library to cut down on size?

The solution

Enter iPhoto Library Manager: it’s a commercial offering and currently the best option I’ve found available, it will set you back $20 but is well worth it in my opinion.

When you start managing multiple libraries probably the easiest way to keep them arranged is by chronological date.  The three I currently have are just iPhoto 2008, iPhoto 2009, etc.  When you rename your existing library (do this when iPhoto is closed) the next time you launch the app it will ask you which of your multiple libs do you want to load, or do you want to create a new one called iPhoto Library.  Accept the default name offered, that way it’s always easy to see which is your current library.  With iPhoto 11 (version 9.x of the app, confusingly) you can launch the relevant lib in iPhoto just by double-clicking it.

In terms of shaving a few GBs off your monolithic library, iPhoto Library Manager makes the task very easy.  Simply do the following:

• locate your large library and your newly created empty, default library in the library list view
• select the large library
• change the default view from photos to events
• select the events you want to migrate to the empty library
• drag them to the empty lib within the library list view
• sit back and wait

I recently relocated around 8 GB and it took around 1/2 an hour.  Once the move is complete open iPhoto with it pointing at your large library, and simply delete the events that you copied into the new lib.  You can rename all your libs appropriately when the event move is complete.

Using this approach you can clean up your digital photo collection and keep future libraries down to a manageable size.

I just uploaded 1000 DSLR photos from a trip to India and it took up 3 GB!  For active photographers I can imagine managing disk space becomes a real concern.

Bonus win

Once your libraries are nicely packaged in smaller 8-16 GB bundles, you can easily offload them onto another machine on your network, like a Time Capsule, freeing up space on your lightning fast SSD.  Then just mount the disk on your local machine, fire up iPhoto by clicking the remote library, and be amazed as it browses the photos almost as fast as if they were local!

Check out Mactracker on the App Store.  This free app will help you find the exact model and spec of your Mac (or iPad, iPhone, Apple TV, etc) which will make it a lot easier to figure out things like:

• how many watts power supply you need
• max RAM capacity
• graphics card capability
• speed of USB port

It turns out my mbp is “late 2008″ or MacBookPro5,1, and contrary to what the Apple site and Crucial say, it has a capacity for 8GB RAM, which I think it needs.

I hope amix will forgive me for copy/pasting his blog post wholesale, just a really nice collection of Jobsian moments.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

I was lucky — I found what I love to do early in life.

You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.

I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year. It’s very character-building.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.

I was worth over $1,000,000 when I was 23, and over $10,000,000 when I was 24, and over $100,000,000 when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.

We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.

For the three very inspiring videos see here.

Teleport is indispensable software, once you use it you don’t know how you could have survived without it.

Of course there is screensharing, but this doesn’t allow you to easily control 2 screens at the same time, whereas Teleport allows you to have 2 macs side-by-side and control each with a single mouse and keyboard.