Fischerspooner is a group I just shouldn't like, but do. They play 80s style new wave/techno pop complete with all the blips and bleeps that were so common in that music. I don't know what it is about them that makes it work, but it does. i guess there's just enough fusion of elements from other styles of music that it keeps the music from sounding like a bad 80s rehash. I shouldn't like them, but for some reason I love it.

Now explaining Yerba Beuna is tough, they're kind of a fusion between Santana, Beuna Vista Social Club, Nelly, Tito Peunte and maybe some Portishead. So I guess that makes them Latin Hip Hop Jazz Rock Trip Hop or something. I don't really know, but their sound has a really great vibe. The only thing that can be stated clearly is that they are latin music so if you don't like latin music you won't like this, also if you can't stand Hip Hop/Rap you probably won't like some of the songs either. Me? I think it's great.

Digital MediaMusic2003-08-14T10:03:58-07:000 Google has a calculator. You just type an expression in the search field and it gives you the results. First thought ... how useless. Second thought, does it work from the search box in Safari, yes of course. Third thought, how very useful, it's actually faster then firing up calculator and clicking on the buttons (don't know why I always click instead of type the numbers, stupid me). Google: web services that actually work. Mac OS XWeb Services2003-08-14T11:01:37-07:0000 There's one thing that absolutely drives me crazy about Mac OS X and that's the proliferation of windows. I've been using Hydra (aka #####) as my editor of choice for the last few months and the number of windows I end up with is astonishing. I've been aggressive at closing stuff and right now I still have 18 windows open in Hydra alone. Back when my machine was having to reboot every day or so it wasn't a huge problem, but now that it's finally stable I can't take it anymore. I have never understood why people think having so many windows is a good thing, but all the major Mac OS X text editors are like this. The only exception is Project Builder, which unfortunately isn't all that great as a general purpose editor.

Today I finally broke down and downloaded jEdit again. This was my editor of choice back when I used Linux all the time. When I moved to Mac OS X I stopped using it because at that point in time Java was just too slow on Mac OS X. I've looked at jEdit off and on since then and have always been annoyed by it because it's just ugly and I really wanted to use a Cocoa application as an editor since I use TextExtras. Anyway, the thing I liked about jEdit is that everything is in one window and you can have your choice of ways to manage open documents. I prefer the tabbed approach and that was what I always used on Linux. It is so much more productive then trying to find a particular window in a whole mess of windows or even finding it in the list on the window menu.

What perplexes me is that people screamed like crazy for tabs in Safari and I see constant criticism (including my own) of Omniweb because it doesn't have tabs, yet every other Mac application has a gazillion windows. This doesn't make much sense to me. If tabs are good in Safari they should be good in a text editor or any other application too. Maybe I just don't understand this particular Macism.

At least to me it seems there's a real need for a solid Cocoa editor for Mac OS X that supports good syntax highlighting, has a good plugin architecture and doesn't open a new window for every file. Project Builder could actually be good if it had a better way to access files in the file system without adding them to a project. The way it works now is good for things like Cocoa applications where you have a bunch of files that make up the project, it just doesn't work very well for writing Python scripts and such. If it could just add a file system browser along with the project browser it would probably be workable.

One thing I am curious about, is if my opinion will change once Panther is out and I can use Expose. I've been seeing comments that people are starting to use tabs in Safari less often because of this. I hope that's the case, because the current window proliferation is really unproductive and in my opinion a fairly significant flaw with the Mac experience. I wonder if I'll even be able to read the windows in Expose, I must have 60 windows open right now. Mac OS X2003-08-14T14:14:58-07:000 Linked from this blog entry is a paper that gives some insight into Microsoft's XML programming language that has been called X# by some people. It looks like they're doing more then just integrating XML into the language, they're also integrating relational database access. The paper's a very interesting read.

XMLXML Databases2003-08-14T14:41:57-07:00