And by that, I don't mean that it beats the crap out of Microsoft Windows, I really mean that Mac OS X application windows sometimes disappear when you use Spaces. You can't cmd-tab to them anymore or otherwise see them again. They are not just minimized or hidden, they are in no man's land.

I hit this over the last few days, and I am not the only one. See this discussion: Disappearing windows in spaces.

The workaround of disabling Spaces and then re-enabling works for me, but it's quite an annoyance to have to resort to that as you need to move windows to their proper space again for applications which aren't assigned to a particular space.

Following-up on the release of the Amazon Kindle, you may want to read Mark Pilgrim's The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts). Sometimes, you just need to be reminded of certain ideals and go past the lure of the gadgetry. Thank you, George Orwell and Richard Stallman.

Today, Amazon officially announced the Kindle eBook reader and associated services. This has already produced a flurry of blog posts all over the place. The device is not yet available, but it already has 248 customer reviews on Amazon.com (mostly negative so far but again almost nobody actually got their hands on it).

So what did Amazon get right?

• The Kindle features an "electronic paper" display from E-Ink, the same company that makes the Sony reader screen. This means crisp black text on almost-white-but-kind-of-gray background, 180 degree viewing angle, and ability to read in broad daylight. You can take this on the beach or on your mountain hike, but you will need a reading light in the dark.
  
• It doesn't require a PC to synchronize. Instead it uses a Sprint EVDO connection and you buy your books directly from the device. There are no fees for the connection, everything is included when you buy the Kindle.
  
• About 80,000 books and magazines are available for download from Amazon.
  
• Free wireless access to Wikipedia.
  
• Built-in search and dictionary functionality.
  

On the negative side:

• As everybody has pointed out, it is a dead-ugly, uncool, device. Compare it with the beautiful second-generation Sony reader. Amazon should really learn from Sony and Apple.
  
• If you loose or break the Kindle, USD 400 go down the drain. This today buys you two OLPC XO-1 laptops. I thought that the Sony reader, at USD 300, was already too expensive and beyond what I would pay for such a device.
  
• Your only option to get content seems to be through EVDO and Amazon. There is no Wi-Fi or bluetooth transfer. Besides obvious coverage limitations in the US itself, this also means there is no coverage at all outside the US, which alone makes this a poor choice for a device you may want to carry all over the place.
  
• Free Wikipedia is better than nothing, but what about the thousands of free books from the Gutenberg project or Creative Commons books?
  
• Apparently, you can email Word documents to the Kindle for 10 cents a pop. There is no mention of PDF support, or other open formats so far. But paying for uploading your own documents to your own device sounds quite ridiculous. Even the Sony reader allows you to load PDF and RTF files (although it seems that the result is less than satisfactory for PDF files).
  

I think that some form of electronic book reader is bound to succeed, and that soon enough paper books and magazines will be largely a thing of the past.

However, I doubt that as is, the Amazon solution will be successful. To succeed, you need a cheap, cool device, and a good degree of openness so that a healthy ecosystem develops.

So far, the electronic book business has followed the same path as the music industry: strong DRM and no sign of openness. We all know the result: after years of painful struggle, DRM for music is being phased out. It seems that instead of learning from this experience, book publishers want to go through the same process instead of embracing the future right away.

Anyway, you may want to read what's Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's take on the whole thing.

Windows Explorer has long had an option to show the path of the current folder in the title bar of the window. This is a very convenient feature which was lacking in the Finder so far.

Leopard now has something similar. It's called the "Path Bar". I stumbled upon it by chance when doing a search with Spotlight: the result window had this funny path at the bottom. It turns out that you can enable it for other windows by going to the "View" menu and selecting "Show Path Bar".

The Path Bar may even be better than just showing the raw path in the window title: you see icons and can double click on path elements. So yay for a useful improvement in Leopard!

Here are a few of my issues with it:

• It crashed at least once.
• It feels quite slow, certainly slower than the Windows Remote Desktop, for example. Maybe because it's based on VNC and sending around pixmaps all the time?
• The clipboard is not automatically shared. You have to send it around explicitly. This means that you can't just copy and paste a URL around without going to a menu inbetween (or click on an icon).
• I restarted my wireless router with a screen sharing session open. The session just hung and was not able to pick up the connection again. I had to restart the screen sharing session.
• The "New..." connection menu entry just opens a dialog with a single text field. There is no way to browse from a visible computer on the network. Annoying if you just had to close the connection (see aforementioned problem) and just want to reopen it. You then have to go back to the finder.
• If you show the toolbar (with three miserable icons), you have a "Fit screen in window" option, which it turns out is the same a the "Turn Scaling On/Off" menu entry. Mmmh, did anybody at Apple even looked at this app?

I wouldn't say Screen Sharing is useless, but this is a version 1.0 and it shows.

Since Apple still doesn't think that supporting a free, fast, unemcumbered, lossless audio codec is a good idea, I had been using Play on Tiger. Unfortunately, it is broken on Leopard. Version 0.2 doesn't start anymore at all. The good news is that the author is working on it. In fact, the latest builds (using r1057 at the moment) at least start and seem to, well, play, but I don't seem to be able to import anything into the Play library, for example.

As good as Play will eventually be on Leopard (and it is likely to remain a much more lightweight alternative to iTunes), Apple really needs to support FLAC. Who needs the Apple Lossless format anyway? So go Apple, put an engineer on it for a few days and support FLAC already.

Last night, I figured (completely irrationally) that I would take the jump and upgrade to Leopard. Here is my first feedback after one day of work with it:

• I got the infamous "blue screen" upon restart during install. I followed option C and luckily thing went smoothly after that. I don't know yet which app installed ApplicationEnhancer.bundle.
• As I already knew, Java windows don't play nice with Spaces. All the Java apps remain stubbornly in the first space and won't move. Also, if you are in a space other than the first one and cmd-tab to a Java app, nothing happens: you have to explicitly go back to the space containing the Java app. It's not a showstopper, but it should be fixed.
• IntelliJ has some random problems with the tabs in the files section: they sometimes, behave erratically. This is annoying and I hope that IntelliJ >= 7.0.2 will fix this. It seem that changing look and feel may work around the issue, but IntelliJ then looks utterly ugly.
  
• Parallels seems to run fine, except that Windows drives don't show up in the Finder.
• I had no immediate obvious issues with Firefox, Thunderbird, or Tomcat.

So I can't really say "so far so good", but it seems like things should be workable.

I just found this old post by Norm about a pretty cool idea:

"Some of my friends engage in a friendly contest: they compete to see who can visit the most countries. It’s a life-long game. One of the sub-goals is to always have visited more countries than you are years old."

If I am not missing any (not quite in exactly the right order, I fear):

1. Switzerland
2. France
3. Italy and Vatican
   
4. Germany
5. Spain
6. Belgium
   
7. Poland
   
8. Austria
9. Czech Republic / ex-Czechoslovakia
   
10. Hungary
11. Turkey
    
12. Egypt
13. Cyprus
    
14. USA
15. Canada
    
16. Kenya
17. Tanzania
    
18. Peru
19. Morocco
20. UK (England and Scotland)
    
21. The Netherlands
    
22. China and Tibet
    
23. Taiwan
    

Here are a few candidates for the next ones:

• Mexico
• Japan
• Greece
  
• India
• Nepal
• South Africa
• Congo
• Brazil
  

There are currently 193 countries (well, "states"), 194 if you count Taiwan (and really it should be counted). This means I have 171 countries to go to be done (countries popping up or disappearing notwistanding), and starting exactly today, I have 12 to go to catch up ;-)

I am hereby (13949712720901ForOSX) casting my vote for Java 6 on Leopard. But even more importantly, I am asking Apple to realize that good communication is of the essence.

As much as I dislike Windows, I wouldn't have bought a USD 3000+ Mac Book Pro without Java on it, and many people I know wouldn't have either. I wouldn't be considering using Macs at home, or thinking about getting some of my family members to use Macs, if I wasn't using one daily in the first place. So you see, there is a little bit of a snowball effect here.

It is very important for us developers who use Java to know that Apple fully supports it, and plans to fully support it in the future. Delays in the release of new JDKs on the Mac are already annoying enough. Not even knowing whether we'll get those new releases is unacceptable.