ThinkMac‘s Rory Prior has written a couple of posts on his blog about his disappointment with the Apple Mighty Mouse. Its touch sensitivity means you have to lift your index finger off the mouse in order to right-click, amongst other annoyances. Latest post here.

That’s a shame because I quite liked the idea of a mouse that didn’t look like you needed 12 fingers to operate it and had some extra OS X features of its own. Of course you can do all this stuff with other mice (mouses?), but you’d expect to see a Mighty Mouse bundled with new Macs in the not-too-distant and this isn’t going to be good enough.

Anyway, Rory has saved me £40 for the time being, so cheers! 😉

You can find the full transcript of Steve Jobs’ speech to the Stanford University graduates here.

Normally Jobs’s private life is justifiably and understandably just that, so make the most of it. While it could almost be considered a strange speech to give to these graduates, I thought it was very interesting and great advice, having followed a similar path to Jobs myself. I dropped out of education early for the same reasons and have experienced life joining the dots in ways I could never have planned nor would ever expect. Of course I’m only 30, so there’s a long way to go yet! 😉

There is an article on Wired entitled Tiger Tweaks Could Kill Folders, the main gist being that with Spotlight the 20 year old practice of organizing files into hierarchical folders (which incidentally is another one of those metaphors that doesn’t extend to the real world) could be on the way out. It’s an interesting read and while I don’t for one minute think we’ll see the end of the Finder or nested folders I do wholeheartedly agree that people want to see their files in different ways and find them quickly. In that sense, Spotlight goes a long way to alleviating the pain of organising all your stuff. Steve Jobs mentioned also this point in his WWDC 2005 Keynote.

This was the whole idea I had behind KIT and yet the most popular feature request was that it include hierarchical folders – I had so many I decided to write something much too long, complicated and now somewhat outdated about why it was a bad idea, back in my pre-blogging days.

KIT was modelled as an iTunes for your files; something different where you could find things almost instantly and organize them in ways liberated from the file system. Like Gmail, its motto is to search not sort. Thankfully quite a lot of people got KIT but since many of its selling points were made much less persuasive by Spotlight and Smart Folders in Tiger, I will be addressing this wholeheartedly in the next few months.

Simon Waldman, Director of Digital Publishing for Guardian Newspapers, gave a speech to the World Editor’s Forum in Seoul last week and has posted a transcript on his blog. It makes for an interesting and thoughtful read on the impact of RSS from a publisher’s perspective:

RSS and News Aggregators: Opportunity or Threat?

To add my completely unscientific tuppence-worth, I believe that if you have a feed on your site, no matter what you do it will attract more traffic. Maybe this is more noticable for a small site like my own, but you should certainly not lose any traffic as a result of syndication overall. Feeds don’t just sit there waiting for subscribers to come along but, along with the articles therein, are propagated around the web thanks to the likes of Del.icio.us, Technorati and Syndic8. More links to your site increases your Google page rank and the additional exposure, while perhaps not a big deal for a large and popular site like Guardian Unlimited, can only be a good thing. If people really like what they read they will come back for more. Say what you like about the Guardian, but it stands out from the crowd.

Simon doesn’t dispute any of the above but in the highly competitive and increasingly globalised arena of news delivery, no such organisation can afford to ignore RSS or the implications of syndicated content overall. As he says, it’s great for readers but wasn’t designed to make publishers’ lives any easier.

A final thought from me is that with Safari’s RSS support, we now have one-click subscription that is easy and works; increasing adoption of RSS in other browsers (e.g. Firefox and OmniWeb) and with the rapid evolution of high-quality newsreader applications such as NetNewsWire Mac users seem way ahead in embracing this new technology.

Thanks to Gillian Thompson at Macworld UK for sending the link along.

Sadly, I couldn’t attend WWDC this year – I was about $3500 short (i.e. all of it) and not being overly keen on spending $999 on leasing the transition kit I’m going to need an Intel Mac in the next 18 months or so, which means I can’t really expect to be going next year either. Always good to know where you stand!

So what of the switch to Intel? Naturally, I gasped in horror when the rumours proved to be true, but after some deep breaths and even longer spent in a darkened room I’m warming to the idea. I haven’t seen Mr Jobs do his thing yet, so it can’t be RDF, unless it’s seeping subliminally through my RSS feeds. Overall, and performance issues aside (consider the lack of optimisation, PPC emulation and no AltiVec support), things should be no different. Mac OS X will still be Mac OS X and it won’t (officially / legally, at least) run on anything that hasn’t got an Apple logo stuck on it. RISC chips such as PowerPC may perform much more efficiently at lower clock speeds than CISC chips, but try telling that to the marketing department. Additionally, I would imagine almost everyone has had enough of seeing PowerPC roadmaps redrawn on an annual basis because of manufacturing problems, corporate meltdowns, Mercury retrogrades, etc.

Like many other developers my applications won’t need anything particularly special done to them apart from recompilation, packaging and testing on the aforementioned Intel Mac. I can see a few issues, but nothing devastating. The developers most affected will be those who do low-level funky stuff that will be affected by a change in architecture (big-endian vs. little-endian, for example). The cross from 680×0 chips to PowerPC was almost a seamless experience and this should be similar but different. Similar in the sense that you would have emulation of the “old” chip on Intel and different in that the hardware transition will take much longer and could start from the bottom up rather than the top down thanks to deficiencies in Intel’s 64-bit SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessing) support and a lack of G5 laptops. I also think it will be much less painful than the transition to Mac OS X, which felt like being a full-time beta tester for the first year or two.

So is this simply Apple abandoning over 10 years of PowerPC (incidentally it was my interest in the introduction of PowerPC that made me buy my first issue of MacUser UK, back in ’94) or could there be advantages beyond the ones that only interest accountants? Well yes, if you consider that the Mach kernel (upon which OS X runs) is designed to run multiple operating systems simultaneously (think Classic) and that Windows would require no hardware emulation to run on a MacTel. I think you will agree that would make switching to Mac a whole lot easier and considering the endless troubles PC users seem to be having with the security and stability of Windows, Apple should have a captive audience there. What’s more, things that are low-level and funky might not be quite so difficult to port from other Intel-based platforms to OS X.

Overall it’s a big announcement, which by its very nature can send your MacEmotions into a spin, but in reality it won’t make much difference. The transition will be “fun”, could cost some people quite some money, but it will be nothing compared to the transition to OS X.