The Victorians were obsessed with death as todays botox induced Frankenstein monsters are with youth. Whereas today we seem to build monuments to childhood, and have a youth obsessed mass media and beauty industry, the Victorians seem to have been enamored with death. …[more]
The US Bill of Rights gives Americans the right to the freedom of speech. This means, besides a lot of other things, that typefaces aren't controlled by copyright in the US. Ok, maybe that needs a bit of explaining:
Because physical type was the only way to reproduce text, he who controls the type controlled the information, so someones ability to restict distribution of typefaces could also limit free-speech …[more]
Zork is a fine example of the genre of game known as Interactive Fiction (they used to be known as 'Adventure Games'). As a genre they are, perhaps the polar opposite of the modern "first person shooter", more Radio Four than MTV. …[more]
Finally (?) we get to Text Edit.
Textedit is MacOs version of WordPad, it does RTF (Rich Text Formatting, nasty Microsoft document standard (dry, technical RTF specification ). Seeing as MacOs just loves PDF, I've no idea why Text Edit doesn't use that. Actually I do, it's called "playing nicely with others", or accepting the fact that Windows dominates the market.
Text Edit seems to completely ignore the 'style - format - structure' metaphor of most modern word processors. Instead styling is so fluid that you can just make text 'a bit bigger' or 'a bit smaller' seems to imply that structureless documents are the intended aim, which is very difficult to work with.
Turning it into text mode rather than rich-text mode, well, it's just like Windows Notepad. No code or syntax highlighting, no regular expressions. Incredibly underpowered really. Heck it is to web development what a rusty spoon and a sink plunger is to heart surgery… needs must as the devil drives, as they say.
Before I mix any more metaphors or plagurise (or 'remix' as the copyleft kids call it these days) any more William Burroughs, I'd better stop. Thanks for trying, Apple, but I'm guessing GarageBand and iTunes are more 'where its at' for Apple Inc's software strategy. The focus on software for consumers and hobby-ists makes sense because creators and producers already have a veritable army of third-party software developers begging for attention, just a shame none of them seem to be able to do a decent text editor.
Next up in the great Apple iBook text editor quest: Taco HTML Edit.
Firstly, Taco supports PHP, which is very freindly for me, its code-highlights pickup PHP syntax (even when blended with HTML, for those of us who haven't quite separated our logic from our structure!). It will even run your code though PHP before previewing it in the browser if you've got PHP set up, which I havent, but anyway…
Taco presents your text in Monoco (a monospaced font - i.e. all the characters are the same width, "i" takes up as much as an "m" e.g. Courier or another 'Typewriter' font on the PC). Yet somehow Taco manages to create tabs-spaces of 4.5 ems, which means nothing actually lines up. Then to compound legibility issues it text-wraps half-way though a word.
These typographic details make actually reading, editing and constructing documents almost impossible. I'm not saying monospaced type is more legibale than variable width, far from it in fact, but text editing or 'coding' does require the editor to look at text in a slighltly different way than if you were laying out a novel or magazine, clarity of hierarchy, and the begfinning and ending of sections is often shown by how far something is indented, and if the start and end of the indent don't match, it can be really hard to spot whats what and who is where.
Taco also falls into the trap of such famous WYSIWYG editors as Dreamweaver, and .Front Page, it will insert code for you. Anyone who types a lot can type "open-bracket b close-bracket" faster than they can scroll down a list of tags. Secondly we shouldn't even be using the b for bold tag any more. "Bold" is part of the old-school of using HTML to describe what parts of a document should look like rather than what part of a document means, Emphasis, or Strong, rather than Italic, or Bold, and stylesheets control what it looks or sounds like.
Embedding any single approach to document creation in something as fundamental and basic as a text-editor is a warning that it's inflexible, cumbersome, and encourages bad practice.
Well, Taco HTML Editor no thank-you.