Bill Gates – Blatant Liar

Here’s page two of some excerpts of an interview that Steven Levy of NEWSWEEK did with Bill Gates of Microsoft. Clearly Bill is a bit annoyed by the I’m a Mac commercials. I find it particularly interesting that Bill responds to criticism about upgrading a PC being equivalent to surgery with:

And I don’t know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don’t even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you’re really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There’s not even the slightest shred of truth to it.

And then goes on to blatantly lie about vulnerabilities in Mac OS X in response to a question about why the features of Vista seem suspiciously similar to those in Mac OS X Tiger, which has been out nearly two years now:

Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.

Perhaps he was referring to the Month of Apple Bugs which as far as I can tell was much more of a publicity stunt than a serious list of vulnerabilities against the OS. It appears from a quick perusal of their site that many of the bugs aren’t even in the OS, but in applications, some of them not even Apple’s. As far as I’ve heard there hasn’t even been one exploit where your machine can be taken over, totally or otherwise. But there certainly are not such exploits released daily. I expect the MoAB people took quite a long time to compile their list in order to know they would have a month’s worth of bugs.

Unfortunately, and I’m sure Bill knows this, all it takes to start a myth is a well publicized lie. I don’t know if Steven Levy pressed him on this because MSNBC only saw fit to publish excerpts of the interview. What a shock.

UPDATE: Michael has a similar view of this interview in his blog entry Is Bill Gates on Crack?

Macworld ‘07 Keynote Reactions

I must say I’m a bit shocked. Not shocked by Apple TV or even the iPhone really. Shocked that Steve only unveiled Apple TV and the iPhone, the latter not even being available for another 6 months. Don’t get me wrong, I think they are both cool and will talk about them a bit but I am surprised we didn’t see new versions of iLife and iWork. Granted nothing about a year-based naming scheme requires that new versions be released every year, just look at Microsoft, but I really thought Apple would continue with Macworld timeframe updates. Anyway, lets look at what they did announce.

PagePacker from Big Nerd Ranch

Big Nerd Ranch are known for their excellent classes about many Mac OS X technologies include Cocoa Bootcamp. One of their instructors is Aaron Hillegass, a name you should know if you do any Cocoa work on the platform as he’s written two great books on the subject. He whipped up a small application called PagePacker that lets you print 8 of the DIY Planner templates (or any single page PDF you want) onto a single sheet of 8 1/2 x 11 paper and fold them into a tiny book. I think the UI for selecting the template could use some work, but it is still a nice freebie. Check it out!

Unfortunately my output has most of the spaces in any text in the templates converted to exclamation points. This probably isn’t going to happen for everyone, but I don’t have solution for myself yet. If you know of a solution please leave a comment.

Leopard Tech Talk – Boston

Just received my registration confirmation for the Boston area Leopard Tech Talk! I’m very happy to be able to go. I look forward to meeting other east coast developers as well as learning about cool things like Xray. Hope to see you there!

Save MacXword!

MacXword was my first real Cocoa application for Mac OS X. It has been available since 2002, back when the platform was still fairly young. It was one of those applications that allowed people to free themselves from Classic. At the time creating a Cocoa-Java application was the most sensible approach for me as I came to the platform with a strong Java background. Unfortunately, as the years have passed this has become more of a liability. Apple no longer expands the Cocoa-Java API, and with the move to Intel-based Macs it is just plain broken in some ways. One of those ways affects MacXword. I reported the bug to Apple when I first learned of it and even included a simple example application that illustrates the problem. Alas, it has never been fixed.