I was hired at Apple on May 13, 1996. I was twenty years old, and had been using a Mac for approximately two years, during which time I had been contracting for Apple on and off as a QA engineer, while I finished my B.A. at UC Santa Cruz. Gil Amelio was the CEO.

I had grown up using mostly non-Apple products. My dad bought me a Timex Sinclair when I was six. I moved on to a Commodore 64, an Amiga 1000, and finally a Unix-based Sun 3/50 before I caught Mac fever in 1994. Two years later, I was working full-time at Apple as a software engineer at Apple.

When I signed on, Jobs was long gone, but his legacy was strong. Ten years after his departure from the company, bumpers in the parking lot remained plastered with the aspirational “The Journey is the Reward” proverbs that he had famously reiterated. Jobs made his mark, and the pursuit of excellence was alive and well inside Apple.

In late 1996, Apple announced that it would acquire Steve Jobs’s NeXT computing. Steve Jobs, in one role or another, was returning to Apple. I was overwhelmed, but excited. Although I had never worked for Steve Jobs, I felt that I had been working on his vision.

When I left Apple in 2002, it seemed that Jobs had won. He proved himself to critics by rescuing Apple from the throes of bankruptcy and restoring it to a company of huge successes. The iMac, iPod, and Mac OS X were all new testaments to his enduring legacy at Apple.

But he was just getting started. Still to come were not only the obvious iPhone and iPad, but dozens of less obvious successes ranging from the ever-improving Mac OS X, to the incredible Airport Express, to the fact that every damn thing Apple makes just works so damned well together.

Pixar Animation Studios is another of Jobs’s great successes. My three-year old, Henry, has lately been obsessed with everything Pixar. This includes “Cars,” which I have seen more times than I care to admit. It’s actually a pretty great film, and I’m fond of the romantic interlude where the protagonist Lightning McQueen is led on a carefree drive through the desert by his love interest, Sally. Their ride is set to an upbeat Randy Newman tune, which helps to pack an emotional punch in the scene.

Today I was driving in my own car, and heard an old Bob Dylan song that I realized the Randy Newman score reminds me of.  Steve Jobs is known to be a huge Bob Dylan fan, so it’s especially poignant that on the day of his retirement as CEO of Apple, I may have found myself listening to one of his favorite songs. Buckets of Rain also includes a concise proverb of its own, which serves as an appropriate comment on Jobs’s career:

“Life is sad, and life is a bust, all you can do is do what you must. You do what you must do, and you do it well.” — Bob Dylan, “Buckets of Rain”

Well said, Bob. Well done, Steve. For the rest of us: let us do what we must do, and do it well.

Those of us who do a lot of typing on Macs are familiar with a variety of keyboard shortcuts for navigating lines, words, and characters in text editors that use standard “Cocoa key bindings.”

Among those common keyboard shortcuts are cmd-arrow to move to the beginning or end of a line, and option-arrow to move between words in a sentence.

Starting in Lion, Apple fine-tuned the behavior by changing the definition of what constitutes a word delimiter for option-arrow navigation. While it used to stop on e.g. period-separated words, now it considers such chains.of.words to be a single “word.”  My friend Mike Ash noticed this and, when he complained about it to me, I set about finding a solution.

It turns out there’s a supported preference setting to alter this behavior. Look in your System Preferences under the Langage & Text pane, and you’ll find a “Word Breaks” setting with various options, including a special one just for nerds:

For most people, the “Standard” setting is probably the right choice. But computer programmers are far more likely to encounter words that are separated by syntactic characters such as periods, colons, etc. For us, it makes more sense to have the system pause at these word breaks than to breeze right by them.

Updates:

1. You should take note that after changing the setting, you won’t notice changes in applications until they have been quit and relaunched again.
2. As noted in the comments, this feature was apparently available in 10.6 as well, and was possible more along the lines of the default in 10.5 and previous. The growing consensus seems to be that it was in the update from 10.6 to 10.7 that a previous selection of this setting was not preserved.

I’m on the verge of a major move from New York back to the Boston area, but I wanted to get a quick release out to address some long-standing glitches in MarsEdit. These are the kinds of little issues that aren’t likely to cause major disruption for most users, but which are nonetheless infuriating if you happen to be affected by them.

• Fix issues that caused side-panels to shrink gradually when collapsed/expanded
• Fix a problem that prevented the width of the blogs list area from being restored across launches
• When main window’s preview is collapsed, it’s now kept collapsed when window size is increased
• Fix a crash that could occur when removing the last item from the Uploaded media list
• Fix a crash that could occur when “unsplitting” a post or searching/replacing in rich editing mode
• Fix a crash that could occur when authorizing Flickr

This update is available immediately from the MarsEdit home page. It will be available for update via the Mac App Store as soon as Apple approves the release.

After I get settled in to our new home in Boston, I hope to make a lot of progress on MarsEdit 3.4 and to continue chipping away at the long-longed-for MarsEdit Touch.

MarsEdit 3.3.3 is now available as a free update for registered MarsEdit 3 customers. Because of the relatively urgent nature of this update for Tumblr users, the direct-download version is being released before the Mac App Store has been approved by Apple. Mac App Store customers may download and run the direct-download version without restriction.

This update includes a change to improve the reliability of MarsEdit when posting to Tumblr. Previously, MarsEdit used an “API URL” for Tumblr that worked reliably, but which has recently been changed by Tumblr to fail with an error.

This release also includes a few other important fixes, so I recommend updating even if you are not a Tumblr user. Complete change list:

• Improve Tumblr posting reliability by switching to an API URL that is less likely to report “over capacity”
• Improve memory efficiency for post editor documents
• Improve reliability of setting and removing links on images in rich text mode
• The main window’s post list area now stays the same size while resizing window