30 January 2006 |
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Intel iMacs can reportedly have CPU upgrades very easily. (If you believe a French news site’s translation of a Japanese source.)
I never quite paid attention either to the fact that SafariStand (the only Safari extension I use, because I occasionally need a Mozilla-like sidebar) can change Safari’s window themes, because it used to make them rather ugly. Turns out the latest betas do Unified (and variants), and that makes Safari look pretty cool. (Funny though how SafariStand’s own sidebar fails to use unified toolbars.) For those interesting in “pimping” Safari, SafariStand offers a host of other functionalities that I don’t quite need, such as history/bookmark search, a tab bar with thumbnails (which I don’t use because it doesn’t disappear automatically when you only have one tab open, and doesn’t have an associated shortcut — I’ll try defining one in the system preferences to see if I get around to using it), search engine keywords, site alteration, and a bunch of additional configuration options.
iTunes 6.0.2 can apparently now display half-star ratings. I didn’t find any way to set them in the iTunes interface, so I suppose it’s only for control-freaks using Applescript. Which is… I don’t know, it makes kinda sense, but at the same time it’s pretty absurd. I’m no using Butler (again) to rate my songs, so I’ll wait until it’s updated to support that.
I want to make my own Yojimbo clone (only simpler, yet better, and free of course, because I don’t care for the hassle it must be to make people pay for your software). I need a crash course in OS X development, Objective C and CoreData, for C++ or .NET veterans. |
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29 January 2006 |
More Quicksilver goodness: screen cornersI experimented with adding Technorati tag feeds to my aggregator, and look what I found: Quicksilver Tips & Tricks introduces another Turns out the developer, in his quest for domination of the Mac mouse (because keyboards are secured now), has also added a “Mouse Triggers” plug-in that allows you to trigger any kind of Quicksilver action or menu to a number of mouse operations (not gestures — I think there’s got to be a gestures plug-in somewhere, but I don’t care for those, as surprising as it may be for a Wacom tablet user). The Constellation plug-in (which installs radial menus into Quicksilver, as I showed and explained thoroughly a few weeks back) comes with a mouse trigger included: ![]() Drag a file (or several) to the bottom-right corner of the screen and you get a Constellation menu listing possible e-mail recipients. Select one, your files are ready to be sent. But I hardly find that convenient, though — as much as I love radial menus, I never really got to use them in Quicksilver because the whole point of a radial menu is muscle memory, i.e. options should always be at the same place, and unless you’re always sending files to the same people there’s no way you can involve muscle memory in the process of dropping files onto a contact — especially if you have more contacts than you configured Constellation to display at once, in which case you have to use the keyboard, or click the tiny arrow, to switch “pages”. I think mouse triggers become really interesting when you don’t enable the Constellation plug-in. (At least not until it’s improved enough to be really usable. Particularly, taking keyboard input like the regular Quicksilver interface.) Here comes the same functionality, only associated with the default interface rather than Constellation: Drop a file onto your screen corner, and you get the regular, efficient Quicksilver interface to select your recipient. Or recipients — select one, press the comma key, select another, and so on. Just works great. Note: to disable Constellation for those triggers, you seem to need to disable Constellation for all triggers (surely it will be available as a per-trigger option soon) by changing the “Missing Object Selector” handler (the “Show Radial Menu” actions will still be available, and you’ll be able to use them in other triggers if you need them): The coolest part is, since you’re using the regular Quicksilver interface, you can associate complex, interactive actions to drag-and-drop. Now when I drop a file onto my bottom-left screen corner, I get a prompt to select where I want to copy them. I can type the destination or navigate to it, and there it goes. (This is why the Constellation plug-in needs to accept keyboard input, even though it’s primarily mouse-oriented. If you define a “Copy to…” trigger but leave it to be handled by the Constellation menus, they will show up completely empty and useless.) Because the options to define mouse triggers are pretty extensive, I was able to define a second trigger, for the same screen corner, that moves the file instead of copying them when Shift is pressed. (I’m not sure it should be Shift, though, but I couldn’t remember which modifier moves files instead of copying them, when dragging from a volume to another. I guess it’ll make more sense to change that to Command-drop for copying and regular drop for moving.) The problem is, defining those triggers is a bit complicated right now (you can see on the screenshot above that I mistakenly defined a “Move to ~/Public” action instead of “Move to…”, and I haven’t managed to fix it yet1), because the interface doesn’t really allow them (it’s only show a very limited set of available actions for the “Mouse Trigger Dragged Object”, with nothing much useful beside “Email to…”), so you’ll have to hack the right actions in. (Oh, and it’s not documented, of course. Did I say none of this is documented? I had to dig through the Blacktree forums, in the thread dedicated to Constellation, to find out all about this.) Since you can’t get the “Copy to…” action (or whichever you want to apply to the dragged objects) to appear, you’ll have to copy and paste it. That is, when creating your trigger, instead of “Mouse Trigger Dragged Object” right away, choose a file or folder (e.g., “Home”); press Tab to switch to the action field, and select “Copy to…” (or anything you want); press Command-C to copy; shift-tab to get back to object selection and select “Mouse Trigger Dragged Object” this time; tab back to action and hit Command-V to paste your action. Now it should be all right. Quick, save your trigger before you press the wrong key and lose it. (Of course, you can also define lots of other mouse triggers — not necessarily associated to screen corners or borders, since clicks of whichever buttons, with or without modifier keys, can also be associated to actions — which, having nothing to do with drag-and-drop, will be as easy to define as regular hotkey triggers. This was just a particularly convoluted example, but it’s also one of the screen corner uses that make most sense.) Looks like I can disable CornerClick now. (I never really got to use it anyway.)
Note: if you can’t get it to work, try starting from the setup I defined in my guide to Constellation (you’ll need proxy objects in particular for “Mouse Trigger Dragged Object” to be available).
P.S. I forgot to explain: I usually hate screen corner shortcuts (such as those Exposé offers to configure), because in general use I’m always throwing my mouse pointer all over the place (when you’re sitting down at your computer it’s typically faster to send the pointer into a corner than try and find it on screen — and I already did that before I had a 20-inch iMac); that’s the why the Quicksilver mouse triggers I find most interesting are the drag-and-drop ones. There’s no risk of accidentally triggering those.
1 Thanks to the Quicksilver developer’s quick reply in the forums, I could remove the third pane’s contents in the trigger definition dialog by pressing Command-X. |
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27 January 2006 |
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Unrelated to GTD but not to ergonomics: NuFile adds the long-missed “New File” command to the Finder’s contextual menu. It’s not easily customizable (and cluttered with needless templates — I don’t need to create new Office documents, not to mention LaTeX files) but it’s free and simple and it just works. [01/29] The latest version includes a NuFilePreference.app helper that lets you add and remove templates. No more clutter.
And, while we’re at it, John Siracusa on the renewed rumors of the Finder’s resurrection:
As he notes, if Apple is only now looking for a top engineer to work on the new and improved Finder, that doesn’t bode too well for Leopard. |
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In my Yojimbo review I wished for a program where I could drop web pages and type notes while writing blog posts; Webstractor can do just that, saving web archives by drag-and-drop or right-click from Safari or NetNewsWire, and letting you manage and edit them as you like, all the while staying linked to the original site, with direct access to the URL and manual or automatic reloading (which means it’s also great for storing links to blog posts you’ve commented and keeping track of replies). The way original material and edited pages are artificially separated is rather annoying, but it would be the perfect blogging companion (and even more valuable for those who do real, productive research work)… if it didn’t cost $79.99. The price difference versus Yojimbo and other apps isn’t justified at all.
Scrap Book, on the other hand, isn’t nearly as pretty or powerful, but it works fine for managing your random bunch of… scraps — even though it saves web pages as rich text rather than HTML, losing and mangling much of the layout in the process — and it’s only £10 ($17.85). Trouble is, when it comes to GTD and stuff, I really need to have a pleasant interface, to feel at home (or what would be the point of buying a Mac?), and Scrap Book doesn’t fit that at all.
KIT (Keep It Together) looks most similar to Yojimbo (including the “by kind” smart folders, only it’s up to you to create them) but doesn’t handle web pages at all, which is, come to think of it, amazingly retarded.
DevonThink, the veteran and leader (and costing in fact only $40 for the Personal Edition, oops, that’ll teach them not emphasizing more on the product prices) remains clearly the most functional, even though the interface is a bit dated and creating web archives is more complicated than needed (instead of having an option to drop a link and make it an archive, you have to display the page in the integrated browser and select “Capture Page” from its contextual menu). It won’t replace VoodooPad Lite for storing all my more structured data, but it’s just fine for all temporary stuff. |
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SnatchEm is a Dashboard widget that takes a URL and saves (in a clean folder on the Desktop) every file (your choice of images, videos or documents) linked by the page. It might not work for every case, but that’s just the kind of thing I find useful to have on my Dashboard rather than have to hunt everywhere for whichever application it was that could do that.
Okay, seriously, how come iTunes is able to crossfade tracks, but can’t manage to play album tracks in sequence without blanks between them? Even if I activate crossfading but set it to zero seconds, it doesn’t take a hint and won’t preload the next track.
Universal Applications, the Apple-maintained list of all applications available as universal binaries. Maybe all Mac blogs could stop announcing each and every application that switches to universal now…
This will be of limited use to most people, but if you want to remove the Contour ShuttlePro’s useless menubar icon in OS X (that’s a decent controller, most useful with video editing apps, that I just use to control system volume and iTunes playback), you have to kill the ContourShuttleMenu process, then (for more permanent results — you could also certainly create a script to kill it on each login) dive into the Contour Shuttle application’s package, then into the Contents / Resources / ContourShuttleHelper package, create a Contents / Resources / Disabled folder and put ContourShuttleMenu.app file in there (I figure it should also work if you just delete or rename it).
Windows has its Quicksilver, and as ridiculous as it looks from an OS X user’s standpoint, it’s got to be a must-have for any PC user. Try it, install it and press Ctrl-Space. (Not personally tested, I don’t feel like turning my PC on. Ever again. But Quicksilver is so indispensible, even the lamest copy can’t be superfluous.) |
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26 January 2006 |
Yojimbo
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25 January 2006 |
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iTunes Signature Maker [via] takes your iTunes library and makes a signature mix based on the tracks you listen to most often. Here is my iTunes signature — a bit of a cacophony at times, but rather representative. |
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As expected, the race is on to boot Windows on an Intel Mac; but the prize won’t just be (blogosphere) fame, there’ll also be (moderate) fortune. But that’s not such a bargain, because trying too hard can easily kill your brand-new Mac. Nobody’s better qualified to hack this than Apple engineers, and nobody has more incentive to do this than Apple itself. How long until they ‘leak’ the necessary patches?
![]() A map of future Apple Store locations in Europe. It’s going to amuse this one blogger who often complains about the Apple distribution network (or lack thereof) in his country.
iTunes Signature Maker [via] takes your iTunes library and makes a signature mix based on the tracks you listen to most often. Here is my iTunes signature — a bit of a cacophony at times, but rather representative. (It’s quite customizable, but it took a bit of time to analyze my 100 gigs of MP3s, so I won’t play too much with it.)
I’ll try Yojimbo tomorrow, but even if it’s cheaper than DevonThink I don’t see myself paying for a simple scrapbook, when there are hundreds of alternatives. |
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I’m back! I have crappy bandwidth, waiting for my ISP’s official, proprietary DSL modem, but at least I’ve got a connection (I could have been content with dialup, only in the middle of switching providers I didn’t even have that anymore). So, anything important happen when I was away? Like, Steve Jobs selling Apple to Microsoft or something similar?
Oh, right: Gilles de Robien, mobilisation, etc. |
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Hallelujah! Thanks to Brenig I found out that, while setting the SpeedTouch up for my ISP is a nightmare, I could very well use the Sagem F@st 800 my parents lent me, just by installing a driver (which is known for causing kernel panics, but nobody’s perfect). It’s a USB modem instead of a router (which probably slows the whole computer down, besides being less convenient), and I get pathetic bandwidth, but I’ve got a connection and that’s all that matters. ![]() |
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20 January 2006 |
![]() Intel Macs don’t appear to have the ‘Processor Performance’ option. That voids my proposed explanation for the MacBook Pro’s alleged poor battery life. Thank heavens there have been contradicting observations since.
The $1,300 iMac costs $900 to make. Who’s surprised? Who cares? Let Windows users focus on the price difference if it can comfort them.
10 raisons de détester les blogueurs / 10 raisons d’aimer les blogueurs. |
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19 January 2006 |
AlloCiné BlogsAlloCiné (kind of a French IMDb, with more end-user functionality) launches its own blog platform [via] and, lo and behold, it’s based on the same CMS as the infamous (and unfamous) Illico blogs. (A very crappy platform that got launched last year, announcing they were the first French gay blog platform even though we beat them by two or three years.) ![]() Signing up is more complicated than it should, of course, because AlloCiné very much wants to you sign up to the whole site and give out your contact information, but the rest of the interface has improved a bit since Blog-n-co (and the name is better, too — at least they weren’t stupid enough not to use the opportunity to give their brand name more exposition). And there’s a really nice functionality that does take advantage of the connection to AlloCiné : ![]() “ ![]() “ I have no idea how good it looks on the final blog page, though, because I had a tiny problem there: ![]() No matter how hard I click, my post isn’t saved. I’m sent back to the administration home page, but still have zero post in my list. Since the platform is already in use, I suppose it’s just because I’m using Safari. I’m not sure anyway why you’d want to create a blog looking like this (although dull layout and big ads haven’t prevented other platforms from rising): ![]() At least you don’t get interstitial ads like on the rest of AlloCiné — not yet anyway. But all of that doesn’t matter much compared to the big flaw: I can’t find anywhere a list of AlloCiné blogs — just like on Blog-n-co, incidentally: I figure that’s a way of hiding that nobody uses it, but it doesn’t entice people to try it out. Community is the way to go (or so I observed; personally I hate people… but then I’m blogging on my own domain name). ![]()
Disclosure: I know one of the founders of Abricoo, the company that developed this blog platform. And, being myself one of the founders of Gayattitude, I’m in competition with other free blog hosting solutions. |
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Who at Apple had the brilliant idea to…
Is the wireless keyboard different?
The Animaris Rhinoceros Transport weighs two tons and walks pulled by a single person or pushed by the wind. Photos, video. Uh, wuh?
The Song Tapper [via]: find the name (and lyrics) of a song by humming it with your space bar (no, really, it does make sense). The theory seems sound but the site is pretty slow (or my connection is) and my first test failed, so I’ll leave it up to you.
If you’re going to use a mediocre Finder replacement, you might as well take a freeware variant [via]. Even though it’s a bit of a shame to make an OS X app that won’t open a second window, and quite weird to assign a shortcut to the F9 key (which is taken by Exposé), it’ll be quite enough for those cases when the Finder doesn’t do it (such as displaying folders at the top of the list). And you can’t beat the price-to-quality ratio.
And on the same topic, it looks reproducible: after I’ve set my Mac to sleep two or three times, drag-and-drop quits working in the Finder — I just can’t pick up an icon, until I log out and back in. It’s probably an incompatibility with some program I’m using, but I have no idea what.
FeedXs [via] lets you create RSS feeds without a blog. Write (presumably short) posts on the website or via an MSN bot, and the feed is updated. I just don’t understand who’s supposed to have a use for this: geeks have other options and will want more customization (starting with password protection); newbies will have trouble explaining their friends how to read the feeds, and will be put off by the bot’s interface, which could be way more friendly. Too bad: with passwords and a nicer bot, I could see myself keeping my contacts updated on my schedule by posting to a private feed (or a public feed that could even be syndicated on my blog). |
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Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye [via]. I could have told you the same just by intuition, but it’s always interesting to see it confirmed by scientific studies (even though I’m not certain the way they conducted it means so much; it relies heavily on the idea — which is probably proven, but still — that “
Still, nothing you couldn’t have figured out on your own, but having a scientific study and a Nature article to back you up can help you convince a client that, no, there shouldn’t be blinking horrors all over his web page. (Although the whole piece is discredited by the use of the “enlightened web users” phrase — in most cases, that’s not who you design for.) The human being is still such a superficial animal: it’s love or hate at first sight, always. |
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18 January 2006 |
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Apple did the right thing, and updated the iTunes MiniStore to ask for permission before activating and sending your information to the iTMS. Why don’t they always react so fast? They also tried to do the right thing by actually hiring for the Mactel commercial the directors of the ad it’s “inspired” of. In my opinion, that doesn’t make it any less of a plagiarism; it’s just legal (even if they’re not the first to do that, and most video directors dream of the same thing happening to them — but it’s just not fair for those who paid for the original video). |
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17 January 2006 |
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I hadn’t seen the demonstration videos for for the plenoptic camera (which simultaneously takes 175 photos focused differently) and I’m not sure whether they’re new or I had just missed them (or hadn’t seen them because I couldn’t view .vmw videos on the Mac then). Whichever, they’re very impressive (particularly those two with water splashes).
tickr for flickr [via] scrolls Flickr pictures (chosen by tag, or author, or whatever) on the side of your screen. There already were equivalents (particularly for Windows; not sure for OS X) but this one is simple and well done (it’ll only be better once you can set the scrolling speed, because for now it’s a bit too distracting).
All Core Duo laptops seem to have poor battery life. That’s encouraging for the MacBook Pro. If they only offered another model with bigger batteries — now that would be a good way to differentiate MacBook and MacBook Pro. |
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16 January 2006 |
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After some trial-and-error (I’m not that good at math theory) I’ve finally found a PHP script to make a decent tag cloud from Dan Steingart, and used it on the archives page of this blog and the other.
Rather unsurprisingly, iWeb doesn’t seem to allow FTP upload, only publishing to .Mac or the local hard drive; it’s up to the user to upload files onto their server if they want to. It’s amazing Apple could get away with such pettiness.
Mac users ‘too smug’ over security? [via] Probably: as reliable and secure as OS X may be, there’s not much to prevent a trojan from erasing (or stealing) the active user’s data and forwarding itself to their contacts. |
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Path Finder 4
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15 January 2006 |
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Uh… my database’s contents have disappeared. All posts are there, but empty.
P.S. Thanks a lot to the person who found out I had forgotten to put an .htaccess file in the administration directory, and chose to delete the whole contents rather than notify me.
P.S. After examination of my logs, it may well be a poorly programmed robot indexing my website — though the post-saving URLs are not called in POST, nor in GET, but in Javascript! Okay, it wouldn’t have mattered if I hadn’t linked to the administration interface from the posts, and forgotten to upload my .htaccess, but what kind of dumbass robot doesn’t see the difference between Javascript and HTML?
P.S. Thanks a lot to Laurent and Laurent for the RSS backup copies. It’ll take some time to put it all back into the database — |
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14 January 2006 |
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The cultish Optimus keyboard concept (the one with OLED screens for keys) is going to start by having unexpected offspring: a tiny gadget with only three keys/screens (which will assumedly launch the applications associated with each display, and be entirely programmable). If they intend to use this to evaluate the market for a full Optimus keyboard, we’re screwed. Who really needs this thing to take up room on their desktop? The OS X dock does exactly the same on your computer screen!
The Windows Media codecs for Quicktime have been updated, and Quicktime Player doesn’t crash anymore when I close a file (the bug apparently also affected Safari, and is fixed).
The Intel iMac disassembled. Not particularly appetizing. I’m not surprised Apple would cut out bits, like the modem, to make the MacBook Pro a hair thinner, but I’ll never understand why they messed up the iMac’s bowels so badly just to win a couple centimeters on the edges and make it look like a hunchback.
This blog is now officially open (if you’re reading this, I suppose the DNS are up to date), after a few days of offline posting, mostly about Macworld, because I wanted to practice and couldn’t be bothered to rewrite my posts for publication on my other site. I’ll certainly write a fuller introduction post sometime later; in the meantime, I didn’t want to open without acknowledging the influence from The Tao of Mac on this site’s design. (Including a wiki part that isn’t coded yet but will be integrated better than on garoo.net). Done. |
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13 January 2006 |
![]() So there might be a reason for the Macworld keynote being so anticlimactic: they’d have released more stuff if it weren’t for a shortage of Intel chips. But I wonder what could fit the bill as “much, much cooler” than the MacBook Pro — the only thing worth saying that would be a MacTablet, and I can’t seriously imagine Apple releasing one. Or could they?
Like I said, I wouldn’t like to have bought one of those. It’s really not good karma for Apple to treat their customers this way.
The latest OS X update apparently makes Front Row easier to install and more functional on all Macs. I’ll try this later.
Days after Logitech, Microsoft announces a keyboard and mouse designed for the Mac (how amazing is that?!) and the only thing everybody finds it interesting to comment upon is that it doesn’t have an Apple logo on the Command key. Just so you know, I own a Macally keyboard, and I was pretty much not surprised when I noticed it didn’t have an Apple symbol. Because it kind of makes sense for them not to want competitors to slap Apple’s corporate logo on their products, you see? I think I remember being surprised that Logitech’s offering, however, did have the logo. Maybe they paid for it? (Which Microsoft would obviously had declined.) As for the keyboard itself, I’m wary of buying a Microsoft keyboard for the Mac that requires drivers — although I haven’t had issues with my MS trackpad’s software. I love my Macally keyboard (I’ll publish a review someday), but had to uninstall its drivers (and therefore relinquish the volume keys) to stop my Mac from crashing.
Chandler is a cross-platform open-source iCal clone that might certainly be of some interest if it weren’t 180MB, didn’t take ages to load, and showed a particularly well-designed interface. It’s only version 0.6, but I fail to see the promise.
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12 January 2006 |
Macworld, continuedMacBook Pro, I am your father.
Microsoft officially offers [via] the codecs to open Windows Media files in Quicktime. If I’m reading things correctly, even WMV3 files (that the indispensible VLC can’t open, and the OS X version of Windows Media Player doesn’t bother to read either) should work. Well, it makes Quicktime Player crash every time I close a file, but at least it’s there.
Sure enough, people are up in arms about iTunes 6.0.2’s MiniStore and its spyware ways. Not being an iTMS customer, I care more about the real estate and the commercialization of the interface than the data itself (I have no iTMS account number to be associated with my music-playing habits), but since1968.com has some pretty valid points (emphasis mine):
And this point is pretty interesting, too:
That is really sneaky and off-putting. (Note for the non-geek: numerical IP addresses beginning with 196.168 are local addresses, on the local network; making your program connect to a server with a non-numerical address of 192.168.112.2o7.net means you’re expecting some geeks to be keeping an eye on what’s going through their network connections, and you want to fool them into thinking there is no outbound traffic, when there is. That’s no way to act when you’re honest.)
![]() The new Apple commercial for the Mactels is quite strongly inspired from a music video. Again. It’s not like Steve Jobs not to fire a marketing guy who’d plagiarize a video — or at least shout on him loud enough to be sure he doesn’t do it again. He must have knowingly okay’d this. Kudos, Apple. [01/12] Oh, and Intel isn’t too pleased about the ad, either, surprisingly.
The new Macs are now pre-installed with Comic Life, with no mention of it being a demo or trial. That’s cool, but weird. But cool.
Intel Macs might not [via] be able to run Windows XP, only Vista. Or maybe they can, according to some of the comments.
It seems iPhoto reads Flickr photocasts, and iPhoto photocasts can be read by other aggregators. |
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Microsoft officially offers [via] the codecs to open Windows Media files in Quicktime. If I’m reading things correctly, even WMV3 files (that the indispensible VLC can’t open, and the OS X version of Windows Media Player doesn’t bother to read either) should work. Well, it makes Quicktime Player crash every time I close a file, but at least it’s there. |
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11 January 2006 |
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Maybe you’re expecting me to post a longer article now about what was announced at Macworld. Or you’re not expecting anything, because you don’t care, but you’re still a bit surprised I didn’t. As it happens, I spent over an hour writing a long post commenting the most important points (and more), and I published it. On my other blog. The new one, that won’t be accessible until I have money on my account to buy the domain names. |
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Macworld, etc.![]() There it is: the iMac is two or three times faster than the G5 was (or is it? it seems the benchmarks are way too optimized for multiprocessor systems — unlike most common applications — to mean anything at all [via]), for the same price. I’m obviously a bit frustrated, but I can find solace in the knowledge I own the last revision (hence, the most reliable) of the old, entirely user-serviceable, iMac G5 design. Whereas those who fell for last fall’s revision trap have a design as recent, and as likely to be faulty, as the new Intel Mac — only much slower. Suckers. As for the PowerBook, it becomes MacBook Pro (is the PowerMac going to be named Mac Pro? the iBook, MacBook? if so, why does iMac remain iMac?): the name is rather ridiculous, and the change wasn’t that necessary — after all, “Power” remains pretty neutral. Price and specifications aren’t much surprising (once could have hoped the Mactels would be cheaper, but that would only happen if Apple wasn’t using the latest in Intel chips — if they put old Pentium M chips in the next Mac mini, it would really get interesting); what’s weirder is only offering a 15-inch setup. And including Front Row and the remote (with a poorly located IR receiver). On a 15-inch setup. How hard is it to cram the same motherboard into a bigger box?
[01/14] But you should probably take into account the fact that demonstration machines have to be configured for maximum CPU power, not minimum energy consumption. ![]() As for the Mactel commercial… the blogosphere consensus is that it’s too geeky, but cool; I find it way too geeky, not particularly cool, and absolutely useless: either you already know that Apple has switched to Intel, or you have no idea who Intel is and you don’t give a damn. I wonder where they intend to air it — or maybe they only made it for Macworld and blogs, and that would be the most reasonable option.
The way iLife integrates with the internet is pretty nice: creating podcasts in Garageband, generating RSS “photocasts” so grandma can receive the latest family photos directly in iPhoto or her screensaver; creating your website or blog in a few clicks (and with Ajax). As retro as it may be to make a blog with no serverside scripting whatsoever (which means, no search, no comments), it’s quite tempting. And included in iLife, and free with all new Macs. It’s odd, though, that they wouldn’t think of making iWeb work in tandem with a real blog platform on .Mac. ![]() iTunes 6.0.2 forces a big iTunes Music Store contextual ad on me, taking up a third of the window. What the hell is wrong with them? You can very easily remove it, in the “Edit” menu or by clicking the associated button, but my first reflex was rushing to the “Parental Controls” preferences to disable the iTMS. Will I be the only one? ![]() Of course, the privacy paranoids among you will have immediately realized that inserting contextual ads, i.e. recommending records related to what you’re currently listening to, means iTunes keeps reporting what’s playing to apple.com. And it won’t bother to ask whether you’re okay with that. On such a touchy subject as MP3, and when the program’s developer happens to have deals with most majors, it’s a bit awkward — beyond the fact itself of inserting ads into the interface.
![]() The new widgets are pretty disappointing. The calendar is visually less interesting than the previous version, and it still won’t display your appointments (it’s a good thing the iCal Events widgets seems to have become pretty reliable); the new address book is almost ugly; the ski weather totally is; what’s most annoying, though, is that Google widget having as much appeal and use as all the other search widgets you could already download. Seriously, who wants to press F12 to type in a Google request instead of switching directly to Safari? Okay, obviously some people do want to, but should Apple really be encouraging them? At least, the Yahoo! Widgets equivalent displays results inline. It doesn’t make it really much more useful (except that, unlike Dashboard widgets, it’s allowed to live permanently on the desktop), but it does give it some kind of an excuse to exist.
Google Earth is available for Mac, and isn’t uglier (actually, it may even look better) than the PC version. A compulsory download, even if you have no need for it. Just play with it. And as I launch it again to make a capture I find out it lost the bookmarks folder I had created (looks like you’re not supposed to be placing bookmarks outside the “My Places” folder — but it won’t tell you).
This year’s most important contest in the blogosphere has just launched: be the first to post pictures of your Intel iMac running Windows (preferredly with a game, since that’s the main point of having Windows on a Mac) and you can be sure your name will be on everyone’s lips for two weeks and your webserver will never recover. [01/12] Or maybe it won’t be so easy, or possible at all, until Windows Vista [via].
Oh, they did so well updating Safari: it just crashed on me for the first time in months.
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10 January 2006 |
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There you go: the Intel iMac is two or three times faster than the G5, for the same price. My computer hurts. (Though not as much as for those people who fell into the trap and bought an iMac G5 with iSight last fall.) |
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9 January 2006 |
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I don’t think I’ll be trying out the Adobe Lightroom beta, because I really don’t want to get hooked up to the kind of program that redefines workflows when it’s only a beta and will quit being free in June, but the first overview video seems promising enough. The interface isn’t quite as pretty and innovative (what, no stacks?) as Aperture’s, but the possibility to run it on a real-world Mac configuration (and the fact that Adobe is anything but new at decoding RAW files, so Lightroom will probably be as good as it gets at this) should make up for any limitation. I’m very curious to see the next overview video, uncovering the most important part of the software: “developing” photos. It’s sad that Apple themselves weren’t able to make their program usable on regular Macs, and it’s particularly surprising that salvation would come from Adobe, which is more renowned for the growing sluggishness of the Creative Suite or the Acrobat plugin. Now we’re left to wonder why Aperture and Lightroom look so much alike when their release dates are so close. Which of Apple or Adobe left too much information out about their new project? And how will Adobe make Apple pay, now that it’s obvious they do care and we’re way past complementarity and into direct competition? |
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LightroomI don’t think I’ll be trying out the Adobe Lightroom beta, because I really don’t want to get hooked up to the kind of program that redefines workflows when it’s only a beta and will quit being free in June, but the first overview video seems promising enough. The interface isn’t quite as pretty and innovative (what, no stacks?) as Aperture’s, but the possibility to run it on a real-world Mac configuration (and the fact that Adobe is anything but new at decoding RAW files, so Lightroom will probably be as good as it gets at this) should make up for any limitation. I’m very curious to see the next overview video, uncovering the most important part of the software: “developing” photos. It’s sad that Apple itself wasn’t able to make its program usable on regular Macs, and it’s particularly surprising that salvation would come from Adobe, which is more renowned for the growing sluggishness of the Creative Suite or the Acrobat plugin. Now we’re left to wonder why Aperture and Lightroom look so much alike when their release dates are so close. Which of Apple or Adobe left too much information out about their new project? And how will Adobe make Apple pay, now that it’s obvious they do care and we’re way past complementarity and into direct competition?
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4 January 2006 |
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A creative, unexpected application of the electronic ink technologies: a capacity meter for USB keys that’s displayed even without power. But it has to be just a concept, because even for something as simple as this I doubt it’s quite economically viable. |
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1 January 2006 |
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Wow: Quicksilver, the one compulsory utility for any OS X user, gets radial menus [via] (that means putting every menu option around the mouse pointer rather than in a column, and is orders of magnitude more efficient, ergonomics-wise). Of course, since Quicksilver isn’t exactly the most self-evident program in the world when it comes to using its advanced features, you have to work a bit to access them:
No, it’s not just pretty: it’s also useful and convenient. (Except, being beta functionality and all, I’m not sure it’s quite reliable. I had to relaunch Quicksilver a dozen times before it started working correctly, and even then it’s still a bit erratic. Actually, now I have to launch Quicksilver every hour or so because it has silently crashed.)
Incidentally, the “User Interface Access” plugin has other uses: it lets you access, with your keyboard, every menu item in the active appllication. Among many other things, you can create a trigger (the detailed lesson will be for another time) so that every menu item ends up in a big, flat list and you only have to press N, T, Enter to trigger “New Tab”, for instance. (And, yeah, I know it’s a lousy example because there already is a keyboard shortcut for “New Tab”.)
And don’t let this post discourage you from trying out Quicksilver if you’ve got a Mac and aren’t a geek: it also does much simpler things (universal application & bookmark launcher, clipboard history manager, etc.) right out of the box (provided you know it appears when you press Ctrl-Space, by default). Oh, and it’s free. |
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Wow: Quicksilver, the one compulsory utility for any OS X user, gets radial menus [via] (that means putting every menu option around the mouse pointer rather than in a column, and is orders of magnitude more efficient, ergonomics-wise). Of course, since Quicksilver isn’t exactly the most self-evident program in the world when it comes to using its advanced features, you have to work a bit to access them:
No, it’s not just pretty: it’s also useful and convenient. (Except, being beta functionality and all, I’m not sure it’s quite reliable. I had to relaunch Quicksilver a dozen times before it started working correctly, and even then it’s still a bit erratic. Actually, now I have to launch Quicksilver every hour or so because it has silently crashed.) Incidentally, the “User Interface Access” plugin has other uses: it lets you access, with your keyboard, every menu item in the active appllication. Among many other things, you can create a trigger (the detailed lesson will be for another time) so that every menu item ends up in a big, flat list and you only have to press N, T, Enter to trigger “New Tab”, for instance. (And, yeah, I know it’s a lousy example because there already is a keyboard shortcut for “New Tab”.) And don’t let this post discourage you from trying out Quicksilver if you’ve got a Mac and aren’t a geek: it also does much simpler things (universal application & bookmark launcher, clipboard history manager, etc.) right out of the box (provided you know it appears when you press Ctrl-Space, by default). Oh, and it’s free. |
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