Today’s “Too Much Time On Their Hands” episode is brought to by TUAW:
Stick the guts of a modern optical mouse in to a classic Apple ADB mouse.
Tag: Mac
Thank you so much for the magazines you keep sending, even though we’re coming up on the fifth month since my subscription expired. I don’t really care about the fact that these “teaser” issues do not contain the CD, as I often found the CDs included with MacAddict to be out of date and the original content mostly useless. The only reason I re-subscribed in the first place was because of the $10 off the regular subscription price offer through Apple’s .Mac service. Your magazine hasn’t been worth much more than that for a number of years.
But feel free to keep the teaser issues coming. I can use the laughs.
And thus Apple’s plans at world domination were dashed.
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Regarding HTML in e-mail: what Tom said. I’m not even an admin like Tom that has to deal with this crap on a day-to-day basis. E-mail is for text. The Web is for graphics. No co-mingling of the two. I realize I’m in a rapidly dwindling minority on this issue, Jeff, but that’s my area of Ludditism, I guess.
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The Tetran doesn’t look too terribly comfortable to be sliding in to one’s front pants pocket. [Via Lee.]
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I’ve noticed the severe lack of updates to Apple’s iCal Library section, too. Now I just get whatever I want from iCalShare.
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Google continues to intrigue me. Really.
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I pronounce it like the peanut butter, with a hard J. [Via John.]
Yeah, it’s been up a few days, but I’m just getting to it, okay? John Gruber has come around, much as I have recently, to the notion of PowerBook-as-main/only-system, a concept Lee has been a proponent of for some time. John also has an in-depth review of the latest 15-inch PowerBook, outfitted just as I would like, with his usual attention to detail.
It’s Monday evening, and I’m still sore from the neighborhood tree planting from Saturday morning. Eleven ten-gallon trees to go in the neighborhood’s greenbelt area. Seventy homes, with an average of two adults per home. Seven people showed up, including myself. Yeah.
An interesting tip I picked up from No Plot? No Problem! shows an innovative use for all that spam that gets collected for me. This one writer keeps a list of names that show up in the From field of spam e-mails, so she always has a pool of character names to pull from. I really like this, since usually when I’m working on fiction, I can come up with two or three good character names, then I start really pulling stuff out of bodily orifices. A simple text document in BBEdit now has 305 names, one per line, and the built-in Kill Duplicates filter ensures I don’t have the same name twice.
I’ve been trying to send some e-mails with attachments via Gmail, from within Safari. Frustrated, I launched the 1.0b1 version of Camino, and it worked the first time I tried.
If Camino could mimic the easy subscribability of Safari when it comes to RSS and Atom feeds, there would be no looking back. Based on my own usage, Camino is consistently faster than Safari at rendering, uses less RAM over time, and remains more stable.
Then Tom has to go and remind me why Safari kicks butt when it comes to designing for standards.
An article in the latest Macworld has prompted me to look seriously at del.icio.us. My personal work habits have evolved to the point where I’m no longer worried about keeping bookmarks synced between two systems, but the prospect of an online backup of my bookmarks, that I could access from any where, is appealing. I’m coming closer all the time to my own personal death knell for .Mac.
Anthro’s eNook is so cool it almost makes me wish I didn’t have enough space to get one. Almost.
A happy belated to Tiffany.
Finally, my thanks to Tom. He knows why.
So Leander posits Apple is prepping a WYSIWYG widget-creation app. TUAW’s David Chartier whines “what took so long?” I can’t help but think, “So what?”
I know I’m not alone in minimal widget use. I see the myriad widgets being created and updated daily fly through my RSS feeds, and I can easily imagine users with 20-30 of these things flying around at once, bogging down their system’s background process time. At least now to create a widget you have to have some Javascript and HTML knowledge, and it helps if you’re design savvy. God help us if “Dashcode” is for real; it will unleash untold useless and ugly widgets on the Mac-using populace.
I do see a lot of widgets where I think, “Hey, that would be cool/convenient to have.” Then I realize that a particular widget wouldn’t be one I would want running all of the time. Then I realize that in the time it takes me to activate Dashboard, go in and make the widget active in the Dashboard environment, and have it refresh, I could just as quickly pull up my web browser and point it to whatever page I needed for the same information.
Ah, you say, but what happens when you’re using your PhischBook some place where you don’t have ‘net access? Granted, this is an instance when widgets would be useful, provided the widget itself doesn’t require an Internet connection to load its information. For my own use, there’s not a non-Internet-using widget out there that I cannot live without. A scenario where such a widget would come in handy when I am without Internet access has not arisen, and even if it had, I believe it would be for something that could just as well keep until I had access again. I probably activate Dashboard between eight and a dozen times a day.
For the record, the widgets I run:
+ Dictionary, Phone Book, Stocks, and Weather, all widgets that come with Mac OS X Tiger
+ SysStat
+ Backpack
+ BibleSearch
+ DailyVerse
+ Scoreboard, during baseball season
I had been using iCal Events, but I’m giving MenuCalendarClock for iCal a try, and am attempting to determine which one I like better for everyday use.
Your thoughts on widgets? What are you running? Drop a note in the comments.
Michael now has a dedicated blog for C-Command products. Since the illustrious Mr. Tsai has not yet posted feed links, allow me to help you out: RSS, or if you prefer, Atom.
[Big wave of the phin to Lee for the pointers to the feed links.]
The November issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure. I’m wondering if Charles Anthony’s cover art will be the last to feature the Power Mac G5.
Daniel Jalkut, of Red Sweater Blog, was kind enough to contribute this month’s Pod People column. We are actively seeking new iPod stories each month, and if you would like to share yours, please [e-mail the editors](mailto:editor@atpm.com?Subject=Pod People).
In this month’s FileMaking, Chuck Ross takes a break from the usual how-to to examine the new features of FileMaker 8. Sylvester Roque sets up a Mac music server, while Matthew Glidden upgrades his Cube’s video card. I’ve performed the latter operation myself, though instead of the Radeon Matt uses, I went with a nVidia GeForce2 MX.
Lee Bennett is kind enough to share with us his photos of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis as this month’s desktop pictures selection. I especially like numbers four and eight.
In Cortland, Chad Wieser finds himself beginning a new phase in life, while Cortland collects the last of a client’s bill. Frisky Freeware notes the return of a Classic classic: FinderPop! Turly O’Connor is porting the venerable productivity app to OS X, and I’m looking forward to putting it through its paces. I’ve been thinking that I wouldn’t get as much use out of FinderPop now, since I use Quicksilver, but I’m also thinking of the two apps as compliments rather than competitors. For those times when you’re mousing around, it’s easier to activate FinderPop, rather than going to the keyboard with both hands for Quicksilver.
Yours truly shares the review spotlight with my fellows this month. Lee puts the AirClick and AirClick USB from Griffin Technology through their paces, while Matthew goes behind enemy lines with the Commandos Battle Pack. Tom Bridge examines the third edition of Derrick Story’s excellent Digital Photography Pocket Guide. Eric Blair gives OmniGraffle Professional 4 a workout, while I chime in with a look at RadTech’s Portectorz for the 12-inch PowerBook.
We still have openings on the editorial staff, and we are always looking for new writers, and need new cover art each month. If you are interested in volunteering some time to ATPM in any of these areas, please e-mail the editors.
With thanks to John for the post title and link:
Rich Siegel, of Bare Bones fame, is finally blogging.
As if it weren’t enough that Rich is responsible for two of the applications I use the most each day, he is a fellow scotch and peanut butter lover. Rich, drop me a line when you’re in Dallas; there’s 12-year Glenfiddich Special Reserve in the pantry.
Brent Simmons announced tonight that development of MarsEdit will continue. w00t!