Tag: Mac
Oh, right. The March issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available. You’d think someone on the editorial staff would be more aware…
Angus decides to reward Microsoft’s recent marketing efforts regarding the Zune and Vista by purchasing a brand-new 17-inch MacBook Pro. Yeah, when I first read his column, I had problems with the logic there, too, but someone informed me it has something to do with this thing called “sarcasm”. In this month’s Bloggable, Wes tracks the biggest news making the circuit of the Mac blogosphere, Steve Jobs’ recent condemnation of DRM for music downloads.
Mark has a quick hit on publishing formats, notably the resistance coming against Microsoft’s Office Open XML, because the words “Microsoft” and “open” go so well together, don’t they? (I like this sarcasm thing. Must note to use it more.) Lee continues his fabulous series, Photoshop for the Curious, this month walking us through color calibration. I really could use one of those monitor calibration tools. Miraz has a great column on web accessibility this month, one I can really relate to, given how I am amongst the spectacled crowd. (We also learn Miraz’s age this month, and please note this was volunteered by the author; our mothers taught us well enough to know better than to ever ask that of a lady.)
This month’s desktop pictures are courtesy of ATPM reader Le Anne Brown, and feature the land of Tasmania (coincidentally, the home of ATPM‘s own Tasmanian devil, former staffer Raena Armitage). Strange things are afoot for Cortland at the swing dance-hosting lodge, which appears to be more than meets the eye. Staffer Linus Ly doffs his editorial cap for that of an artisté, introducing the ATPM readership to Qaptain Qwerty.
You may notice a striking similarity between Qaptain Qwerty and the review of Art Text. As a member of the editorial team, allow me to reassure you, this is not accidental. Ed got his hands on a piece of tech that’s found its way on to my personal gear lust list, the SnapScan S500M, by Fujitsu.
I never thought I’d have the opportunity to write, “Ellyn lays the smack down with Smack Mahjong“, but you can’t pass up those opportunities when they present themselves. Finally, Lee reviews the intriguing TuneView from Keyspan: leave your iPod connected to your entertainment system, but have its screen in the palm of your hand with the TuneView remote. Sounds sweet.
As always, you can enjoy About This Particular Macintosh online, or in a manner more appropriate for your reading preference.
So I have this email signature. Actually, I have about three. One is the somewhat standard signature I use for all ATPM-related correspondence. The other two are personal sigs which vary only in the email address contained in the signature. One is for the address at this domain, and the other is my Gmail address.
I have set up these signatures with keystroke shortcuts in TypeIt4Me, which I encourage you to check out. Without going in to too much detail, these three signatures are shorthanded “asig”, “gsig”, and “rsig”, and this works very well. For the most part.
I seem to have this memory muscle problem with the last abbreviation. The other two I can rattle off with nary a conscious thought going from my brain to my fingers on the keyboard, but the last has proven to be rather elusive. Instead of typing “rsig” I find myself typing “risg” instead. I even did it in the previous sentence, and had to backspace and fix it.
The obvious and lazy solution is to create a new abbreviation in TypeIt4Me that automagically puts in the proper signature when I mistype the actual abbreviation, because there’s little chance “risg” will ever be a real word in the English language, but that still doesn’t help with why I’m mistyping it in the first place. Bizarre.
This post is coming to you from MarsEdit 1.1.3, the first release of my blogging app of choice since Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software acquired it from NewsGator. This update fixes my biggest druther with MarsEdit, where images flicker when you’re previewing your post. Thanks, Daniel!
Speaking of not taking long, Lee and I were chatting via IM last night while he watched the Oscars, and, of course, there was talk regarding the iPhone teaser commercial. I wondered jokingly how long it would be before some post showed up somewhere detailing all of the stars shown in the commercial. Lee provided the answer: two hours. And here I thought I didn’t have a life. I’m sure there’s now a post somewhere detailing each of the movies or shows featured in the commercial, but I’m too lazy to google it.
Bandwagon, going live in two days, is an iTunes backup for Mac users. They’re offering free one-year subscriptions if you blog about them, and like Eric, I can be a cheap date.
Tired of Tetris™? No good at first-person shooter games? Want something quicker than world-building or war strategy games? Frenzic may be the answer you’re looking for.
A joint release from The Iconfactory and ARTIS Software, Frenzic is an addictive puzzle game that you can play solo or against others online.
Jobs and company should seriously be looking at getting this game on the upcoming iPhone.
Sorry, Windows users need not apply.
Update, 1:00 PM CST: If you decide to register Frenzic, feel free to add me as a friend.
Julio Ojeda-Zapata, for the St. Paul Pioneer Press:
I praise Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system, and I also curse it.
[…]
But after waiting five years — as in half a decade — for this thing, I think I should get something revolutionary, a PC operating system so astonishing it makes the competition look laughably primitive. The almighty Microsoft made this, right? So Vista–being released to consumers Tuesday–has to be jaw-droppingly superior, right?
Well, it’s not. Vista hardly rocked my world during weeks of testing. It’s a fine Windows upgrade, but it’s also a shameless rip-off (and not quite the equal) of another major operating system, Apple Computer’s Mac OS X.
That begs the question: Why not just use OS X?
Those upgrading from XP likely will have to get a new computer anyway because Vista doesn’t work properly on most older PCs. […] So, instead of purchasing a Windows PC, they could–and typically should–get an Apple Macintosh computer running OS X.
[Emphasis in the original. –R]
The February issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.
Kudos to Lee for this month’s cover art. He ran the idea by me via IM one night, I thought it was great, and Michael gave it the final thumbs-up. Our thanks to Steven Frank for playing along. In case you missed the link, you can also get the cover art as a desktop picture this month.
Well, well, well, well, well. What’s that? Steve Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld Expo last month? You don’t say. Why, I believe that means Wes has to eat his hat. And given how another ATPM staffer is resident in the city Wes currently calls home, I’m sure we can arrange a photo shoot of the happy event, because let’s face it Wes, tasting is not the same thing as eating. I’m sure we can find a nice Rachel Ray recipe wherein we substitute the meat of choice with the hat. Perhaps former ATPM staffer and amateur chef Tom Bridge can help us out in that regard.
While we hammer out all of those details, Wes does have the blogosphere’s coverage of Apple’s next paradigm-shifting product, as well as weigh-ins on MacHeist and MacZOT. iPhone fever has certainly set in amongst the ATPM staff, as Mike Chamberlain attests to in this month’s Mac About Town. He talks about some other stuff, too. I think. Did I mention the iPhone fever settling amongst the staff? Angus takes us on a safari of the Apple landscape, including, yes, the iPhone, but oh so much more as well.
We welcome Ed Eubanks to the staff as we present Next Actions, a column devoted to to using your Mac to get things done. Lee presents the third chapter in the ongoing saga of Photoshop for the Curious, with a look at the application’s menus and a tutorial on getting better grayscale (viz: “black and white”, even though that’s really a misnomer) photos from your color pics. Chris Dudar has a beginner’s guide to the UPS, and no, he’s not asking what brown can do for you.
Reader David Kettlewell was kind enough to share some photos from Sweden’s “Little Leaf Sea” for this month’s desktop pictures selection. Cortland has junior-high flashbacks after a night of swing dancing with Angie doesn’t go like he planned. Meanwhile, the chameleonesque Agent Smith arrives in town, palming a familiar-looking comm device…
Ellyn isn’t very smitten with Arctic Quest, but David is quite taken with MoRU. Our eastern seaboard surfer, Eric, tries out NetworkLocation, while Frank Wu beats me to a review of Booq’s Python XL System. Matthew wraps up this month’s reviews with a look at Eltima’s SWF Movie Player.
I remarked to Michael that this month’s issue was our most content-packed out of the past few months, and we still had four writers unable to submit this month! (Hey, we have real jobs outside of ATPM, you know?) We’re both very pleased, and our thanks go out to the staff for their efforts.
As usual, this issue is available in a variety of flavors for your reading pleasure.
Turly’s brought out a universal version of the venerable FinderPop, now a preference pane.
I found with earlier builds of the OS X version of FinderPop that I wasn’t using it nearly as much as I did under OS 9, due in large part to my use of Quicksilver. However, I can still find a use for FinderPop in my workflow, and I encourage you to give it a go and see if it has a place in your workflow, too.
Scott McNulty noted Tweet in his Twitter feed as well as on TUAW. I downloaded Ted Leung’s Growl-modified version of Coda Hale’s script. Coda has good installation and usage instructions in the original Tweet script, which you can use if you don’t care about Growl support.
Tweet combines the power of AppleScript with that of Quicksilver (you are using Quicksilver, aren’t you?) to make posting to your Twitter account easier and faster than ever. Sorry, Windows users, but all of this, except the Twitter service itself, is Mac-only.