found_drama

Downloaded and installed Firefox 3 this morning¹; here are some first impressions from throughout my first day of use:

1. Content rendering seems improved.  Not sure if it actually is improved or not.  Just feels that way².  Noted that it seems to use the default OS X buttons for otherwise unstyled form buttons now.  I should look into this content rendering thing, see if there really were changes.
2. Tab bar is more “Safari-like”; tab now merges with the browser chrome instead of with the window of content.  But the closing ⊗s are still on “the wrong side”.
3. Tab drag/drop indicator is easier to see.
4. Firebug was incompatible with the upgrade.  (No surprise.)  But the Add-on/Extension Manager couldn’t find the compatible, updated version?  I had to go looking for it.  (Maybe this is more of an issue with Firebug?)
5. TOOLBAR:
   1. I actually like the big back button³.
   2. Why not merge the Stop/Reload buttons like the Apple team did in Safari?  They’re mutually exclusive actions anyway…
   3. I like what they’ve done with the address bar.  Especially with the favicon.
   4. Also, I like how they have the little star for the bookmark.  Kind of reminds me of how “favourite” pages are marked in Confluence.
   5. Default theme makes it hard to see the separators on the Bookmarks Toolbar.
6. Some fields don’t seem to want to let me type in them.  This one is hard to replicate but I think it has something to do with when I try to give focus to the field before the page finishes loading.
7. When did the RSS “radio” badge get turned from orange to blue!?!?
8. There seem to be a lot of pages that wind up with horizontal scrollers that didn’t have them before.
9. When it comes to showing the address bar all the time, Firefox 3 means business.
10. Speaking of the address bar: I like how it drops down like that with the memory of the favicon and title and URL.  Gimme some context!
11. I like that the bookmarks are now displayed/managed in a sidebar.  Where they belong.  Responses to clicks seem a little strange sometimes.  (Try right-clicking on a bookmarklet?)
12. And at the end of the day: it was nice that it didn’t crash when I quit the browser.  For a change.

Up next: Ubiquity?

1. At long last?[↩]
2. Then again…  Some elements appear to render totally differently.  Maybe block-level elements?  Something is off in a few places…[↩]
3. Is this blasphemy?  Everyone else seems to hate it.[↩]

My otherwise limitless love for Quicksilver has recently been tempered by a burgeoning love for the addition of Quick Look to Mac OS X in the 10.5 version.  Pre-Quick Look, Quicksilver was hands-down the fastest way to access and open files.  ⌘+Space ➟ type a few characters ➟ and you were on your way.  In some instances you still had to wait for some Behemoth Application¹ to open up and unfurl its many tendrils into memory.  But it was still a hell of a lot faster than navigating the Finder via mouse clicks, etc.

With the advent of Quick Look however, we are faced with a little bit of a conundrum.  

Read the rest of this entry »

1. Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word: I’m looking in your direction.[↩]

Already “link-dumped” on July 28th but¹…  Here are the detailed notes: it would seem that as of today (July 28th) Google has added CalDAV support to their online calendar²!  The short version of what this means?  Now you can get “native” reciprocal syncing between your Mac’s iCal and your gCal³.  ”Just follow these easy steps!”

It seems like one of those “haven’t you been waiting for this?” type moments.  The delicious UI of iCal, finally playing nice with that pervasive gCal used by so many users at home and abroad…  The “holy grail” of calendar sharing: two-way (even three-way! four-way!) sharing of a single calendar across multiple computers and applications. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Saw this first over on LifeHacker.[↩]
2. From here forward referred to as “gCal”.[↩]
3. TUAW seems to have tagged it “together at last” and I do believe I agree.[↩]

Taking the Aperture plunge…

After about four years and approximately nine thousand digital images collected, processed, managed, and shared via iPhoto, we’ve more/less out-grown it around this house.  Yes: this coincides in large part with the DSLR upgrade and the desire to shoot RAW but iPhoto just didn’t seem to be cutting it for us.  But was Aperture really going to fill our needs?  Or was it going to be overkill for this here hobbyist, this admitted amateur?  Did the perceived 120% I needed out of iPhoto translate into 10% of Aperture?  75%?  53.68%?  I had no illusions about taking 100% advantage of Aperture¹ but I wanted to at least get an idea of our utilization level before going all the way.

And so did the 30-day free Aperture trial period come in to the rescue. Read the rest of this entry »

1. I have some sincere doubts that I’ll ever shoot while tethered, for example.[↩]

A few thoughts on Mac OS X 10.5 (”Leopard”) after having spent a solid week using it:

1. Spaces.  I didn’t think that I was going to use this at all but it turns out that it’s a great alternative to minimizing certain windows.  Example: during the day I typically run all the apps I need and minimize certain ones (e.g., Things; e.g., OmniOutliner) to “get them out of the way” while I work in others.  What Spaces has allowed me to do is to put these apps off to the side, in their own separate context, without having to get them jammed up in the Dock.
2. Time Machine.  In a word: awesome.  It’s already come in handy and permitted me to recover some inadvertently lost files¹ from the otherwise certain doom of “Secure Empty Trash”.  The UI is a little intense but the metaphor makes sense and it didn’t take me long to figure it out.
3. The “new” Dock.  I’m a hidden-Dock-on-the-side kind of guy on my main machine so I really haven’t noticed this.  That said, I actually like the way it looks.  Also…
4. Stacks.  I didn’t think I would use this either.  But I’ve found them to be pretty useful.  It has also been nice to pull stuff off the ol’ Desktop.  This new default Downloads folder, for example: I could get behind that in a big way.
5. Translucent menubar.  Meh…  I could see why some folks are turning it off.  None of the Desktop graphics I’ve used have made it difficult to read the menus (at least not yet).  One thing that I do like about it is that it seems to soften the top edge of the screen a little bit while still maintaining that “hard ceiling” effect.
6. Cover Flow in the Finder.  Another one that I thought I wouldn’t use.  Sure enough, it’s replaced column view as my preferred file browsing method.  Combined with Quick Look, it’s emerged as a very nice UI improvement.
7. Accessing Shared Machines.  Weird.  I’m undecided if I like this change or not.  On the one hand, it seems to be a lot easier to access the machines I need.  On the other hand, I was accustomed to the whole “⌘k” thing to get to the Connect to Server dialog.  So that screwed me up for a while — especially since it didn’t seem to want to respect the afp:// in my server addresses.  Once I figured out how to make the connections, the rest kind of fell into place (e.g., network-connected volumes still “live” at the same place on the command line so I didn’t need to update my rsync scripts) but it was a little bit of a rocky start.
8. “Unified” UI.  I like.  Active/front-most windows are certainly more obvious than before.  And this UI treatment seems to make better use of individual pixels and overall screen real estate.
9. New Mail.  A lot less crashy.  (At least for me.)  But just like when they threw RSS into Safari: /meh.
10. Quicksilver.  Not “Leopard” per se but I’ve noticed a couple things about Quicksilver since the upgrade.  First, like Mail, Quicksilver also seems a bit less crashy than before.  Second, some of Quicksilver’s pre-loaded scripts seem to require updating; e.g., “Show Character Palette” and “Show Keyboard Viewer” (both of which I use all the time) seem to just flake out now².  Also, something about the animations and special effects in the UI are a bit different.
11. Plays well with others?  Seems to play less nice.  Example: finding printers shared over Samba?  Oh you can find them.  But forget about authenticating.

1. Damn you, Microsoft Office 2008 Upgrader![↩]
2. Fortunately I found where apps “live” and I have instead dropped aliases to them in ~/Applications.[↩]
3. Except for this tip here.  Damn but I wish this still worked.[↩]

For about the past month, I have been trying out the public beta of Cultured Code’s Things. Things is a “GTD-style” task management application with a clean UI and some nice, convenient features. While I am not really an adherent to GTD philosophy credited to David Allen, the truth is that a decent task management application can be difficult to find and doubly so if you shun “GTD” all together. iCal has its half-baked to do list¹; then there are full-blown project management apps; or you can hack your way through it with a more general purpose app like OmniOutliner. That said, it perhaps goes without saying that I have eschewed these task management apps in the past because they have either seemed overkill or else flimsy band-aid solutions to more pernicious problems. When I read about Things for the first time on TUAW, it sounded like it might hit the sweet spot for me and I decided to give it a spin.

Read the rest of this entry »

1. Say what you will about its integration with Leopard Mail, I still think it’s little better than sticky notes.[↩]

OS X 10.4.11 is out. Included in the update is Safari 3. Initial, 30-second impressions? Well, Safari can finally rock-and-roll with all of the WordPress editor features. So I’m happy about that. (Now to bring all of my Camino bookmarks back over…) Everything else looks like bug fixes, patches, security updates, compatibility improvements, and the like.

Goes to 11, indeed…

UPDATE: Safari doesn’t seem to “actually” play nice with the WorPress rich text editor (MCE, if I’m remembering correctly); it just LOOKS like it does?  Also: double-clicking on the tab bar MUST yield a new tab (like Camino) — none of this “right-click > New Tab” nonsense.

Hold down cmd+ctrl when you hover over a link in VoodooPad; you’re in for a treat:

Just more evidence that this is the greatest application available today.

I didn’t exactly “get it” with the iPhone but this week’s release of the iPod touch has me convinced: when the much-rumored, ever-coveted “tablet Mac” comes, it’s going to be an iPod. It’s going to be a big iPod (form-factor-wise, x- and y- but not z-axis-wise) with some extra, even fancy features — but it’s going to be an iPod in heart and soul. It just sort of hit me on the walk home today.

If Apple is going to give us some kind of “tablet” offering¹, it’s not going to be like every other tablet PC out there. The gnarly form factors, the easily-lost styli², the 6 lb. box that still gets hot in your hands? It all adds up to something very un-Apple. No, I would think that they’ll give us something that much more closely resembles the iPhone and its new cousin the iPod touch in both form factor, relative size, and certainly in interface.

Why reinvent the tablet PC when you already have a proven interface? When you already have a proven strategy? Create a small³, thin⁴, lightweight device that you can dock or sync over WiFi and you’re off and running. Right? I’ll grant that I’m glossing over some significant technical and engineering hurdles here⁵ but I don’t necessarily think that it’s completely out of reach. There’s already some pretty incredible stuff being done with the iPhone and (from the looks of it) the iPod touch. And we’re — what? — just over two months into the iPhone’s tenure.

Of course, given the length of said walk home, my imagination started to run wild:

…perhaps it’d be more of a “MacBook touch” with the screen being the touch screen tablet and it docks to the base and when you’re ready to use it you sort of “eject” the screen like you would with a CD or DVD and the screen’s interface does a little transition kind of like when it goes into Front Row and your UI environment transitions over after syncing up the docs that you wanted and…

Yeah, I got annoyed with myself, too. That would be too complicated. And clunky. And we’re right back to the very un-Apple remark. And so I’m sticking with my “iPod touch (or some such sibling) is the tablet Mac…”

Now what I’m suggesting isn’t exactly new. The “touch screen tablet” patent was granted over two years ago; and folks have been speculating about such a thing for much longer than that. Jobs’ comments be damned! The speculation is fun and (in my modest opinion) probably not all that far off — if you think of these “tablet Macs” as next generation, glorified iPod touches. And apparently, I’m not the only one that thinks so.

1. Don’t mention why we will not see this. We’ve already heard about that.[↩]
2. And I think we all know how Steve Jobs feels about your stylus.[↩]
3. For “small” say: 8″ diagonal screen?[↩]
4. For “thin” does 8mm sound right?[↩]
5. Application installation and management comes immediately to mind, for example.[↩]