Category Archives: Technology

Housebreaking an iMac

iMacThere’s a witch hunt going on inside my new iMac; last night I made the resolution that I would excise from my hard drive as many applications as possible that rely on Apple’s Rosetta. That’s the supposedly invisible translation layer that Apple provides on its Intel-based Macintoshes in order that users may run programs originally written for the platform’s previous motherboard tenant, the PowerPC chip.

The reason is that, after several weeks of usage, I’m sufficiently fed up with the slow application switch times, the spinning beach balls and the unfortunately frequent crashes that I encounter using this Intel-based machine. I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate to blame Rosetta (I suppose it could be the relatively paltry 1 Gigabyte of RAM that I have installed, but if that’s a more accurate cause of my troubles, I’ll also say it’s an unreasonable one) but forgoing as much ‘dynamic translation’ as possible seems like as good a tactic as any for increasing the responsiveness of my machine.

Continue Reading …

+

Listen Up, Adobe

AdobeSeveral weeks ago, at his personal Web site Design by Fire, former Adobe employee Andrei Herasimchuk published an open letter to John Warnock, co-founder and spiritual father of Adobe Inc. In it, Herasimchuk proposed the idea of making a selection of Adobe’s highly popular typefaces — Caslon, Franklin Gothic, Helvetica Neue, and others — available to the public under an open source license. The idea would be to reshape — and improve — the typographic climate for Web designers through a newfound ubiquity of these generally well-regarded typefaces.

It’s a terrific concept that I fully support, but it’s probably best described as ‘a long shot’ in the grand scheme of things. It’s true that Adobe would generate a tremendous amount of good will by open sourcing a slate of very useful typefaces, but I think I have an even better idea for Adobe to totally hit a home run in the near term, and without compromising any of their existing businesses. Ready for my crazy idea? Here goes; make the next version of the company’s Creative Suite software not totally suck. Crazy, right?

Continue Reading …

+

A Browser Back from the Brink

OmniWeb 5.5The latest version of OmniWeb, which is perhaps best described as ‘the Macintosh browser you pay for,’ is out on the streets, just now emergent from its long beta gestation period. Version 5.5 finally brings us a third-party browser based on Apple’s now open source WebKit framework, which puts it nicely in line with Safari with regard to rendering fidelity and Macintosh fit and finish. On top of that, it faithfully re-creates virtually all of OmniWeb 5’s winning features: visual tabs, page source editing with instant previews, expandable text-entry boxes, etc.

Continue Reading …

+

Supersize Me

24-in. iMacFinally. Finally! Last December I walked into Tekserve, my local Apple retailer and my favorite place to buy anything Macintosh related, with a credit card in hand, ready to buy myself a brand new iMac G5. At the very last moment, I demurred a bit, frozen, for some reason unable to commit to buying the machine. Ultimately, I left empty-handed. Something in me was shouting out loudly, “This is not the time to buy a new computer.”

Ever since, I’ve been waiting for Apple to release just the right machine. The Intel-based iMacs they shipped earlier in the year seemed intriguing, but for whatever reason I still felt disinclined to commit. Now, today, they’ve upgraded the entire iMac line and even added a new model: a super-sized, 24-in. iMac with a healthy Intel Core 2 Duo processor at its heart. I came across the news this morning, when I sat down at my desk after a very early meeting that lasted several hours, and I knew — somewhat instantly — that this was the one I had been hoping Apple would release. I placed my order just after lunchtime. Now, the trick is to wait for it to arrive.

Continue Reading …

+

Challenge to the Death

I’m no one special just because I get a boatload of spam every day, but I do, and it’s annoying. My mail host provides SpamAssassin protection at the server level, trapping most of the incoming junk messages before I ever get a chance to review them. If it catches some false positives once in a while, I long ago decided that life is far too short to bother wading through its harvest, even irregularly, so I leave them there for eventual deletion by the system.

There are plenty of junk messages that do make it through, though, and those are filtered through the reasonably effective junk filters provided in Microsoft Entourage. I’ve always liked this application-level protection; using a custom view, I can easily monitor the spam filter for messages erroneously marked as spam. It’s really the way I prefer to manage my mail.

Over time, though, the number of junk messages that make it through SpamAssassin has gradually increased, as has the number of false positives I see in Entourage. One has to admit, spammers are Darwinian fighters if nothing else; they adapt and re-calibrate with great persistence — their uncompromising vision of a low-finance, Viagra-fueled utopia just won’t be denied. After seven years of this kind of noise level, I’m just getting weary of combing through my email every day.

I know I could add a utility to my computer like SpamSieve to help improve this error rate; I tried it once and didn’t really like it that much. And I know I could move over completely to Gmail or some other Web-based mail program with purportedly much better, centralized spam protection, but I have a low tolerance for webmail as a general rule. So I’ve been thinking about using a challenge/response spam protection system. Is that totally awful? I know there are many drawbacks, but is anyone out there using such a system successfully?

Continue Reading …

+

Message to the Messengers

AdiumIf there’s an indispensable kind of software that helps me keep my work and personal lives balanced during the day, it’s instant messaging. It’s absolutely integral to making impromptu appointments, clarifying questions, asking for quick-hit reactions, and planning my social calendar. Because of this, I take a very conservative view to altering my instant messaging tools in any way — I generally don’t like it. Whenever the software I use changes — whether a feature is modified or a new one is added — it can take me weeks of grumbling about its newness before I can get accustomed to it.

For the most part, my program of choice is the superb, open source Adium. As an instant messaging client, none of the others can touch it; Adium is elegant on the whole, extremely pliable in its customization options, satisfyingly capable of talking to multiple I.M. services, and a high bargain at the price of free. I also make it a habit to use Apple’s iChat while at home, more so that I can keep an eye on what Apple’s doing with their instant messaging platform than anything. If I had to choose between the two, Adium would win, hands down.

It’s likely going to stay that way, too, because I’m not particularly encouraged by what I see coming for iChat 4.0, the next major revision scheduled to ship next year with Apple’s Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system update.

Continue Reading …

+

Please Return Your Battery (If You Can)

Dear Apple Customer: Thank you for checking our Battery Exchange Program page for the eligibility of your 12-inch PowerBook G4’s accompanying battery for replacement. According to our records, your battery is is covered under this program.

So congratulations, it stands a better-than-usual chance of blowing up! And when we say “blowing up,” we mean it in the old school way, not in the way that young kids were bandying about five years ago as a euphemism for “getting really popular.”

Continue Reading …

+

Announcing Shorty

ShortyFor several months now, between my day job, writing for this blog and numerous other commitments, I’ve been working with some friends on a project called Shorty. Today, for the first time, it’s available as a free, public beta release over at Get-Shorty.com.

Shorty is a link redirection tool not unlike TinyURL or Url(x), which allows you to take ridiculously long URLs, like those you might encounter at Amazon.com for example, and create much shorter aliases for them. This is useful for all sorts of things, but handiest for passing these URLs along to friends and co-workers through email or in collaborative Web environments.

Continue Reading …

+

Stick a Database in It, It’s Done

For months now, I’ve been using the superb Kinkless Getting Things Done system to manage my to do lists. I like it a lot. It’s a beautiful hack of the excellent-in-its-own-right OmniOutliner Professional that uses ingenuity and a healthy dose of AppleScript to turn that program into a fairly robust expression of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” philosophy of personal time management.

Yet it’s still a hack. Ethan J. A. Schoonover, the author of what᾿s commonly abbreviated as “kGTD,” has done a tremendous job of turning OmniOutliner into a malleable repository for categorizing and manipulating reminders and to do items. As good as it is though, I’m rarely able to forget its limitations when I’m using it; the fact that OmniOutliner Pro wasn’t conceived from the ground up to handle this kind of data and the way users interact with it is often too easy to see.

Continue Reading …

+

Stick a Database in It, It’s Done

For months now, I’ve been using the superb Kinkless Getting Things Done system to manage my to do lists. I like it a lot. It’s a beautiful hack of the excellent-in-its-own-right OmniOutliner Professional that uses ingenuity and a healthy dose of AppleScript to turn that program into a fairly robust expression of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” philosophy of personal time management.

Yet it’s still a hack. Ethan J. A. Schoonover, the author of what᾿s commonly abbreviated as “kGTD,” has done a tremendous job of turning OmniOutliner into a malleable repository for categorizing and manipulating reminders and to do items. As good as it is though, I’m rarely able to forget its limitations when I’m using it; the fact that OmniOutliner Pro wasn’t conceived from the ground up to handle this kind of data and the way users interact with it is often too easy to see.

Continue Reading …

+