That’s Entertainment (For Kids)

Talk about a change of pace: this morning my girlfriend and I flew out to the quintessentially suburban and exceedingly pleasant town of Lafayette, California to help my mother watch my nephew for roughly four days (his mom is on a short holiday). On the slate for this weekend: a science fair, my nephew’s Little League game, a trip to San Francisco to see the Giants play the Washington Nationals, and lots of Nintendo GameCube. We stopped by Hollywood Video this afternoon to rent a DVD, and I was reminded how few movies are really appropriate for watching with a seven-year old and how just about any seven-year old in 2005 will have already seen every one of them. In spite of having my own child-at-heart preoccupations, it’s very different keeping an actual young kid entertained.

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F’d up Font Palette

Font PaletteJust because I’m about to add further to the list of Tiger gripes that have flooded the Internet since its release last Friday night, it doesn’t mean that I don’t like it. I like it a lot, I really do; not just its new features and user interface improvements, but also its under-the-hood advancements, which make me feel very confident about the operating system’s long-term prospects.

But it’s a complex platform, and any time Apple upgrades it, it’s impossible to avoid baring imperfections, some old, some new. A case in point is the Mac OS X font palette, the system-wide, floating interface for typeface selection that received a major overhaul with the release of Tiger’s predecessor, Panther. It’s a fairly powerful interface for control of typographic specifications in most all Cocoa applications, and so it plays a rarely discussed but central role in Mac productivity.

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F’d up Font Palette

Font PaletteJust because I’m about to add further to the list of Tiger gripes that have flooded the Internet since its release last Friday night, it doesn’t mean that I don’t like it. I like it a lot, I really do; not just its new features and user interface improvements, but also its under-the-hood advancements, which make me feel very confident about the operating system’s long-term prospects.

But it’s a complex platform, and any time Apple upgrades it, it’s impossible to avoid baring imperfections, some old, some new. A case in point is the Mac OS X font palette, the system-wide, floating interface for typeface selection that received a major overhaul with the release of Tiger’s predecessor, Panther. It’s a fairly powerful interface for control of typographic specifications in most all Cocoa applications, and so it plays a rarely discussed but central role in Mac productivity.

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Noisy Signals

An Adium instant message window interrupted me at my desk last night. It was Jason Fried of 37signals, and he was like, “Dude, up for guest-posting over at our Signal vs. Noise weblog for, like, the month of May?” I was all like, “Dude, what does that entail?” And he was all like, “Dude, whatever you want!” And I was all like, “Dude, can I start off with something mildly inflammatory about Microsoft?” And he was all like, “Dude, go for it.” And then I was like, “Dude, that’s totally radical, I’ll do it.” And he was like, “Dude, right on!” And now you know.

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Throw It in Your Backpack

BackpackAs if you could avoid hearing the news: the prolific 37signals launched their latest online application today and it’s called Backpack. As a beta tester, I took a crack at helping the company craft its messaging for this hard-to-describe product, and the best I could come up with was this: “It’s perhaps the most convincing Web answer yet to the power, flexibility and simplicity of a spiral-bound notebook.” You can tell that I had my little marketing hat on for that particular brainstorming session.

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Tiger Blemishes

Several readers have noted some problems in the display of my comments entry form, courtesy of the very recent iterations of Safari released with Mac OS X 10.3.9 and, of course, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. In essence, what were once orderly boxes now appear tumbled and in disarray when rendered by the new versions of this Web browser. The form remains fully functional; it’s presentation has just been more or less destroyed, is all. This is a byproduct of Apple’s vigilant, ongoing improvements to Safari’s CSS rendering engine, a process which I wholeheartedly support, in theory… I won’t lie to you, though, the fact that little bugs like this continue to arise annoys the heck out of me.

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Back to Square One

Install Mac OS X Tiger
Between Friday night and this morning, and between trips to New Jersey and Brooklyn, I managed to find some time to get Mac OS X Tiger installed — all the while demonstrating quite admirable restraint and patience, I don’t mind saying, given how much of a lather I’ve been working up over the release of this latest version of my favorite operating system.

Part of that was the idea that dedicating a weekend to something so clearly geeky, while undeniably satisfying, might perhaps be a case of misplacing one’s personal priorities; I still endeavour to have some kind of balance in my life. Also, thinking in terms of ounces of prevention versus pounds of cure, I took great pains both to properly prepare for the upgrade and to perform the most extensive flavor of installation available.

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Catch a Tiger by the Tail

TigerJust prepare yourself for a veritable ‘perfect storm’ of bad puns on the word “tiger” when the latest version of Mac OS X ships tomorrow. Journalists have been saving them up for their headlines for months now and can’t wait to unleash them, just like users have been building up anticipation for months and can’t wait to install it. I know, because as the hour of its official release approaches, I get more and more worked up.

A co-worker at my office pre-ordered a copy a while ago (I did too, but from Amazon). When she checked on the shipment earlier in the week, they led her to believe it would arrive today, a day early. In excited anticipation, we made plans to install it this very afternoon… but the FedEx guy never showed up. Now I’m more anxious to get my hands on it than ever. Unfortunately, when the software is finally released for real tomorrow, I’ll be preoccupied with some personal obligations, and similarly through the rest of the weekend. It may not be until next week that I get it installed. That is, provided that a legal injunction doesn’t prevent Apple from shipping the software. Grrrrr… (Get it? Grrrrr?)

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Ooh, Ooh It’s Magic

MerlinIn the twenty-first century, software development has become incredibly easy: if you have a need for a program that you don’t think exists — like, say, a credible alternative to Microsoft Project that runs on Mac OS X— all you have to do is imagine it, then Google it or write about it on your weblog, and there it is; someone else has already thought of it. Somewhere, some enterprising and talented programmer has already coded it and tested it and even built a snazzy little Web site for it and it’s maybe even in its second or third major version. Just like magic.

It’s a cheeky sentiment, but I honestly feel that happens often enough to ring at least partly true. The most recent example being just yesterday, when I asked that very question about project planning software. As several very sharp readers pointed out to me in short order, there are at least a few excellent options out there that I had no idea existed. One of them is called Merlin. I downloaded it, gave it a spin and was immediately floored by how closely it matched what I had been looking for in vain: Gantt chart resource management and budgeting just like Microsoft Project — except Mac-like and elegant.

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Ooh, Ooh It’s Magic

MerlinIn the twenty-first century, software development has become incredibly easy: if you have a need for a program that you don’t think exists — like, say, a credible alternative to Microsoft Project that runs on Mac OS X— all you have to do is imagine it, then Google it or write about it on your weblog, and there it is; someone else has already thought of it. Somewhere, some enterprising and talented programmer has already coded it and tested it and even built a snazzy little Web site for it and it’s maybe even in its second or third major version. Just like magic.

It’s a cheeky sentiment, but I honestly feel that happens often enough to ring at least partly true. The most recent example being just yesterday, when I asked that very question about project planning software. As several very sharp readers pointed out to me in short order, there are at least a few excellent options out there that I had no idea existed. One of them is called Merlin. I downloaded it, gave it a spin and was immediately floored by how closely it matched what I had been looking for in vain: Gantt chart resource management and budgeting just like Microsoft Project — except Mac-like and elegant.

Continue Reading

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