In the early 80s pre-announcing details and price points of your new product could prove to be disastrous. Especially so when there was a delay in releasing said new product. Everybody knows that this is what happened to Adam Osborne (and as usual, everybody appears to be wrong) but at least the saying has stuck around.
In the world of software — in particular operating systems — the effect seems to be harder to gauge. Apple’s announcement and iPhone induced delay of Leopard (OS X 10.5) didn’t appear to dent their financial results. On the flip side, developers of third-party software are likely to have suffered. I know that I have personally held off purchasing several applications while waiting to see how Leopard addresses the situations in which they have proven to be valuable while using Tiger (OS X 10.4). In particular, the brilliantly useful utility Hazel and Power Manager.
We use remote .ics files in the office for our calendering with Apple iCal and Thunderbird with the Lightning extension. The files have got to be pretty unwieldy as some of them date back to late 2004. Thunderbird in particular was becoming so slow and non-responsive as to be bordering on being barely usable.
I knocked together this Perl script which is run via cron at the start of each month to archive old calendar files and remove events older than one month to try and keep file sizes more manageable.
I’m not talking about Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (easy for me to say) but the brilliant just-out-of-beta text editor that my colleague introduced me to last week. It basically brings the power of TextMate to Windows. I’ve tried to switch from TextPad several times before but I’ve always been shackled by just how used to the keystrokes and shortcuts I’ve gotten over the years. True enough, you can alter the keystroke bindings in a lot of editors but one thing kept me returning to TextPad time and again: the context-sensitive transpose call invoked with Control-T.
I’m glad to report that it wasn’t just me being weird. The developers of e obviously value this functionality as highly as me. Actually, scratch that. Higher than me as they’ve extended how this tool works to embrace multiple sections and a column mode.
It’s not quite perfect just yet. Line bookmarks and a split-screen edit mode are missing. A more powerful search and replace is also conspicuous by its absence. One final downside is that after a lot of excited discussion of new features with my colleagues it will probably be expected that I’m at least 15% more efficient!
I’ve recently switched my day-to-day browser of choice from being Firefox (herein taken to be version 2) to Safari. Okay, so being the geek I am, I actually use a nightly build of WebKit (Safari) and Bon Echo (OS X Intel compiled Firefox) but I’ll use the names that everybody knows.
A couple of things annoy me in Safari however. I can’t start up with the windows and tabs from my previous session. Control+Enter still top-and-tails what I type into the location bar with http://www. and .com but does so in another tab. I guess I’ll get used to it. Also while I’m actually building sites I’ll still be using Firefox mainly due to the fantastically useful array of developer tools available.
Continue reading ‘Safari, so good’
I spent a little of this morning watching the iLife ‘08 guided tour video and when I noticed the new “skimming” feature of iPhoto and iMovie I couldn’t help but feel like I’d seen it somewhere before. Then I realised that I had seen the style sheet genius Stu Nicholls use exactly this effect for pure CSS flick-book style animations at least two years ago. I never really found an occasion to use the technique myself but it seems to work well in the iLife examples I’ve seen.
In light of recent postings of software lists in the comments I thought I’d better chime in with my two cents. After all, it is my blog! My favourite piece of software of late which always gets a good reaction from my less geeky friends is the marvelous MacOSaiX, which produced this topical image (click for larger version):
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks clearing through roughly 10,000 emails which adds up to more than 1.5Gb accumulated from over three years of borderline obsessive pack-ratting. Next up is categorising my blog posts and rating and tagging over 3,000 songs and a similar amount of photos.
Meta information is becoming more and more important and, by extension, useful to me. Finding things quickly is just one outcome. Being able to put together auto-updating Smart Playlists in iTunes (for example, 20 songs that I’ve rated with five stars but not listened to in six months) or Smart Albums in iPhoto (again, as an example, family pictures from Christmas) are simple examples of what can be achieved but using these in conjunction with Automator can really demonstrate the power of meta information.
Of course, it’s a lot easier if you’re disciplined and keep on top of things!
I’ve been scouring the blogs over the past few days trying to see what I missed at Refresh Edinburgh last week. One thing that caught my eye was a link to Meri Williams and her essential toolkit for a web developer. As it turned out this was more to do with project management than the software slant I first expected.
While I could make do with just a shell prompt and my wits, there are obviously oodles of programs out there to make my day-to-day life easier.
Chained to a PC in the office I use:
When at home and playing my MBP:
- SvnX to access the Subversion repositories in the office
- skEdit as my editor of choice
- Transmit to make up for the deficiencies in the aforementioned text editor
- Seashore for my relatively basic image manipulation requirements
Of course I’m definitely not saying that either of these combinations are anywhere near perfect, but they work for me at this moment in time. I find that the emotional attachment to software some people can forge is very strange to say the least. I’ve noticed this ever since the full-blown religious wars erupted at university over the merits of emacs, pico and vi.
While in Tignes last week I had to break my practice of not touching a computer while on holiday. One of my friends had a work-related Word document he had emailed to him but thanks to the locked down web terminals in the bars, nothing could be saved, opened nor any program run. A combination of a USB flash drive and Google documents provided us with a work around. That only left us to find our way around the infuriating French keyboards!
I’m fairly certain that Google Apps will start to become a cheaper and genuinely viable alternative to the Microsoft Office lock-in in the very near future. It only remains to be seen how many people will trust Google with their documents.
I have more than a passing interest in cryptography, ciphers and steganography (probably due to my fascination with all things spy as a child). You can perform some mind-boggling things with the software freely available on the Internet, which does make me wonder exactly what super-secret techniques are in use by certain government agencies.
Anyway, I finally have two-factor authentication (i.e. something you have and something you know - a thumbdrive and password for example) working on my MBP. My GnuPG keys are all stored on my USB drive and using symbolic links I can now sign and/or encrypt emails or individual documents both at home (using Apple Mail.app with GPGMail) and at work (using Thunderbird with Enigmail) with the corresponding subkey.
