OSX: Get your hands on Mail 3.0 now

Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Get your hands on Mail 3.0 now:

You don’t have to wait until next year to get your hands on the new features in Mail 3.0. The third-party apps and plugins that may have inspired the new features are available now.

About a week ago I would have been really excited about this, but I’m finally over my ‘email as GTD platform’ fantasies. Nevertheless, it’s a nice page for anyone who wants the features of Mail 3.0 now.

It also proves, once again, how grassroots developers are solving real-life problems for real-life people in simple, practical ways only to have their ideas ripped off by large corporations who put them forward as innovations.

And it also demonstrates how the best applications are simple but extendable. This is why Winamp was so fantastic until it became bloatware crippled by DRM. It’s why Firefox is not just the best web browser, but probably the greatest application of our time.

XP: Clever little VLC

One of the annoying things about the current generation of graphics cards is that they only have one overlay surface. What this means is that if you have more than one video window open, only one of them is being optimally displayed by the graphics card. In some cases, it can actually mean that some apps won’t load if another is open. Try to record a TV show whilst watching a DVD and you might see this behavior. Most TV tuner software will steal the overlay surface, even if you only want the app running in the background. For this very reason I have a separate PC purely to run my TV tuner.

I hope this situation will change one day, but I don’t hold my breath. I’ve not ever heard anyone mention it, anywhere, ever. I am reminded of the time when soundcards would only play sound from one application at a time (about a decade ago) and if one application tried to access the soundcard whilst another was using it, you would get a popup box complaining to you.

But now here is a cleaver thing. I just noticed that if you are running a video in an instance of VLC (this is on a Windows XP PC) that is not using the overlay surface, and you close another instance of VLC that was using it, then the first instance of VLC immediately starts using the overlay surface.

Fantastic.

You can observe this behavior most easily if you have the overlay surface set to display on a specific screen of a multi-screen setup.

I’d appreciate any feedback about this type of behavior with other applications, or any gripes you might have about how overlay surfaces work and any work-arounds or tricks.

I am using a nVidia FX5200 based card. Not fancy, but it’s a nice fanless card which runs 2 monitors and a TV and is excellent for video playback.

OSX: Google plus Safari WTF!!!!!!!

This is what is wrong with technology. One day it works and the next day it doesn’t. No wonder the average computer user barely manages to hold on.

Yesterday I could drag links out of a Google search and dump them straight into a draft blog post in ecto. Standard procedure in a modern OS like OSX. Today it no longer works. I can drag and drop other links, even links on the Google site EXCEPT SEARCH RESULTS.

I had the perfect system for almost 24 hours. The beauty of dragging links out of Safari is that it keeps the original link text and the underlying URL, so you don’t just end up with the URL text, you get a nice pretty link ready made with no work required to fit it into the text.

So I’d write a post in ecto, and see a word or phrase that should be a link. I select it, right-click, and select ‘Google Search’. Safari opens and does a search and I choose the relevant link and drag it into my post.
So now I have to open up the page and drag the link from the address bar. Oh, well, I can live with that. It still sucks.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to vent my spleen about the stupidity that often ruins otherwise great ideas. Until now I’ve not had an actual, good, proper, rant. Inconsistency can be a killer. The best technology, the mundane stuff like reticulated water, telephones and cars, is the best because most of the time they just work, and work the same way each time.

And now that I’ve had my rant, I think the solution to the problem has just occurred to me. Yesterday I was not ‘logged in’ to Google in Safari and this afternoon I logged in. That is the only thing that I know of that has changed in the mean-time.

I’ve just logged out of Google in Safari, and what do you know… it works properly the way it did before. So there you go, some practical problem solving and a rant.

Sometimes it just helps to get things off your chest.

OSX: Google plus Safari WTF!!!!!!!

This is what is wrong with technology. One day it works and the next day it doesn’t. No wonder the average computer user barely manages to hold on.

Yesterday I could drag links out of a Google search and dump them straight into a draft blog post in ecto. Standard procedure in a modern OS like OSX. Today it no longer works. I can drag and drop other links, even links on the Google site EXCEPT SEARCH RESULTS.

I had the perfect system for almost 24 hours. The beauty of dragging links out of Safari is that it keeps the original link text and the underlying URL, so you don’t just end up with the URL text, you get a nice pretty link ready made with no work required to fit it into the text.

So I’d write a post in ecto, and see a word or phrase that should be a link. I select it, right-click, and select ‘Google Search’. Safari opens and does a search and I choose the relevant link and drag it into my post.
So now I have to open up the page and drag the link from the address bar. Oh, well, I can live with that. It still sucks.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to vent my spleen about the stupidity that often ruins otherwise great ideas. Until now I’ve not had an actual, good, proper, rant. Inconsistency can be a killer. The best technology, the mundane stuff like reticulated water, telephones and cars, is the best because most of the time they just work, and work the same way each time.

And now that I’ve had my rant, I think the solution to the problem has just occurred to me. Yesterday I was not ‘logged in’ to Google in Safari and this afternoon I logged in. That is the only thing that I know of that has changed in the mean-time.

I’ve just logged out of Google in Safari, and what do you know… it works properly the way it did before. So there you go, some practical problem solving and a rant.

Sometimes it just helps to get things off your chest.

OSX: Sync your iPhoto library to your iPod

So Apple have trundled out another release of the idiosyncratic bloat-ware that is iTunes. Pardon me while I completely ignore it… oh, hang on…

You see I got the update by accident when I forgot to untick the relevant box on the Software Updates nag-bot. It would have all gone unnoticed, except that I wanted to delete the photos from my iPod to make way for some videos. There wasn’t much point wasting the space, the photo collection was a dis-organised mess of dupes.

You see, the only way to get photos onto the iPod was to point it to a directory full of photos. When I bought the iPod, silly me assumed that there would be integration with iPhoto. Nup, no-way. Idiotic Apple. So I pointed iTunes (version 6) to my iPhoto folder and it merrily went away, copying not just the proper images, but the thumbnails and the ‘undo’ copies as well. They were, after-all, image files underneath the folder I had pointed to.

Utterly useless.
(BTW, I will get to my point.)

But tonight, when I was looking, in iTunes 7, for the place to delete the photos, I found the sync photos with iPhoto page. Now I’m almost certain this feature was not there before. I went looking on Apple’s site, and on Google for some mention of this. I paged through the entire iPod + iTunes sub-site for a “what’s new” or some other mention of it. No mention at all. Not a one. Not even really any mention of storing photos on one’s iPod.

This, I think, is the only real interesting new feature for several versions. And now that my photos have finally copied across (it took about 3 hours to process and copy about 4000 5MP jpegs) I can say that it’s totally great. I can browse photos only by album, but who cares. It all syncs up, it works, no dupes. Fantastic!

(I bought this iPod specifically for storing photos, as an ‘in the field’ backup unit using the USB adapter and also to be a pocket photo album)

OSX: Blogging Widgets

I am disappointed to report that the 2 blogging widgets I have tried don’t support tags properly with wordpress.com.

WordPressDash lists them okay and you can select multiple tags but they don’t actually show up on the blog.

RapidMetaBlog only allows you to choose one tag, which completely misses the point.

Nevertheless some may find them useful. Other than the tag issue they seem to work fine.

This is my first proper post in ecto and I must say, it looks like love at first sight.

Dupe posts, and all that

Lads and Lassies, please be patient with the dupes and such… i’m testing out some new blogging clients.

Irregular service will resume, maybe… later. Otherwise soon after that, if not before.

OSX: Official GMail Widget

Google have an official widget for viewing your Gmail inbox.

They get points for using the keychain to store the password, but loose twice as many points for assuming that the keychain is always unlocked. If you have taken the time to secure your keychain (see point 6) then each time you access the dashboard keychain asks for your password.

I’m a bit ambivalent about this.  I’m certainly not going to unsecure my keychain.

Oh well, life goes on… without the Gmail widget, aparently.

Windows XP: Photoshop Elements 5

Adobe have announced Photoshop Elements 5 for Windows, and have listed the reasons to upgrade.

It would seem Adobe have run out of ideas and have decided to add a bunch of trivial features stolen (probably) from a bunch of also-rans which use them to mask their lack of true power.  The only actual useful feature that they mention is the addition of curves, but then there is a work-around for that if, like me, you are still stuck with choose to use version 3.

I can understand why Adobe are stuck though.  Even Elements 3 is a very capable program.  I imagine it does what 99% of hobby photographers need to do 99% of the time, so long as they are prepared to learn how to use it.  And Photoshop CS2 is a very, very expensive program.  I would love to have it, for the other 1% of times, but I just can’t justify that cost, even though I could afford it if I really wanted it.

So Adobe can’t make Photoshop Elements much better than it is without further canabalising their own market.  If they add any more actual, real, photo editing features, it will give more people less reason to pay the exorbitant premium that CS2 carries.

Maybe the product will be much more impressive when it ships.  It’s also possible that the marketing department have entirely missed the point and failed to highlight features which would actually be of use editing photos.  Perhaps Photoshop Elements is now going to be marketed to scrapbookers and turned into a kind of desktop publisher.

It seems that Photoshop Elements 3 will be with me for awhile yet.

(N.B. That the OSX version is often a version number behind.  Version 4 has only been out a few months.  It will likely be quite awhile before we see version 5 for OSX.)

My New Fridge…

…has a startup tone.

I just switched it on and it beeped a tune at me.

It also beeps in a most annoying ding-dong fashion when you adjust the temperature or other settings. It’s quite a loud beep.

This fridge has a “Super Cool” and “Super Freeze” function. I don’t know what it does because the pamphlet I got with it (I can’t call it a manual) is written in Engrish.

“Surely when thy fridge has become like unto thy PC, and event sounds utter forth from it, and the distraction there-of is most annoying, then Armageddon is neigh at hand. Yeah, it knocks on your very door.”