There’s but a few minutes left in Halloween here on the east coast, so I’ll have to hurry and pound this out before you start having to manipulate your clock in order to benefit. I’m still a die hard BBEdit fan and have yet to even try TextMate, but it will celebrate Halloween in several ways.
Icon changing seems rather obvious, so it’s good that the developers didn’t stop there. The new project window features a big spiderweb and the output console has it’s own Halloween theme. The Apple Blog post has all the pictures. It brings me back to a fonder day when so-called Easter Eggs were commonplace. Heck, the book Mac Secrets was chock-full of them (I shed a tear on a regular basis that the book hasn’t continued that original glory).
I thought I'd squeeze in the last post of the month with a little bit of Mac-spook. It's how to make a Mac-O-Lantern (no, not the electronic version Derik posted earlier today)! This little sucker houses a Mac Mini, sees through two iSight eyes, breathes through a fan in his nose, speaks through a speaker in his mouth, and proudly proclaims what OS he's running with the neon Apple on his side. Check out the instructions (with lots of pictures) on how to make one yourself--although you might need to save them until next year, as the trick-or-treating begins at sundown!
[via MAKE]
After a long wait and much anticipation I discovered last night that iSkin has finally released its skin for the second generation iPod nano. I have always loved iSkin's products because of their simplicity and functionality. However, rather than being excited over the new iSkins, I was disappointed. iSkin has been going down a path which strays from the simplicity of their original skins, and I don't like it.
The new nano skins, for example, have two parts--one which is the silicon skin and another which is a hard plastic shell (much like the iSkin for the iPod video). I think their skins detract from the simple beauty and functionality of the iPod. Not only that, but the skins aren't even compatible with the iPod nano dock. I emailed iSkin a question about this and received a response which said:
The iPod nano (2G) is only compatible with the universal [dock] adapter, but we will be releasing an extension cable [for the nano dock] in the near future.
What? An extension cable for my nano dock? Oh, you mean like one of these? Oh yes, and I nearly forgot: iSkin only sells these nano skins in packs of three. Since when do I need three skins for my one iPod? Plus, the colors they choose now a days aren't nearly as exciting as they used to be. Just check out the picture above--it has boring written all over it.
Call this post a rant, but I just don't like where iSkin is going. I miss the olden days with the original, simple iSkin eVo. Maybe my expectations for iSkin were just too high on this one.
Just one of the many things you may not know about me: I lived in Scotland for a time while in college. Edinburgh, to be exact. This was well before the days of brick-and-mortar Apple Stores back in the US, but I was pleased to find in my first ramble about the town that there was an Apple reseller not a block from my dorm. Just like being at home.
Now Apple's about to get its first official store in Caledonian climes. Unfortunately, it's not in my old stomping grounds of Edinburgh, but rather in that other Scottish city: Glasgow.
The store will be situated at 147 Buchanan Street, in one of the city's prime shopping districts. Currently at the site is a building called "The Pier." The plans call for removing the mezzanine floor, adding an elevator and, of course, covering the inside floor and walls with stainless steel. I rather hope they leave the exterior largely untouched, as it's quite an attractive building with, I'd imagine, at least some degree of historical significance. The intended start of construction is next February with the store opening sometime in July. The total cost of the endeavor? £1,168,000 (or $2.2 million). That's a wee bit of change, it is.
But if you ask me, what's the real reason for putting an Apple store in Glasgow? Why, its most famous artist and designer, but of course.
[via Infinite Loop]
TechRepublic has a great article posted, covering the more technical details of networking Macs and PCs. Sure, you can easily plug them together, but making them talk is a whole 'nother matter entirely. Thankfully, Mac OS X comes loaded with many of the technologies to make sharing files easy.
One point I'm surprised they didn't mention, though, is the great little Mac application SharePoints. While OS X may come with the necessary technology, accessing it can be made much easier using SharePoints, which allows you to create Windows (and Mac) shared folders, much like how the Finder used to work in pre-OS X days. If you deal with both Macs and PCs and intend to share files between them, both the article mentioned above and SharePoints are your best bet for starting points.
One of my favorite Safari addons, AcidSearch, can vastly improve your web browsing speed by creating just a few custom Search Channels. The end result is that you're able to type something along the lines of "img macbook keyboard" to instantly jump to a Google Images search. Here's how.
When searching a site, take a look at the address bar and note where your search terms appear in the web address. Copy the entire address, open AcidSearch's preferences by clicking on the search engine icon in Safari's search field, and add a new channel. In the prefix field, paste the entire address leading up to your terms, and put the rest of the address (minus your search tems) in the suffix field. When your new channel is put to use, your terms will be sandwiched between the prefix and suffix, making a new address for each search. Finally, give the channel a short letter or three combination.
Close the window and try out your new channel by typing [combination] [search terms], sans the brackets. After you've added a few more on top of the default channels, you'll be cruising through searches in no time!
Awaken, a pretty neat application that turns your Mac into a ridiculously expensive alarm clock, has just entered its beta stage for version 3.0. For an application that's sole purpose is fulfilled by just about every gadget on the planet, it actually seems like a pretty cool setup. It might beat my current solution of dragging a song file to the desktop, then telling iCal to open it up every morning (there's no better way to hate a song than to hear it every day at the time when your wrath levels are at their highest).
With a sleep timer, iTunes playlist support, Apple Remote support, and a cool FrontRow-esque interface option, you can try it for free for two weeks. After that, Awaken 3 costs $8.95.
As promised, I went ahead and grabbed the beta of Disco. After a night of CD burning on a scale of unprecedented magnitude (for me at least), I think I've gained enough experience with the app to give my opinions some credibility. What follows are some of my initial impressions of the app.
Keep in mind that this is a beta. Some of the negative attributes I've mentioned may go away, or at least be minimized by the time the app reaches its final stage.
So, without further ado, here's the good, the bad, and the rest.
Continue reading "Disco Beta First Impressions"
There's been a lot of talk about Apple's blogging policy—or lack thereof. Not long ago, we were all speculating about the Masked Blogger, an occupation that was interesting for perhaps a full five minutes. Anonymity is attention-getting, but it soon becomes boring when you have no idea about the person's credentials or whether or not they're even what they purport to be.
That's what makes nondifferentiable.com so refreshing. Jim Puls is an Apple engineer working on Apple Mail. He says so, right in his blog. No tricks, no hiding, no masks. Of course, being an Apple blogger, there're restrictions on what he can talk about, but again, he's upfront about it:
Just like everybody else at Apple, I've signed a non-disclosure agreement. You’re welcome to ask me anything you want about juicy unreleased product details and I’ll be happy to respond with a hearty "no comment".So we won't get any details on the down low; I'm cool with that. The best thing about Jim's blog is that it gives me the impression that the people at Apple aren't simply shielded behind a big gleaming white facade that filters all traffic in and out. They're people and, better yet, they're Mac fans:
You’re welcome to report bugs you find in Mail or ask about a feature you really want to see, and I’ll be happy to read your e-mail and promptly not respond. Believe me when I say that I read all of the same Apple-related websites that you do. If Macintouch or Hawk Wings or Macnn or Macworld or TUAW or TAB or any of the rest are reporting something, I guarantee I’m well aware of it.See? He's one of us, trolling the web for the latest infor—wait, no MacUser? Dude.
[via Hawk Wings]
