Tiger, finally
After two failed delivery attempts last week and one this morning, i finally managed to have tiger successfully delivered this afternoon after a bunch of phone calls. From what i can tell even the austrian postal service seems more reliable than tnt.
So far it feels more like an incremental update than something genuinely revolutionary, but that’s perhaps because the “big” new features like spotlight, dashboard and automator haven’t made it into my daily workflow yet. Unsurprisingly it’s the little things that i find most pleasant so far:
- Caps lock can be deactivated! I bet there’s nobody out there who actually finds caps lock useful, but millions stumbling over it regularly. Just go to “system preferences” ->”mouse & keyboard” ->”modifier keys” ->”caps lock key: no action” to deactivate.
- The image slideshow finally delivers one of very few features i really missed after switching from windows to mac os x.
- I don’t really care for rss support in safari, but it’s nice that you can specify an alternative default feed reader. Proper feed subscription from within the browser at long last.
- The birthday calendar in ical is really nice, pulling in birthday information from addressbook. Except that with this feature missing in the past i never bothered to enter birth-dates in addressbook and threw them in a regular old ical calendar. Well, my address book needs lots of care-taking soonish anyway.
- Dictionary lookup everywhere is every bit as nice as expected.
- Smart folders in mail appear as useful as anticipated and i’m sure i haven’t grasped a fraction of their versatility yet.
- Preview appears a lot more polished. The two new features i appreciate most so far are jpeg2000 support (the lack thereof forced me to install the abysmal adobe reader twice in the past) and the capability to display two pages alongside each other – not exactly revolutionary, nice nonetheless.
Of course it’s not all sunshine: spotlight is a tad slow on my machine, mail is as ugly as it looks on screenshots and dashboard just doesn’t quite feel right – not quite up to quality standards one has come to expect from apple. Nonetheless so far i’m quite happy with the upgrade. More as it comes to mind.
New major podcast player
If this appleinsider report is correct, odeo et al. will get some serious competition soon:
During his chat, Jobs demonstrated iTunes 4.9, a forthcoming version of Apple’s digital music jukebox software. Calling it the “Tivo for Radio for iPod, ” he said the new version would incorporate Podcast support – allowing users to download and subscribe to pre-recorded audio content. [...] Apple will also release a tool that will allow any Podcast creator to easily upload their content to the company’s music store.
Apple definitely isn’t a company i’d like to compete with in the digital music landscape.
Star Wars Episode 3
I went to see star wars episode 3 yesterday. Apparently there are people who claim that it doesn’t suck, that it’s actually quite good and that it’s worth your money. Heck, i’ve heard some people say it’s the best part out of the whole series. It’s not. Let me repeat this so nobody misses it: it’s not. It sucks big time.
George Lucas shouldn’t be allowed to write just one more line of dialogue. The love scenes with ani and padme are among the worst i’ve ever seen, Natalie Portman doesn’t even pretend to attempt to deliver an adequate performance and Hayden Christensen always sucked (i dig his haircut though).
Who cares about dialogues and love scenes anyway, it’s all about the action you might say. Well, even that didn’t work out for me at all. Amidst a flurry of blazing lasers, epic battles in space and lightsaber duels i had to try hard not to fall asleep halfway through the movie. I think this new yorker review wraps it up precisely:
Whether the director is aware of John Martin, the Victorian painter who specialized in the cataclysmic, I cannot say, but he has certainly inherited that grand perversity, mobilized it in every frame of the film, and thus produced what I take to be unique: an art of flawless and irredeemable vulgarity. All movies bear a tint of it, in varying degrees, but it takes a vulgarian genius such as Lucas to create a landscape in which actions can carry vast importance but no discernible meaning, in which style is strangled at birth by design, and in which the intimate and the ironic, not the Sith, are the principal foes to be suppressed.
It’s a dull and ungraceful flick lacking any substance and most definitely neither worth your time nor money. Don’t taint your precious childhood memories of the original star wars myths with this concoction.
SimpleBackpack: PHP wrapper class for Backpack API
I had a few spare braincycles to burn over the last two days and whipped up a simple php wrapper class for the backpack api. It’s in a very early stage and lacks documentation at the moment, but perhaps someone finds this useful. Read more about it at the simplebackpack projects page.
N-Gage, the platform
N-Gage ‘Platform’ To Expand Over Nokia’s Smartphone Range. Not to toot my own horn, but i told you so. Well, technically Russell told you so before me, but we were both way earlier onto this than nokia. Here’s what he has to say about the announcement.
Productivity redux
Having written rather extensively about backpack before (the good, the bad), it’s appropriate to mention that 37signals kept their promise to introduce an api for backpack, and an extensive and well documented one at that. As i expect my copy of tiger to arrive by the end of the week, could someone put together a dashboard widget for backpack pretty soon pretty please?
While i’m on the topic of productivity tools, tiddlywiki has regained some momentum lately, mostly due to gtdtiddlywiki, an adaptation of the original tailored to getting things done. 43folders asked its readers how they’re putting it to good use, worth a glance-over. Also noteworthy: tiddlywikiremote, a neat tiddlywiki implementation with a serverside component and Jonathan Paisley’s hacks for safari-saving support and putting gtdtiddlywiki onto your dashboard.
Established way before engadget.com
I recently came across someone who mixed up engadget.com and engadgeted.net (the site you’re reading right now).
I don’t remember where it was, i think the person was misattributing my heat map plugin. I really don’t mind too much because i can easily understand how such a mix-up can happen what with the very similar names, but i thought it bears repeating that this similarity really isn’t my fault. Let’s do two quick whois-queries to drive the point home, shall we?
First, here’s (in excerpt) what you’ll get when you query “engadget.com” at whois.godaddy.com:
And here’s what you’ll get when you query “engadgeted.net” at whois.godaddy.com:
There! You see? Me and my site have been around a year longer than engadget.com. Now if you’re wondering where these two months in the archives before my domain registration come from – i started this site under its current name without the proper domain in dec ’02, back when Peter Rojas was still writing for gizmodo.
I already think about adding a byline like “established way before engadget.com”, but what i really wanna know is – can i sue? Just kidding.
Back on Mac
The ‘book’s back after only four days in repair. Hopefully things will stay in order now *knock on wood*, i’ve read far too many stories of recurring problems on bulletin boards during my troubleshooting research.
Two good things that came from being on windows for a few days: i was reminded why i love my mac so much and i finally came around to fixing all the design problems with internet explorer 6. Everything should look exactly as intended in firefox, internet explorer 6 and safari now.
p.s.: system-wide spellchecking is a godsend.
Snafu
I’ll just put the whole weekend-debacle up here as a bulleted list, i’m too exhausted for anything with real merit.
- The whole thing started on wednesday, when my ibook started randomly freezing. Later examination suggested kernel panics. Booted without extensions, zapped the pram, no signs of relief. Ran the hardware test that came with my ibook, ran the other hardware test that came with my apple care protection plan, no signs of faulty hardware. Things got continually worse over the next few days. Managed to grab a half-decent backup. On sunday the ibook didn’t even boot anymore, i started to brace myself for having it picked up and fixed with the prospect of going back to windows for a few days or possibly even weeks.
- On saturday at 5am my domain transfer to a new registrar came through. What i hadn’t expected was that my old registrar would also dispose of my dns records on his nameservers, so the site wasn’t reachable anymore. I slept late that day, with no working ibook waiting for me i couldn’t find any reason for getting out of bed, noticed that my site was down when i finally got up. Rushed through a chaotic site transition to textdrive and switched nameservers. Things should be more or less working around here by now, again sorry for any inconvenience caused. Again if you need to email me, please use my gmail address for now (firstname.lastname@gmail.com) or ping me on aim, screenname christoph179.
- Called apple support today. They couldn’t find any traces of me, my ibook or my apple care protection plan in their system. I started to panic. Fortunately the person on the other side of the line was extremely helpful, gave me instructions on how to activate my protection plan even though my laptop is out of its one-year-warranty by now and issued a cs-ticket so i can drop the defunct laptop at a service partner without having to remedy the protection plan issues beforehand. I’m still a little freaked out, but i’m slowly calming down. Really looking forward to my pilates course today, i need some soothing.
So it’s back to windows for a while. Gosh, i didn’t know my site looks that fucked up in internet explorer…
Sorry for the downtime
Had some hosting-trouble, resulting in this site being down/unreachable most of yesterday. I switched dns-servers late last night, so far the change has propagated to one of my two providers, the other one’s apparently a tad negligent in keeping its nameserver records up-to-date. If you can read this post, you’ve made it to the new server, this site is from now on proudly hosted by textdrive. Sorry for any inconvenience caused. E-mail at this domain might be wonky over the next few days, if it’s urgent, ping me on aim, screenname christoph179, or use my gmail address (firstname.lastname@gmail.com).
Possibly more on the whole thing later, right now i’m a little stressed out. Worst weekend in at least a year.