MarsEdit 3.0

If you regularly write blog posts, and do so on a Mac, you should be using MarsEdit – a real post editor – and not some browser-based textarea junk. There’s a new 3.0 version out today, and you should download the trial and then buy it in support of excellent independent software authors! I mean, […]

Apple WWDC 2009

If you read my post last year and want to make plans, here’s the link.

Facilitating Online Identity Management

Companies should make identity management easy within their online services. Specifically, it’s becoming more and more desirable to have a “split my identity” feature. For example, I have a Twitter account. Turns out I like Twitter. (It wasn’t always the case.) Eventually I want to split my twitter stream into a personal stream and a […]

Downloading .asx video streams

Say there’s an online video that is only available for real-time streaming, and you want to watch it offline at your non-‘net convenience, like on a plane or on your iPhone. A lot of these streams have urls that end in .asx. If so, here are some (techie, Mac-centric) references that will let you download […]

Hot Dating Tip [SF, CA, USA]

It’s sweeping generalizations day at Notio! I guess it’s kind of a semi-secret, but once you crack the code, dating geeks is a really good move. Granted, the male/female ratio is unbalanced – but generally, if you’re a woman and you’re looking for a guy, you could do a heck of a lot worse than […]

FYI

WinXP (hello, ActiveX) & IE7 (welcome, Acrobat Reader 8.1.2) running Online Quickbooks, via Parallels and Mac OS X running on a MacBook Pro, prints checks no problem on the HP color laser connected via JetDirect and Ethernet. Astounding.

Programmatic Color Palettes From Images

You may recall that I wrote a Ruby program about nine months ago to programmatically generate a color palette. In that version, I manually measured the colors from an image on screen, and typed them into a text file, and the program generated color squares from the text file. When I finished I wanted to […]

Leopard Might Be Ready

When Betalogue says Mac OS X 10.5.2 is a very good release, it may be ready to use. So, it’s not all rosy and there is of course still plenty of room for improvement. Still, I must say that the combination of the improvements that Mac OS X 10.5 brought (particularly in Spotlight and Safari) […]

The Point and Pixish

The Point looks really interesting. The Point is a social platform for people to solve problems they can’t solve alone. Start an ultimatum, fundraiser, or social contract. Whatever the cause, use a campaign to bring it to the tipping point. Also, beautiful minimalist design. Bonus link: Pixish, Visual Assignments For Creative People. Less beautiful design, […]

On Twitter

rentzsch: yay morphed a client meeting into client work-time. “Nothing new to talk about, how about I just keep working?” “Sure.” I love sane clients I never understood Twitter. I checked it out way back when, probably around when it first started, readin’ the blogs and all, and I just didn’t get it. “Okay, you’re […]

Running Out of Ideas?

Amusing one-line review of Handmeon, pointing to the Boston Globe article: Handmeon.com is a cool idea, perhaps showing that Web 2.0 entrepreneurs may be running out of ideas. Well, I laughed out loud. He goes on to say, “Actually, I do think it’s a pretty interesting social experiment.” Thanks Pito, for taking a look.

Letter from Steve

As usual, John Siracusa wrote the definitive review of the new Mac OS (Leopard). Upon reading about the continued slide into foolishness that is today’s Finder, I sent the following email to Steve Jobs’ public email address: Hi, Please hire John Siracusa to lead the conceptual design of the next Finder revision. http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/12 It’s worth […]

This Explains Everything

Well, all those IE problems are a lot clearer now. via cboone.

Programatic Palettes

It all started when I saw Running the Numbers. I really enjoyed the colors of the very last photo, Shipping Containers. I thought, “I wonder if that would make a good color palette?” I fired up the Digital Color Meter, which ships in the Applications/Utilities directory of all Mac OS X systems, and set the […]

On The Matter of Constructing RSS Feeds

I believe this is working now, for real. The situation is that RSS readers vary significantly in how they mark what is new and what isn’t. It turns out that the GUID, supposedly a “globally unique identifier”, when constructed as a url, can confuse newsreaders – even good ones like NNW. It is globally unique, […]

The Joy of Developing

The great Mac RSS newsreader, NetNewsWire, has a new beta out, version 3.0. It’s really good, with a ton of performance improvements and nicer layouts. But, they say it crashes some, and they want bug reports. In fact, it did crash on me once in the past couple of weeks ago, so I sent a […]

Rapid Serial Visual Presentation

Reading this interview with Cory Doctorow (by RU Sirius, nonetheless), I discovered Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (of text). The speed-read shows you one word at a time, and it shows them at a speed that’s determined by a little slider. And it pauses a little after a comma, and longer after a period, and longer […]

Social Web Hits The Election Cycle

Great post over at Bokardo Social Web Design, altering us that Hillary Clinton is using Yahoo answers to gather the prol’s thoughts on health-care reform. One, Clinton is actually asking the American people what they think, rather than assuming or generalizing from the party she’s a part of. (this doesn’t mean she’ll listen, but it’s […]

Wesabe

Been meaning to post this for a while: Wesabe. There’s a good tour describing the app. Wesabe is a community of people who share our experiences with our money so we can help each other make better financial decisions. We do this by aggregating and analyzing our community members’ personal financial data, and showing tips […]

PawSense

PawSense: Catproof your computer. When cats walk or climb on your keyboard, they can enter random commands and data, damage your files, and even crash your computer. This can happen whether you are near the computer or have suddenly been called away from it. PawSense is a software utility that helps protect your computer from […]