Cameron Moll’s website sometimes runs Screen Grab Confabs, whereby participants post 320 pixel square portions of their work and post in onto his site. I’ve decided to adopt this idea for this blog, posting teasers of what we’re working on. Here’s the first:
..something which greatly improves the usability of a client’s website, by leveraging Behaviour, a library which enables unobtrusive Javascript behaviours.
After one day of being without backups for my music, normal services has returned. I purchased a 250Gb Iomega Minimax which sits under my Mac Mini in my lounge. Reformatted it as an Extended Journalled disk and then psync-ed it.
I’d link to the device, but the Iomega site doesn’t work anywhere unless the links have a valid session ID. (If you don’t have one, you get a lovely ‘Bad Request [C2]’ error)
The best I can do is link to the Iomega home page, then you can go hunting for the product yourself. No, there isn’t a search form.
Yesterday, Apple announced its annual winners of the Apple Design Awards ‘Celebrating the best in Mac OS X software’.
Pity the announcement page has no links to the software that they believe is so great. But, you can find the official contest rules for a contest that’s over.
Today – the day of the election – I received a campaign letter from the same guy who sent me the letter yesterday. I’m half-expecting another one around about noon! Please, don’t bother, because I’m not going to vote for you. Nor, would I vote for anyone who pesters my doormat with such vigour, or assumes me to be a ‘friend’.
No, I’m going to vote for someone who sent me just one campaign letter, nicely designed and printed, with succinct messages, and who in the previous six years has demonstrated his commitment to our area through the evidence of the work he does.
We have a local councillor election tomorrow in my area. Over the past four weeks numerous leaflets have been sent to me. On two occasions, the candidates themselves have appeared on my doorstep – whilst I was out. But, such is the way of politics that I never see these people outside of elections. So much for the passion and commitment they allege to have to my area.
Today, I received a ‘personal’ ‘thank-you’ letter inside a hand-written envelope from one of the candidates. The letter was even hand-written too. Gosh, what an impact I must have made. Gosh, a personal letter. How nice and, um, committed.
Except, it wasn’t a personal letter. It was a hand-written letter that had then been professionally printed.
My lesson of today is: don’t claim that something is personal, when it plainly isn’t.
Here’s some evidence of why you should backup. Today, the hard drive that contains all of my music failed. That’s 15974 songs. Gone. No disk utility was useful. And instead of music I now have the clackity-clackity sound of the drive trying desperately to find something.
How many of the songs did I really lose? 13. Precisely the number of songs I bought yesterday.
Because I have a daily backup that moves everything onto another drive.
Maybe some people were drooling over the release of Mac Pro systems at this year’s Apple WWDC, but I wasn’t. Heck, it’s a box with some faster kit. No, I was interested in Mac OS X, Leopard, due to ship Spring 2007.
In particular, improvements to and/or introduction of the following:
Apple Mail seems to be sprouting features unrelated to mail in the same way that iTunes grew photo support. However, now that Apple Mail has Notes and ToDos, it’s possible that entire workflows can be managed from within it. Especially when one exploits Smart Mailboxes. True, Microsoft Entourage had similar features years ago, but has always been crippled by dismal search capabilities.
By providing system-wide, any-application creation of ToDos (which integrate with iCal), Apple Mail can become the centre of one’s work. This assertion is backed-up by the new version supporting RSS feeds, much like Mozilla Thunderbird currently does.
Taking all the improvements to Mac OS X as a whole, it is apparent that Leopard will be about collaboration. We have iChat’s remarkable Shared Screen capability, and although the idea is not new, the execution is stunning. I can see us using this in an office environment: remote pair programming.
iCal will now support group calendars, meetings, attendees, location reservations and files for events. It’s currently unclear whether Mac OS X Server, .Mac and/or iCal Server will be a pre-requisite for all this. There should also be a calendaring API which will allow application developers (and perhaps those who use Automator) to leverage the technology in their software.
For user-friendly backups and ad-hoc restoring, Time Machine provides version controlled files for the ‘rest of us’. All you need is an extra hard disk. Time Machine is not merely a copy of Windows System Restore – they serve entirely different purposes – because Time Machine is file based, not system based. This will be ideal for all of those times I’ve accidentally overwritten a working version of a source code file.
With these features alone, I’ll be buying Mac OS X Leopard when it’s released.
Techcrunch reports on DesktopTwo – a web based service which provides desktop-like usability on a web browser. Facilities include instant messaging, MP3 player, address book, web page editing, blog publishing, e-mail and search. All using the well understood and used metaphors of the desktop and computer-based applications. Their business model will probably derive from the selling of online storage space, although you get 1GB for free when signing up.
It’s undeniably cool, and one of the better examples of this genre of web service. But it’s the wrong solution to the problem of accessing information away from your desktop in multiple places.
As someone commented “So, while using an OS that has a ‘desktop’, I fire up a browser to launch.. a desktop?” Moreover, if you are using a device that doesn’t have the power or capability to run fully-fledged applications, you can bet that a web-based desktop running on the same device won’t be worth using. In this example, DesktopTwo requires: Java, Acrobat Reader, Flash version 9, Cookies and Pop-up support. I guess you need a web browser too.
Another writes “after you use them for about 5 minutes you realize that you would never use them for day-to-day activities.”
All of this is getting me more antsy about Everything Online. There is an alternative solution. Perhaps it’s about time I splurged out some text and graphics on it.
Throwing Muses:
Strange time to be hazing me
Breaking me
Shaking me awake now
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