Saturday, April 30th, 2005

Well, it seems a ton of respected sites are posting their thoughts on Tiger, so it’s a given that I should throw my hat into the ring as well.

After using Tiger for a day or so, I have to say that it’s one of the most polished operating systems I’ve had the pleasure of using in quite some time. While the ‘gee whiz’ factor for Spotlight and Dashboard obviously will capture most headlines, it’s some of the other things that have made my experience so far very pleasant. Some random cool things that have made my day a lot brighter:

• Safari 2.0 is FAST. Fastest browser I’ve ever used.
• Safari’s new RSS button (a la firefox’s in a way) will automatically send the feed to your default aggregator if you so choose
• Control+Command+D when selecting any word brings up a dictionary definition of the word
• The ‘Grab’ screenshot app now saves as png, not just pdf.
• Mail has been totally revamped, and now is a borderline “professional” application. Lots of features that finally rival Outlook, etc in it’s customizability.
• Spotlight has already supplanted Quicksilver as my app-launcher of choice. It’s just so much faster and indexes things immediately. Speaking of Spotlight…
• I searched for the word ‘and’ with Spotlight, and within 1 second I was shown 16,000 examples of the word. Very cool.
• Dashboard is kind of useful, but not something I can see myself using that much. I do plan on writing a nice little app to let me update my blog without actually having to use a browser, however. As it’s based on javascript/css/xhtml, it won’t be much of an issue.
• 99.9% of my apps work, and all my ‘mission-critical’ ones do without a hiccup.

Overall, this version of OS X runs like a dream. It’s noticeably faster in almost area (startup, shutdown, app launch, window resizing), and a .4.1 release is due out soon to squash any lingering bugs. Also, with Dave Hyatt making Safari the first browser to pass the Acid2 test, the next release or two should bring us huge improvements to standards-compliance.

Overall, I’d have to give Tiger a pretty solid review - it’s only been around a day since I’ve installed it, so I’m sure I will find tons more that I love, and tons more that I hate in a week or two.

Welcome! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Posted on April 30th, 2005 | No Comments »

Wednesday, April 27th, 2005

I’ve been really busy lately.

This month has been really hectic - not difficult, but just hectic. Both of the classes I’m currently in are both very demanding of your time (especially our web project class), and it’s been a while since I’ve really been able to come home from school and disassociate myself from what’s going on in lab.

My web project class consists of the following assignment: choose a local business and redesign their site. My group and I chose Palnano’s, a local coffee shop that has a really nice atmosphere, but their current site was really lacking that same feel. We should be done with the redesign by tomorrow, and I’m really pleased with how it came out. It took tons of work to get everything where we wanted (and a lot of compromise as well), but overall the project went smoothy. I have a final presentation on Friday, and then it’s over.

My real time 3d class has not been as demanding (and admittedly has been a lot more fun), but it still has had it’s share of stressful elements. The assignment in this class is to create a level for a first-person shooter style game. It’s been really interesting to see the process that goes into game content creation, laying out assets, and texturing/modeling in a 3d environment. I’d never actually do this for a career or even a job, but I’ve really enjoyed working with the team I ended up working with. While there are no characters to fight or anything like that in this current level, I will post a Windows executable of the game level when we finish tomorrow night. I’m looking forward to seeing our work in action.

Overall, it’s just been one of those months that has drained every ounce of energy out of me. Sadly, the only “fun” things I’ve done in the past 3-4 weeks are as follows: went and saw one movie, and watched the NFL draft last weekend. That’s it. I just can’t wait till this weekend to get out to the beach and away from the thought of school. I can’t believe I only have 5 more months here before I graduate. I’ve got to make some big decisions about my future soon, and I’m still torn on what to do…

Anywho, sorry about the long gap between posts. Things should be back to normal soon.

Posted on April 27th, 2005 | No Comments »

Saturday, April 16th, 2005

Safari 1.3 is out, and wow, it’s remarkably faster than version 1.2 was (30+ % faster according to most benchmarks). Safari ‘RSS’ (2.0), due out with Tiger, is supposed to be even faster, and I’m really looking forward to the competition between all the browsers on the Mac platform in the coming months.

With Safari 2.0, Camino .9 and Firefox 1.1 all due out by the end of the summer at the very least, it’s going to be a very exciting time for the Mac web browsing experience.

The one thing that may have me leaning back towards Safari 2.0 is what Mr. Dave Hyatt is doing with the Safari team. He’s making great strides to make this browser not only fast, but in line with web standards. So far, he’s more than halfway thru getting the Acid2 browser test, which is light years ahead of how most browsers render the page.

If this page keeps up, I can see myself using Safari more than I do right now…

Posted on April 16th, 2005 | 2 Comments »

Friday, April 15th, 2005

After weighing the pros and cons of all of the free CMS’ out there (Movable Type, TexPattern, WordPress amongst others), I have decided to move my v4 of this site to TextPattern. I’ll still try to stay up on the MT syntax, but I think I’ll also try to move future clients in need of a good CMS to TextPattern as well.

Some of the plugins for TextPattern look truly compelling, and I have been talking about switching for quite some time … well, thinking about it at least. The amount of rebuilding one has to do with TextPattern is noticeably lower as well. I also want to use Textile in my blog, and the MT implementation is a bit awkward.

Anywho, this transition will likely take quite some time, as I’m up to my neck in schoolwork and other projects right now. I’ve started the basic process of laying out the site in a more original manner, but I think it will be quite some time before I have the entire process done. I want to use this redesign as practice of how my workflow should progress. So, I’m doing this very formally, as if it’s for a client. Also, look for a flash-based portfolio site to move to DanielAndrews.com by the summer. I’m trying to separate the ‘wtmcgee’ thing from my business side, and it’s kind of hard when you use it as your business email.

Posted on April 15th, 2005 | 2 Comments »

Monday, April 11th, 2005

I was over at Jon Hicks’ site and saw he had done an entry on the history of his site. It seemed like a great idea to go thru the old designs of my site and see how it’s evolved over the years. I’m still in the process of learning the fine art of CSS, XHTML, and web design in general, but it’s amazing to see how far I’ve come in the past few years. Below is a magical journey down memory lane.
(more…)

Posted on April 11th, 2005 | No Comments »