Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007

In case you didn’t know, Apple’s newest OS is due to be released this weekend. I pre-ordered my copy, but will probably wait a few days before installing, just to make sure it doesn’t melt peoples computers or anything. However, there are a few new features I am really excited about with the forthcoming update to OS X:

Font Auto-Activation

Automatically activate fonts as you need them. When an application requests an installed font that’s currently disabled, Leopard activates that font and keeps it active until the requesting application quits.

This will negate the need for a lot of people to have to use separate applications just to manage and automatically activate fonts when working on larger projects with many different font sets.

Mail Data Detectors

Act on information in Mail immediately. Mail automatically detects text fragments like appointments and addresses, and lets you choose smart actions with a click: create a new contact, map an address, or create an iCal event.

This is something I miss from Gmail, so it will be nice for this to be in Apple Mail.

Notes

Write handy notes you can access from anywhere — including graphics, colored text, and attachments. Group notes into folders or create Smart Mailboxes that automatically group them. Your notes folder acts like an email mailbox, so you can retrieve notes from any Mac or PC.

Notes & To-do lists synced between my home and work computer, and my iPhone? Not bad!

PDF Manipulation in Preview

Re-create your PDF as you like. Move individual pages around, or remove pages altogether. You can even combine PDFs with a simple drag and drop.

I work with PDFs a decent amount at work. Acrobat Professional is garbage. This will allow me to use a bad application less. I like that.

Quick Look

Look inside any document without launching an application. Use Quick Look with documents, images, songs, and movies and get a large-size preview of the file. Flip through multipage documents, preview movies, even add images to iPhoto. You can use Quick Look in Finder, Mail, and Time Machine.

Description says it all. This will save me tons of time trying to find images and documents I need.

Spaces

Organize your activities into separate spaces and easily switch from one to another. Make a space for work or play. Choose from a number of convenient options that make moving from space to space fast and easy.

I used to use VirtueDesktops, but it’s lack of OS-level integration made it kind of flimsy when working with applications assigned to certain virtual ’spaces’. This should work a lot more cleanly.

Spotlight Network Indexing

Hopefully this will be able to index non-macintosh networked computers. If Leopard can index our windows server at work (which has all of our files) that would be worth the price of admission alone.

.Mac stuff

Back to my Mac (basically like Remote Desktop, but it lists the files of your remote mac in the file sources menu just as if it were a locally networked machine), .Mac synching of Dock items & System Prefs should make using more than one mac even easier.

Finder Improvements

See the path of a file when you view it in the Finder. Just choose Show Path Bar from the View menu and the path is visible at the bottom of the Finder window. You can also drag files to any location in the Path Bar.

Welcome to 1999. Finally.

Start an interactive screen sharing session with other Macs on your network. Just select the Mac from your sidebar and (if authorized) you can see and control the Mac as if you were right in front of it. Change a system preference, publish an iPhoto library, or add a new playlist to iTunes.

This should be outstanding as well.

Overall, it looks like a pretty impressive upgrade, but not earth-shattering (or Vista-killing) yet. I plan on upgrading within a week or so of it coming out, so I’ll post my thoughts

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Posted on October 23rd, 2007 | No Comments »

Monday, October 22nd, 2007

I recently came across a really interesting article about Firefox 3’s upcoming UI refresh. That may sound boring to some, but to a interface snob like myself, knowing the Mozilla team is hard at work customizing the underlying XUL to allow for deeper system integration makes me a very happy person. One of the main problems with Firefox, especially on the Mac, is that it feels out of place, slow, and pretty ugly compared to other system applications. I’m a Camino user for this very reason, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care about some of the fantastic extensions for the Firefox client (Camino, while based off of the same rendering engine as Firefox, does not support extensions). If they are able to modify the UI to match 10.5 (and Vista, XP, Ubuntu, etc) and speed things up a bit in the process, I think a lot of people who are Camino users might switch to Firefox - myself included. Developers are already working on making things like submit buttons, checkboxes and textareas respect the OS look and feel, so by the time version 3 ships, we could be in good shape.

Why is UI consistency important? From the author:

Fitting in to the visual appearance of the native operating system may seem like a reasonably obvious decision, but it certainly isn’t one that every cross-platform application or windowing toolkit makes. For instance RealPlayer (image) uses a custom appearance across operating systems, as do applications built using Java’s Swing windowing toolkit (image). Personally I think a unified cross platform UI results in applications that at best feel foreign everywhere, and at worst don’t even feel like real applications.

He hits the nail on the head when he mentions that when using a default skin, at best the application looks out of place everywhere it goes. At worst, it looks like a flimsy Java app that nobody really wants to use. It makes the application easier to use and feel comfortable with when it fits into the operating system’s UI paradigm. This will be a big step in that direction.

I think it really depends on how far they go with it, and what parts they focus on, coupled with the limitations of Firefox as a non-native app. As long as we’re dealing with a cross-platform application, it’s pretty doubtful it will ever match the application (not rendering) speed of a Safari or Camino. But based on the few screenshots, it is looking promising. Firefox 3 is still a ways off, so we’ll see how this turns out.

Read more about the UI refresh here.

Posted on October 22nd, 2007 | No Comments »

Thursday, October 11th, 2007

I don’t know if you guys have ever seen this site, but it’s one of the most amazing (and disturbing) sites I have seen in a long time.

Posted on October 11th, 2007 | No Comments »

Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007

Remember the man running for office 8 years ago, preaching ‘compassionate conservatism?’ Well, in case you were wondering what happened to him, I don’t know either. Today, George Bush vetoed a Children’s Health Bill that was intended to provide care for poor and middle class children whose parents cannot afford to provide healthcare for them. The State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or Schip, was due to increase it’s ranks from its current enrollment of about 6.6 million children to more than 10 million. However, Mr. Bush decided that ideology trumps morality in this case.

The bill calls for $60 million over the next 5 years. Six Zero Million, over 5 years. We have now spent $450 Billion in Iraq - nearly 10 billion per month at this point. I just can’t see how we can make an argument about the fiscal responsibility of denying this type of care to children.

I understand the free-market economy argument regarding healthcare, and one could even argue that if you cannot afford health care for your child, you should not have had one in the first place. But this isn’t an expensive car that someone foolishly invested in - it’s a human life. If someone gets into financial trouble that only affects them, then I suppose they should reap what they sow. However, a child should not have to suffer or potentially die because their parents cannot or will not care for them properly.

Apparently, there are adequate votes in the Senate to override Mr. Bush’s veto, but the House is still a dozen or two votes short. Hopefully some republicans break rank and vote to override this veto.

On a local level, I’m disappointed (again) in our local representatives. Chambliss, Isakson, Price, and none of our republican representatives in the House voted for this bill, and I have written the appropriate people to let them know - as if it would actually change anything.

Posted on October 3rd, 2007 | No Comments »