blog.shrub

From Membranophonist:

• a good fix for the iTunes CDDB dialog
• he then points out a vestigial modal dialog indicating something was succesfull.

Lots of other good stuff there too.

Next, ThinkMac rethinks the spotlight window. Their design is lacking a few things, like an “all” button. I’m not convinced.

In a satire of iTunes 5, VoodooPad is now available in Dalmation and Flower Power window styles.

CreativeBits rethought the Finder, but I don’t get it.

A former Microsoft Internet Explorer (for Windows) designer explains why he switched to Firefox.

Over the past couple of years, many of my friends have started using a Mac. I often find I’m recommending software to them. Sometimes it’s because they ask; sometimes it’s because I’m so enthusiastic about a program I just have to tell them.

The single most indispensible utility for me is LaunchBar. I use it to find applications, people and music. It’s a great complement to Spotlight. LaunchBar is the first piece of software I install on any Mac.

Other stuff I like:

Internet tools

• Instant Messaging (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Jabber) in one: Adium
• (S)FTP Transmit
• P2P Acquisition
• BitTorrent Tomato Torrent
• If you’re a web developer, you need at least two browsers. Firefox is my second browser.

Productivity tools

• BBEdit is where I do my heavy lifting. (TextWrangler, its sibling, is free.)
• SubEthaEdit is a great collaborative text editor
• PCalc is a very nice calculator.
• OmniOutliner tracks my to-do lists.

System utilities

• Pseudo is handy for dealing with software that uses shitty installers.
• DiskWarrior will save your disk.
• Growl

Media

• Delicious Library tracks your books, movies, and CDs.
• VLC plays pretty much any audio or video file.
• DiVX is a great video code, cramming lots of data into very little space.

Daring Fireball: The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme:

Brushed Metal: I’m the bad-ass theme. I’m the one who flouts the Human Interface Guidelines.

Mike: This guy trashes the HIG the way Johnny Depp trashes a hotel room. He even sports a custom radius on his window corners. No other window on the system has a shape like this. It’s wild. Just wait until the HIG zealots get a load of this guy.

Kutztown, Pa. school district: Downloading iChat is a felony - IO ERROR

Thirteen high school students in Kutztown, Pa., have been charged with computer trespass, a third degree felony, for simply trying to use the laptops the school district forced on them.

I, Cringely:

What if Apple introduces OS 10.5, its next super-duper operating system release, and at the same time starts loading FOR FREE the current operating system version — OS 10.4 — on every new iPod in a version that runs on generic Intel boxes? What if they also make 10.4 a free download through the iTunes Music Store?

What’s wrong with my printer?

Originally uploaded by shrub.

My Canon i950 has started printing horizontal bands across everything but yellow and black.

Any idea what’s wrong or how to fix it?

I spent some time on the phone with Canon tech support, and changing the paper type to photo paper and the document type to “top quality photo” eliminates the banding, but I get a green cast on my photos.

I downloaded the Canon LIDE scanner software. The file was a StuffIt (.sit) file.

After I decompressed that, I was faced with “CSToolbox_OSX_v4130X.app.” That installed … another installer. The “CanoScan Toolbox Installer” actually installs the software.

Ideally, this would have been a drag install from a mounted disk image. They could have at least used the Apple installer.

Yuck.

Delicious Monster’s Wil Shipley gave a talk to students at WWDC 2005. His slides are now online.

Well worth a read. And damn funny.

Developers Speak Universal Binary:

As long as Apple picks the fastest chips, they could be tortilla chips for all we care.

—Wil Shipley

Winn Schwartau ditched Windows:

This is my first column written on a Mac - ever. Maybe I should have done it a long time ago, but I never said I was smart, just obstinate. I was a PC bigot.

But now, I’ve had it. I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.

In the coming weeks I’m going to keep a diary of an experiment my company began at 6 p.m. April 29, 2005 - an experiment predicated on the hypothesis that the WinTel platform represents the greatest violation of the basic tenets of information security and has become a national economic security risk. I do not say this lightly, and I have never been a Microsoft basher, either. I never criticize a company without a fair bit of explanation, justification and supportive evidence.

Oh yeah, he’s blogging this.