Chausse.org

So, anyone on the fence about upgrading to Mac OS X Leopard, just… don’t. I mean, it’s not as much a step backward as going from XP to Vista, but I’ve found very little in it that has improved my life. In fact, I’ve spent a whole lot of time figuring out how to hack away most of its changes:

1. Removing the horrible translucent menu bar. Here’s how I did it.
2. Getting rid of the ridiculous 3D dock. Here’s how I did it.
3. Changing the folder icons to ones that are, well, distinguishable. Here’s a good set.
4. Getting rid of the abysmal Stacks. Oops, can’t be done. But putting Aliases instead of folders in the dock can help. You don’t get the “show-as-menu-mouse-button-hold” thing, but at least you can avoid the stupid Fan and Grid views, and use a recognizable icon.

I also have never gotten my Aiport Disk drives to work quite right in Leopard, and Time Machine, the one compelling reason to upgrade, required a hack to work with my wireless drives.

And just as a final note, the OS has literally lost its sheen. Sure, early versions of brushed metal were a bit tacky, but I really miss the faint pinstripes, metal textures and other subtle effects. The totally flat gray widows of Leopard are just… blah.

I guess there’s some good back-end stuff going on in the Leopard kernel and whatnot but nothing that’s really changed MY life. And, of course, you can’t sell a $129 OS upgrade to regular folks without throwing in some new whizbang features. But I get the feeling that (aside from the brilliant Time Machine) Apple just focused on the back end for Leopard, and threw in some entirely rushed and thoughtless UI changes just to give folks the impression that they were buying an improved experience. I wouldn’t say that Emperor Leopard has no clothes, but they’re wearing out as quickly as a $20 acrylic sweater.

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Have an Apple Mighty Mouse (or regular optical mouse?) Check out this optical illusion and/or Easter Egg…

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Just when you think you’ve seen everything, another mind-blowing demo. This could play a huge role in the Mobile Web.

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Here’s a great little personal computing “life hack” I picked up via a colleague. If you’re the type who lets icons pile up on your desktop, then gets annoyed and depressed by your lack of digital organizational skills, try this little trick.

Make your desktop icons REALLY, REALLY big. Like, as big as they can get. Like, 128×128 pixels on the Mac.

I’ve been doing this on the Mac, which is simple to set up, but I believe this is also reasonably doable on Windows Vista.

At first, I thought this was silly, but it really works. And, I think it works for a few reasons:

1. The desktop stops feeling cluttered after about five or six icons, at which point it’s still quite easy to clean up.
2. If, for whatever reason you don’t keep clean, your desktop will completely fill up rather quickly, yet still be fairly easy to clear up.
3. The detail within the icons makes it much easier to determine at a glance what has reason to be there (your drives), and what doesn’t (gobs of PDF’s that Firefox dumped there during a browsing session?)
4. The icons feel more like physical objects. When you clean up, you feel like you’ve performed a real task, rather than just moved some bits around.
5. With the Mac’s beautifully rendered icons, the things that belong there feel like attractive real world desk accesssories, further inspiring you to keep the clutter away. With Vista your mileage may vary

Give it a try. Let me know what you think!

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If you use Boot Camp on a Mac to dual boot between Windows and Mac OS X, you have likely noticed that the clock goes wonky every time you switch between operating systems.  Here’s a quick registry hack for the Windows side that rectifies this problem (I hope… I’m blogging this before I actually reboot to try it out…)

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I’m now a 100% Mac user (aside from the incident where my mom wanted to show my wife a “how-to-knit” CD-ROM that was Windows-only. I have an iMac in my home office, and i use a MacBook Pro at work. One thing I’m learning about Mac culture is that Mac users are a productivity-minded lot. Contrary to the stereotype that we’re noodling on GarageBand or iMovie all day, Mac users like to get things done quickly, their way.

There are so many Mac apps devoted to this goal. Some examples:

VoodooPad: A personal Wiki tool that lets you do damn near anything.

TextMate: A text/code editor that brings the “customize everything” ethos of Emacs into the modern world.

TextExpander: A tool that lets you create really cool text abbreviations that expand into long chunks of text that you would otherwise repeatedly type out.

Quicksilver: I haven’t even quite figured out what this does, but it’s some sort of major productivity enhancing tool with a cult-like following.

I bring this up now because I came across this great quote from a Mac user stuck working on a PC for a while:

One thing Windows does is make me want to give up earlier. I actually just don’t care if I can’t figure out a good way to do something. This is an exciting new feeling - I just give up and get back to work, and each time, I feel a little more like a real grownup. You know, how you feel after all your youthful dreams have died.

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Can’t you just FEEL the excitement surrounding the Vista launch?

Woohoo.

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I was doing something in iPhoto, when I noticed something very odd. I could drag a single image into an album, but couldn’t drag multiple images. After a bit of Googling, I found the following Apple Knowledge Base article:

What to do if you can’t drag multiple photos in iPhoto

Apparently, my computer was missing the Helvetica font (don’t ask). You see, iPhoto likes to draw a nice little number icon showing how many items you’re dragging, and it likes to do it using Helvetica. And if it can’t have Helvetica, it just won’t let you do the drag at all.

How Apple-ish to just completely remove a feature if it can’t execute it using the perfect font!

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Tivo will soon integrate with Rhapsody. I’m a huge Rhapsody fan, and a huge Tivo fan. Two great tastes tasting great together. Nearly any song on my home theater system at any time. I like it.

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This morning I installed Firefox 2.0. This evening I declare it unspeakable awesome.

Why? Well, I was working on a Very Special blog post (you’ll see it shortly) for at least half an hour, when my computer suddenly rebooted itself without any warning whatsoever - (note to self: I think the computer is overheating). Being that this is a Wordpress blog, my post was simply being typed up in a basic, garden variety HTML “textarea” - so, clearly my post was doomed.

Not so. Upon getting back into Windows, Firefox realized Something Bad had happened, and asked me if I wanted to “restore my session”. I agreed to this, and Firefox not only reopened all the browser windows and tabs that I had open when the computer crashed - the entire contents of the textbox containing my unsaved post were also revived. I see now that this is a new feature called “Session Restore”

Kudos to the Mozilla crew for building such an unbelievably useful feature into Firefox. If you’re a blogger, this is reason enough alone to upgrade. If you’re not already using Firefox - what are you waiting for?

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I clicked on a banner ad regarding the HP xw8400 Workstation. It sent me to a cutesy Flash promo, which then sent me here:

HP xw8400

If you click “Buying Options”, it tells you “This product is not available for purchase from HP’s online store”.

Well, that sucks. So I went to Google to find out who WILL sell it to me. A bit of searching led me to this page - a page in HP’s store. Where you CAN buy it.

Then I did a seach for the workstation via HP.com’s own search engine and came to this page, where I’m told the system will be available in 30 days.

Right hand, meet left hand, meet… middle hand?

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TIME.com has a great article about a new generation of writers becoming celebrities by publishing amateur news reports online:

Just as radio and television spawned new personalities and stars, the rapidly growing computer networks […] are breeding their own celebrities.

Oh, did I mention the article was written in 1985?

(Via evhead)

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Apple announced a lot of new goodies at their media event today - I’m so excited that they’re building Cover Flow into iTunes. In my brief phase where I used a Mac at home regularly, I fell in love with that app. Album view and automatic album cover downloading are a huge plus as well - lately, that’s the one feature I’ve felt iTunes really lacked - the visual experience of flipping through your CD collection. I recently moved into a rather small house and decided I’d fully embrace the MP3 revolution and keep the CD’s packed. This development will make that decision a lot easier to live with.

Anyway, not only did Apple not announce a TV tuner, they actually announced a forthcoming set-top box device called iTV that doesn’t have a TV tuner. If there’s any doubt that Apple will never integrate with cable TV, hopefully that doubt is now fully quashed.

Oh, and “one more thing”. Am I the first person to comment on Steve Jobs’ first wardrobe change in, like, 15 years? This is truly shocking - seriously. Steve just threw away a whole lot of cult figure status with one brown shirt.

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I just discovered a very cool new application/service (”beta”, naturally) for managing and sharing photos, called Sharpcast. Seeing as I already use Picasa and Flickr, why would I need another one?

Well, here’s the thing. Web apps (like Flickr) are lousy for “managing” photos, and desktop apps are lousy at sharing photos (Picasa’s new so-so Web Albums notwithstanding).

Sharpcast straddles the two with aplomb. Here’s how it works: You download the Sharpcast web application (Windows-only for now), and you dump your photos in it - via a very clean, intuitive UI. Folders automatically become “albums” (which you can modify later, if you desire). So far, no big deal. Here’s where the magic comes in…

All your photos and albums are automatically synced with a web server, which you can then access online, to view/download/manage your picture - a la Flickr. Any edits you make there will then sync back to your desktop. Cool, huh? And, the really cool part is this: when you install the app on multiple computers, all your photos get synced there, too. So, load up your images at home, install Sharpcast at work, and suddenly you have full access to all your photos - everywhere! It’s all very (dare I say it?) groovy.

Then there’s the sharing aspect. When you create an album it starts out as a “private” album - a good thing. Two clicks and it becomes a public album, which anyone can view online if they know the URL. How do they get it? Welll, Sharpcast contains a very primitive but effective “contact” manager so you can very quickly spread the word about your new online album without having to re-type email addresses, or copy and paste URL’s into your email program.

Finally, there’s a very clever capability to share photos within the client application. If I add “foo@example.com” to my contact list, and he has a Sharpcast account, his public photos (as well as the semi-private ones he specifically chose to share with me) magically show up within the Sharpcast app on my computer for my perusal. Rather view them via RSS? They’ve got that too (as a Web 2.0 app, they’re obligated by law to have RSS feeds, you know.)

There’s also some features involving mobile phones, but they’re limited to Windows Mobile 5, which is a pretty limited audience. They also claim they will expand the whole system to include more than just photos. Of course, sharing audio files this way will lead to a legal death trap, but videos would be an incredibly cool feature. Documents? Hm…

This whole system is very, very nice. There are some obvious features missing (like the ability to sort photos by date - if they inadvertently get imported in the wrong order - a snag I hit in my first session), but it’s very solid for a beta application. A Mac version is allegedly in the works - I think Mac folks would eagerly embrace the clean UI and “it just works” functionality.

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Wow, whodathunkit? Apple has released (in beta) a tool called “Boot Camp“, which allows you to dual boot Windows and OSX on a Intel-based Mac. And, no, this isn’t a belated April Fool’s joke, it’s the real deal (although they do slam Windows’ security and BIOS usage on the info page). Now, Microsoft should have no gripe with this since selling a boxed copy of Windows to run on a Mac likely nets them more an OEM copy pre-installed on a Dell. But let’s see how Apple feels when someone does this in reverse…

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I bought this mousepad from the “company store” of a company that shall remain nameless. Why? Because it has four built-in USB ports - providing a very handy location for plugging in various gadgets. I Googled around for other mousepads like this, but they were all a lot uglier, so I went with the company store version. See if you can take a wild guess as to why I’m not such a big fan of it, now that it has arrived…

I guess it makes a decent USB hub/drink coaster.

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MailNation appears to be offering free email with a terrabyte of disk space. Now, disk space is pretty cheap these days, but a terrabyte of disk space will still set you back a cool grand or so. They’re probably just assuming most people would never use that much space (probably the same strategy Google was using when they announced a free gigabyte of space).

Besides, if you have a terrabyte of data, and you’re relying on a free webmail host to keep it safe - well, you should re-evaluate your plans.

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Since my usual email address has recently turned into a giant bottomless pit of spam, I’m planning on changing my address, likely to one of the “webmail” variety. Syncing my personal email between multiple computers is turning out to be a nightmare, especially since at work, we’ve switched to Microsoft Exchange. (Aside: I’m shocked no one has made a plug-in that will just sync up your mail folders — p-to-p style — between multiple Outlook installations. Maybe I’ve been hanging around Groove for too long…)

Gmail seems the hip way to go these days, but the UI there still seems a bit counter-intuitive for me. It feels like a web site, not a mail system. What I’m really intrigued by is the upcoming relaunch of Yahoo! Mail, which was fashioned after the little-known, but incredibly innovative OddPost (which they acquired). It basically offers all the interactivity of Outlook, but in a web browser.

The only problem is, you have to get an invitation from Yahoo itself, before you can use it. Grrr… Let me in, Yahoo!

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This stupid, stupid device is a perfect example of what goes wrong when you treat a feature as a bullet point, instead of carefully figuring out how the feature will integrate into the device, and how people will actually use it.

The device in question is called the “RCA Rip & Go Digital Music Studio“. The big picture sounds pretty cool. It’s a bookshelf stereo system which has the ability to rip CD’s (sans PC) directly to an included MP3 player.

Problem number one. The included MP3 player has only a 128 MB capacity. This means it will hold about 30 songs. So, two albums-ish.

That’s pretty weak, but for the total overall price, I guess there’s at least some redeeming quality to the offering. The player is nice and tiny, so you can rip a CD to it while you’re heading out of the house and take your music along with you in a nice convenient size.

One problem - and here’s the huge head scratcher. The device “rips” in REAL TIME. If you have a 45 minute CD, it takes 45 minutes to rip. This is positively mind boggling. Freeware software available 5 YEARS AGO ripped CD’s faster than that. Not to mention… remember “High speed dubbing” on your dual-deck tape recorder?

Thankfully, it is actually possible to move the MP3’s to your computer after you’ve ripped them, so you can, I don’t know, do anything sensible with them. Oh, but the device doesn’t tag your tracks in any way (to be fair, that’s mighty hard to do without full Internet access), so get ready to keep renaming “track1″ and “track2″, etc.

But, if you had a computer, why in the world would you rip CD’s with this… thing in the first place?

With very, very few exceptions, the gulf between what consumer electronics producers make and what consumer electronics consumers actually want just continues to widen. And that’s just sad.

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Another year, another “Revolutionary 3D Web Browser“. Yawn.

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