The Author – Bart Busschots
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Apr
3
NeoOffice 2.2.3 Disappointing on Leopard
Filed Under Computers & Tech on April 3, 2008 | 1 Comment
NeoOffice has been around for ages and I keep expecting and wanting it to get better to the point where I don’t feel an urge to buy iWork or, heavens forbid, MS Office. I installed it on my work machine yesterday and I’m sorry to report they’re a LONG way off yet. Firstly, it does not play nice with Spaces so it’s simply not Leopard ready. Poor show at this stage of the game. Secondly, the spell checker is broken, AGAIN. I had problems with this during the very early days of NeoOffice and then they got it fixed but now it’s bust again. What good is a word-processor that can’t spell-check? It’s possible that the spell checking problem is showing up because my computer is configured to use British English rather than American English but that’s not a valid excuse.
NeoOffice is still sluggish, un-polished and buggy. I’m sorry to have to report that but it’s the truth. The sooner the native OS X port of OpenOffice comes out the better.
[tags]OS X, Leopard, OS X 10.5, OpenOffice, NeoOffice[/tags]
Mar
27
Why Jing Is Absolutely Not For Me
Filed Under Computers & Tech on March 27, 2008 | 5 Comments
Before I explain what it is about Jing that makes me grumpy I’ll start by explaining what Jing is. The product was entirely designed around the idea of making it easy to show someone how to do something on a computer. Rather than trying to laboriously describe what to do step-by-step you simply fire up Jing and record yourself doing the task. It’s the standard a-picture-says-a-thousand-words idea. A very sound idea indeed. Jing also goes one step further and provides one-click web-publishing for your little screen-casts. So, it’s certainly safe to say that Jing is built around a very sound concept. My problems are with the implementation.
Mar
5
Nice Update to SoundSource
Filed Under Computers & Tech on March 5, 2008 | 1 Comment
Rogue Amoeba have updated their freebie menubar app SoundSource. I reviewed the previous version a few months back and this new version is very similar. The big difference is the addition of volume sliders for input, output and system sound sources right in the menubar. This cool new feature is Leopard-only but the new version is still Tiger compatible. All-in-all I think this is a nice update to a free app I use a lot.
[tags]Rogue Amoeba, Sound Source, Freeware[/tags]
Mar
5
Fluid – Turning WebApps into Desktop Apps
Filed Under Computers & Tech on | 3 Comments
I tend to avoid web apps because I don’t like having my apps stuck in a tab in a web browser. This makes it hard to command+tab to the app and impossible to assign that app to a particular space. I don’t use GMail but if I did I’m pretty sure I’d be using Mailplane to access it. Fluid is not as advanced as Mailplane but it does allow most webapps to be liberated from your browser.
[tags]Fluid, web applications[/tags]
Feb
12
OS X 10.5.2 Arrives at Last – A Worthy Update
Filed Under Computers & Tech on February 12, 2008 | 7 Comments
Well wha’ d’ ya know, Apple DO listen to us when we complain. They’ve removed the excessive transparency in menus, they’ve made the translucent MenuBar optional, and they’ve added some nice options to Stacks. If, like me, you thought that having a pile of icons super-imposed upon each other was a terrible way to represent a Stack, then you’ll be happy to hear that there’s now an option to have a stack be represented by the icon for its folder. If you used to like the way Tiger let you navigate a folder in the Dock then you’ll love the newly added ‘List’ view for Stacks, it basically lets you do things the way you used to. Another nice usability improvement is that addition of a MenuBar icon for TimeMachine. This means you can it out of your Dock where it wastes way too much room IMO and just work off the MenuBar. You can now see when TimeMachine is working its magic at a glance and also easily stop an on-going backup or trigger one at any time. Needless to say there are also a myriad of bug fixes, security updates, and a few other tweaks. You can get more details in the uncharacteristically detailed release notes from Apple. 10.5.2 is like a Microsoft Service Pack, it gives the OS a really significant update.
Oh, BTW, if, like me, you were too impatient to wait on Apple to fix the stupid MenuBar transparency and applied the fix I suggested a few months ago you’ll notice that toggling the new checkbox for MenuBar transparency doesn’t work. To roll back that change just issue the following command in the Terminal and then reboot (courtesy of John Gruber on Twitter):
sudo defaults delete /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables'
[tags]Apple, OS X 10.5.2, Leopard[/tags]
Feb
9
Twittering on the Mac Revisited
Filed Under Computers & Tech on February 9, 2008 | 1 Comment
It’s only been a week since I posted my first thoughts on Twittering on the Mac but already I need to make a correction and two additions. First to the correction, Twitterific is free, the website is just very confusing. You can use it for free but you get ads, and if you pay you don’t get ads. I gave Twitterific another go because I was quite hard on it last time. Turns out I was right the first time though, it’s not a particularly good client and it’s certainly not an inspirational piece of software. There are better clients out there for free.
Feb
5
Why I Love MarsEdit
Filed Under Computers & Tech on February 5, 2008 | Leave a Comment
I had been planning to write a detailed review of MardEdit but since reading Sean Blank’s excellent review I don’t see the point, he’s done a better job of it than I ever could! So, instead I just want to link to his review and explain why I love Mars Edit.
For me it comes down to four things. Firstly, I want to manage my blog posts in a stand-alone app. I want to be able to command+tab from what ever I’m doing to the blog post I’m working on and I certainly don’t want to have to go searching through my sea of browser tabs and windows to find a post I’m working on. I also want to be dependent on an internet connection to work on my posts. Secondly, the reality is that a text area does not make a good text editor. Another reality is that I have never yet come across a good WYSIWYG HTML editor. MarsEdit does exactly what I want in this regard, it provides a proper text editor with syntax highlighting, spell checking, shortcut keys, and good contextual menus. Not only do I have no issue writing my own markup, I WANT to write my own markup, and the editor provided by MarsEdit is a much nicer place to do it than a text area on a web page. Finally, I like being able to manage multiple blogs from a single place.
Having said that, MarsEdit is not perfect, yet. It’s under active development and the recent 2.1 release already addressed some of the minor issues I had with 2.0. At this stage the biggest issue I have is that MarsEdit doesn’t show the hierarchical relationships between my categories, it just presents me with a flat list. Other than that the only issue I have is that I’d like to be able to control the default markup MarsEdit uses when inserting an image into a post.
All in all I really enjoy using MarsEdit to manage my blog. $29.95 well spent as far as I’m concerned.
[tags]MarsEdit, Blogging[/tags]
Feb
5
Free Astronomy Software on the Mac Revisited
Filed Under Science & Astronomy, Computers & Tech on | 6 Comments
The last time I posted on the state of play for free Astronomy software for the Mac things weren’t looking so good. At that time your best option was to build the Linux program KStars from source using Fink. A long, complicated, and rather daunting install for anyone who’s not a Unix geek. I’m happy to report that things have improved a lot since then. There’s now a choice of three apps and you don’t have to compile any from source (unless you want to).
[tags]astronomy, OS X, Stellarium, Cartes du Ciel, KStars[/tags]
Feb
1
Twittering on the Mac – First Impressions
Filed Under Computers & Tech on February 1, 2008 | 7 Comments
I’ve heard Leo Laporte prattling on about twitter for what seems like years on TwIT and have been actively avoiding it for ages. However, a few weeks ago I finally caved in and decided to give this whole Twittering thing a go. My overall impressions are that it’s a great idea, just poorly implemented. The service is about as stable as a pencil balancing on its point! I’ve only been twittering for two weeks and already I’ve experienced two Twitter outages, there’s no word for that other than poor. Then we come to their website. What an ugly and clunky mess! Yea, it works, but not that well and it’s far from a joy to use. Then we come to the main thrust of this post, Twitter clients on the Mac, overall I’m not really that impressed. I’ve settled on a client that’s good enough, but that’s the highest praise I’ll give it.
[tags]Twitter, OS X, Titterific, Spaz, TwitterPod, TwitterPost[/tags]
Jan
25
iTunes 7.6 – A Step Backwards for the iPhone & iPod Touch
Filed Under Computers & Tech on January 25, 2008 | 2 Comments
A few months ago I happily reported that iTunes 7.5 had fixed one of my major gripes with the way photos are synced to iPods and the iPhone. When Apple introduced iLife ’08 they made a big deal about how iPhoto now automatically organised your photos into events for you so you no longer had to waste your time creating albums for everything. Albums and smart albums were now for creating special sets of related photos where the photos could come from any event. This makes perfect sense so I use iPhoto Events extensively.
Before iTunes 7.5 only albums were synced to iPods and iPhones. This made is much harder than it needed to be to find a particular set of photos. This was one of my initial gripes with the iPod Touch. However, iTunes 7.5 improved things dramatically. It treated Events as albums and dutifully synced them. regular Albums and Smart Albums were also synced, and given priority by placing them at the top of the list of albums, above all the Events. The only minor issue with iTunes 7.5 was that events were not in reverse order so you had to scroll to the very bottom to get to your most recent event.
With iTunes 7.6 Apple have thrown all that good work out the window. All the had to do was change the sort-order on events and they would have had it nailed. Instead they added an option so you can now sync EITHER events OR Albums, but not both. This is a real step backwards and nothing short of retarded in my view. It’s an uncharacteristically stupid and negative thing for Apple to do. They had better fix this again in iTunes 7.7 and they had better leave it fixed this time!
[tags]iPod, iPod Touch, iPhone, iTunes, iPhoto[/tags]