The Author – Bart Busschots
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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]
Jan
17
Wacworld 2008 Steve-note in 60 Seconds
Filed Under Computers & Tech on January 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment
If you’re just too busy to sit down and watch an entire Steve-note the good people at Mahalo have condensed it down to 60 seconds for you. The scary thing, it doesn’t miss any of the important points!
(thanks to Allison for the link)
[tags]Apple, Steve Jobs, Macworld, Mahalo[/tags]
Jan
16
The iPod Touch Upgrade – Money Well Spent
Filed Under Computers & Tech on January 16, 2008 | 19 Comments
Normally with a Mac keynote you don’t get instant gratification. Sure, you can surf right over to the Apple site and pre-order immediately but you won’t get hold of the goodies for weeks. This keynote was different. My iPod Touch feels like a whole new device today. That’s what I call instant gratification! When the iPod Touch was announced Apple made it very clear what the device would and would not have. The Touch was a very shinny iPod, not an iPhone without the phone, and not a PDA (a point I re-itterated strongly in my initial review). Yesterday Steve announced that from now on all new iPod Touches will literally be iPhones without the Phone, and that those of us with old Touches can upgrade for $20 (or just under €18 in Ireland). That’s $20 to turn an iPod into a PDA. Needless to say I grabbed the upgrade as soon as it became available via Apple’s software update system 🙂
[tags]iPod Touch, Apple[/tags]
Jan
16
Macworld 2008 Keynote – First Thoughts
Filed Under Computers & Tech on | Leave a Comment
Well, another Macworld has been and gone, we have a new stock of Apple goodies to slurp up our disposable cash, and we get to tally our score and see how well we did with our predictions. In some ways this keynote was rather disappointing, so many of the rumours were true! That’s the second year in a row that we’ve had the big news leak before the show. Then you have the fact that there was no ‘and one more thing’ announcement. On the other hand though, if you just look at what was actually announced it was a very impressive Macworld. There were also some wonderful surprises in the details. Sure, we knew we were getting movie rentals, but with so many studios? Sure, we knew we were getting the 1.1.3 mobile OS X (as I call it) firmware, but we had no idea we’d be getting mail and Google Maps on the iPod Touch! Then we come to the ultra-portable, sure, we were expecting it, but really, I wasn’t expecting something quite so thin yet big. So, although there were no surprises in the over-all structure of the keynote, there were some wonderful surprises in the details. Oh, and I did well with my predictions 🙂
[tags]Macworld, Steve Jobs, Apple, Keynote[/tags]
Dec
11
Night Time Photography – Another Reason to Go Fast Fixed Focus
Filed Under Photography on December 11, 2007 | Leave a Comment
When I recently purchased a 30mm F1.4 fixed focus lens I explained my reasons for doing so while reviewing the lens. Today I realised I left out yet another reason to add a fast fixed-focus lens to your collection. Because fast lenses gather insane amounts of light you can shoot hand-held at night and actually get good results. I did manage to get some night time images before using the standard 18-55mm zoom that comes as part of the Nikon D40 kit, but that was really working at the limit (see the results here). Because that lens is quite slow at F3.5-5.6 I had to crank the ISO up to 1600 and even then the exposure times were still very high. This resulted in images that were grainy and a lot had to be junked because they were blurred to a greater or lesser extent.
On my way home from work this evening I had a go at some night time photography with my new F1.4 lens. It was such a nice experience! With the ISO turned down to 800 I could easily take hand held shots that look pretty good.
You can see the results of my work in this gallery.
Dec
8
Two New Toys
Filed Under Computers & Tech on December 8, 2007 | 1 Comment
It’s been a while since that last time I got some new hardware, I think my iPod Touch was the last bit of new tech I’d gotten before this week. So, this week I made up for lost time and got myself new network printer and a new USB headset. I have to say I’m very happy with both, they just worked, no drivers, no messing. Actual, genuine, plug and play. Oh, and I was testing these on Leopard.
[tags]Apple, OS X, HP, Logitech[/tags]