The Author – Bart Busschots
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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]
Dec
5
More QuickLook Goodies
Filed Under Computers & Tech on December 5, 2007 | Leave a Comment
I’ve already posted about two third party QuikLook generators (QLEnscript & Folder QuickLook Plugin) that I’ve come across and like. Today I have another one to add to that list, BetterZipQL. As its name suggests this generator is released by the people behind BetterZip. It’s completely free and doesn’t require BetterZip to be installed to work. The download and buy buttons on the top right of that page are NOT for the QuikLook generator but for the actual BetterZip program. The link to download it is in the text of the article just be low the screen shot. As you’ve probably guessed this generator allows you to see the contents of a wide variety of archive file formats using QuickLook.
On a related note, there is now a 1.0 version of QLEnscript available.
[tags]Apple, OS X, Leopard, QuickLook[/tags]
Nov
26
Another Nice QuickLook Plugin
Filed Under Computers & Tech on November 26, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Following on from my post yesterday about the Enscript QuickLook plugin I came across another nice QuickLook plugin today. When it comes to viewing images, movies, text, office documents etc. QuickLook is great. When it comes to showing you a folder it is USELESS! It just shows a massive folder icon. What’s the point of that! Well, Folder.qlgenerator offers a nice alternative. It shows a list of folder contents with thumbnails as the QuikLook preview for a folder. This is a great little third-party tweak for OS X Leopard.
[tags]Apple, Leopard, OS X, QuickLook[/tags]
Nov
25
A QuickLook Plugin for Programmers
Filed Under Software Development, Computers & Tech on November 25, 2007 | 2 Comments
This week I installed my first QuickLook extension, QLEnscript by Dave Dribin. It uses the Enscript libraries to provide syntax highlighting for a number of common languages within QuickLook. Nothing fancy but handy for programmers none the less. You can find out more in this post on Dave’s blog.
[tags]OS X, Leopard, QuickLook, Enscript[/tags]
Nov
17
What’s In Your Menubar?
Filed Under Computers & Tech on November 17, 2007 | Leave a Comment
I like to make a clean start from time to time. When you make a clean start you soon realise what applications you actually need and use and what’s just wasting space on your system. I decided to use the arrival of Leopard as an excuse for a long over-due clean start. A few weeks have now passed so it would seem like a good time to take stock and see what applications I’ve actually re-installed. It would take me for ever to write about all the apps I’ve installed so instead I’m just going to talk about a sub-set of the most visible of all apps, menubar apps. It should be noted that all the items in my menubar are either a part of OS X or free.
[tags]Apple, OS X, Menubar apps[/tags]
Nov
17
iStat Menus – A Nice Alternative To Menu Meters
Filed Under Computers & Tech on | 1 Comment
I’ve been a huge fan of the various iStat products for years. I don’t feel at home on any Mac unless iStat Nano is installed. I used to use the command line tool top all the time to see what programs were hogging resources when ever my machine slowed down, now I just bring up my Dashboard and check iStat Nano. This is great but there are some things I want to keep a permanent eye on. In particular I like to keep an eye on my CPU temperature (particularly on the MacBookPro) and the network bandwidth I’m currently using. iStat Nano can show me these things but it’s not really that practical to constantly keep switching to the Dashboard. I guess that’s why Menu Meters is such a popular application and why you see so many people using it. Personally I’ve never liked it. I always found it looked very cluttered and messy. I just don’t like the way it prints graphs in the menubar and takes up way too much room.
[tags]iSlayer, iStat, iStat Menu, Apple, OS X, Menubar app, freeware[/tags]
Nov
17
As someone who produces a fair few contributions to various podcasts I find myself having to switch audio devices a lot. I’ve always found it to be a terrible pain to have to open up the System Preferences app and then navigate to the Sound applet and then finally have to go through both the input and output tabs to make my changes. Then, when I was done, I had to go through the same procedure again to change everything back. I found it so annoying that I actually gave serious consideration to learning Objective C just to write a simple menubar app for changing audio sources quickly and easily. It would seem that the guys in Rogue Amoeba shared my frustration and since they are a software company it was easy for them to actually implement the idea. They did an excellent job, and what’s even better is that they chose to release the result, SoundSource, for free. You can get it on their freebies page.
There’s not really much to say about this application, it does one thing and it does it very very very well. The screen shot below says it all really. The only thing that remains to be said is that I’ve tested this app on both Tiger and Leopard and it works perfectly on both.
[tags]Apple, OS X, SoundSource, Rogue Amoeba, Freeware[/tags]