this is blandiose.org » Apple

Must Have Software

derek — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Alex King compiles his list of OS X software he can’t do without. Others chime in with theirs in his comments.

Steve Jobs, Digitizer

derek — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Steve Jobs, quoted in a New York Times story extolling his vision of steering Apple toward consumer electronics like the iPod: “We’re getting a chance to see what Apple engineering and Apple design can really do once we get out from underneath the 5 percent Macintosh operating system share.”

Apple Store Coming to Bethesda

derek — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Tom passes on news of the arrival of an Apple Store for those of us who don’t love hiking out to Tysons Corner.

OS X Office Suites

derek — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I broke down and got Office X for my PowerBook. I would have preferred not to pay for another Microsoft package, much less one in which I’ll pretty much only use two of the four applications (Word and Excel). A couple factors drove me to doing it, but the main one is a lack of a viable Office suite on the Mac.

But what about OpenOffice? Yeah, I thought that would be the answer, too. Except it isn’t, and may not be for years. The recent announcement that a native OS X version wouldn’t be out until at least 2006 was disheartening but not surprising. It’s not a big priority for Mac developers - other apps that make fuller use of the operating system are more attractive and cooler, to boot - and so the porting of OpenOffice is a tiny volunteer enterprise. As the ever-astute John Gruber writes, “Wondering why your friendly neighborhood Mac developer doesn?t devote his nights and weekends to volunteering for OpenOffice is like wondering why your friendly neighborhood barber doesn?t spend his spare time giving free haircuts.”

So I bit the bullet and bought Office because I have to deal with lots of Word and Excel files and the current Mac version of OpenOffice, well, sucks. It doesn’t look like an OS X app and it doesn’t act like one. It’s slow and ugly and all those things I wanted to leave behind when I switched to Apple. The remaining hope, as Gruber points out, is that Apple comes out with a competing office suite. Eventually.

Well, at least I saved a bunch of money buying my Office X on eBay.

Wrangling Text

derek — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

My search for a favorite OS X text editor continues, but now there’s another choice. BareBones Software released a new version of Text Wrangler, a lower-priced editor than the company’s flagship product, BBEdit. John Gruber explains what makes Text Wrangler more attractive this time around: “TextWrangler 1.5 includes full support for AppleScript, and includes syntax coloring for numerous additional programming languages, most notably Perl, Python, Java, and TeX.”

Playing with AppleScript last week on vacation (yes, that’s my idea of a vacation!), I used Tex-Edit, another scriptable text editor that has a repository of scripts written expressly for it. I liked it ok, but it (and other text editors I’ve tried on OS X) have lacked some the features found in my favorite editor, UltraEdit, namely the ability to easily grab lines based upon a regular expression or pattern match and a tabbed window environment. Now, I’m sure it’s possible to grab lines (Tex-Edit even has a script to do it but I couldn’t figure out how to transfer those lines to a new document within a larger script), but I haven’t grokked it yet. But I did write a few useful scripts that I’ll be posting over on OSCAR.

The Sounds of OS X

derek — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I got my iPod, which completely rocks. How cool is it to have basically your entire music collection (the parts worth listening to, at least), in your hand? Then I found out about Wire Tap, a free utility which saves to your hard drive any audio playing on your Mac, whether it’s a song, news program or speech on C-SPAN. You can transfer the resulting AIFF file to your iPod. Then, today I saw Todd Dominey mention Detour, an app that allows you to set sound preferences for each application. Two days, two useful and cheap programs that I can and will use.

iPod

derek — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I’m getting an iPod - a slightly used one, but a lovely 20G model with loads of extras, including a transmitter for use with a car stereo and a car charger. Now, no more geek purchases til Panther comes out.

Using ODBC

derek — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Andrew Anderson has a nice walk-through on using ODBC in Jaguar. Haven’t had to do it much myself yet, but it’ll come in handy.

Qt for OS X

derek — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Very cool news: Trolltech will release a version of Qt/Mac, its cross-platform GUI builder, next week. What that means is that I’ll be able to run KDE applications natively - so KWord, for instance, looks like a Mac app, not a Linux one. And that means more attractive software choices for OS X users.

Baltimore Sun Widget

derek — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

A year ago the Baltimore Sun introduced RSS feeds, and now they’ve got a Konfabulator widget for OS X that displays the latest headlines from the paper. First such one I’ve seen from a newspaper. Update: for some reason I was unable to download it correctly, so the Sun replaced the .dmg file with a .sit file that should work better.

Roll Your Own

derek — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Something to study this summer: Charles Ross of ATPM shows how AppleScript handles lists as objects. Part of his Roll Your Own column.

Keith Whitney

derek — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Just found the site of Keith Whitney, a Macintosh sysadmin in the DC area, who writes about OS X and links to other Apple-related blogs.

Pentagon Shutters Web Database

derek — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Gripe of the day: the Pentagon has made its database of military installations off-limits to non-military personnel. That would include me, since I use it for research purposes. And it’s not like the information contained in it was so terribly secret anyway. Now that’s using the Internet to its fullest capacity!