Giles Turnbull - page 37

I’m not sure which this post is more in favor of: Camino (The World’s Best Browser) or Dropbox (The World’s Best Sync Thing), so let’s just say we love both of them and get on with it.

The marvellous Mac OS X Hints has a hint for Camino/Dropbox users everywhere: how to sync Camino via Dropbox. Which makes a great deal of sense if you use Camino on more than one machine.

Camino, like Firefox and other ‘zilla-based browsers, stores all its stuff in a profile folder on your hard disk. Normally that profile is buried in your Library/Application Support folder, but you can move it to your Dropbox folder and with a tiny bit of Terminal-fu, link the one place to t’other. Camino carries on its merry way, and any changes it makes to the newly-relocated profile are invisibly and promptly synced to your other machines thanks to the incredible magic of Dropbox.

I think this is the aspect of Dropbox that makes it so much more appealing than other sync services I’ve used in the past: Dropbox doesn’t act like an application, it acts like just another folder on your system. It works with and inside the Finder, no messing about, no having to remember to do anything (like click a button marked “Sync”).

It’s just a folder. But a MAGIC folder.

Here’s my latest addicton, taking over where Trism left off. It’s Drop7, and it’s just wonderful.

The rules are very simple: drop the numbered discs into the grid. If the number on the disc matches the number of discs in that column or row, that disc will vanish and you’ll earn points. Hidden discs are revealed by making their neighbours vanish. It sounds simplistic but it soon gets fiendishly challengng, especially as extra rows of hidden discs appear whenever you move up a level.

But the main thing I’ve noticed about Drop7 is the way other people react to it.

The Cult team members are not famous for colorful desktops, but when I saw this little beauty I felt it deserved some link love. This gorgeous desktop picture (and its slightly spikier sibling) are now available for free from the generous hands of Wolfgang Bartelme, having recently made something of a splash of their own on Flickr.

Wolfgang is no stranger to design gorgeousness, having also created other desktop and iPhone wallpapers like Dashball, ColorFlow, and ColorFlow 2.

Download and enjoy.

Ooooh, now this is interesting. Flux solves a problem that I didn’t even realize I had.

It automatically adjusts your computer’s monitor brightness according to the time of day and likely lighting conditions. Most screens look fine during the morning hours, because they’re made to be BRIGHT like the day outside. But when you come back to them after dark, or even just as evening’s falling, they sear your eyes and you reach for the brightness controls.

Flux automates that. Tell it your location and the kind of lighting you normally work under, and it will do the rest. I like the way you set it up and forget about it after that – it will take care of everything without you having to think about it. My kind of software.

(Larger version here.)

Norwegian Mac support company Teknograd likes to have fun with its advertising campaigns, and this latest one is the cleverest idea yet.

In recent years they’ve had a series of ads showing a Mac desktop where the Hard Disk is under attack from a mass of files and folders. But for this year’s campaign, they wanted something new that made use of the default Leopard desktop wallpaper.

The result is these TIE fighters, created by advertising agency TBWA. I asked them how they did it – surely not with real icons on a real desktop? No.

“We have photoshopped this, in almost 400 layers, but each folder is named individually, so it was a hell of a lot work. Martin Holm, the illustrator and art director, just passed out when we asked him how long time it took,” they told me.

Ancient Frog is a new kind of puzzle game for the iPhone. The premise is very simple: you have to guide your frog so that he’s in position to eat a tasty fly. But there are only so many places on the lily pad where he can tread, and his legs will only move in certain ways.

Yes, it’s bizarre, but it’s different and it’s challenging after the first few easy levels. Each fly catch is given a par score, just like golf, and you have to think very hard to get your fly caught under par.

This game isn’t just unusual to play, it’s also gorgeous to look at. Like all the best software, Ancient Frog benefits from attention to detail – I particularly like the way the frog’s little toes animate after you’ve moved his foot. Recommended.

Wow, here’s a fantastic hack from the RetroMacCast forum, in which contributor Charles Mangin creates a new body for a Mac mini – using the body of an ancient Apple Disk ][ drive.

Mike Pinkerton, who has been building web browsers since before you were on the internet at all, is something of a hero of mine. He’s worked on all sorts of Mozilla and Mozilla-offshoot code, and was one of the key people behind my daily browser of choice, Camino. This man knows how to build browsers, kids.

These days he works for Google on the team that is building a Mac version of Chrome, Google’s browser of choice for the next few years.

And he’s just posted this little announcement:

“This week, everything came together and we can now load web pages in the renderer processes and display them in tabs.”

(There’s also a screenshot at the other end of that link, which is worth seeing.)

There’s still a pile of work to do, but the news is that one of the most important aspects of Chrome – that a tab can crash without taking down the whole app – is working as expected.

Partly because I’m impressed by what I’ve seen of Chrome on Windows so far, and partly because I’ll happily install anything that Mike Pinkerton’s worked on, I’m very excited about this. Chrome for Mac might – just might – be the browser I’d be prepared to leave Camino for.

We start this week with The Belgian Constitution.

Yes, the *actual Belgian Constitution*. As in, the Constitution of the nation of Belgium. Not a joke app. The real thing. Look:

“One of the most important changes was the introduction of the Court of Arbitration whose competencies were expanded by a special law of 2003, to include Title II (Articles 8 to 32), and the Articles 170, 172 and 191 of the Constitution. The Court therefore developed into a constitutional court and in May 2007 it was formally redesignated Constitutional Court.”

See?

I think this goes some way to proving that Rule 34 applies not just to the internet, but to the App Store: if you can imagine it, there is (or there will be) an app for it.

Moving on.

I’m one of those freaks who much prefers listening to radio than watching TV. Consequently, I like to have radios around me. I have one in my office, one in the kitchen, and one in the bedroom. I really need to get hold of one for the bathroom.

FStream and the BBC Streams web site have jointly come to my aid.

httpv://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=jCHU4ZHq15Y

Oh, the fun you’ll have with Fracture. Created by Visuamobile, it finally gives you the chance to find out what it would be like to smash your iPhone to pieces – without actually doing so.

I very nearly put this in a WTF iPhone Apps Of The Week post, but then I thought – actually, no. This might be quite entertaining, especially for the kids. My son loves smashing stuff up (I blame Power Rangers, myself) so I think he’ll get a kick out of destroying my iPhone. Over and over again.

Fracture is, as they say, “Coming soon” on the App Store.

Yes, it’s true. There is a man who swapped his iPhone for a Blackberry. In some respects, I greatly admire Ben Ackerman. Not because of his choice of smartphone, but because he was brave enough to own up to his change of heart in public. Not many self-confessed members of the “giant Mac fanboy” club would be prepared to do that.

But Ben has. He prefers the Blackberry, as he explains in a slightly contradictory post on his blog.

I say “contradictory” because Ben is clearly caught between a rock and a hard place. He’s the first to admit that the iPhone:

(a) is “prettier”

(b) has better apps

(c) and better web browsing

… but he *still* prefers the Blackberry. Why, Ben, why?

Because, it seems, the Blackberry is (in Ben’s opinion), simply a better mobile device. It does things you’d expect a mobile device to do, like, you know, MMS and copy-paste. The basics. That’s what it does, and it does superbly: the basics.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why the iPhone doesn’t appeal to Ben and many thousands of other people. It’s because Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Jonathan Ive and the rest of the Apple gang just don’t consider “basics” to be part of their remit. They leave basics to everyone else. Their products go above and beyond.

So, two questions for you:

(1) Do you agree with any parts of Ben’s argument?

(2) If you ever ditched your iPhone for a Blackberry (or, God forbid, your Mac for a Windows PC), would you have the guts to say so in public?

Using Dock Spacers from Caleb PIke on Vimeo.

Here’s something I’ve not thought about before: an utility that lets you create multiple Dock configurations, each one mapped to one of your Spaces. It’s called Dock Spaces and you can get it from here.

As someone who rarely makes use of Spaces and always keeps the Dock hidden from view, this leaves me bemused at best. But I know lots of you love yer Spaceses and yer Dockses, so this one’s for you.

(Look again at the video, though: wouldn’t you find it annoying to wait for the second’s pause as each fresh Dock is spawned for each Space? I would. Blimey.)

Over at Reddit, some of the Redditors have been enjoying a little friendly desktop sharing over the past day or so. If you’re looking for some inspiration for your own desktop arrangement, there’s plenty to be found here.

Seeing all these desktops got me thinking: what are the desktops of the Cult team like? And how about our lovely Cult readers?

At the top of this post you can see my desktop, and “minimal” doesn’t really do it justice. My desktop is always kept clean and clear, devoid of decoration and deprived of a Dock. But that’s just me, and I’m a bit weird. How about my fellow Cultists?

Beatrice Murch is not a woman who lets a minor problem like a broken power lead get in her way.

Twitter engineer and minimalism enthusiast Alex Payne writes with some passion on the subject of “everything buckets” – by which he means those apps into which you can throw pretty much everything.

You know the apps he means: the likes of Yojimbo, Evernote, Devonthink, and a dozen or so competitors. Database-powered shoe boxes into which you can chuck PDFs, web archives, bookmarks, plain or rich texts, anything really. And then search through the lot.

Alex thinks “everything buckets” aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. The proprietary databases they use might break; they add little that the OS X filesystem doesn’t offer:

“Everything Buckets are selling you a filesystem, and removing the step of creating and saving a new file within that filesystem. That’s their primary value. Whatever organization scheme they may claim to offer, you can replicate on the filesystem. I promise. Even tags (symlinks, aliases –œ look ’em up).”

I suppose he has a point, but I suspect there are many OS X users and Cult readers who will disagree with him. Yes you *can*, with a little effort, replicate most of what Yojimbo does by fiddling around with Automator actions, Smart folders, Spotlight comments and Finder windows; but let’s be honest, who has the time for all that, when Yojimbo (or any of the other apps Alex mentions) will do it all for you in an instant?

But that’s Alex’s point: the convenience of the app is what you’re trading your freedom (and particularly your *data structure*) for.

Over to you then, Cultists. Does Alex have a point? Or will he have to prise your Yojimbo archive / Devonthink database / Evernote note collection from your cold, dead hands?

Me? I’ve still got a Yojimbo bookmarklet and I’m gonna use it.

Using bookmarklets and shortcuts in Camino from Giles Turnbull on Vimeo.

Here’s something new for you: a little video demonstration of one of the tricks I’ve been using on my computer for many years. Assigning short, mnemonic text shortcuts to browser bookmarks and bookmarklets, so that I can drive them from the keyboard.

Many of you, I’m sure, will know about this trick, but some of you won’t, so I hope it’s helpful to you.

This is also my first demo video made using Screenflow, which I purchased a day or so ago and am very, very pleased with. It makes screencasts like this super simple.

A confession: as a teenager, I got involved with amateur acting and ended up doing a great deal of improvisation. Every Sunday evening a gang of us would get together in a tiny theatre just yards from the beach, where we would play improvisation games until we fell over.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember those games, to conjure up just the right one for just the right moment.

Enter stage right: iProv, the improvisation database for iPhone. It contains over 250 improv games. They’ve been sorted using tags, you can search through the list, and create your own list of faves by just tapping a star. Feeling lucky? Open a random game idea by just shaking the iPhone.

iProv is free on the App Store, although you can make donations at the web site if you want to support ongoing development.

Woohoo! A bumper issue of WTF iPhone Apps this week, thanks to the ever-increasing avalanche of bobbins and foonity spewing forth from the App Store.

Let’s not dally! Onwards! With the craziness!

First up this week is Angry Scot: “Learn the Scottish way to say No! This application will help you summon your inner Scotsman to give you the courage (and words) to solve your problems in these trying times. Each response is carefully crafted and then spoken by an authentic Scots person in his native tongue.”

Daft, but we can live with it. Can things get worse? You bet they can. We’ve not even started yet.

Last week I posted some half-baked rants about iPhoto 09, and as usual the comments briefly buzzed with some agreement and disagreement.

But there was also this comment, from reader KaL MichaeL (reproduced sans editing):

“I love your blog except when you say anything negative about an apple product. I feel that if you are promoting the Mac Cult then you are a apple Fan end to end.”

And that… that struck me as a little weird.

No personal criticism intended, KaL MichaeL, but words cannot express how much I disagree with you on this.

The Cult of Mac celebrates all that’s good and great about Apple and its products, but that doesn’t make us blind to its failures and errors. A blog that simply promoted Apple and Apple fandom from “end to end”, as you put it, would be beyond dull. In fact, it would probably be a little bit like Hotnews: nothing more than PR puffery.

And that’s not what we’re all about. We don’t want to do that. We want to celebrate what Apple does (in our opinion) right, and moan in a grumpy manner about what it does (in our opinion) wrong. What else, after all, is the blogosphere for?

Cult readers, now’s your chance to cut me down and demand more slavish devotion to the Church of Mac. Or not.

Accomplishing what Apple has so far failed to do, Google has now created a todo list that syncs perfectly between your desktop, the web, and your iPhone.

Michael Bolin, one of the engineers who works on the Tasks function in Gmail, announced a new iPhone-optimized Tasks site that you can visit at gmail.com/tasks.

I’ve been playing with it this morning and so far, it looks and works great in Mobile Safari. And hey, get this: I can add a todo to the list while I’m out and about, and it *magically* appears in Gmail when I return to my computer! How about that?

It’s worth pausing for a moment here, and reminding ourselves that Apple STILL has not supplied iPhone users with todos or text notes that sync with their Macs. I’ve come to the conclusion that Steve Jobs, Tim Cook and the rest of them simply don’t have anything to do, and therefore don’t understand why anyone else should need a sync-able todo app.

Therefore, I propose that henceforth this should be known as Give Apple Management Things To Do Day, or GAMTTD. If Tim Cook’s any good with a hand drill at the top of a ladder, my gutters could do with replacing. Any time this week would be good, Tim.

In the last of our stories from owners of original and classic era Macs, we talk to Nigel Curson. His Mac Plus has seen action as a desktop publishing workhorse, early internet client, and now toy for kids. And it’s still going strong.

When the new iLife 09 package was announced, I was pretty keen to get my hands on a copy. Some of the features in iPhoto – face recognition, photos on maps – looked too good to be true.

Turns out they *were* too good to be true.

Now that iPhoto 09 has “upgraded” my photo library, I’m cursing myself for installing it. Allow me to explain why.

I *do* like the new features. The face recognition is a little haphazard, but it works most of the time. Seeing photos mapped is also very cool and a great idea for browsing through a large collection.

But you pay a price for these new features. iPhoto 09 includes plenty of new eye candy and interface snazz which is having a detrimental effect on my photo browsing. Photos now animate into view when selected for editing or viewed full-screen. Each photo can be flipped upside down to add metadata, an idea copied from Dashboard widget behavior.

The net result of all this animated swishery is my MacBook’s fans going bananas, and the machine slowing down noticeably when I’m browsing or editing. Frustrating doesn’t cover it: this is maddening, when I stop to consider how smooth and easy and processor-friendly everything was with iPhoto 08.

Another frustration (a minor one, I’ll concede) is that the built-in Flickr upload offers very little in the way of options. Every upload creates a new Flickr set, even if you’re uploading just one image.

What seems to be missing, in my view, is some flexibility in the preferences. If I could simply switch off the eye candy, and tweak the Flickr upload defaults, I’d be a much happier bunny.

In the meantime though, I’m a bit of a grumpy one, and wishing I was still using iLife 08.

I think I need a beer. Yes.

Bruce Fox has been a Mac user since 1988. He got in touch with the Cult to tell the story behind his beloved Mac Classic.

Meet Rob Baca. He’s a serious vintage Mac collector, with a total of 75 machines in his possession. He’s also the man who co-directed the documentary Welcome to Macintosh, which counts among its interviewees our very own Leander Kahney.

One of Rob’s computers – bought from a friend on the condition that Rob would give it a loving home – is this original 128k Mac.

What can you tell us about it, Rob?