by Chris Barrus
Great Cthulhu, it’s a good day today! Delta Tao released a public beta version of Spaceward Ho! 5. Spaceward Ho! is one of the all-time great Mac games. I burned at least a half-dozen or so months on this back in my Mac IIsi days. New features include native OS X support, and (gulp) Internet play via spacewardho.net.
There goes Thanksgiving break.
As much as I wanted to stay with OmniWeb, I switched to Chimera full-time now. It hauls!
Patrick over at Forwarding Address: OS X notes:
Maybe I’m the last person on the planet to know about this, but on a recommendation from macosxhints.com, I went into Finder Preferences and unchecked every language, even English, under “Languages for searching file contents.” All of a sudden the Finder’s performance sucks much, much less. (I’m using a 500mhz iBook with only 320 MB of RAM, not one of them dang hot-rods like you kids have.) I think I’ve asked the Finder to search within a range of files perhaps twice since adopting OS X; I’m much more liable to use grep. So this is a feature-for-performance trade-off I’m happy to make.
I just tried this on both my 800MHz Titanium and 867MHz Quicksilver (both with 1GB RAM) and seem to notice a difference, but it might just be my own projected hope.
…here’s what I want:
I want an Apple version of that Fujitsu ultra-sub-notebook or the Sony PictureBook. Here’s the specifications:
Can it be done in 2.5 pounds? And at what price point? I’m willing to pony up, and I’m sure the Apple otaku in Japan would too.
(Over Flagstaff at the moment. There’s still fires burning out here)
So the reason I’ve been blogging at a minimal level the past couple of days is that I got a new phone. Not the Danger Hip Top that’s the current Geek Objet d’art of the moment, but the equally-as-cool Sony Ericsson T68i
The T68i hit my radar screen (well, everyone’s radar screen) back at Jobs’ Macworld NY keynote this year when he was using one to show-off iSync, the dialing capabilities of the 10.2 Address Book, and the OS level integration with Bluetooth. First time in awhile that a non-Apple product was actually the most impressive thing I’d seen in the keynote.
Anyway, I’d hit the wall with my current cell phone service (AT&T’s One Rate plan) which was terrific in Los Angeles, but spotty in Orange County. The phone was nice, a Nokia 6162, but pretty much of a barge compared to what the current current tech level is. The tipping point was the release of iSync. For a beta release, it was working great with my iPod, .mac account, and a Visor Platinum, but the phone thing was starting to bug me – especially after reading the early reports of iSync working perfectly with the T68i.
So all I was really waiting for was a decent plan that offered the phone: AT&T or T-Mobile. T-Mobile’s network in Southern California is Verizon, which is an automatic “no way” for me. I’d rather eat a bug than use Verizon. AT&T analog blows in O.C., especially around UC Irvine where I work, but I was hoping their GSM network would pick up. Early reports from news://alt.cellular.attws were inconclusive, so I was basically on my own.
Then Amazon has was running a deal for a T-Mobile for $50 after the various rebates. Then I heard that Best Buy was offering a special on AT& T68i, so what the hell – I’ll go check it out. The Best Buy special is pretty nice. $199 for the phone. $50 mail-in rebate from AT&T. 50% off the price of the phone if you buy any two accessories (like a power adapter and a car charger). So after dealing with the activation bureaucracy, I had a new phone. It’s really small – not much longer than the space bar on my PowerBook G4. The screen is bright and the joystick navigation was easy enough to deal with without going to the manual too often. For the first time ever, I can now get phone reception inside my office which had always been a dead zone.
One major irritation I have with the phone is the damn flashing green LED that let’s you know everything is OK. This is a violation of every fundamental design law I can think of. A flashing light indicates that you need to pay attention to it. The damn LED is bright enough to show through my shirt pocket.
Obviously the next step was a Bluetooth adapter, so I picked up one up the following day at the South Coast Plaza Apple Store. 10.2 recognized the adapter instantly and threw up a bunch of options I still have to familiarize myself with.
Anyway, iSync was next and it recognized the phone instantly, didn’t even have to add it.
More phone adventures as they come in.
Ken Bereskin points out a cool OS X feature that I didn’t know about:
There are two very strong views about how the Get Info… command should work. The first camp wants to be able to compare the info of different files at the same time, so every time you choose Get Info… a new window is displayed (just like Mac OS 9). The other camp wants the “Inspector” behavior where the info window is a single floating palette that always reflects the current selection.
What to do? Well, in Jaguar, the default is to spawn an info window for each Get Info command but hold down the Option key and the command morphs to “Show Info”, the floating palette version. The crowd cheers – everyone is happy!
Awesome BBEdit script that takes a URL and opens up the source in a new BBEdit window.
Not too shabby, especially for a v1.0 product. I’m impressed. Over the years I’ve gone through (in rough order) Dynodex, InControl, NUD, Claris Organizer, back to NUD, Palm Desktop, Chronos Consultant, Entourage, back to Palm Desktop after a Entourage database meltdown, and now to iCal. And out of all of these products, iCal is the first one that I’ve been more or less satisfied with out of the box (well, out of the .dmg file).
I think iCal’s real promise lies with being able to easily share events and schedules. The stuff up on Apple’s library is a nice start.
The one negative thing is that I’m *still* stuck with two calendar apps since work uses CorporateTime for scheduling. Bleh.
So I was unhappily looking forward to upgrading emily.no-fi.com (the web server here at home) from OS X Server 10.1.5 to 10.2 and was expecting the usual hassles to replace my httpd.conf, sendmail, config files. I went through all this before with each point release and was prepared for it. Apple upgrade sheet suggests that “you really want to export the user list and back everything up first”, but I just shotgunned it and installed over everything.
Cool thing #1: The single 10.2 server disc updates both the base OS X and the server items to 10.2
Cool thing #2: My sendmail config was preserved intact!
Bad things: httpd.conf and the root index.html was overwritten. No big deal as I backed everything up. The only real change was to re-enable PHP and that was it.
The new server monitor apps are way cool!