Archive for the ‘apple’ Category

Snow Leopard Goodies

August 30th, 2009

A quick run­down of some of my favorite little things from Snow Leopard:

  • Seems slightly faster – maybe 10% faster for most operations
  • Min­i­mize to dock icon instead of to no-man’s land next to trash
  • Time Cap­sule can now back up hourly speed­ily. Used to have to use TimeMa­chi­neEd­i­tor and modify for every 4 hours to avoid con­stant backups
  • Time Machine backup mounted DMG isn’t generic icon anymore
  • Search now can search ‘current folder’ by default instead of the entire mac
  • Expose shows min­i­mized win­dows below main win­dows, smaller icons.
  • Expose, press­ing space­bar while moused over a window shows full size pre­view of window.
  • Column view allows you to sort by type, etc
  • More ani­ma­tions in finder when reorder­ing, etc. Every­thing seems smoother.
  • The much hyped stacks improve­ments. You can now nav­i­gate thru folders.
  • 4 finger swipe on older Mac­book Pros!

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Twitterrific 2 for the iPhone

May 12th, 2009

Twitterrific Premium_128x128.pngSo last week, Twit­ter­rific 2 for the iPhone was released. The Icon­fac­tory guys had lagged a little behind other com­peti­tors due to the fact that they launched first, but have def­i­nitely man­aged to catch up and sur­pass the others in the fea­tures depart­ment for the most part.

What I think I love the most is the single ‘action button’ that allows for future fea­tures to come in pretty easily into future updates. Press­ing the one action button allows you to star some­thing, reply to a person, view their pro­file, and so much more. Addi­tion­ally, you can cus­tomize ‘tap shortcuts’ to quickly do things you do fre­quently (star an item, view a pro­file, etc). I hope that future releases allow direct mes­sages to be allowed as a ‘tap shortcut’.

Nothing’s per­fect though, but there are only 3 things that jump out as prob­lems to me:

  • No ‘go to user’ fea­ture. Some­times I want to quickly bring up a pro­file that I don’t follow. How would I do that in Twit­ter­rific 2?
  • No ‘view more’ fea­ture. I’d like to be able to view more than just 100 tweets.
  • Selected tweet loses focus on scroll.

I’d like to think that most of those are going to be addressed in a future update. Anyway, Twit­ter­rific costs less than $5 in the iTunes store, or has an ad sup­ported free ver­sion. So give it a go.

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Firefox 3.5 & Blasphemy

May 3rd, 2009

I’ve been using Safari since day one. I’ve always found it’s speed, system inte­gra­tion, font dis­play, and over­all min­i­mal­ism to be a per­fect mix for me. Other browsers may be one or two of these things as well, but as a whole, there is really noth­ing that quite matches up as an entire package.

Well, that might be chang­ing with the soon-to-be-released Safari 4 browser.

When the browser’s beta ver­sion was released a while back, I had some ini­tial reac­tions that I still stand by. They were trying to do too much with the new ‘tabs on top’ inter­face, and they actu­ally cre­ated a franken­stein browser that breaks so many UI rules that it’s not even funny.

I’m keep­ing my fin­gers crossed, but some­thing I have been doing a lot lately is using the Fire­fox 3.5 betas and the ‘GrAp­ple Crisp‘ theme. This is a ‘tabs on top’ ver­sion but it’s actu­ally done cor­rectly in my view.

  • The title­bar stays intact
  • Click-​though is respected
  • Click­ing any­where on the bar that is not a tab cre­ates a new tab
GrApple-Crisp-1.9.9.43.png

Worth a look if you like the tabs on top look that Chrome and Safari 4 are offering.

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