Happy New Year fellow Mac Geeks! I look forward to (among other things) making MacSparky even better in 2008. A few ways I’m going to do this include:
* Better production values in the screencasts (I’m slowly figuring it all out)
* Select guest posts
* Superior MacWorld coverage in just 2 weeks!
If you would like an excellent New Year’s Resolution, try slowing down. Leo made an excellent post on this point over at zenhabits. Go and check it out.
I just discovered this little donationware app called Warp that allows you to change spaces simply by hovering the mouse on the edge of the screen. I’m finding it really useful and so far no “false-postives”, meaning no unexpected screen changes. Check it out.
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Today lifehacker ran an exclusive interview with Quicksilver developer Nicholas Jitkoff in which Jitkoff essentially says he is moving on and leaving Quicksilver to linger.
Jitkoff: I’m inclined to encourage users to move over to the more stable and well supported alternatives like LaunchBar. Right now QS 54 (ed: the current build) accomplishes everything that I really need, the problem is stability, which for some reason most people seem to be ignoring.
Lifehacker: Right, in the end stability is what matters most. I have a MacBook Pro that—until your recent updates—crashed QS on a very regular basis, which was always heartbreaking. But I’ve seen major stability improvements since the updates, which has been fantastic.
Jitkoff: Basically, that branch is condemned to a long slow death. I just don’t know if the experimental one will ever be up to snuff. Hence the recommendation of third party apps.
Blink.
Quicksilver’s developer just told me to download Launchbar. The apocalypse has arrived.
I’ve noticed stability problems with Quicksilver since Leopard arrived. Primarily, it has shut down on me a few times requiring me to restart it. I’ve also helped a few friends troubleshoot some general Quicksilver wonkiness. While my initial reaction is that you’ll have to pry Quicksilver out of my cold dead hand, you never know. Jitkoff also implied that he has something else up his sleeve and, since QuickSilver is now open source, some enterprising programmer may just take it to the next level. Time will tell. For the meantime anyway, I’m sticking with it. There is just way too much functionality to give this application up.
You can read the entire interview right here.
My kids went nuts over these new plug-ins for Leopard iChat. We spent about an hour chatting too each other with the various faces and effects. The 70s kid in me of course immediately gravitated to the the Star Wars bluey thingy. “Luke! Use the Force!”
You can download them from Apple right here.
I installed 10.5.1 on all of the Sparmerica Machines tonight and nothing exciting to repart. All the installs went well but the MacBook Pro gave me the grey screen for about five minutes which caused a bit of nerves but all is well that ends well.
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Believe it or not, I spend a lot of time thinking about writing. Now I know if you are a regular reader of MacSparky you may chortle but this blog is where I let my hair down a bit. When writing for clients and guys wearing black robes I am always very careful. You only have so much time and attention from your reader and people’s lives depend on me laying out their position favorably and quickly before I lose my reader.
There is a joke in the legal profession. “The difference between a good brief and a bad brief is about ten pages.” This doesn’t mean ten more pages. It means ten less pages. I like to finish my legal briefs about three days before they are due. I then spend the next several days stopping every once in awhile and hacking at it with my red pen. The brief never gets longer during this three day period. It usually gets much shorter. Just today I was paring down one of my briefs and came to a line comparing the other side’s position to Alice falling down the rabbit hole. While that seemed rather brilliant while I dictated it a few nights ago, today it looked cheap, contrived, and unprofessional. Scratch.
So there you have it:
1. Give it some time;
2. Don’t take ownership in every word;
3. Hack away.
There is a point to this post. Honestly.
Today I came across a post at DailyWritingTips.com called “Is There Really Room for Error in Writing?”. It is another fine post and I think Michael really nailed it when he explained:
As a writer, you have a limited arsenal. A sentence can only hold so many words before your reader loses track of what you’re saying. The English language only has so many synonyms that your reader understands, which limits the vocabulary you can use. So a writer has to squeeze all his or her meaning into a small space. There is little room for error.
Go read the article here. If you also “think” about writing, add DailyWritingTips.com to your RSS feed. It is well worth it.
This week Quicksilver went open-source which is leading lots of folks to think it will be getting more development attention. That being said, I found an older post on Hawkwings detailing how to tweek the Quicksilver interface. I’m not sure if this is interesting to anyone else, but I sure dig it. Check it out.
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My assimilation as a Mac Geek is complete. We have some relatives in the Bay Area we’ve been meaning to visit for a few years so we decided to go up the week of MacWorld. I don’t think I’ll be buying a ticket for the Keynote ($300!) but definitely haunting the expo floor and sharing my experiences with the MacSparky gang.
I’m going to stay at the Hotel Milano using the deal Dave Hamilton put together over at TheMacObserver. If you are attending, let me know and we can meet up.
I’ve been thinking about looking for a native photo application and this review was excellent.
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Mail Act-On, an outstanding donation-ware application for Mail.app released a beta version for Leopard Mail today. I’m very pleased to have my Act-on back on. I reviewed it awhile back right here. You can download it right here. Now I just need SuperDuper to get its Leopard version out.
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