I went to the Grand Opening of the Tucson Apple Store this morning. It was a lot of fun, and I took some pictures while I was there. You can check them out here. I couldn’t get out of there without spending some money. 🙂 I ended up buying Katrina an iCurve laptop stand and David Pogue’s new book, Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition for myself.
Year: 2004 (Page 5 of 5)
Gus Mueller has posted some really cool music he has created with Apple’s GarageBand software. His latest was posted today. Here are a couple of his past postings.
Keep pumping out the cool tunes Gus!
Rich Wareham released Desktop Manager 0.5.0 today. Here’s a quick list of new features.
- New plugin-based system — almost all user-visible functionality is implemented by plugins.
- New preferences pane — more like System Preferences.
- Active screen edges — configurable, switching may be triggered by moving to screen edge.
- Desktop-based pager — An often reqested feature. A desktop pager compatible with CodeTek VirtualDesktop(TM) skins.
- Desktop switch transitions — Eight eye-candy switches for your enjoyment [EXPERIMENTAL].
- Preliminary sticky window support — There is some code for sticky windows available. Currently it is used to make all panels sticky. This will be configurable in future [EXPERIMENTAL].
- Other non-user-visible bug fixes and optimisations.
I’ve been using Desktop Manager since the 0.3.1 release, and in my opinion it’s the best virtual desktop tool available for MacOS X. It’s very light on resources, and the feature-set is almost exactly what I’m looking for (total sticky window support would be great for XRG). Anyway, if you have a Mac, check it out.
During the past couple of weeks, I have been trying to add functionality to XRG that breaks beyond the bounds of the application itself. One area that I’ve finished is adding contextual menu’s for each graph with additional statistics and links to other applications and web sites. For the weather module, I wanted to link to an online weather site, but most sites go off of US zip codes and not the international standard ICAOs that XRG uses. I finally found a company online that offers free CGI weather server software as long as you have a link to their web site on your server. I gave it a go and modified the templates to match the XRG web page. You can check out the XRG Weather Server here.
Contextual menu support will be included with the upcoming release of XRG 0.5.0. I still have a ways to go before I finish 0.5.0, but it’s looking pretty nice so far. I want to get some feedback on the contextual menus before the release though just in case there is something blatantly obvious that I’m missing. Here’s a list of the menus for each module:
- CPU Graph: Shows top 5 processes’ CPU usage, and a link to Apple’s Activity Monitor.
- Memory Graph: Shows top 5 processes’ Memory usage.
- Battery Graph: Link to open the Energy Saver System Preferences.
- Network Graph: Shows separate total RX and TX stats for each network interface and links to open the Network System Preferences, Internet Connect, Network Utility, and NetInfo Manager.
- Disk Graph: Link to open Apple’s Disk Utility.
- Weather Graph: Shows more detailed current weather statistics and links to the XRG Weather Server for your configured ICAO.
- Stock Graph: Links to detailed web stock information for configured stock symbols.
Am I missing anything? I’m sure I’ll get comments on it after the 0.5.0 release, but I’d like the menus to be as good as they can be for the initial release.
MacShareware.net today released an SDK to help save Mac software developers time when releasing their applications. If you have released a piece of software before, you know it is a ton of work. I usually spend a couple of hours writing something up, and posting it to all kinds of web sites. With MacPAD, it will be a lot easier. From their site, it sounds like Windows developers already have something similar to this…
Basically, how it works is you create a PAD file with information about your application release. This has a short description, long description, release notes, etc, all contained in an XML file. You then upload this file to your website and let other websites such as VersionTracker and MacUpdate know where your PAD file is. Then, all you have to do to release a new version is to simply update the PAD file at that URL. Other servers should pick up the change in a matter of hours.
I really hope that other software sites adopt this method of updating software, as it would make my life a lot easier when releasing XRG. The project is open source and has a page on SourceForge. You can find out more information about the MacPAD SDK here.
I have to say that I was a little disappointed with the new hardware offerings that Apple introduced at MacWorld yesterday. I was expecting a new machine that was kind of “out there” to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Macintosh. A few years ago (1997 I think), Apple released the 20th Anniversary Macintosh to celebrate 20 years of being in business. It would have made more sense to call this the 20th Anniversary Apple, or something different so they would be able to ship a real 20th Anniversary Mac this year. For it’s time though, the 20th Anniversary Mac was “out there” compared to the more boring machines of it’s time. It was no speed demon, but it’s design was top notch.
Instead, we got new iPod minis and a new G5 XServe. Both of these are pretty nice products, but it just wasn’t what I was expecting.
I think the iPod minis miss their intended market slightly. Apple wanted to have competition in the high-end flash card MP3 player market. The iPod mini does do very well when you just look at it in a narrow field of high-end flash players. However, I wouldn’t buy one at the price that they set for it. $249 for a 4Gb player? Yes it’s only $50 more than Rio’s 256Mb offering, but the 15Gb iPod is only $50 more for almost 4 times the storage. Give me that amount of space for $150-200 and you have a sale.
The XServe G5 looks like a pretty nice machine. Being able to get dual G5s cooled enough to run in a 1U rack gives me hope that we’ll see a G5 Powerbook soon. Then again, they had to put 7 fans in there to do it…
Today I was checking out my web server statistics and I came across 5 or 6 lines in the referrer section that advertised sites that would never link to my web server. I really hope this isn’t a new form of “SPAM” that will be used by advertising companies in the future.
You would think that the number of people who actually look at their web server logs wouldn’t be large enough for companies to go through the trouble of faking a referrer. Also, personally, I will be a lot more pissed off if things like this throw off my log statistics than I do when I get some SPAM in my inbox. At least there are some reasonable ways to block most advertising email (I use a combination of SpamAssassin on the server and Apple’s Mail.app Client that is blocking about 99% of the SPAM I get now). Then again, spammers never cease to amaze me in the hacks they put together just so people might see their ads.