|
Archives: August 2004
Thu Aug, 26 2004
Mac OS X's Color Picker
The blog codepoetry explores the Color Picker in OS X in great detail, helping us find all the great hidden features found within.
There are ways to use the Color Picker to choose a color anywhere on your screen. You can use external images as a custom palette, and much, much more.
One thing in the Comments is a complaint about having to go into an app's font colors to work with the Color Picker. I wrote a quick little AppleScript that does the job for you. It opens the Color Picker, and will even return a color in {R, G, B] format, if you choose one and press OK.
Here's the code:
set rgbValue to choose color default color {65535, 65535, 65535}
set rValue to item 1 of rgbValue
set gValue to item 2 of rgbValue
set bValue to item 3 of rgbValue
set the clipboard to ("{" & rValue & ", " & gValue & ", " & bValue & "}")
return rgbValue
[0] comments (1271 views) | link
OmniWeb 5 - the best web browser
I had been hoping for a long time that OmniWeb would reach this point. Version 5.0 finally puts OmniWeb on top for serious users. It now has the stability to match its always-amazing feature set.
One unmatched feature - your browsing state is saved between re-launches. I cannot count the number of time I had many pages loaded in Safari or another browser and accidentally quit (or crashed), losing everything I had queued up to read.
I partially got around this in other browsers by making an AppleScript stay-open applet that saved the URLs of all open windows every minute. However, this leads to another area the OmniWeb excels: AppleScript support. When Apple put tabs into Safari, they did not make them accessible to AppleScript: you can only get information about the active tab for a window. This means that for my "backup web addresses" script to work in Safari I could not use tabs. It was even worse in other browsers that did not support Applescript AT ALL. OmniWeb's tabs are elements of a browser window, which means you can get every address of every tab of every browser. This is the right way to support AppleScript.
OmniWeb is definitely the best Mac web browser (which I believe makes it the best browser, period). How many hours do you spend web-browsing? If it is more than an hour per day, you need OmniWeb, and the money is well worth it. How much is your wasted time worth getting all your pages opened again? How much is it worth to be able to edit web forms in reasonable text boxes that allow Undo, etc? How much are site-specific font choices, popup-permission, cookie-permission, and more worth?
Buy it - invest in these guys and OmniWeb will only pull further ahead.
[I'm not affiliated with OmniWeb in any way except that I want this browser to stick around for a long time...]
VersionTracker.com page: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/3253
OmniWeb product page: http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/
I'm looking forward to 5.1, which will use a more up-to-date WebCore rendering engine. I still need to dip into Safari every now and then to view a page properly.
[0] comments (2453 views) | link
Thu Aug, 19 2004
Fiefdom of Music Choice: Real Networks is being Deceptive
No, I'm not talking politics here, folks. I'm talking about a company that releases poorly-designed products, harasses its users, and then tries to bully its way into a competitors product when it can't compete on its own.
Real Networks has tried for years now to get people to pay for music they can't keep, and have had limited success. Apple came along and ate their lunch by combining a best-of-breed portable music player in the iPod and combined it with an easy-to-use, enjoyable online music store. Their reward? Lots of customers, using good products.
Real then offers Apple the wonderful opportunity to partner with them for, basically, only Real's benefit. They include a threat to go to Microsoft and partner with them to compete against Apple if Apple turns them down. Apple concludes, correctly that Real is not much of a threat and their lousy software design would certainly NOT benefit Apple or its customers. Apple tells them to get lost via releasing Real's childish-sounding message to the New York Times.
Real then reverse-engineers Apple's DRM method so that they can encode their music to play on the iPod while still being copy-protected. There are some problems here: first is that Real could have just converted their music to MP3, which the iPod can play without a problem. Apple's DRM (Fairplay) is presumably their own intellectual property, or at least is SOMEONE's intellectual property. Whatever your politics on this are, Real is using someone else's IP to make a profit. Generally not allowed. Apple correctly announces that as they have no control over what Real is doing, a future update may break Real's hacked conversion (ignore negative connotation of the word "hacked." I'm just using it to describe programming without the full documentation of a particular environment). Apple is trying to explain that Real's software is not Apple's responsibility to support, which is the whole problem with this in the first place. Who will iPod users complain to if a song won't play on their iPod, and someone told them it would?
Finally, what most tech news sites are NOT reporting, the software Real uses to do this is not available for Mac OS X. So, the champions of "music choice" are deliberately leaving Apple's core customers out in the cold. When Real foolishly puts up a petition that claims to represent users clamoring for Apple to let Real screws its customers, many flocked to the site and told Real how wrong they were. Once again, Real showed its true colors by ripping down the comments, and posting a new site where users have no choice to have their say.
This kind of self-serving hypocritical garbage should be ridiculed by everyone as the desperate ploy of a company that knows it is out-classed, out-designed, and ready to go out-of-business.
Read Real's garbage
[0] comments (2242 views) | link
Mon Aug, 09 2004
TuneTags 0.86 - posted at VersionTracker
Well, I finally went and did it - posted my new program TuneTags on VersionTracker.com. Here's hoping I didn't miss any obvious bugs and get roasted.
I thought of making TuneTags when I realized how limiting the Genre tag was for song tracks. I wanted to be able to mark songs as good for driving music, good party music, mellow to help you relax, romantic, some combination of those, or whatever. I realized that the Comment tag usually goes fairly unused, and I could save keywords, or "tunetags" there. It is slightly limited by the fact that the Comment tag is limited to 255 characters, but it will work for now. If I made a custom MP3 tag iTunes would be unable to build smart playlists based on those tunetags.
Anyway, here's the freeware product blurb:
TuneTags is an application that works with iTunes to let you add keywords, or "tunetags" to your music.
Have you ever realized that many songs do not fit into just ONE Genre? Or, you want to note which songs are good for Driving, are Romantic, or just about anything else useful to know? You can make playlists for these things, but it would be better if the song itself could be marked with many different keywords, or "tunetags" that let you know more about each song. Then, smart playlists could be made that show you all your good 80's Driving music, or Romantic Folk music, or Defiant Rock music or even music good for getting psyched before a competition.
TuneTags lets you mark each song using many tags from a list, or Library, of tags. It comes with a starting Library of tags, but you can add your your own to the Library as you think of new tunetags that describe your music.
[2] comments (3402 views) | link