Mat on Macs

I’ve started using Tumbler over at matlu.tumblr.com

Anybody who wants to buy me a present, feel free!

I got the call. After plugging around on my own for a while I’m finally heading to the bigs. Catch my posts from now on at The Unofficial Apple Weblog. Hope to see you over there!

Here’s a quick tip for my fellow bloggers. I find that I often have to slightly manipulate my images (often screenshots) before posting them in the blog, and I generally do this with the marvelous little freeware program ImageWell. This means I generally need to start ImageWell, and then either drop the image into it or go through the File -> Open menu. Well it just dawned on me that I could save a step by putting ImageWell directly in my Finder toolbar (I actually use Pathfinder, but same difference). Now I need only drag and drop the image file on the ImageWell icon, and it opens with the image loaded ready for editing. Of course the principle applies to any program you can drag and drop to, so I use the same idea with the cool AppZapper software deinstaller.

I normally limit my posts to Mac related things, but this is just too cool to leave unremarked. Today Google released Google Maps for Palm Treo and it just plain awesome. It works just like you would expect: the five-way Navigator scrolls the map and any direction (you can also use the stylus). In addition the side buttons zoom in and out just as you would expect. Prior to this official release from Google there was a program available called KMaps that would allow you to do some of these things, but unfortunately it was Java (and so required the memory eating Java runtime) and just plain did not work as well. In addition to maps you get (as you would expect) full satellite views.

You can search for locations in more or less the same way you can in Google Maps, with to/from directions, nearby businesses, and realtime traffic (in a few cities). Running on my old Sprint Treo 650 (without the benefit of the much higher bandwidth of EVDO as in the newer Treo 700) it is a bit sluggish, but still eminently usable. This one is definitely a keeper! Thanks Google!

Pukka is a neat little multi-account del.icio.us posting client compatible with NetNewsWire as well as all browsers (via a bookmarklet). To be honest I until recently really preferred cocoalicious, but it has stopped working for me since the API change, but even more importantly it does not support multiple accounts as does Pukka. Multiple account support alone is worth Pukka’s modest fee of $5. There is one, however, I don’t like about Pukka: its posting sound effect of a smooch. I could just turn the sound effects off (in the Preferences), but it does in fact serve a purpose of letting the user know that the item has successfully posted. So the solution is to change the annoying sound effect; fortunately, it’s pretty easy to do.

Before you start, duplicate the original Pukka.app in case you screw something up.

1) First find (or make) a wav file you’d like to replace the default posting effect with.
2) Right click on Pukka.app in the Finder and select “show package contents”
3) Navigate to Pukka/Contents/Resources/
4) Delete (or maybe just move to the desktop) the file called: kiss.wav
5) Copy your preferred sound effect from step (1) to Pukka/Contents/Resources/
6) Rename that file: kiss.wav and you’re done

Now when you post with Pukka you’ll get your preferred sound effect. I used the OS X default ping sound which I converted to a wav with SoundConverter

An Intel native build of ecto was released today, and this is mostly a test to make sure it works. Apparently ecto 3 is taking a while, so Adriaans’s decided to post this Intel build. It’s not a Universal Binary, but it does load much faster than the PPC build under Rosetta, and seems to work just fine.

I had previously chided MLB.TV for their weak support for OS X. Well with the release of MLB.TV Mosaic for OS X, all is forgiven. This is awesome! The concept is really cool, this stand alone application allows you watch six game streams simultaneously! Furthermore, subjectively at least the video quality is much better than was was previously available through the browser-embedded Windows Media streams via Flip4Mac. It allows you to click on any of the six mini-views to enlarge a single game.

Here is last night’s Astros-Pirates matchup. About the only downside I’ve detected so far is that the application is definitely a memory hog (~200 MB of real not virtual RAM). Nonetheless, for any baseball fan this is a no-brainer. Well done, MLB.TV!

WOW! My 17″ iMac is now running a Virtualized copy of Win XP thanks to Parallels Workstation for Mac (luckily I still owned a copy of XP from the bad old days before I saw the Mac light). It is in fact, quite responsive, though there is definitely still quite a bit of work to be done (e.g. networking is fragile–thanks to endemic Windows suckiness–and there’s no sound support yet), but this is really shocking. Firefox and WIndows Media Player run just fine, opening up web content previously unavailable on the Mac. I’m personally much more interested in a virtualization solution like this one that in dual booting, though I’m also going to try Boot Camp tomorrow just see what kind of gaming performance old Bonaventure is capable of. All in all, an amazing week; watch out for those flying pigs!

Well this is insanely ironic. MacVolPlace publishes a picture of some kind of operations center at Major League Baseball, showing them running lots of OS X machines with Apple 20″ Cinema Displays galore. Of course, MLB.TV runs like crap on the Mac since it depends on Windows Media. As of version 2.02 Flip4Mac will play the streams, but it doesn’t work yet on Mactels! Of course the real question is why MLB is using Windows Media in the first place, especially if they’re doing lots of work on Macs, presumably in QT. Ugh.

I got this via MacVolPlace, but it looks like a scan from a newspaper. They don’t give the original source. Click on the picture of a larger version.

BTW, Go (defending National League Champion) Astros!

Update: They’ve released a bloated, but cool stand-alone Universal Binary: MLB.TV Mosaic.