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Tuesday, February 5, 2002 |
PowerBook vs. the new iBook [MacCentral] - There is no hands-down winner in this grudge match. The equation is simple: If you are a hard-core user who needs high-performance graphics and expandability, the TiBook wins. If your portable computing needs are less demanding, the new iBook fits the bill.
11:13:43 PM 
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Derrick Story offers a wrap-up of iPhoto plug-ins and enhancements in a short piece on the O'Reilly Network: iPhoto Scripts and Plug-ins
9:41:27 PM
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BlogScript 1.5 is now compatible with any sites that support the Blogger API, including Movable Type and Manila sites. It’s also now Open Source. [mac.scripting.com]
5:16:49 PM
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Nicholas Riley: F-Script Anywhere 1.0 “lets you embed a F-Script interpreter in any Cocoa application. You can use F-Script like a debugger, so you can examine your application’s objects in a richer environment than GDB or Project Builder permits. F-Script Anywhere can also be useful for examining applications you didn’t write, to isolate bugs or add new features.” [mac.scripting.com]
5:16:16 PM
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OK, I admit it...I am spending some time this afternoon geeking. My friend John got his Pismo laptop back from Apple's repair folks today, so he returned my old PowerBook 3400c. And rather than hooking the old laptop up in my office, I created a spot for it next to the TV in the living room, hooked an Ethernet cable to it and hooked the sound-out to our stereo.
Finally, after months of saying I would try using this machine as an MP3 player running iTunes and piping the audio through our stereo, I have it up and running. Now I just need to copy MP3 files over to the machine and I will have days' worth of music ready to be played on demand. And the 3400c can still work as a file server, it can run a slide show of recent digital photos, and all of this can be controlled over the network since I use AT&T's Virtual Network Computing (VNC) client to access the machine from my Pismo running OS X 10.1.2.
This is old technology, but old technology that can still be very useful. And the PowerBook 3400c runs 24/7/365 as a file server, so I may as well spread out its usefulness.
3:19:03 PM
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Browser update: I did some testing of the Java plug-in for Mozilla with the latest version, 0.9.8, and unless I am doing something wrong here, it doesn't work properly with OS X. I also continue to have a problem that crashes the browser every now and then, mostly when I am closing tabs. Maybe the tabbed browsing feature is the root of my problems...
1:15:29 PM
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NY Times' NewsStand is Windows only [MacCentral] - It looks like the New York Times is being as intelligent as always on this topic, ignoring the fact that many who live a lifestyle that would include a stylist new iMac are likely the same people who want to keep up with the news in the Times...
12:53:49 PM
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Brent Simmons weighs in with his comments on Mozilla 0.9.8 and why he cannot switch to it as his browser of choice just yet:
I checked out Mozilla 0.9.8 for OS X last night—and was very pleased with how it looked much more like an OS X application than did previous releases. It doesn’t seem like so much of an oddball anymore.
However, on my machine there's still something jerky and slow about the interface that's just a bit too annoying to make it my main browser. I want to use it, but for now I'm still using IE, which feels smoother and faster. Nuts. [inessential.com]
11:41:01 AM
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Macupdate notes the release of Proteus for OS X 1.4, a multi-protocol chat program that works with AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and others. I will give this a spin later today...
10:00:10 AM
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FinePix 30i: it's a digital camera and more [MacCentral] - This sounds like an interesting hybrid device, playing MP3s, taking photos, recording audio and recording video. Interesting that the video portion can help the camera double as a video conferencing device.
9:03:09 AM
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Charles Moore weighs in on the laptop vs. desktop philosophy of working with computers in The Laptop vs. Desktop Dialectic. The concluding sentence in Moore's piece is something that I whole-heartedly agree with: "But be forewarned, once you begin using a laptop it's highly likely that you will be ruined for desktops forever."
Once you move to a PowerBook, you wonder why you ever decided to tie yourself to a desk, to working in one place, tied down. Admittedly, deciding to do your computing on a laptop is a lifestyle decision. What appeals to me, and what will appeal to me even more when I buy a wireless access point and become even more portable with my PowerBook, is the ability to integrate computing, writing and work into living. It is much more comfortable writing my books while music plays or The West Wing is on TV and I am sitting here with Natalie than if I had a TV on doing the same thing isolated in the office.
8:45:48 AM
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Maccentral today mentions an upcoming book by John Holland that is aimed to make the transition to OS X easier for creative professionals. The book, "Mac OS X for Creative Professionals," is published in PDF format. It is available for a short time at a discounted rate of $39.99 and will be available for $49.99 once the special is over.
8:31:58 AM
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I need to follow up on last night's note that Mozilla 0.9.8 has been released. While digging through the release notes I noticed this:
On OS X, there is no "Default Downloader Plugin" (aka. the Default Plugin) and Java is not working yet. (Bug 88870)
And so while I will be grabbing the new build today, it looks like this new version will still fall short as a Java capable browser.
8:21:34 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Rob McNair-Huff.
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