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Friday, September 13, 2002 |
How big do you keep your Dock?
Just out of curiosity, do you run your Dock minimized as small as it can be? Or do you bump the size up to the max and enjoy the icons?
For what it is worth, I go back and forth. I don't change as often as I change my default Web browser, but that is a familiar story...
9:45:25 PM 
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Today's notable software releases
Noted from Macupdate:
6:27:08 PM
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No doubt, RSS and newsreaders are here
A little more about the statistics for Mac Net Journal:
- 39% of the hits are on the rss.xml file for MNJ.
- 42% of the kilobytes transfered from the site are the rss.xml file.
- 29% of the traffic comes from users of NetNewsWire Lite, by far the most popular referrer for the site.
- 9% of the traffic comes from the news aggregator from Radio Userland.
- NetNewsWire Lite 1.0b21 is the top user agent (15%), followed by MSIE 5.21 for the Mac (10%), Radio Userland (6%), NetNewsWire Lite 1.0b22 (4%), NetNewsWire Lite 1.0b20 (3%), and Mozilla 5.0 (3%).
5:58:11 PM
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MNJ success continues, but it comes with a price
Mac Net Journal continues to grow day-by-day to the point where the site draws around 12,000 hits per day - 32 times more traffic than the site saw in October of 2001. Hopefully many of those readers find the articles, commentary, and comments of other MNJ readers a useful addition to the experience of getting the most out of their Macs under OS X.
Now comes the cost part. The company that hosts MNJ charges me extra fees once the site reaches a certain level of throughput, and in the last two months those extra charges have added up to $24 - a small amount right now, but something I need to keep an eye on for the future. Ultimately, I would like to see MNJ support itself and offer me a small amount of income to help offset the time spent running the site and writing the articles. Most of the time it doesn't happen that way.
I want to thank those who have donated to keep MNJ alive over the last few months and the two people who have donated $25 so far this month. If you find MNJ a useful source of information that you read often, please consider clickiing the PayPal link on the MNJ Web site to pitch in $10 or $20 a year to support the site. There is still a lot of Mac OS X news to be reported and stories to be told...
Thanks!
5:45:12 PM
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Bring peripherals when you switch
Using PC Peripherals on the Mac. Much of the "Switch" discussion has focused on computers and software. But what about those expensive peripherals Windows users have already invested in? Do they get tossed out the Window with XP? Wei Meng Lee says no. And he has the toys to back it up. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]
5:35:09 PM
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College to students: No sharing
USC to Students: No Sharing Files. Napster started in a college kid's dorm room. Now, students at USC face the prospect of campus life without Net access if they're caught swapping MP3s and other files on the school's network. By Brad King. [Wired News]
What this story and college adminstrators seem to forget is about Wi-Fi. Students don't need the college network to exchange files. An iBook with a $50 Airport card bought on special from an online store like OWC, where last year I bought two Airport cards for a combined $100, and OS X 10.2 with its easy to set up software base station set up and students can trade anything they want. That is until this copyright riduculousness reaches the point that college adminstrators are wardriving and sniffing out Wi-Fi content to catch file traders...
4:19:06 PM
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More on the state of OS X browsers
It looks like I am not the only person struggling with and juggling multiple Web browsers today. Brent Simmons writes:
Bugged by browsers. Some days I’m just totally bugged by the situation with browsers.
OmniWeb has way too many problems with CSS.
Mozilla, though wonderful in so many ways, drives like a tank—and I keep reading tales of how it eats its bookmark file. A little scary.
MSIE doesn’t let me block pop-up ads or block images from specific servers.
Chimera won’t let me set my font preferences, which I’m rather picky about.
I think that eventually Chimera will be my main browser, but for now, ugh, I’m screwed. [inessential.com]
2:02:32 PM
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Print Center Repair 2.0
Print Center is a many splendored thing. Print Center Repair 2.0 for Mac OS X 10.2 is out. Print Center Repair is a magical utility which can fix printing problems. When Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, he was talking about Print Center Repair. [dive into mark]
8:35:38 AM
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Comments on recent browser updates
I am trying to use OmniWeb 4.1.1sp4 today as my main Web browser after a fairly disappointing day of using Mozilla 1.2a yesterday. It is probably just coincidental, but after loading the Mozilla alpha on my machine I had some odd system problems that forced me to reboot my machine for the first time in a couple of weeks yesterday. And oddly enough, twice yesterday Mozilla lost my bookmarks - first all of them in one fell swoop and then just a few of them from the favorites bar. I will revisit a newer Mozilla build sometime next week...
Meanwhile, the latest OmniWeb build seems usable so far, though it renders pages much slower and it still suffers from the well documented lack of standards support and flaky CSS page display. I am keeping my hopes up that the people at The Omni Group in nearby Seattle will address the standards issues soon, and that Apple will fix the Java frameworks in Mac OS X to make it more likely that the Mac can once again access the Java-based Web sites that were once usable underMac OS 9.x. Will the rumored pending release of Mac OS X 10.2.1 roll in fixes to the Java frameworks? I doubt it...
7:16:50 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Rob McNair-Huff.
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