ISSN 1496-3221
May 8, 2008
It was tough keeping this under wraps for so long, but the project I have been working on for the past six months was finally released last week. The longer we worked on it, the more impatient we became about letting everyone in on the story. A handful of people probably managed to pick up … More
October 26, 2006
Apple unveiled a revamped .Mac webmail today. As expected, it’s chock full of delicious Ajaxy goodness and mimics quite a bit of the functionality of their desktop Mail application. The .Mac Address Book gets a swift kick in the interface as well. I’ve documented some of the major changes in this Flickr photoset. The best … More
November 7, 2005
While muddling my way through a thousand or so autoreplies after sending out a Veer email newsletter, I came across what has got to be the strangest (and yet, the cutest) verification message ever. This is definitely one way to smack down the screen scrapers and dictbots that spammers use to get around sender verification … More
December 1, 2003
Mad props to Phil Dokas who managed to absolve me of one more niggling OS X quirk that had been stuck in my craw. He pointed to this handy tip on how to reinstate Command-N as the default keyboard shortcut for creating a new folder. The beautiful thing about this tip is that it doesn’t … More
May 20, 2003
Thanks to this slightly dated thread over at Mac OS X Hints and a brief refresher on standard Unix date and time formatting, I now have the day and date alongside the time in my menubar clock. Gosh, I’m feeling positively Now Utilities all over again. Why simple things like this have been left out … More
May 20, 2003
Since I first mentioned how I was tinkering with various OS X Finder settings to customize the views, I’ve had a few requests from viewers wanting to know what my windows looked like using 9 point aliased fonts. I’m reasonably happy with how the text labels look on the desktop, but the list and column … More
May 16, 2003
I received an email from Jason Sutter regarding my complaint that I couldn’t use Safari to post to Blogger. Since Jason works on Bloggerish things over at Google, he probably knows what the heck he’s talking about. Proving my assumption, he passed along a little trick that forces Blogger to work with pretty much any … More
April 2, 2003
John Siracusa has written numerous enlightening articles about OS X going back to the early developer previews. This week he specifically takes the OS X Finder to task for not being a successful spatial user environment. About the Finder… isn’t so much about slamming the obvious problems and interface widgets that everyone loves to hate, … More
October 15, 2002
Ah, what wondrously cryptic dispatches lie just beneath the surface of modern software. Not only is the phrase “Portable Document Format File Format” a fine example of descriptive over-exuberance (not unlike the Beach Boys tune which waxes lyrical on the populous fashion of wearing huarache sandals), but I find the whole idea of having an … More
March 23, 2001
In the earlier releases of Mac OS X, there was a curious little fellow that lived in the Fonts panel called the “Buy Fonts” button. A few eyebrows were raised and collective mumblings were shared between onlookers of the typographic variety, and then the “Buy Fonts” button quietly slid out of view and out of … More