ISSN 1496-3221
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
February 23, 2003
Oh dear. The startup drive on this server is beginning to sound like an F-15 winging its way to some Kuwaiti air strip. Fortunately, the entire server gets backed up nightly alternating between two incremental images on a completely separate drive. None of my hostees need to worry about their data being irretrievably strewn amidst … More
December 16, 2002
When your company name is straddling the chasm between typographic awkwardness and nerdy self-awareness, your product better be damn good and useful. From what I’ve seen so far, IOXperts seems to have avoided most of the issues surrounding its corporate moniker by developing some dearly needed device drivers. USB and FireWire-based cameras, webcams and other … More
April 1, 2001
Creating Docklings in Mac OS X “A dockling is a lightweight component, packaged in a MacOS X bundle, which can provide constant visual feedback through its icon as well as a pop-up menu which can execute commands.” Cool.
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
March 5, 2001
Lucky me. I just stumbled across Jonathan Hoefler’s Geometer screen font packages over at his typography.com site. These bitmapped lovelies are Mac only (natch) and positively free for the taking. Give Geneva and Monaco a rest and grab some gorgeous alternatives to the default cast of characters usually found in Finder windows and email clients … More
January 31, 2001
Somewhere around four years ago, before I moved this site onto the Quadra 950 that’s running the show right now, I used MacHTTP on a cute little IIcx with an infinitesimal 8MB of memory. MacHTTP was the original web server software for the Mac and after a six year hiatus, it seems to have resurfaced … More
September 5, 2000
If you’re anything like me (and I pity your loved ones if you are), you’re the type of person that just can’t seem to stuff enough ephemeral Macintosh knowledge into your limited cranial cavity. Well, now is the time to start up the trash compactor because we’ve got to make room for the historical background … More
July 27, 2000
Writing’s On Wall For Mac OS X It looks like Apple is resurrecting the acclaimed Newton hand writing recognition software once known as “Rosetta” in future iterations of Mac OS. Now dubbed InkWell, it appears to have the exact same features as what I use in my MessagePad 2100 right down to the font used … More
May 8, 2000
So, you think that your favourite computing platform is going to protect you like a Bondi blue condom from the amorous advances of some coworker? Here’s a little reminder that everybody can be infected by a digital STD.