So far it’s looking good. All three of my themes – Ahimsa, Audacity of Tanish and Rachel – seem to have no issues (at least new issues!) with WordPress 3.3, which was released yesterday.
It is I think by now well known that Google’s IMAP interface was an afterthought that was awkwardly grafted onto their splendidly useful label paradigm, and as a result promises chronic annoyances for those actually using it full-time. You could follow Google’s prescriptions for client configuration — here I will be talking about the OS X Mail app — to the dot, but find scant alleviation of your woes. Read the rest of this entry »
I have been searching for an app that lets me quickly write notes that also double as tasks – and therefore could use a due date/time and reminder alarm. There is the built-in “todo” capability in OS X iCal, but not only does it sport a terrible UI, it is also dismal at syncing across computers (this feat can be accomplished, as far as I know, only by the hack of storing such Todos on an IMAP server). Below is a summary of my quirky search for such a tool. Quirky because the authors of these apps could justifiably object that their app is being unfairly evaluated here. For example, Day One is a journal application, not a note-taking app, much less a task manager. At the same time, there are candidates, like JustNotes, that have a reasonable claim to appear on any such list. But nevertheless, here they are:
Read the rest of this entry »
Apple has a couple of great pages (1, 2) for switchers. What they fail to tell you about are the great non-Apple apps that make the Mac experience a worthwhile switch. So, here they are (at least some of them):
All of them are free. One or two are ad-supported.
Merlin Mann and John Gruber have been, quite admirably, extolling the virtues of backing up your computer in recent blog posts. They remind you that it might be tedious, but it will be well worth it when your hard disk ultimately fails. Mann lays out his idea of “The Holy Trinity” when it comes to what backups are:
If it’s not automated, it’s not a real backup. If it’s not redundant, it’s not a real backup. If it’s not regularly rotated off-site, it’s not a real backup.
And then outlines a detailed plan of action that you should adopt, including information on the necessary hardware, setup and process.
This is all commendable stuff. But I worry that in trying to “scare you straight” when it comes to backups, Mann and Co might be erring on the side of making the perfect the enemy of the good. The anxious reader might do well to keep his prescriptions an attainable Holy Grail but proceed with the comfort that every step towards it is, in itself, a giant leap towards preventing data loss.
To that end, my own more pragmatic thoughts (based on my own guesstimation of the probabilities of events and their simultaneous occurrence) follow.
If you have read this far into the post, it suggests you find my advice worthwhile, and at the risk of abusing that notion, I offer three steps that will get you within swimming distance of the shoreline:
Do the above now. And then go read Mann and Gruber’s posts.
// Link: Yes. Another Backup Lecture. | 43 Folders
Slipcover is a free Mac OS X app that can be used to “create custom case icons for all your media files”. In other words, customise the icons of your files, typically media files. Its a slick app and provides means for creating custom “cases”. Worth a download.
If you recently got a Magic Mouse either because it came with your new Mac or because you got excited by the hype and bought one, only to find that the dratted thing is missing the third and fourth buttons which you had so cleverly bound to Expose and Spaces, there is good news. A free application calledMagicPrefs lets you not only add this functionality to the Magic Mouse but lets you define gestures and perform other kinky mods that should be worth a lot more than the millions that Apple paid to acquire Lala.
UPDATE: TUAW has a pointer to another free tool called BetterTouchTool.
It is difficult not to fall in love (insofar as such emotions have been called love) with Posterous, the fast-growing mini-blogging service, especially in comparison to its bigger competitor Tumblr. In contrast to the insider ethos that Tumblr (ironically, currently the larger service) actively embraces, Posterous eschews the superficially hip for the genuinely productive, when it comes to features. Read the rest of this entry »
Did I say file transfers? That’s an injustice because DropZone can do more than file transfers. It can zip and email files, install apps, upload pictures, post them to Twitter or Posterous (did I tell you about Posterous? well, that’s the next post), print stuff (though you really shouldn’t be killing trees in the 21st century), generate short URLs via bit.ly … and all that for less cost ($10) than it took me to type up this list (what, you don’t think my time is worth $1/minute?).
And if you are capable of coding in Ruby, then DropZone provides a well-documented API using which you can write your own extensions. I plan to write one (though I am not a Ruby programmer) that uploads dropped files to a WordPress blog (using XML-RPC)… using the WordPress provided mechanism (XML-RPC) is useful because uploaded files (images) then show up in the built-in media manager (uploading such files via FTP, SCP, etc., will not have this effect).