John Dvorak on Apple
November 2nd, 2009 by ravi

This is John Dvorak commenting on the Apple Macintosh in 1984:

The nature of the personal computer is simply not fully understood by companies like Apple (or anyone else for that matter). Apple makes the arrogant assumption of thinking that it knows what you want and need. It, unfortunately, leaves the “why” out of the equation — as in “why would I want this?” The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I dont want one of these new fangled devices.

[ via Daring Fireball and  Jan. 1984: How critics reviewed the Mac – Apple 2.0 – Fortune Brainstorm Tech ]

Safari 4 beta
February 28th, 2009 by ravi

Apple has had a Safari 4 Beta out for a few weeks now. Should you wish to try it out on your Mac, a word of warning: installing this version utterly messed up my Mail, in particular my IMAP accounts. I blew away all traces of the accounts and recreated them from scratch in Mail. That didn’t help, nor did any of various other cleanup operations. Uninstalling it made my problems disappear. It is possible this problem is specific to me (such a critical problem would have raised louder howls!) or I am misdiagnosing it (one is a browser and the other a mail client). So usual acronyms apply: YMMV, FWIW.

Safari 4

Some interesting new features in Safari 4:

  • Offline support (HTML5)
  • New JavaScript engine (Nitro)
  • Cover Flow for bookmarks and history
  • “Top Sites” — new tab options like Google’s Chrome
  • Tabs on top like Google Chrome (what where they thinking?!)
  • A JavaScript debugger and profiler

Available for Mac OS X and Windows, if you want to brave it!

UPDATE: The problem was incompatibilities between Safari 4 and one of my Mail Plugins (Proxifier), which I was not using anyway. I removed /Library/Mail/Bundles/Proxifier and all is well!

MacHeist 3
February 10th, 2009 by ravi

Head on over to MacHeist to grab some free software after you sign up as an “agent” and solve the assorted mysteries on offer (actually, from what I can tell, you don’t even really need to solve them?). Now available:

  • ShoveBox (a collection management system for storing bits of info, URLs, etc)
  • Webbla (a very slick looking URL manager)
RSS reader NewsFire is now free
March 8th, 2008 by ravi

NewsFire
Looks like NewsFire has gone free a la NetNewsWire. I downloaded and played with it for a while, and while it is impressive, I do not plan on switching from NetNewsWire. One nice feature that NewsFire does have is that when a feed (in the left sidebar/column) has no unread articles, NewsFire moves it to the bottom of the list. I would like such feeds to be entirely hidden, as Google Reader does, but this NewsFire feature is at least better than the lack of any such feature in NetNewsWire or other readers.

If you are looking for other free options for a Mac RSS reader I also recommend Vienna RSS reader.

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