Linkstew

Finder Drag/Drop bug still around? - I had this problem before Leopard, but Leopard certainly exacerbated it and things deteriorated to the point that I couldn't drag tabs in Firefox or text within TextEdit; that said, I still didn't believe it was Quicksilver's fault until I read this. I'm already missing Quicksilver.

DarwiinRemote is released! (Hirolog) - Use your Wiimote with your Mac!

I was excited to hear about the movie support in iPhoto 5, but it turns out it's just not any good. Here are the problems I've had with it tonight:

• When you double click on a movie, it opens in QuickTime. iPhoto doesn't have any built in support for trimming my movies, so this finally spurred me to buy QuickTime Pro for the third time.
• So I enter my new QuickTime Pro registration key and start editing the movie in QuickTime pro, assuming that it's going to work in the same was as PhotoShop does as an external editor for photos. In particular, I was expecting that I'd be able to hit "save" and it'd save a new copy of my movie, preserving my original movie in the process. Nope. It prompts me where to save the movie, and it doesn't automatically import it.
• After tracking down where I just saved the movie and dragging it into iPhoto. Unfortunately, iPhoto apparently doesn't recognize QuickTime Pro 7's default save format, and informs me that "The following files could not be imported (they may be an unrecognized file type or the files may not contain valid data)."
• So I finally figure out which format iPhoto can import and I get all my movies edited and ready to export to my Gallery, but the export module will only export photos. Apparently I'm going to have to manually upload each of my movies to my gallery if I want them there.

Though now that I look at the iPhoto product page, they seem to only claim the only new feature with regard to movies "Import video clips from your digital camera," which seems accurate since I ran into problems with editing, importing from the file system, and exporting.

Needless to say, this isn't exactly motivating me to finish sorting through my New York and Las Vegas pictures for posting.

iPhoto feedback goes here.

Blueprint for a widget of mass destruction

I'm undecided on just how dangerous this could be, but anybody running Tiger should probably at least be aware of the potential issues.

Oh, there's a lot I could say, but let's leave it at this: I already ordered an iPod shuffle (the "Do not eat iPod shuffle" footnote is pretty great), I kinda want a Mac mini to use as a home server, I'm going to wait for iPhoto 5 to actually deal with all the Europe pictures (and yay, it also finally stores movies, too!), and I really really can't wait for Tiger.

Ars Technica Reviews Mac OS X 10.3 Panther

As usual, Ars' review of Panther is incredibly in depth, and highlights the OS's most serious problems both in the short term and long term. Absolutely worth a read.

Alternate OS X 10.3 Panther Box Art / Ad (Think Pink)

This is pretty damn amusing, really.

I've been meaning to write this since just a couple of days after I installed Panther, but it took me quite awhile to actually find a third irritation. But find one I did, so here we are:

1. In Preview, the default tool that is selected when you open an image isn't very consistent. Sometimes it's the scroll tool, but more often than not it seems like it ends up being the selection tool, which is very irritating. This is solved somewhat by noticing that you can activate the scroll tool with command-1. Also irritating is that they changed zoom-in and zoom-out from command-up arrow and command-down arrow to command-+ and and command--. Probably more consistent in general, but irritating until I get used to it.
   • An annoying holdover bug from Jaguar's Preview: If you zoom in and then hit the "maximize" window widget, it never fully maximizes horizontally, even when there's clearly plenty of room. It always makes the window just a little bit too small. More irritating, in Panther, it seems like this behavior now happens when you initially open an image, too.
2. In Jaguar, I made backups in Disk Copy by using the "New Image From Device" feature. Unfortunately, when I try to make an image of my hard drive in Panther, it tells me that there was a "Device Busy" error. Instead, I have to resort to making a "New Image From Folder," which is a little more work to do each time.
3. The final irritation I've found has to do with the new application switching interface. In 10.2, if you hid an application and then hit command-tab once, you would return to the application you just hid. However, in 10.3, that newly hidden application gets moved near the end of the application list. In theory this is a good change, but in practice it seriously disrupts my workflow, because I would hide applications I was still actively using but that I just want off my screen for a second.
   • Also irritating is that hidden apps don't get shown when you use Expose. It'd be nice if there was some sort of modifier key to make it show hidden apps in addition to visible apps. Minimized windows, too, for that matter.

So, those are my first three irritations. As usual, feedback to Apple goes here. I'm sending the above comments to them pretty much as written.

In a word, "whoa." I've probably said "whoa" enough times in my first 3 hours of using Panther to give gold ole' Keanu a run for his money. If you're for any reason waiting to buy Panther, let me just reassure that it made my PowerBook feel like a whole new computer. There are so many improvements that I couldn't even begin to list them all. Boy, I sure wish I had a Mac to use at work. I'd be so much more productive than with windows.

But just to pick one out of the hat, here's a feature of Expose that I hadn't heard anything about until I discovered it myself: Activate Expose in either "All Windows" or "Application Windows" mode, and then hit "tab," and Expose will cycle through the open applications, displaying each one in "Application Windows" mode. So cool.

After I found out about the power of shift-space in most web browsers, I went and played around a little more and I found a few more things I didn't know about.

While space in Mail.app will pages down in the message you're viewing (until you get to the end of the message, at which point it goes to the next message), shift-space will go to the previous message. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually page-up first, and instead it just jumps to the previous message.

In iTunes, Enter (as opposed to return) will put the title of the currently selected track into edit mode.

And I found this one out a few weeks ago, and I really love it: In many apps (including Mail, Safari, and iTunes), command-option-f will select the "Search" (on in the case of Safari, the Google) search widget.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure this one out, though, because I used to have command-option-f mapped to "skip forward 20 seconds in iTunes" using Key Xing (an excellent keyboard mapping tool). Which kind of makes me wonder if any of my other keymappings -- or even LaunchBar's command-space invocation -- are masking anything interesting.

Huh, I just noticed that my little mini-review of LaunchBar (my #1 favorite OS X app!) was quoted on and linked from the LaunchBar Testimonials page.

Hm, now I kinda wish I'd said something more profound than "LaunchBar is really an incredible interface, and I'm already having trouble imagining doing work without it. It's that cool..." But I guess it is kinda cool how my emphasis on "that" almost reads like an exclamation point at the end of the "Reviews" section on that page, thanks to them bolding it.

When "About the Finder..." was posted a few weeks ago, it seemed like I saw it linked on every site I read that day. And yet, here I am not only linking to it, but two weeks late, to boot.

While a lot of the ideas are nice, I mainly wanted to draw attention to Sircusa's write up of "live search folders" and "iTunes for files (a finder powered by arbitrarily extensible metadata)." First, if just those two ideas were implemented in Panther, I'd be thrilled.

And second, after reading Siracusa's article, I was left regretting that I hadn't written up my ideas for basically what he suggested sooner. Admittedly, my ideas were no more original than his. Mine were also inspired by iTunes, Copland, and the BeOS File System. But I'm now more motivated than ever to start sharing my thoughts on how things could be that much more powerful and usable. Hopefully I'll have something posted in this vein by the end of next week.