I have a been a Camino devotee for a long time, but the improved search UI on the recently released Safari 3 Public Beta has left me impressed and finds me particularly pleased to have discovered it works just as well when searching through a web page’s source code.

Oh dear.

I’ve always been self-employed up till now, and I always owned a Mac of some sort.
So, I was kind of bummed by having to work on a PC -albeit a quite decent one.
BUT, at least I found the thing I miss the most from current Macs: Quicksilver.

God, Launchy was a gift from heaven for me! I mean, seriously, quick launch and Windows Start menu just doesn’t work for me. Not even Dock works for me since I first used Quisksilver. Why don’t the OS X people just incorporate it to their product I’ll never know…

Nevertheless, Launchy is still a bit rough around the edges, but -hey! It works! It might be not as beatiful, and some details might have escaped the creators, but it really is a decent app. I could do with it disappearing when the focus moves away though…

Is it just me, or have the last 5+ updates on iTunes been concentrating primarily on the iTunes Store?

I pay money to get the computer and the operating system, and I pay money to get the iPod. Why do I have to be constantly bombarded with hints about buying music and movies off the iTunes Store?

Why would anyone ever want to pay money for something they’d use to buy stuff?

I always find people treating others like a demographic with a budget annoying. Blatantly being treated as a marketing target through something I have payed for, I find downright offensive and wish it was illegal.

Yes. Magazines do that and TV Channels do it and the radio as well. That’s why I usually don’t read magazines, I hardly ever watch TV and never listened to the radio my entire life. That’s why I buy CDs and DVDs and books, although advertising often slips in there. And that’s direct advertising, to keep things clear.

Imagine if every time you turned on your stereo, some guy told you to go buy CDs from his store…

The internet is pretty sad in that aspect, too. The standard way to make money is by advertising. Get enough clicks, then sell your page by the pixel to advertisers. How noble and, most importantly, how socially beneficial.

But I’m not that fussed with Google, because at least Google offers an invaluable service for free. I find AdSense pretty lame and totally ignore it (eBay – great deals on Lisp anyone?) but I’m not really that mad at them, because if they made me pay one penny every time they let me use their service, I’d be broke and in jail having to sell cigarettes to make pennies to use on Google the one hour of internet access a week inmates probably get…

Back to iTunes, I probably wouldn’t be as furious if iTunes 7.0.0 worked properly. One thing Apple has got us spoiled with is providing us with software that just works. And now I’ve come to expect this and no less from them. And let me tell you, iTunes 7.0.1 is still pretty flaky on my iBook G4.

Maybe it’s that software which I bought, the one that sells me stuff, eating up my CPU…

If you’re a Mac OS user into Ruby and haven’t done so already, go grab yourself a copy of Ruby 1.8.5.

Unpack and…

cd ruby-1.8.5

sudo make install-all

… and that’s it. Killer.

Dear Sirs, please find attached…

… and then completely forgot to actually attach the attachment. A couple of times I even went on to write a follow up email to apologize for forgetting to include the attachment and still left the attachment out of the e-mail again.

Thank God, then, for the guy(s) who created Attachment Scanner Plugin for Mail.app.

I remember I tried out Vienna some while ago and found it rather nice, especially for a free piece of kit in early stages of development. At the time, I was still drinking the NetNewsWire Kool-Aid and didn’t bother making the switch.

That was until recently, when my bud Juanjo brought it back to my attention. We talked about it and both vowed to migrate because Vienna performs better, is free and, most importantly, is Open Source.

I am not going to go as far as claiming that Vienna is better than NetNewsWire, because it isn’t, but it’s not that far behind. It’s still a bit rough around the edges, but it has most of the features I require for an enjoyable, day-to-day weblog experience. A lot of work is being put into it and there’s a very interesting list of enhancements coming up in version 2.1.

In my mind, open sourcing your code is still a very noble thing to do and that’s the main reason I will always award extra points to Free (as in Open Source Free) apps when comparing them against commercial ones. After all, generating interest in them is an almost sure path to give the contributors incentive to make their application even better.

So, yeah, I did go to Vienna and, for now, I’m staying there. I suggest you do, too.

Now why the hell would I want to do that? Easy. I’m running a small web app development business, meaning I need to do a lot more things than a straightforward hardcore programmer would.
I need to assist never-getting-it-straight clients with their applications , troubleshoot, configure and generally deal with all the things a sane developer wouldn’t want to touch with a 12-foot stick. And I can’t start sentences with “Press the Apple icon top left”, because 0% of my web application clients up to date are Mac users.

I also need to test my web apps on as many system configurations I can, and this means I at the very least need a WindowsXP Machine filled to the brim with browsers and email clients and whatnots.

Up till now I had this Win Machine that everyone seems to have at his place, but doesnt really remember when he bought it exactly, or indeed, if he bought it. You know the one: It used to be gray, but now it is aged-iced-coffee-scars all over that yellow-gray depressive-looking color you can only get by getting you and your friends to smoke a lot in a confined space with a lot of hadware stashed around you.

I hated sitting in front of that thing.

I had tried the pre-MS Virtual PC on my trusted G4 Dual 867Mhz. Didn’t work for me. I couldn’t get a definite user experience by sludging through app pages like I was running a 486 box. Hence the aforementioned Machine From The Gray-yellow Lagoon.

So back to the MacBook. Now that I had the ability to run windows natively, I naturally tried it out. After the initial shock of finding myself looking at that ghastly black Windows loader screen on my New Black Macbook’s screen, and a failed attempt at installing the Apple drivers CD bootcamp burns, all was as expected. Good. Good. Of course, now that I was here, I’d probably have to install a copy of Photoshop (being a designer) and maybe a couple of editors, probably a FTP client… You catch the drift. Can’t log in and out of Windows just to change that .PNG file to .GIF because once more you forgot that IE STILL doesnt correctly render opaqued and transparent PNG’s.

Cue Parallels. Big downside, not free. But, pretty cheap. So I gave it a go. I still had VirPC freezing flashbacks back then, but tried it anyways. Not bad. Not bad at all. Pretty fast actually… by now I had also discovered that Firefox plugin that Embeds IE tab right into FF, which actually expains far better than I can why Parallels is a better development tool that Boot Camp. You can’t beat the flexibility of having two engines both running at the same time, and doing so smoothly enough to leave you work between them undistracted.

Yes, the 8 MB VideoRAM parallels forces on the virtual Win system messes with the interface a bit while performing memory demanding operations, but hey, now you got windows running side by side with OS X, you dont really need anything in there other than your IE Tabbed FF!

8MB VideoRAM will suffice. Unless what you REALLY wanted was finally getting to play FEAR.

Digg BootCamp bashing

We have been toying with this idea for a while now. We wanted to make some icons that look different from the standard OS X feel, so we can tell our stuff more easily apart. We made them, started using them, liked them – and then we thought other people might like them, too.

So we bundled them by color (three choices for now, but the set will probably feature more colors after its first update), and they’re available here. Each set consists of 10 folder icons: web, art, script, photo, downloads, documents, music, applications, an empty folder and, well, a nutrun folder.

We also made PC versions of the icons available from the same page.

We hope you enjoy them. Next in line will be a generic application iconset featuring arrows, home buttons, edit buttons etc.

Thanks for sending nuticons related feedback to nuticons [at] nutrun.com

Digg nuticons

I can’t get enough of these.

This goes to the HR dept. of Apple: Hire these peeps, I say.

Oh, and while we’re at it, go grab yourself a free copy of iClip.

Digg the future