A few days ago I went to Blacktree to download Quicksilver to give it another try (when I started with OS X I didn't saw value in it; few months later it really turns out that Spotlight is a bit limiting) and found a rather interesting add-on for standard Terminal - Visor. Visor gives you the ability to press a custom key combination to show Terminal - just like Quakes in-game console for advanced commands and finer tweaking of the game.
As far as I've been using it, it turns out to be quite useful. When you need to quickly do something in console it is already at your fingertips, but if you someday feel the need for a conventional stand-alone console you just press Command+N to open it.
I find it particularly useful because I can summon the console by just pressing alt+space instead of constantly trying to find the console with alt+tab+tab+tab ("Oh no, I just pressed tab one time too many and now landed on another Space. Again.")
Image via WikipediaFew days ago I had a problem of downloading pictures from one of Picasa web galleries. There was no download button and even if it were I would still need Picasa to download them. At first I was a bit disappointed by this and thought that I would have to write a script for myself or use a separate program to get them. But I then realized that Picasa Web makes a RSS feed for every gallery unless user specifically disables it.
I launched iPhoto and quickly found the solution to my problem - Subscribe to Photo Feed (Command+U) in File menu. Voila! Problem solved and entire album downloaded without the hasle to download another program just for a bunch of photos as it is suggested in one of the related articles.
But more than the script I was plesantly surprised about the idea - pizzas were delivered to our homes even before internet but only now had the concept of live tracking came to life. For the time being, only in US.
It will take some time to be used widely even though ordering meals to your home is quite popular among students in Ljubljana and would probably be welcomed among them. When one is hungry minutes just seem to last forever and I can imagine that knowing what is happening to your meal would make a bit of a difference.
Personally I am not a fan of ordering food - with the notable exception of pizzas - everything just looks a bit weird to me when they deliver it to your door. But such live tracking would be awesome not just for food.
Image from FlickrFew days ago I decided that my iPod Touch is going to need a bit of protection if I am going to carry it around. After a bit of thought I decided to order Sena Ultraslim Pouch since I wasn't too thrilled about some of the other cases that look a bit to chunky for everyday use.
Not too pricey and with a special offer 9.99 dollars for international shipping it seemed a pretty good deal. I grabed my debit card and ordered it straight away. The only problem was that I forgot to read fine print regarding international shipping.
Only after already making a transaction I took the time to read the fine print and see that Slovenia was one of the countries which are not valid for special offer. It seems that although Slovenia joined the EU in 2004 and is heading it for the past five months or so, we still sometimes find ourselves experiencing special treatment. In my case this special treatment would mean that I would have to pay additional 30 dollars to Fedex for costs of getting a package from civilization to Slovenia - the same amount as I would have to pay for the case itself.
If I was a bit disappointed about Fedex (I presume its their policy/offer), I do have to give some praise to Sena though - after contacting their support about my sloppiness, their average response time was about 5 minutes and they reverted transaction straight away. Although funds were already withdrawn from my account, they should happily reappear in a few business days according to their representative. I will probably try to get the same case but this time in some other way.
Image by riccardodivirgilio via FlickrAfter playing around with my iPod Touch for a few days (didn't jailbreaked it yet though) I quickly came to the idea of reading PDFs on it - and as simple as that may sounds, it turns out it's not. Although you can sync quite a few things with your Mac, you can't sync PDFs.
At first I tried by just importing PDFs to iTunes, but you still can't copy them over to the iPod. Then I tried to save and view PDF as an image but although I was using pretty decent images, iPod still shrinks them down to 640x480 or something which makes them unreadable.
Two ways that I found to actualy work were mailing PDFs to myself and reading them in the Mail application or using Filemark Maker. Mailing PDFs would be acceptable, but it still feels a bit awkward to me personaly and I decided that for the time being I will be using Filemark Maker.
Basicaly what Filemark Maker does is that it uses data: URI scheme to encode PDFs as URLs which you can bookmark and - after syncing your bookmarks with your iPod Touch - open and read as if they were located localy on file system.
It works well with small files and until you bookmark a couple of PDFs - after that I noticed a bit of a lag (about 5-10 seconds) when starting Safari for the first time since restarting iPod. I suspect it caches bookmarks afterwards and all works well.
I am still wondering however why Apple decided not to support syncing of PDFs or giving iPod Touch and iPhone users some other way of storing PDFs and other formats that Safari/Mail support...
And the guys are receiving quitesomepositivefeedback which they more than deserve. I won't go into details about what they are doing and how - they have some interesting videos on their web site that you can check out, as of wednesday you can download Zemantas plugin for Firefox and try it yourself, but the best testament of their technology (at least on the page you are looking at now) can be seen in my blogposts since I began using and testing it at the beginning of February.
Even before I began using their technology as a novice blogger I also had an opportunity to work with their technology in London (on Wordpress plugin) for a brief period of time. Even back then when their technology was still in its infancy I was often pleasantly surprised about the results it returned. But as I left London and didn't have any actual contact with their technology for 2 months I was even more shocked when I saw to what extent had their product matured and how useful it actualy became when I started to look at it as a user and not as a developer.
At several occasions it proved at least as useful tool as Google - if not even more. One such example would be when I was writting a blog post and sometime during the process I took notice of articles that it suggested to me. The good thing was that those articles weren't strictly from the topic about which I was writting about - which may, based on ones intuition sound as something one would want to avoid at all cost. But it turned out that the articles that it suggested had helped me develop my ideas a bit more thoroughly.
Google is a very useful tool for searching precise information but it fails when you would want it to cover a bit broader field of knowladge. Either your search is very precise and in the process loses any interesting bits of information that could turn out to be useful for developing ideas and gathering knowladge, or its too broad and you get a whole bunch of information (majority of which happens to be useless to you) that quickly overwhelms you and causes you to lose focus.
In part this is a result of the method used for searching - Google has to find good information based on few keywords, Zemanta has the advantage to extract data based on a lot more input information. While Googles way turns out to be more useful the majority of time, Zemantas way is more useful when you are writing something like blog post (or any other piece of writing, for that matter) that can benefit from general links and related articles (besides images and tags that Zemanta also provides).
Since Zemantas product is still in alpha phase I am more than eagerly waiting to see how its technology will mature and what kind of suggestions can give me in my future posts.
Source: FlickrI was more than a bit surprised yesterday when I first saw the statistics published by Omnigroup regarding their userbase and what kind of operationg system their users are using. Sure enough, this data is not a definite indicator and probably only Apple can give more accurate data, but its probably good enough that we can at least draw some conclusions from it.
Omnigroup develops whole bunch of different applications that are focused both on business users and on home users. I haven't been able to find any statistics about how large their userbase actualy is and will for the time being presume that their large array of products gives a rather good sample of users - if, however, anyone finds this jumping to conclusions too quick, feel free to enlighten me in the comments. ;-)
On the first sight of data I was almost a bit disappointed about the number of Leopard users. 32% of Leopard users seemed rather low for a system that was relesed at the end of October and had brought with it a number of interesting and exciting features. But then I gave the whole idea of 32% another thought - if one third of users on a particular platform upgraded in roughly six months to the flagship version of some companys operating system, that doesn't sound that bad. Since Microsoft released Windows Vista in a recent past it could even make a rather interesting comparison of the speed of adoption of a new platform.
It turns out that only 8.7% of Windows users had opened their hearts to Vista (either voluntarily or when they purchased their new computers). Since Vista was available in retail stores on 30. January of 2007 this means that it was present on a market for about 420 days, which in turn means that its approximate rate of adoption is about .02% of Windows users per day or about .6% per month. For Leopard, this rate is almost ten times higher - since its introduction on 30th October of 2007 it was present on a market for about 150 days and was adopted at an avarage rate of .2 %. per day or 6% per month.
Based on the data that I used this means that Mac users are migrating to newest platform at almost ten times the rate of Windows users. This puts Apple in rather favourable position compared to Microsoft. If Microsoft has to maintain compatibility for such a long time (if adoption rate would be constant this would mean Windows XP would still be in usage for about 10+ years after Vista was released - until 2017 or more) it means it can not implament new features at a pace Apple can - or at least it can not make them requirements at until a large majority of its users migrate to a new platform. Apple on the other hand can implament new features and declare the old ones as deprecated far more easily and more often.
(Luckily Microsoft doesn't wait for 10+ years for its users to upgrade - Windows XP will enjoy full support until 14th April of 2009, after which it will enter Extended Support that will last until 2014, although personally I think Microsoft will extend both full support and Extended Support.)
For developers this means that when Apple said Carbon would not enjoy 64-bit benefits that can be found in Leopard and encouraged developers to get their hands dirty with Cocoa, developers can sleep a bit easier knowing that their users will shortly follow the development cycle that Apple dictates. On the other hand developers that had huge code bases written with Carbon probably enjoyed a number of sleepless nights after first hearing Steve Jobs about implamenting 64-bit support only for Cocoa.
At the end it is only fair to write a honest disclaimer - both Omnigroup and W3Schools say that their data is not to be fully trusted, to which I can only add that you should trust my conclusions even less. I only did some quick math with basic data that both of these companies provide online in an effort to see how users of different platforms view flagship products of their beloved company and how this love is translated into purchase of new operating system or new computer. This data clearly misses all those users that had migrated either to OS X or to Windows from other platforms (and probably a bunch of other edge cases). Basically my analysis is just a quick look on a subject that is almost impossible to analyse with great certainty and should be treated in that manner.
A few days ago I went to Blacktree to download Quicksilver to give it another try (when I started with OS X I didn't saw value in it; few months later it really turns out that Spotlight is a bit limiting) and found a rather interesting add-on for standard Terminal - Visor. Visor gives you the ability to press a custom key combination to show Terminal - just like Quakes in-game console for advanced commands and finer tweaking of the game.
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