I love tiny little details, even if they’re not ever intended to be seen by the public.
The screenshot above is one I took in Need for Speed: Most Wanted (while looking backwards). What I find interesting in this is the detail written on the cardboard box texture on the left.
A dual keyboard setup! Unnecessary? Perhaps. But it does prevent you from straining if you are typing ‘at’ something on the second monitor, which you want to look at whilst typing.
It’s also useful if you want to have something open for reference and glancing at up on the white MacBook screen (*cough* Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible *cough*). Just don’t need to type anything on that machine. And if you do, you hook up the wired Apple keyboard to that machine instead.
I just pushed out an update for DfontSplitter for Mac. The application now features:
You can download the release from the (newly prettified) DfontSplitter project page. Enjoy!
Tweetie for Mac was released today, to much fanfare. Its interface on the iPhone is absolutely top notch (I happily paid the £1.79 for my iPod Touch) and the Mac interface also looks interesting as well.
I’m not going to go into a full review, because I really haven’t used it much yet. What I don’t want this post to come across as, however, is a rejection of it totally. There are just a couple of issues relating to privacy I have with this initial release.
UPDATE: As of Tweetie 1.0.1, which was released minutes ago, this issue is fixed. Consider this paragraph obsolete.
For some reason, Tweetie for Mac does not send your Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible username and password over a secure HTTPS connection. Quite frankly, I’ve come to expect this in any Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible client. It surely takes no extra effort to implement this, it has a minimal performance overhead and even if you don’t really need it, does it really hurt to encrypt your password?
This really bugs me. I don’t really want to be throwing my credentials across the network in plain text every few minutes. It’s like shouting out your Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible username and password to everyone in the street. Sure, probably no-one cares, but why do it if you don’t have to?
UPDATE: I contacted Fusion Ads on this subject recently and as of this morning, 2009-04-23, the Tweetie for Mac page has been updated with a brief, but better-than-nothing privacy statement. I’m still interested in seeing something a bit more substantial, but this is a good step forward.
Tweetie for Mac costs $14.95 at the moment, going up to $19.95 later on. To get people to try it, there’s a free ad supported version, using ads provided by a company called Fusion Ads.
What alarms me is not the fact that it is ad-supported, or even that I’ve never heard of that ad company before today (although the latter is a little bit of an issue). The problem for me is that I can’t find a privacy policy detailing how this ad system works, what information it collects on you and what it does with that information.
It concerns me quite a lot that in a desktop application, where an advertising system can get a lot more information about you than it can within the constraints of a web browser environment, nothing is said about what is going on.
I have emailed the contact address on the Fusion Ads site asking where I can find a privacy policy, voicing this concern and asking them to make it more prominent if there is one. I will update this post when I get a reply.
For me, these two issues stop me from using the client right now. I’m sure the SSL issue will be addressed in a future release if enough people ask for it, as I can’t imagine it being difficult to implement at all. It would also be nice to have a little bit of transparency in how the free model works as well, and hopefully this will come with time as well.
For the time being, however, I’m not entirely satisfied that I can use the app comfortably, so I am holding off for now.
I have just released SleekTabs 0.2.1.
Nothing too exciting, unfortunately, just a bugfix release for a bug which would cause the ajax URLs of a tab not to work if they contained an extra ‘/’ character. This bug was a problem with a regular expression used to append a timestamp variable to the ajax URL (which itself is a fix for a bug with IE caching).
As always, you can download the script from the SleekTabs project page or from its home on PHP Classes.
Yesterday my brand new MacBook Pro 15″ arrived.
I got my original white MacBook over two years ago and it quickly became my primary machine. The seamlessness of the Apple hardware-software connection, its increased performance over my existing Linux PC and the desire to learn about OS X motivated this. Since then it has been, for the most part, my primary computer.
The MacBook still is an excellent machine for what it does, but being a full-time desktop as well as a portable computer, I began to desire a larger screen for when I’m using it at the desk and to get away from the limitation of the rather pathetic Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics.
So to address these issues and erm… continue my investment into computing (nothing to do with the fact that the new Pros are just, really, nice) I went out and bought the new 15″ MacBook Pro.
I got the middle model, with a 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM and the dual GPU Nvidia GeForce 9400M (for battery life) and Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT 512 MB (for performance).
I’ve had it just hours, but I love this machine!
NOTE: for the latest release of DfontSplitter, please link to https://peter.upfold.org.uk/projects/dfontsplitter.
The software development wheel has been turning again and I can now announce DfontSplitter 0.2 for Mac OS X.
DfontSplitter is a program which allows you to convert, or split, a Mac OS X .dfont font file into one or more TrueType font files (.ttf). TTF files are much more portable than this Mac-specific format.
This new release sports an entirely new interface built in Cocoa. It is a great improvement over the previous AppleScript interface which required a lot of unnecessary clicking and was generally quite horrible. The new interface also supports batch converting; you can drag several dfonts into the sources list and convert them all at once.
The DfontSplitter icon is from the Oxygen Icon set and is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Unported licence.
If you’re running the excellent Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible client TweetDeck on Linux, specifically with the KDE desktop (here version 4.1.1), you may run into a problem where when you start the program, the TweetDeck window is just blank. The buttons at the top and bottom appear, but there is nothing in the window.
To solve this problem, first launch the application KWalletManager by pressing Alt-F2 and typing in kwallet. It should be the first result, so press Enter to start the application.
After KWalletManager is running, start TweetDeck again and you everything should work as normal.
UPDATE: references to the former Bird Site of short-form social media have been adjusted to avoid providing free publicity to something that is undeserving of such promotion. This is no longer how I feel about this website, but my historical feelings are to be preserved below, with the relevant site’s name obviously altered!
I want to discuss something that has been on my mind for quite some time. I haven’t really discussed this before, at all, on the internet or maybe even in real life.
The internet has allowed us to communicate in brand new ways using innovative new media. It seems that in a very short time, the number of ways that I can choose to communicate with someone has shot up exponentially.
One of these new-fangled ways of communicating is Bird Site (for the uninitiated, go read Wikipedia).
I find Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible to be a very useful social tool for communication, conversation and keeping up with people. In contrast, I find traditional instant messaging (IM, such as AIM, MSN, XMPP/Jabber and the like) burdensome and difficult to use on a consistent basis.
My dislike of the traditional IM most likely stems from my introverted personality. Hopefully in this post I will explain exactly why and why Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible is better.
Note that this is purely my opinion for what works for me. Everyone is different, which means that what might be true for me may not be for someone else, even with a similar personality. These are my personal views on Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible vs IM.
There used to be advertising here, but I no longer feel sure that advertising delivers the best experience and truly reflects the values of this site.
Keeping things running, however, is not without financial cost. If you would like to support the time and effort I have put into my tutorials and writing, please consider making a donation.
