Monthly Archives: February 2008

Quick Twitter Review and Other Ponderings

Posted on by

Twitter Logo

I’m beginning to like Twitter more and more. The only thing that’s stopping me from using it as much as possible is: the lack of pertinent users. I’m not talking about the awesome developers/leaders of their field people that I “follow”, but people that I actually know in, you know, real life. Outside of my nerdier friends, I don’t know of anyone that use Twitter. Yet.

But this situation is making me think about social networks in general: each network seems to create a culture of its own. This is not a new view on social networks, but it’s interesting I’m seeing it now with Twitter.

Facebook with their college crowd, Myspace with their musician/high school crowd, and now Twitter with their tech crowd.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that these social networks won’t grow into other groups of users. It’s just that certain networks tend towards a faster and wider adoption with the general population than others. And Twitter, at face value, just doesn’t seem to be a service that can grow very quickly.

I would never use the texting feature (thanks to the iPhone, I don’t have to), but I feel like this feature will help Twitter gain a wider appeal with the slightly more techie crowd.

I do like the 140 character limit, and not because it has to do with the limitations of the texting protocol, but because it puts some creative limits on what I am able to “tweet”. Also, the inability to edit an existing post makes you double check yourself before tweeting.

You know, I never thought about it, but there’s probably an iTunes to Twitter Applescript. The Twitter API is so freeing. But also… this can lead to information overload.

So much power. So much responsibility.

And that ends my rambling on Twitter.

Bezel HUD: Quicksilver Interface Plugin

Posted on by

I love Quicksilver. That’s all there is to it.

But if you can get away with some tasteful lickability, I’m all for it (as long as it doesn’t kill my machine while trying to look pretty).

BezelHUD is just that. I’ve used Bezel for quite a long time now, and this only adds another layer of that delicious icing to the cake. I do like how it fits into Leopard.

And wow, Julius Eckert also wrote the Showcase interface, too, a plugin I used just to have something other than Bezel to play around with. This guy is on a roll! I can’t wait for the SilverFlow interface, now…

Prism vs Fluid: Local Web Application Management on Mac OS X

Posted on by

Basically it boils down to: Don’t use Prism. Yet. It crashes quite often, and not in the way you’d probably want it to crash: It just eats away at your processor until you realize that while you were listening to music on your headphones that the fans were going insane and the processor was running at 81 degrees. Celsius.

The OMFG screenshot came into being while I was testing out some Fluid Applications (The last three applications were Fluid Applications). It’s been a while since I used it, but it looks like it’s getting better and better. A lot of great things in the horizon… but it’s too bad it isn’t open sourced (See Post Here). I’d love to start messing around with the guts…

More about Fluid

But anyway, it looks great, and feels even better. I love being able to command+tab into a web application. Not only that, I can even see some statuses on the desktop icon itself.

Fluidapp Desktop Icon Notifcation

But of course, the nerdy neat freak in me decided to figure things out over lunch and see if there was a way to change the icons to look a bit better. I don’t really thing a 16×16 pixel icon would do in an Apple environment… After poking at flickr a bit, I found these two lovely icons.

Gmail Icon

Gmail Icon at Flickr: Direct Link

Facebook Icon

Facebook Icon at Flickr: Direct Link

These are actual .icns files, rather than just images. Thanks to autodafe0728, I was able to make two of my most accessed Fluid app’s icon amazing.

How do you actually use these .icns files? Well, you have to pick an icon when you create your Fluid app, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to change it after you’ve created it. So if you already have one, delete it, and just remake this new one after setting the “Icon: ” field to the .icns file rather than the default “Use Website Favicon”.

Enjoy. More on this web application vs. desktop application business later.

Angry Letter to Planters

Posted on by

What the heck. I wanted some delicious peanuts, but I got this jar of crap.

So what did I do? I wrote a letter.

Hello,

Yesterday, I picked up a jar of Planters Dry Roasted Peanuts. I was appalled at how it tasted.

I’ve always been a fan of the Planters brand, and have always bought Planters when I had a hankering for some Honey Roasted Peanuts. This was the the first time I’ve tried your Dry Roasted Peanuts. I bought a store brand (Meijer’s) jar of peanuts just last week, and enjoyed them immensely. I had thought that Planters brand of Dry Roasted Peanuts would at least taste on par with the store brand: I was wrong.

What I got was a large jar of bland, tasteless peanuts. Not only bland, but it left me with this really disgusting aftertaste taste that can only be described as a manufacturing defect. Whatever it is, it isn’t a very pleasant taste that gets left in my mouth after I forcefully swallow a handful of it.

And that’s not all. I was over at a friend’s place, and seeing that they had Planters Honey Roasted Peanuts, I knew I had to have some. And even there, I tasted that same blandness in HONEY ROASTED peanuts… the ones that I enjoyed so much from the start.

Maybe it’s just this jar and my friend’s jar, but I’d like to get some kind of compensation for this. It does say “satisfaction guaranteed” on it, and this incident has definitely made me think twice about what brand of peanuts to buy.

We’ll see what happens from here.

Those that know me pretty well will know I love honey roasted peanuts. Heck, peanuts and almonds and cashews and… yeah. I like nuts.

That’s a setup, by the way. Someone bring it home.

Prism (previously WebRunner): The Future of Web Applications? Maybe.

Posted on by

This post is like a month overdue. Bear with me, because it’s still relevant.

I had started to hate Firefox 2 (on the Mac) a few months back. It was getting bloated and very unstable with multiple tabs open. While I still use it for web development (Web Developer, FireBug with YSlow, Aardvark, etc…), I made the switch to Camino after a friend gave me a tour of the shortcut keys it had.

Sidenote: Yes… Opera… I’ve probably used you every time a new version came out, but for some reason, I can never stay with you. Maybe it’s because you’re so perfect, so far from the competition… :-)

Camino is definitely a lot more fast, robust, and responsive, and so it has become my browser of choice. Who knows if Opera or Safari will ever take its place… Of course, very recently, I’ve started to use the Firefox 3 Beta 2 exclusively, with Safari and Camino running in the background (another post all on its own as to why I do this).

Enter Prism (formerly known as WebRunner)

Prism Logo

To be honest, I have web apps that I have “running” constantly. In other words, I have webpages open in tabs, or access them frequently over the course of the day. I have these sites be the shortcuts on the bookmark bar in Safari. That way, I can quickly access them with command + number. Command + 1 = Gmail. Command + 2 = Google Reader. Command + 3 Facebook… so on and so forth.

I was very excited to hear about WebRunner, and went and tried it out. Now called Prism, it basically does these things:

  • Separate process: When the webapp goes down or locks up, I don’t want anything else affected. Thankfully, Firefox does have session restore, but that is beside the point. When I open many tabs and have several webapps running in a browser, things get slow and unstable after a day or two.

  • Minimal UI: A generic browser UI is not needed for webapps. If any UI is present, make it specific to the webapp I am using.

  • Basic desktop integration: Create shortcuts to start the webapp, add ability to show specialized icons in the tray or dock and ability to display notifications.

  • Platform with extensions: I don’t want to download a full browser runtime for each webapp. I do want to be able to add some custom code/features that are not directly supported in the webapp. I should be able to install one runtime and then get packages or extensions for each webapp. Think Firefox extensions or Greasemonkey scripts. These extensions should be able to tweak the SSB UI as well.

  • Open external links in real browser: If I click a link in the webapp that opens a new site, don’t change my webapp browser window. Open all external links in my default/real browser.

In summary, it’s a very streamlined (I mean streamlined) browser, meant to do one thing: serve up a web application. Currently, what’s bothering me is that I’m only able to run a single instance of Prism, and only a single web app at a time.

For now, I’m just going to have it open to Gmail all the time. This way, I can command+tab into my email client. Gone are the days of opening a browser and typing command + 1 or typing gmail.com in Quicksilver. Wee!

What’s the Point?

I hear you. What’s all of this hype for? So I get a crappier browser that does less. However, I feel like bridging that gap between the web apps, only accessible by typing out an address or clicking/shortcut keying into a browser window, and desktop apps, accessible by command + tab or running the application by double clicking on an icon (or single-click on the Dock), is going to be very important in the future. This takes a web application and gives it it’s own container (its own separate process), which makes it behave a lot more like a desktop application.

One Thing I Can't Stand on a Mac: Lag on Print

Posted on by

Sometimes I accidentally press cmd + p when I actually wanted to press cmd + [.

The entire computer freezes up, and I swear inside, as I sit in front of my computer for 3 seconds while the beach ball spins and aggravates my innards.

Is it just me? Does anyone else have this problem with the print dialog taking a bit longer than it should be taking?