Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

Hands-on with Samsung’s slick, sliding glory, the F700 - Engadget

Call it a silly quirk, but I get really bothered when I have to press a modifier key when typing: as in pressing the Shift key to start a new sentence. Back in my Windows-User days, I had a little utility running in the background that was smart enough to handle this small chore for me.

I know that there are many people who hate this feature (I think that Microsoft Word for the Mac has this as a part of Auto Correct, and lots of folks turn it off), but I’m not one of them.

There is another application for the Mac, that is free, with Auto-Capitalization as an option; it’s the gold pre-release version of Scrivener: a shareware writer’s tool that is part word processor — part project management.

Don’t get me wrong — full blown Scrivener is a wonderful app, and great value, but if all you’re looking for at present is a quick note taker, with Auto-Capitalization, and a really nice full screen mode, then give Scrivener Gold a try.

Literature and Latte - Scrivener Gold

This story from Rob Griffiths (Link Below) describes the Catch-22 situation that he got into when attempting to have his MacBook Pro repaired under warranty.

“…I then called Apple’s support hotline to get a shipment box to return my injured MacBook Pro. It was then that I discovered I had entered into the “you’re kind isn’t welcome here” zone in Apple’s revised support system. You see, it turns out that after 90 days as a Mac owner, your status changes. I wasn’t aware of this, but it does. Without my even knowing it, on my 91st day of ownership, I became one of them…”

He goes on to describe how he was stuck in a no-mans-land between being treated well — as a new customer, and being treated well — as an Apple Care subscriber.

My issue is this: Why does Apple have these differing levels of “Quality of Service” at all? There’s a big premium that people happily pay to own Apple products; a premium that contributes to the billions and billions of dollars in cash that Apple has at its disposal.

Apples theoretically “Just Work.” When they don’t, I believe that the after-sales side of the organization should “Just Fix It.” Simple as that.

• It would do wonders for their PR
• They can easily afford it
• Apple owners are decent folk, and wouldn’t abuse the system
• The payback in goodwill would be enourmous

What do you think? Is such a leap of faith viable?

Macworld: Editors’ Notes: The limits of Apple’s warranty

Brilliant stuff — works like a charm!

“If I come across a song I’d like to hear a little bit of, I select my script from the menu (I’ve saved mine as Sample this song). It then starts to play the selected song and displays a dialog box with a stop button. When I have heard enough, I hit the stop button and the song that was previously playing begins again from the position at which I interrupted it.

In the script, I have included the line set player position to 50. This starts playing the selected song from 50 seconds in to avoid listening to lengthy intros. This can be amended or deleted if you’d prefer to sample the song from the beginning.”

macosxhints.com - Temporarily play an excerpt of an iTunes song

This I don’t get at all. Isn’t the whole point of a GUI to hide monospaced ugly clunky plain text? In the olden days, one of the ways Mac users would scoff Windows users was to say, “I can’t believe there’s a DOS box that you can call up. How last decade. How crude. Why would you want to?”

“In a nutshell, GeekTool embeds text command output, text files or images onto your Mac desktop automatically and constantly refreshes them at a rate you define. So instead of opening a command line and running top to see what process is slowing down your computer, GeekTool displays top output at all times, right on your desktop - without opening a Terminal window.”

Geek to Live: Monitor your Mac and more with GeekTool - Lifehacker

The main panel is pure white, as before. while the background and the interface elements are now much more subdued. Although the interface parts are important, and I want the setup to be such that it never takes more than two clicks to get somewhere else on the site, I want the reading of the actual articles to be as distraction-free as possible.

The main panel is also now 30 pixels wider. I originally sized everything so that the whole width of the page would fit on a smaller display without the need for any horizontal scrolling. Research shows that practically everyone who visits has a screen 1152 pixels or wider, and, the previous narrowness made the site look more like a weblog, which it definitely is not.

I’ve also padded out the white space around text and graphics on all the pages. This extra headroom, I think, makes for a more relaxing reading experience.

Finally, I felt that the new more subtle look of the background and navigation parts should be broken up with some color, so I added a logo that appears throughout the site. It looked a little garish at first, so I ended up making it 70 percent transparent. The jury’s still out on its placement though.

Hope you like it.

New Look Andrew’s Mac Tips Website

I recently opened a webpage that I regularly visit with Safari, only this time I used Firefox. There were literally dozens of ads on the screen — ads I’d never seen before. What the hey?!?

I’d forgotten that for months I’ve had PithHelmet running unobtrusively inside Safari, blocking ads. Although it really is a Set It and Forget It affair, fine tuning can be accessed via the Safari preferences pane…

Andrew’s Mac Tips — Quick Review — PithHelmet

I once saw a movie where a boy’s father was a school teacher. The boy submitted a story that he’d written to his father and was told to re-write it — only shorter. This he did, and the grumpy father returned it with the same comment; by about the fourth time, the father finally said, “Ok, that’s perfect.”

I guess this stuck.

Fast forward to my Kaizen days when I liked to do that Alec Baldwin bit from Glengarry Glen Ross: The one where he’s ranting, “ABC: Always be closing… ALWAYS be closing!” Only my version was ABR: Always Be Refining.

When you go back and look again at a process, procedure or product; there’s invariably something more you can do to finesse it. Kaizen is mostly about finessing stuff that’s already out there — when you’re dealing with something new there comes a point where you need to stop tinkering and release it into the world.

Whenever Microsoft release something that’s completely new — the first version is horrible. Observers say: “Yeah, but you just watch… Version 4 will be the definitive one.”

So, what is it that makes Apple so different from Microsoft, and other companies in this regard?

They produce and examine a product — and then do the whole thing over — and perhaps even a third time… And then they release it into the world.

According to an article in Fortune, before Apple built their first retail store, they built a prototype in a warehouse. After looking at and using the prototype for a while, they tore it down and started again… And then they released it into the world.

This methodology is expensive and labourious, but the end result is the classy, polished, just works factor: that X factor, that Apple has. On the effort required, Steve Jobs had this to say: “It’s not important if the customer knows that. They just feel it. They feel something’s a little different.”

Why Apple is the best retailer in America - March 19, 2007

We have unified metal in iTunes, unified Aqua with “bubbly” buttons in Mail, old school metal in the Finder, Aqua in TextEdit, an absolute abomination in Firefox, a bit more metal in Address book and Safari and then pure Aqua in Preview. I don’t really know what the hell to call all of these, but it’s clearly a mess.

Couldn’t agree less. The article is mostly about the inconsistent use of the toolbar toggling button, but it is also an opinion held by the author, and in some of the comments, that there shouldn’t be inconsistencies between the look of various applications.

If you had a showroom full of Audis and they were identical, except for their physical size, it would be hard even for an expert to tell them apart. But they’re not identical; they share the family resemblance so you instantly know that they are Audis, but each model has its own characteristics.

I think the current iteration of OSX is just like that actual Audi showroom; all the apps are obviously of the Mac look and feel, but you can tell them apart by their appearance when they’re exposé’d all over the screen.

Mac OS X Musings » That stupid “lozenge” button

The iLaunch runs Keynote-formatted presentations in high definition through a built-in projector while displaying a 3-D rotating image of the product. Voice-recognition software, Apple’s most advanced to date, can recite a speech highlighting the features of the device while injecting several clever digs at competitors. Should a product demonstration experience a glitch or malfunction, the iLaunch boasts a complex algorithm that can automatically produce humorous and distracting quips.

Apple Unveils New Product-Unveiling Product | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source