Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

This is pretty neat! Jing is a very fast way to select a part of your screen and either capture a Shockwave Flash movie, or a PNG image file.

They are associated with Screencast so the idea is to upload whatever you capture to their servers for distribution, and eventually pay for the service. But even if you’re not interested in that option, it’s still a slick way to record video for your own reference and distribution.

No learning curve, cool interface, an easy way to capture stuff for your own use.

Click here to see a quick and dirty example…

Go to Today in iCal and create a new event. Give it a name like “iCal Quick Alarm.” Bring up the Info window and set the alarm for that event to “Alarm with Sound 0 Minutes Before.”

Now de-select the event and then drag it to your task list (this will make a copy of the event that is now a task). Here’s the trick: You now have a template for any number of alarms that will sound at the exact time on which they are dropped, rather than having to fuss with the configuration each time.

Now, if you need an alarm to sound at precisely 8:23 just drag the iCal Quick Alarm task onto Today at 8:15 or 8:30 (this turns a copy of the task into an event), click on the minutes in the info window and roll your mouse wheel to fine-tune — and you’re done.

When the alarm sounds you can drag it to snooze it, or simply throw it away! Next time you need one it’s right there in your task list as a template.

After years and years, I finally have iCal running on my Mac. I’m not the brightest person in the world, so it took me that long to discover that the culprit was SIMBL (a framework that allows various third party tweaks to enhance your system). I’d read on various forums how iCal might crash on launching because a certain font wasn’t installed, or because of the presence of various other app enhancers, and I’d eliminated those options as being the cause. Then, recently I’ve been playing with iGTD. It can talk to iCal and I wanted to test that feature so I trolled the forums again and SIMBL popped up.

One problem solved by killing SIMBL. But SIMBL supported two utilities that I really enjoy; one is FullScreen and the other is PithHelmet.

I can live without FullScreen, but I am really used to PithHelmet, which sits inside Safari and very effectively kills most ads. So, I did a search for other ad killers and found a remarkably simple solution. At floppymoose.com there’s a ready-made CSS file that you can download and have Safari use it as a first reference when rendering web pages — effectively looking for the telltale signs of ads and then removing them. The resulting pages are not as well filtered as the were using PithHelmet, but they are certainly much more acceptable than no filtering at all.

iCal is pretty neat. There are only a couple of interface features that I wish it had: One would be a line crossing Today’s view that indicated the current time, as seen in the Google calendar. The other would be some kind of arrow to indicate that there are more appointments that are currently off the screen. As it is I have to show the whole 24 hours onscreen which is a pretty tight fit.

Best feature though, is that it finally works!

Ad Blocking for Mozilla, Netscape 7, and Safari

What a beautiful thing it is. That annoying little black square (the camera and mic) that marred the front has gone at last. Still the same classic shape, only refined to within an inch of its life. Brilliant!

I was more than a little afraid that like some other formally respected brands, Apple might use this iMac to suddenly veer off into some wierd new design language. But no, this is the most elegant and elemental Mac ever.

So, where was the One More Thing?

Two hours were set aside for the presentation which only took 75 minutes. If what we saw today was really all there was, then by following the pattern of past presentations, the iMac would have come at the end.

The end (the tablet, married perfectly to the new bluetooth keyboard (which also pairs to the iPhone?)) was left out at the last minute because there wasn’t enough flash memory available in the World to put it into full production.

Kidding aside, I’m really impressed with the new iMac; it’s “evolutionary,” fresh and desirable, but not so desirable that I instantly stop loving my current model.

Call me persnickety, but when someone says something that is just plain wrong, well, I gotta vent. John Gruber (of Daring Fireball fame), has a fairly new podcast. He and his mate talk for what seems like forever on a wide range of subjects that occasionally include the Mac and iPhone.

In the latest edition he talks for a full five minutes about how he has great respect for the British and how they use the English language, and write it. He particularly likes the way they correctly use quote marks, ending sentences with the quote mark followed by the period, or ‘’full stop,” as the Brits would say.

He makes a point of saying that the comma or period or whatever that immediately follows the quoted text should not be inside the quote. He’s wrong.

He might be confusing quote with parentheses (in his defense), but wrong is wrong. Look at the way the punctuation is handled in this entry that you’re reading right now as an example; the same way that punctuation is handled in any well-edited book — American, or English.

Vent Over.

The Talk Show with John Gruber and Dan Benjamin

Last night I downloaded the 10.4.10 combo updater via dial-up. Yes, it can be done, if you have ten hours to spare. Anyways, here I am, all up to date.

The installation went very well. There were a couple of glitches with tweaks that I’d previously added, but that’s only to be expected. I thought I’d list the glitches below for the record.

First, Main Menu popped up a notice to say that it doesn’t yet support 10.4.10. Then I found that my system icons had reverted to the normal set; that was quickly fixed by running Candy Bar again. My brushed metal default finder windows were back so I downloaded the latest version of Uno and successfully ran that. There was one minor glitch with Uno where it said that I didn’t have the version of iTunes that could be modified — I don’t care about that as I like the look of iTunes just as it is.

The major glitch (and I hope it was a one off) was when I used Uno again to change the blue time bar on QuickTime back to the default color. I had a kernel panic. I think (hope) that was just because I didn’t immediately restart after running Uno.

Now that I have 10.4.10 I could install the latest QuickTime, which is great in that the full screen mode is enabled, with lots of options that I didn’t expect.

One last item that I haven’t gotten around to fixing yet — my Services menu is fully populated again. Should be able to fix that by running Service Scrubber…

…Done!

FYI. You can learn more about all the applications mentioned above by visiting the Mac Tips website. There’s a link in the sidebar.