Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

When Apple marches on | Software | Editors’ Notes | Macworld

Apple didn’t get to where it is today by standing still. Generally, it gives its users time to move from old to new—the Classic environment and AppleWorks are two shining example. And when it doesn’t and instead releases a whatchamajigit for a specific kind of user—and I’m thinking the MacBook Air, Mac mini, and third-generation iPod shuffle here—you’re welcome to just say no, thank you. If enough people do, Apple will try again with something possibly more appealing.

And if you choose to not follow, great, you’ve found your happy place. At that point, however, it’s a bit much to ask more from the people who manage Apple. They served you five years ago. And for them, the meal has grown cold.

Have you ever gone to send the URL of a webpage to a colleague via email, only to find that the URL that you paste into the message is about 150 characters long? Sometimes the URL wraps to the next line in their email client, and when they click the link it’s broken. Sometimes the URL gets passed around until it loses it’s initial meaning; someone looks at it and thinks, “Where in hell is this going to take me?”

To resolve those problems there are several free online services that offer shorter URLs that link to the original. Most however, like tiny URL will generate short addresses but those addresses tend to have rather cryptic names.

The beauty of Notlong is that you can prepend your own name to the shortened address that it creates. Use it with your own hosted URL and it’s like having your own domain name, only with .notlong.com instead of simply .com. What’s more it’s permanent and free!

It took me all of five seconds to get mactipslog.notlong.com as a shortened URL for this site.

Notlong is also great for creating your own easily remembered name for a site that you just might like to access while you’re on the run.

At the Notlong site you can also grab a bookmarklet for your browser that enables you to simply click when you’re viewing a site with a long name — a window pops up with a field where you enter your preferred short name. If it’s available you are given the name, along with a secret address where you can manage the name, track the number of people who navigate via the shortened URL etc.

Go to Notlong

 
Just started playing with this. It’s still in alpha, but works great, and looks gorgeous. Jumping in phase over. Now to find out what iusethis is all about…
 

“AppFresh helps you to keep all applications (third-party and Apple), widgets, preference panes and application plugins on your Mac up to date, from one place. It works by checking the excellent iusethis.com for new versions and lets you download and install available updates easily.”

AppFresh - All Software Updates for your Mac in One Place

Plug the address of your website into this and have a go. I certainly learned a thing or two.

“Website Grader is a free tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like webite traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.”

Website SEO Score Tool

I remember these things…

It’s the little custom icon that can appear in your address bar and favorites list. Here’s a nice web 2.0 way of designing your own.

favicon.ico Generator

I just installed this Service on the Mac and selected a lengthy article of text and used the service to create a new contact.

The new contact appeared in Address Book as No Name and the notes field was filled with the text. This could be a great way to take your reading material with you and access it (and edit it) using the iPod Touch.

That’s not its primary purpose of course. To quote the developers:

ContactCreator is a service that will take whatever text you have selected and make an contact in your AddressBook from it. If it’s only one word you have selected, it will automagically dump the word in the first name field of your new contact. If it’s two words, it will automagically dump the two words in the first and last name fields of your new contact. If it’s more than two, it will dump the whole lot in the Notes field of your new contact (which doesn’t have a name). It will also guess that word with an ‘@’ symbol in them are email addresses.

ContactCreator.service 1.2 software download - Mac OS X - VersionTracker

This has nothing to do with Apple and Mac but anyone who uses a computer to read about computers must be nerdy enough to want to read about planes and spaceships. Am I right?

The website of Smithsonian Air and Space magazine has all their articles available, in complete form, without having to jump through any hoops. Every article has a great single page print-friendly version that’s a great option for copying and pasting into your favorite offline editor.

Hours of great reading every month.

Air & Space Magazine

Evidently I have 571 days to go before plunking down on a touch.

The iPod Death Clock - iPodMechanic.com

An impressive looking site from an ex Apple employee discussing some of the secrets behind their marketing successes. Be sure to download the free e-book. It’s a great example of how good a PDF document can look.

Now, back to actually reading the content…

Secrets of Apple-style Marketing

A really great GTD trick. Not really Mac related, as such, but an interesting read all the same.

Dear Me: Get to work | 43 Folders