Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

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

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

When I’m using a tool that’s so good I want to chuckle, well, I just want to tell anyone and everyone. I guess that makes me some kind of an evangelist…

Anyway, I thought I’d kick off the week by mentioning an application that is already covered in the Mac Tips site, but that I’m really getting a buzz off of.

This time it’s Movie Time. I really love how I can escape from a movie, closing the app, and come back to it a few days later — right where I left off.

Andrew’s Mac Tips — Quick Review — Movie Time