It would be an understatement to say that people were looking forward to the desktop release of the popular Twitter client Tweetie, which prior to yesterday was only available for consumption on the iPhone. In this weird world we live in, where Twitter teeters on the edge of complete mainstream absorption, it’s a great idea to step back and see what options are available to you. So, without further ado, let’s get to it.
Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
Gentlemen, Start Your Tweeting
Are Macheist Users Cheap Bastards?
In a nutshell, MacHeist is a great software initiative that, as far as I can tell, successfully does three things:
- Raises money for a variety of excellent charities
- Gives otherwise unknown developers a moment in the spotlight
- Offers users an incredible set of programs for a single, deeply discounted price
The question this raises year after year is: Does partaking in MacHeist make you a cheap bastard?
Google Sync Follow Up
A few weeks back I wrote about Google Sync going head to head with some of the functionality of Apple’s MobileMe and pledged to try both and see how I felt (Original Article). Today I’m here to tell you that I’ve been happily using Google Sync for two weeks now and it’s pretty damn amazing. The whole process, for me, went off without a hitch because I backed everything up multiple times before getting the ball rolling, but here are a few things to watch out for:
- Before starting, open Address Book Preferences and uncheck the “Synchronize With Google” box. If you don’t, just about everyone you’ve ever emailed will start showing up in your address book. Not good.
- It’s a wise idea to clean up your Gmail contacts before you get started because, again, everyone you’ve ever emailed will show up as a contact on your phone.
- If you want iCal to sync with your Google Calendar and thus with your phone (since your iPhone no longer directly communicates with either Address Book or iCal for syncing), your best course of action would be picking up a copy of BusySync. It’s seamless, works like a charm, and is completely unobtrusive in your menu bar.
- Every now and then after adding a few contacts I’ll export them from Google as VCards and import them into Address Book just to keep things nice and tidy.
- Be mindful that “My Contacts” is the only group that gets synced from your Google contacts list.
- Push Email through your Gmail account isn’t currently supported, but we can hope!
My Bit About Safari 4
It’s safe to say that Safari has come a long way since it’s version 1.0 release back in 2003. To get some perspective on that point in time: Firefox didn’t exist yet, Macs at the time (running Jaguar) came bundled with the atrocious Internet Explorer 5, and one of the only viable alternatives, Omniweb, used a completely custom rendering engine. This week marked the beta release of the fourth iteration of Apple’s browser, and after using it as my primary vehicle to traverse the internet, here’s the raw feed.
Alien User Interfaces and You
In my never-ending quest to find the perfect streaming server for my home theater, I’ve come across many programs. I’m currently more than satisfied using the clean, lightweight Medialink for all of my audio and video, but have been investigating a few other solutions that transcode video on the fly (namely for HD MKV files) and that search led me to PS3 Media Server for Mac.
