/dev/blog

Well, WebKit, which is essentially what Safari is, is now open source, and the newest version is the first to pass the Acid2 test!

Anyways, I find it pretty good, now that it complies to most likely all the web standards, I’ve switched back from Camino to Safari/WebKit.

You can find info on WebKit here.

Get WebKit the easy way, using NightShift. It installs WebKit for you, updates to the most recent nightly build for you if you want to, and offers you the option to revert to a previous version if the new one is too buggy, all without touching Safari.

It’s pretty good if you ask me. I’ll report back if there are any problems.

Security Awareness for Ma, Pa and the Corporate Clueless

Here’s the rage of the internet right now. The blog of a company that switched from Wintel to Macs, including a Wintel bigot that now “sees the light”.

I find the posts interesting, and worth reading. The posts are not really biased in any way, other than the guy being pissed at Windows, causing the switch.

Oh, and, man, it feels good when a previous Win-bigot begins to see that he was wrong.

Today, I have just discovered Speakable Items in Mac OS X, and, man, is it *awesome*!

I just turned on Listening in your System Preferences, and my iBook began listening for voice commands. It also provided a floating palette for feedback, so I could see if it heard me. I could optionally have it listen only if a key is pressed and held, or after I say a key word, like “Computer”. There’s also a Speakable Items palette that shows the user what commands the computer knows, and one can add one’s own commands by making AppleScripts that run the command, and name it whatever you want to say to run the command, then move it to the ~/Library/Speech/Speakable\ Items/ folder

I easily made some iTunes scripts for play, pause, and other commands.

The speech recognition worked real well, and understood my commands most of the time. What really surprised me was when it understood the command “open nFoldMan” and actually started the application.

Mac OS X continues to give me wonderful surprises even after I used it for a year. And I definitely don’t regret switching.

In CompSci class, we’ve just got an assignment where we have to work on a program in Java. It can be on anything and can do anything, but has to be worth about 4-5 weeks of work.

Well, I’ve decided to do something with Cocoa, just to start getting familiar with it. But, I need some ideas for the project. Someone in our group proposed a stock simulation. I think it may be too easy if we just pull stock information off the internet, and too complex if we simulate stocks by making our own class.

Well, any ideas on how/what to do with the stocks? Or maybe some other project we can work on?

And, no, it cannot be in Objective C. The class is *Java* orientated.

*Update*: Well, the group has decided to do a Chess game instead.

I was looking for a widget that can either run commands in the shell and display the output, or run the ‘cat’ command on a file. I was going to use it on Folding@Home, to display the unitinfo.txt file.

In boredom, I made a widget for Dashboard in Tiger that runs the ‘cat’ command in UNIX in a user-definable interval, and refreshes the result.

You can get it “Here(dashcat.v0.1.zip)”:http://lokisnake.com/widgets/dashcat.v0.1.zip

It is currently *not* user-friendly, but it gets the job done.

To change the settings, you would need to go into the .wdgt bundle, and edit the javascript and css files. It isn’t complicated to work with, but can be improved.

I will be improving this little by little. And feel free to submit comments and suggestions to lokisnake (at) lokisnake (dot) com

Tiger has now been officially released, and I got my copy at 6:15 p.m. local time in Pasadena. Installed it in store, and played with it the whole time.

Spotlight is amazing. Really instant search. It is *wicked* fast! Much faster than the beta version I tried out on a friend’s computer, and that was already fast. It indexes everything. When it finishes indexing my backup/external hard drive, I’ll see just how good it is, and report back here.

Dashboard also exceeded my expectations. It is fast on my iBook, and not just beautiful, but also useful. At a touch of a key, I can gather all the tidbits of information I need, like weather forecasts, airline flight status, stocks, times around the world, and can also search in the built-in dictionary, do simple calculations, convert units, search in the yellow pages, and much more. Other features can be added by installing third party widgets.

Safari RSS is simply stunning in its speed and the new features. It is now even faster than the original Safari, despite new features. The most remarkable being the RSS capabilities. I can visit a site with an RSS feed, Safari would find it and display a little icon on the right side of the address bar, and if you click on it, the built-in RSS reader would go to that feed. By doing a simple drag-and-drop, you can then bookmark the RSS feed, and Safari would put a number by the feed to show new entries. The whole thing is done elegantly, and is very easy to use.

Other new features that others find great and I have yet to explore include the new Mail.app, iChat, Address Book, iCal, Automator, the new Preview, and Xcode 2. I’ll be beginning to use these when I really start using Tiger to its fullest, and I’ll write something if I find anything I like about these new upgrades and applications.

As some of you know, Mac OS X Tiger is coming this Friday, and, well, there will be little celebration events at every single Apple Store from 6PM to midnight. That’s when I purchase my precious copy of Tiger, and install it right there in the store

Look “here(Apple Store Locations)”:http://www.apple.com/retail/ for a list of stores, and just pick one for details. You should see an image with Tiger World Premiere on it.

I’ve heard there will be drawings for Powerbooks and iPods. And also they might hand out T-shirts and the likes.

Possible destinations for me would be the Rancho Cucamonga store, or the Pasadena store (most likely).

If anyone is or might be going, leave a comment and state which store if you wouldn’t mind.

Hope to see some of you there! And have fun!

Who wouldn’t like to have their own butler?
How about a butler for you on your computer?

Well, get your very own Butler __today__!

Butler

And, yup, it’s Mac only.

It is an amazing little helper, and has worked nicely into my daily workflow. There are so many features that I still haven’t discovered them all of them yet. I currently use the shortcut keys for entering abbreviations for launching applications, for doing a Google or Yahoo search, controlling iTunes, for launching the Unix shell, Terminal, and also the shortcut for the stacked pasteboard, which saves a user-defined number of past cmd-c commands. Almost all of the features can be assigned a user-defined keyboard shortcut, and all the searches are quite fast.

It isn’t a Spotlight replacement, for it doesn’t really index what’s in documents, but instead is an app launcher and helper in general.

Oh, and, it’s free (as in speech). I strongly recommend all Mac users try out this application, and donate some money to the developer if you like it and use it a lot.

It is this kind of software that makes the Macintosh Experience® so enjoyable for me.