Macintosh

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The folks at Panic Software have a wonderful story up that, although it’s long, is really worth the read. It brings back memories of that heady period when everything seemed like a mystery over the horizon, when we felt like we could do *anything*. It has the “startup” story, the references to stuff that Mac users from the period will certainly remember and may have already forgotten, and some great insights about design.

Panic – Extras – The True Story of Audion

Audion, for Mac users of 1999-2001 or so, the MP3 player of choice. At least, among those of us who loved beautiful things on our desktops. It was Mac-like, through and through, with lovely attention to detail.

But when iTunes hit, it changed everything. As explained here:

iTunes was, of course, and I’ll say this now, brilliant. It single-handedly taught us an entirely new philosophy on software design. Do you really need that Preference that 1% of your users will use? Can you find a better way to design that interface than having each function in a separate window? Can you clean this up, even if it means it’s a little less flexible? iTunes blazed the trail for clean, efficient software design for a broad audience, a design philosophy we practice actively today. It was a way to take a complicated digital music collection, and make it easy. Sure, it was limited, but man was it easy.

I think we’re all still trying to learn this.

This is nuts — and evidently done entirely with things like javascript. The only Flash I see implemented is in the fake iTunes app.

Check this out at osx.portraitofakite.com before Jobs sues them and makes them take it down.

Yanked from The Apple Blog

MiniMac

The Mac mini is gorgeous. Brilliant.

When I heard about it I was afraid it would be underpowered… not the case, at all.

Spies and Ads

Wired News: Sick of Spam? Prepare for Adware

Almost everyone I know has ended up having to reformat their drive or something lately due to a spyware install or other virus situation.

I’m so glad I have a Mac. (*knocks aluminum*)

Just a quick note… I LOVE this application. And it was just rewritten in Cocoa and handles higher-ascii characters better. For those of you who don’t care about what I just said…here’s the lowdown. It runs in Mac OS X, and lets you quickly clip articles, text, whatever, and make Palm-readable .doc files out of whatever you want to read later on your Palm. For me, it’s a huge boon. And incredibly it’s freeware. Go figure. PorDiBle 3.0 – MacUpdate

I actually use icons not just for making things pretty (though that’s nice) but for helping me visually get to folders I use a lot… they help me organize things on my computer, and I have a *lot* of things on my computer. So this little dealie is nice to have around… it lets me copy, paste, clear, and even view up-close, any and all icons used on my Mac with a quick right-click: FinderIconCM 1.1 – MacUpdate

I’ve been using OmniGraffle off and on for various IA work. But it hasn’t been robust enough just yet for me to depend on it all the time. However, a new version is out that looks to have overcome many if not all of the current version’s shortcomings. Check out OmniGraffle 3 Pro.

Apparently the French are good for something besides cheese and toast. Some Gallic dudez have made this nifty VLC media player that plays a ton of the formats we normally can’t on our otherwise superior OS. (And, they’re generous enough to make versions for pretty much every other OS under the sun.)
(The French comment is a joke meant in their favor, btw… sarcasm… oh, wait, sarcasm….another thing French are good at.)

Nifty new way to move around in OS X: Spring: Home “More Human. Less Machine.The Spring Desktop is concept-centric, not file, folder, site, or brand-centric. It’s designed for the way you naturally think.”