Support your favorite indie developer
Posted on June 29, 2004
Filed Under Macintosh | 2 Comments
A lot of the reaction to Tiger today centers around “Konfabulator”:http://www.konfabulator.com/ and how Apple has once again sucked in the product of a shareware developer without compensation. Some folks are crying foul over “LaunchBar”:http://http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/ but I think the “smart folders” iTunes-like features in “Spotlight”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/spotlight.html save it from being accused of knocking off the shareware equivalent for folder searching/launching alone. Close, though. “Watson”:http://www.karelia.com survived for a while after Panther’s Sherlock, how long will Konfabulator last?
So this little entry is a reminder for Mac OS X users to take a look at your applications folder. Is there something in there that you use and enjoy, even if it’s only now and then, and you haven’t paid for it? If so, then go ahead and purchase it now. In particular I’m thinking of “Synergy”:http://synergy.wincent.com/ which seems like exactly the kind of thing Apple would want to build into the OS and hasn’t yet. Support these folks now, before the hand that feeds them also puts them out of business.
BTW, I’m not against Apple “borrowing” ideas from the shareware world. But come on, give credit where credit is due. Even better, put your money where your mouth is and offer some measure of compensation. Do you think we wouldn’t notice just how much Sherlock looks like Watson or Dashboard looks like Konfabulator?!? You can get away with the “but we were thinking about this for a while” thing only so many times.
Bummer
Posted on June 28, 2004
Filed Under Macintosh | Leave a Comment
One of the first applications I purchased for OS X years ago is reaching “the end of the road”:http://www.karelia.com/watson/watsonFAQ.html
bq. Karelia is planning on having Watson reach its “end of life” on October 5, 2004. After this end-of-life date, Karelia will not be able to fully support and maintain Watson. (Between now and then, Watson will continue to be fully supported.) Hopefully, by that timeframe, the company will have announced a new product that Watson users should be able to migrate to.
I still use Watson quite a bit and while I completely understand Karelia’s reasons for doing what they’re doing, I’m personally disappointed. More disappointed in losing Watson than when Thoth’s support disappeared a few months ago. I can continue to use Thoth to check newsgroups, since usenet probably won’t change much and I have no immediate plans to upgrade the OS (more on that in another entry). But as Karelia points out, the websites Watson works with change frequently so it’s likely that once a module doesn’t work after October it never will with no one minding the store to update things.
But I’m trying to think positively that my Mac’s loss may work out to be my PC’s gain if the new cross-platform product is half as good as Watson is in its current form. We’ll have to wait and see.
Dear Mr. President
Posted on June 26, 2004
Filed Under Misc. | Leave a Comment
This is the laugh of the day, if not the weekend.
“Bill Clinton’s Blog”:http://billclintonbookmylife.blogspot.com/
You didn’t know our former President who wrote his book in longhand had a blog? Why not? Of course he would write on the Internet:
bq. Sunday, June 20, 2004
Yesterday I had a wonderful day. I did it. I made love. With Hillary. It was the first time in a long time. I have no idea what happened. We were both in the mood I guess.
I saw the link, read the “entries” and chuckled at the parody that it is. But now it gets better. Whoever it is has turned on comments. What a gas! There are people who really believe it’s him! At first I thought it was part of the joke, but the profiles point back to real people who believe that Bill Clinton is reading their comments on his blog. Hysterical! If this is not a scary commentary on what can be easily packaged and sold to people in this country, I don’t know what is. If people can believe that Bill Clinton would take out a free blog to write “I wouldn’t want to meet Barbara Bush in a dark alley at night” then what will they believe when someone really tries to fool us?
BTW, the “point” of the blog seems to be to sell stuff at Amazon.
Introducing a new link blog
Posted on June 25, 2004
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
I had been thinking of doing this for a while. I have a subscription to “Blogrolling.com”:http://www.blogrolling.com that’s going to expire in a month or so. I decided not to renew it. Not that there’s anything wrong with the service, but I have *a lot* of links & feeds and collections of tips that I’m not organizing and using effectively. I’m lazy about maintaining the blogroll, particularly because it involves going offsite to maintain.
So tonight, I brought it in house. I create a new “link blog”:http://www.momathome.com/linkblog with a random sampling on the sidebar here. It’s much easier for me to add/edit links when I can do it here rather than futz with the interface somewhere else.
I’m manually going through my feeds and making sure that they’re valid before adding them, so it will take me a while to get everything here. With bookmarks on multiple computers, I’m looking forward to using my blog as my own link manager of sorts as well as make my eclectic mix of sites available to others. 
When news isn’t news
Posted on June 24, 2004
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
This morning, I logged into MT 3.0 on my site and saw this:
Instead of pulling the normal “MovableType News” headlines on the right hand side of the screen, I was getting the contents of a different page inside my MT news area.
When someone doesn’t know what’s going on and something freaky happens on their computer, the first thing they think of is that they have a virus. True to form, my initial concern was that I had discovered some new form of comment spam that missed the comment section and landed on my mt.cgi page instead.
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