If you do quite a bit of web development there is a nice FireFox plug-in that can help show you which CSS selectors are not in use. This can be handy when you are working on cleaning up a site from an old layout and want to reduce just how much garbage code that is left over from the old design. Dust Me Selectors was just updated to support FireFox 3 which if you have not updated yet I urge you to.
In the past I wrote a review on Linkinus. Since then I have been using it as my IRC client and have been loving it. It has a nice clean interface and allows you to write scripts (AppleScript) and Cocoa Plug-ins to add functionality to the client. The other day version 1.3 was released which added a few new features which I thought were worth reviewing. The first thing I will cover are the split chats. If you command-click on several IRC channels / Queries. You will be able to see all of them in the same window. It takes the window area and splits it if you will. This is a very nice feature however I believe it is lacking a bit of functionality just yet. It is a new feature so I am sure it will be enhanced as time goes on.
The very first thing I noticed is that when I had IRC running but Linkinus closed (detached mode) when I opened Linkinus I had split windows already set. It had been a few hours since I was in Linkinus and I was in some very high traffic channels. The channel windows were scrolling madly for about 5 minutes. It seemed like it was trying to “catch-up” to the IRC buffer. After about 5 minutes I had to close Linkinus, quit IRC and restart it all. The other area of the split chat’s that I feel needs improvement is how you switch windows. Yes you can use cmd+shift+down and cmd+shift+up and you can also click on the topic bar above the channel. However clicking in the channel window alone should change the active window. However it does not work like that.
Over the last few days I have been reading up on CarPuters and the things you can do with them. As you might have read in my post about the CarPuter there are a lot of things you can use them for. I was reading the forums over at mp3car.com and I found this post about a Dashcam video with GPS Speed overlay. I was intrigued to find a solution that I would be able to use with the Mac Mini I plan to integrate. During my search I found a great piece of software called SecuritySpy.
Last week I wrote a review on Handbrake and MetaX which lightly touched on tagChimp. This week I am going to review a nice web based service that MetaX has been tightly integrated with. tagChimp.
If you like me have a lot of movies in your iTunes library, you will like this web based service that is community driven. MetaX used to only search Amazon, but now has the ability to search tagChimp. Before this integration you were subject to low quality cover art and you had to settle for less than perfect tag data (unless you added the missing information from Amazon). Now however when you perform a search you get high quality artwork (generally a max height of 600px) and accurate tag data. Now if you do not find the movie you are tagging in tagChimp’s database, not to worry. When you click on Write in MetaX it will add the data to tagChimp (Only if you have not disabled sharing with tagChimp in MetaX’s preferences). At this time tagChimp is relatively new so not all movies have the chapter data associated with them. Tim is still hard at work making improvments to the site every day. Recently he made it so that if the movie you are editing does not have chapters or the chapters are named like Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc. it will not add the movie to the tagChimp database. This was done to ensure that the tagChimp data was the highest quality possible.
Since I bought my first Apple TV a while back I have been using a few applications to convert my DVD collection to a digital format. I do not know about you but I really got sick of searching through 300+ DVD movies to find what I wanted to watch.
Ever since the release of Leopard people have been taking the initiative to hack their Docks so that they were not using the same old dock that everyone else has been. With the release of CandyBar 3 they have made it very easy to change the look & feel of your dock but it also allows you to change other system icons. CandyBar 3 is not free however it has a $29 price tag. With CandyBar you can download tons of icons and docks from the repository that they have created. Today I read about a program called Dock Library which I have not tried. It looks like this is only for customizing your Dock so CandyBar has the upper hand with me so far.
In the same article that I found the link to Dock Library I also found a link to a site called Leopard Docks. There are a ton of different docks for you to choose from. You can use these docks in both applications that I have stated above. In CandyBar you just click on the Change Dock Appearance tab and start dragging the images from finder into the appropriate spots in CandyBar. Once you are done you can save the set as an iContainer to share with other CandyBar users. I have created the iContainer for the Garden theme which you can download from here if you so choose. I have to say that the best theme I have seen so far would be the Litho theme by Anthony Piraino. You can grab Litho System from this page along with all of the extras which make it even nicer.
Leopard Docks has some nice Dock themes and Icon Factory has some nice themes to choose from. The one thing I really wish was that there was a very large repository of full blown themes for Leopard. Even if they were just images in a zip file I could create iContainers to use with CandyBar. I would like to see a theme where the wallpaper, system icons, dock etc were all rolled into a theme that looked good together. Anyone know of such a repository on the web?
Over the last few days I have had several kernel panics on OS X 10.5.2. The only thing that has changed since this all started happening was a new job. I have been working from home using the Cisco client for the first few days and all was going well. I found it tedious to continuously enter my password into the Cisco client and it was recommended that I use a utility called Shimo which is a more feature rich front end for the Cisco backend.
All of these kernel panics started happening shortly after I started to use Shimo, I am wondering if it could be the cause? Have any of you readers had this issue? It seems to only happen sometimes and not every time I connect or disconnect. It even happens after I have been connected for a while. I think I will have to discontinue use of Shimo and go back to the Cisco client. If this solves the kernel panics I will be sure to let you know.
Tonight I personally lost some faith in the hard drive giant Western Digital. I was reading an article that was talking about the new MyBook 1TB external drive. Currently there are work-arounds for this but when you install the drive and the software that it comes with it does not allow you to share media files like MP3, WMV across your network. These are not the only 2 extensions that are disallowed, there are actually more than 30 that are restricted.
I am not sure why Western Digital thinks it is their place to police the files and what is shared on a network. In the future I can see this software being installed on the drive hidden from view where it will take a nice little utility that someone hacks together to remove the DRM protection. I would be very surprised to see a drive that had DRM protection that was not removable by flashing a ROM chip or clearing a partition but it looks like that is the way of the future.
I guess I will have to stop buying Western Digital and move over to Seagate drives. You can read more on this Wired post.
If you are one of the people who like the idea of the stacks in leopard but hate the way that they expand, take a look at Quay. This nice little app is shareware and will cost you 7 if you want to use more than one Quay item in your dock. I like the idea of this application I just wish it had more options to it so that you could completely customize how it looks when you click the Quay item. I personally like the Leopard stacks over Quay. However I do also wish that you had the ability to customize those as well. I would love to be able to see small icons like you can in Quay and still keep the look and effect of the Leopard stacks.
I look forward to seeing what else they bring to Quay for enhancements. The most significant would be to allow you to customize the display. Have you tried Quay? What are your thoughts of it?
Before I bought my first mac through the years I have always jumped between windows and Linux distributions. Linux had not had the best user interface like OS X, it was just never a nice on the eyes. Last night my roommate was telling me about something he had seen a while ago called beryl. We found out that the beryl project had merged with the compiz project to create compiz-fusion. An excerpt from the compiz website tells you exactly what it is.
Compiz Fusion is the result of a merge between the well-known Beryl composite window manager and Compiz Extras, a community set of improvements to the Compiz composite window manager. Compiz Fusion aims to provide an easy and fun-to-use windowed environment, allowing use of the graphics hardware to render each individual window and the entire screen, to provide some impressive effects, speed and usefulness.
Although that tells you what it is in a nutshell there is nothing like seeing it in action to fully understand it so be sure to watch the YouTube video that I have embedded into this post. It adds some pretty slick visual enhancements to the window manager and in my opinion it’s pretty sexy. From what I understand this runs below the window manager so I think you can use it with any window manager you so choose. A lot of the effects that you will see are mostly just things you can do when you get bored but this is the future of operating systems. I have seen some stuff like this in OS X but not anything nearly as cool.
