All the News That’s Fit to Feed

Wed 17 Mar 200411:35 PM

The reigning king of Macintosh XML news readers is NetNewsWire from Ranchero software. It really is a solid piece of software engineering, but I’ve been looking for something that will let me organize all the XML feeds I’ve been collecting in a more orderly fashion. A search on VersionTracker led me to NewsMac, which has lots of great features but has been riddled with a few nagging bugs in its latest incarnation. But the author has been really responsive with fixes and updates, and has even laid out a pretty detailed road map for the application (when’s the last time a shareware developer laid out a road map?). This level of support has, over the past few weeks, gradually won me over, and I’m pretty sure that I’m settling on NewsMac as my reader of choice now.

Board to Death

Sun 14 Mar 200411:42 PM

For several months, I’ve been working on and off in my free time on developing a small Web site for a shareware developer, and part of that process has, recently, entailed trying to construct a reasonably attractive user forum using phpBB. This free community software is impressively powerful, but after having spent several hours today trying to make sense of its template construction, I have to say that it’s a mess. Have a look at the source code on a phpBB board and you’ll see a soup of embedded styles and nested tables that is mind-numbingly confusing to get through, to say nothing of the style sheet, which raises organizational distraction to an art.

In Store Service

Mon 8 Mar 200409:53 PM

Duplicate and Die

Mon 23 Feb 200410:50 PM

When conservatives complain about “activist judges,” I wonder if they would include the growing number of adjudicators who have been systematically destroying consumers’ fair use rights (or, for that matter, those appointed under Republican presidents who have been diligently repealing environmental protections). The latest of these is Judge Susan Illston, who sits on the federal bench in San Francisco, and who last week in a suit between 321 Studios and the Motion Picture Association of America, ruled that DVD-copying software is illegal.

Foxy Bird

Tue 10 Feb 200407:25 PM

A new version of the resurgent Mozilla project’s Firebird browser was released yesterday under the new name “Firefox,” which seems to me to be an even dodgier moniker than Firebird, but I guess they had a good reason for the switch. I downloaded the Mac OS X version and played around with it a bit today, and it seems buggier than previous versions of Firebird that I’ve used; I had some trouble scrolling through a few Web pages, troubles that seemed caused by the application’s user interface, rather than the rendering engine.

The Safari Ecosystem

Mon 2 Feb 200410:44 PM

The Bitter Suite

Thu 15 Jan 200410:41 PM

Data in Denial

Thu 15 Jan 200412:52 AM

One of the disappointing things I noticed during last week’s Macworld Expo announcements was Microsoft’s sketchy details about their impending Microsoft Office 2004 for Macintosh release. Specifically, there was nothing said about integration of the contact management component of Entrourage with Apple’s built-in Mac OS X Address Book.

This core application is the closest thing to a system-wide contact manager you’ll find in a consumer operating system, and I’ve been patiently waiting for such a thing for years. Being a dedicated Entourage user, I’ve felt frustrated that this very robust Microsoft product can’t take advantage of the Address Book. I have no desire to manually maintain two separate contact databases — something I’ve tried to do in the past and found to require too much effort — so I’m desperate to find a way to link them.

A Clean Slate

Sat 10 Jan 200401:52 PM

Despite the best efforts of a colleague who went out of his way to help me, it took nearly a week to reformat my troublesome Hewlett Packard Pavilion 701 and reinstall a fresh copy of Windows XP on it. This machine had been on its last legs for months, sputtering along with an installation of XP that had been painfully accreted with innumerable Microsoft patches and who knows what kind of damage inflicted from countless crashes and errant programs.