World Wide Webster

Mac OS X Dictionary Application
I’ve done a lot of trash talk about Mac OS X Tiger but I still resolutely insist that it kicks ass, and one of the reasons why is the operating system’s new Cocoa-based dynamic dictionary and thesaurus lookups. This feature has barely been publicized by Apple, oddly enough, but even on its own, it would be fair to say that it accounts for at least thirty dollars’ worth of the US$129 Tiger sticker price.

You can invoke a dictionary lookup within any Cocoa application — one of the best indicators of those is the presence of the notorious font panel, but Safari counts too — by holding down command-control-D and simply hovering over any given word. What results nearly instantaneously is a contextual display of that word’s definition as recorded in the Oxford Dictionary (or synonyms as culled from the Oxford Thesaurus). Both the dictionary and the database are stored locally on your hard drive, so the feature is thankfully not contingent on the presence of an Internet connection.

Continue Reading …

+

Out of Sync

iSyncFor no good reason, I continually get my hopes raised up over the idea of clean, seamless synchronization across multiple databases and devices via my Macintosh. For example, I just want to be able to maintain a single store of contacts, at least, and have it reflected across all the various applications I use: Entourage and Apple Mail, iChat and Adium X, my mobile phone and my PDA if I ever use one again.

This just isn’t the reality, though, not even in the latest and greatest iteration of Mac OS X. In fact, if anything, synchronization has gotten markedly worse; not necessarily less reliable, but less sensical and more de-centralized. I realize there are several third party utilities designed to ameliorate the situation, but I’m frankly disappointed in the infrastructure that Apple provides in the operating system. We seem to be in a kind of transition with Mac OS X, an unfinished state wherein synching functionality, though perhaps more prevalent that ever before, remains regrettably paltry and conspicuously lacking for a clear interaction model.

Continue Reading …

+

That’s Entertainment (For Kids)

Talk about a change of pace: this morning my girlfriend and I flew out to the quintessentially suburban and exceedingly pleasant town of Lafayette, California to help my mother watch my nephew for roughly four days (his mom is on a short holiday). On the slate for this weekend: a science fair, my nephew’s Little League game, a trip to San Francisco to see the Giants play the Washington Nationals, and lots of Nintendo GameCube. We stopped by Hollywood Video this afternoon to rent a DVD, and I was reminded how few movies are really appropriate for watching with a seven-year old and how just about any seven-year old in 2005 will have already seen every one of them. In spite of having my own child-at-heart preoccupations, it’s very different keeping an actual young kid entertained.

Continue Reading …

+

That’s Entertainment (For Kids)

Talk about a change of pace: this morning my girlfriend and I flew out to the quintessentially suburban and exceedingly pleasant town of Lafayette, California to help my mother watch my nephew for roughly four days (his mom is on a short holiday). On the slate for this weekend: a science fair, my nephew’s Little League game, a trip to San Francisco to see the Giants play the Washington Nationals, and lots of Nintendo GameCube. We stopped by Hollywood Video this afternoon to rent a DVD, and I was reminded how few movies are really appropriate for watching with a seven-year old and how just about any seven-year old in 2005 will have already seen every one of them. In spite of having my own child-at-heart preoccupations, it’s very different keeping an actual young kid entertained.

Continue Reading …

+

F’d up Font Palette

Font PaletteJust because I’m about to add further to the list of Tiger gripes that have flooded the Internet since its release last Friday night, it doesn’t mean that I don’t like it. I like it a lot, I really do; not just its new features and user interface improvements, but also its under-the-hood advancements, which make me feel very confident about the operating system’s long-term prospects.

But it’s a complex platform, and any time Apple upgrades it, it’s impossible to avoid baring imperfections, some old, some new. A case in point is the Mac OS X font palette, the system-wide, floating interface for typeface selection that received a major overhaul with the release of Tiger’s predecessor, Panther. It’s a fairly powerful interface for control of typographic specifications in most all Cocoa applications, and so it plays a rarely discussed but central role in Mac productivity.

Continue Reading …

+