Reliably Broken
Extensions are not enough
Another thing I like about Mac OS X is the print preview available in any software that chooses to provide printing (unless that software chooses to be awkward).
July 22, 2010
More mail bombs
Tim Gaden over on Hawk Wings doesn’t agree that Mail.app’s behaviour regarding deleting POP accounts is misguided.
July 11, 2010
A digression on Entourage
Microsoft Entourage is such an interesting piece of software. It evolved from (Mac) Outlook Express which was a great mail client for the old Mac OS (despite its grumpy IMAP implementation). Outlook Express itself took many of its design cues from Claris Emailer, to the extent I believe the early versions of Outlook Express were coded by peeps who had worked on Claris Emailer.
July 3, 2010
Apple mail bomb
Apple’s Mail.app has an approach to mailboxes for POP mail accounts that has never made sense to me. At least, I can see that it is a logical approach, but I don’t think it is a good approach because it can easily lead the user to inadvertently delete messages.
July 3, 2010
Growl for president
It is fun talking to geeks who have recently converted to Macintosh coming from a career with Windows. They are excited about the possibilities of using all those Unix tools from the command-line (and who wouldn’t be excited about that?) and are disoriented by the differences.
June 23, 2010
Station To Station
I am pretty sure my favourite David Bowie album is Station To Station. I am pretty sure my favourite Bowie track is Station To Station off that same album.
June 19, 2010
Office 2008 update includes Entourage EWS
Not that the release notes have any mention of it, but the Microsoft Office 2008 12.2.5 update will also install the latest Entourage EWS 13.0.5 if you had it on your hard disk already (else you get vanilla Entourage updated). You only need to install the stand-alone update if this is the first time you are installing the Exchange Web Services version of Entourage.
June 9, 2010
Xcode and Mercurial .hgignore
For future reference, culled from Peter Hosey and Ben Clark-Robinson, a mostly useful .hgignore definition for use with an Xcode project stored in the Mercurial version control system.
June 1, 2010
Death or beachball
Pierre Igot’s post about Adobe’s use of a new cursor in CS5 draws attention to how Adobe is continuing to fail to adhere to Macintosh user interface conventions.
May 29, 2010
More Python features that I really like
Another thing that makes using Python pleasing is decorators. A decorator is a wrapper for a function (or method) that takes a function (or method) as an argument and returns a new function (or…) which is then bound to the name for the original function.
May 28, 2010