Calling BS, again

On March 11, Think Secret claimed that "sources" told them that Mac OS X Tiger would be announced on April 1 "via satellite to numerous locations around the world." Obviously, that didn't happen (or at least, it's not likely to happen in the next 90 minutes before 5 pm Cupertino time).

On March 14, eWeek agreed with the Think Secret post. Later that same day, I called bullshit on the whole thing and predicted it wasn't going to happen.

Ian Betteridge, the author of the eWeek piece, got his knickers in a knot in our comments over my speculation that he'd just borrowed his piece from a rumor site, and said that he had independent confirmation of those same dates from his own sources. Ian, I'll say it again: your sources either don't know what they're talking about or they lied to you. Or both. Did you notice the complete lack of a big announcement today? (aside: it was an easy call; not only do companies rarely announce anything on Fridays, they rarely announce anything on April 1. The combination of the two made it an obvious non-starter.)

And for everyone else, if you want to get Tiger the minute it ships, the best price right now appears to be at Amazon. They've currently got a $35 rebate deal going, so it's $95 instead of $130. And they'll throw in free shipping, too.

Me, I just want Tiger to ship when it's ready, not when rumor sites say it will ship.

Two heads are better than one

One of the interesting things (as I've said before) about the emerging Dashboard Widgets developer community is how it's, well, developing. The latest news: two of the largest sites, DashboardDeveloper and The Dashboarder, have merged and become DashboardWidgets.com. That's an easy name to remember.

Looking for a USB headset

I'm looking to purchase a USB headset for voice recording (I may be doing some training videos where I put my voice to screen capture movies) and I've gotten good comments from friends about the Plantronics DSP-500 headset. If you have any experience with this unit, especially compared to its smaller cousin, the DSP-400, I'd love to hear it. Seems like for only $5 more at Amazon, the DSP-500 is well worth it.

This is not blogging

I don't have the time to blog, so here's just some things I would blog about if I did have the time:

• RCDefaultApp from Rubicode: "RCDefaultApp is a Mac OS X 10.2 or higher preference pane that allows a user to set the default application used for various URL schemes, file extensions, file types, and MIME types. MacOS X uses the extension and file type settings to choose the application when opening a file in Finder, while Safari and other applications use the URL and MIME type settings at other times for content not related to a file (such as an unknown URL protocol, or a media stream)."
  
  
• Could someone with more time than I have figure out what on earth http://www.mrlventures.com is? Thank you.
  
  
• Scientific American's April editorial: Okay, We Give Up.

Your Questions Answered Here

Blogging's been somewhere between light and non-existent here because we both have paying writing gigs and that's where all my brain cells are currently focused. But other people are asking questions to which I have the answers, so I should help out:

• Via MacInTouch:

  Today's "unusual Mac application query" comes courtesy of "Franklin":

  I'd like to ask the community to help me find software geared for creative beadwork for a jewelry artist friend of mine. Macintosh based software would be preferable but any experiences would be helpful. The only software package I have found so far apparently won't be available for 3 months or so. Naturally, we'd like to get started right away.

  We're looking for a program that can specifically assist in beaded loom work: convert scans into various pattern types (loom, peyote two-drop, etc), uses a Delica color palette, maybe even produce total bead counts and other production stats and anything else that would help a bead artist.

  My answer:

  I'm guessing that the software that he's referring to that "won't be available for 3 months or so" is Beadscape. The bad news is that Gigagraphica has been claiming it will "be ready in the next few months" for several years now, and they've also stopped selling version 2.0, which works just fine in Classic.

  The answer to the question, though, is still Beadscape. Even though you have to launch Classic to use it, it's still the best thing out there on the Mac for beading. There are a few places online where you can buy version 2, such as Beyond Beadery.

  It's also worth recommending the Beadscape Yahoo group. No one from the company is on the list, but it's still a good place to get questions answered.

• Brent Simmons asks:

  For my birthday I got some money to buy some books. (When I’m not programming, I’m reading.)

  I have a pretty good idea of what books I want to buy, but I’m always looking for cool books I don’t know about.

  My interests are literary fiction, science fiction, spy/thriller novels, history, science, languages, art, and animals. (And other things too, but those are the main ones.)

  Are there any books you’ve read lately that you just plain love, that you’d recommend to me?

  My answer, based on books I've enjoyed this year:

  • Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond: A worthy successor to Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which I also thought was just amazing. However, prepare to be depressed — reading 600 pages about disasters isn't light work.
    
    
  • Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell: as with Diamond, I loved Gladwell's previous book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. It's not often that I tell Tom that he's got to read something I just finished, but Gladwell's 2 for 2 — and Tom's agreed with me both times. We did agree, though, that this one just felt too short; there were a lot of ideas that I would have preferred to see fleshed out a little more.
    
    
  • The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki: As has been pointed out elsewhere, this book is almost counterintuitive for us go-it-alone types. But that doesn't stop it from making some excellent points, and anything that stretches my brain (a common thread you'll see through all these books) is A Good Thing.
    
    
  • Integrated HTML and CSS: A Smarter, Faster Way to Learn by Virginia DeBolt: I should start by saying that I'm biased as hell, because Virginia's an active participant on the Wise-Women Lists, and we're all the smarter for it. This book was a fascinating exercise for me, because I learned HTML and then CSS a long time ago, but separated by years in between. Reading a book that describes learning them together makes so much more sense than the way I had to do it that I envy people who are just starting out now.
    
    
  • What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank: Just because the election was last year doesn't mean I've lost my interest in politics. A terribly depressing book; I just don't see how the state it describes can be reversed.
    
    
  • Heloise & Abelard: A New Biography by James Burge: New information about people who lived centuries ago? That's cool. Based on new letters discovered just a few years ago, this biography fills in a few blanks. I admired Heloise immensely before, and my opinion of her went up even higher.
    
    
  • Astro Turf: The Private Life Of Rocket Science by M. G. Lord: A feminist retelling of the origins of JPL and the space program could have gone way off-course, but M. G. Lord pulled it off. I felt like there were a few places where her biases showed through instead of giving factual information, but besides that, it's a great book.
    
    
  • Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A Novel by Susanna Clarke: I don't only read non-fiction; this list just looks like that. This fantasy novel was enough to satisfy my fiction needs throughout all the other titles. It's not for people who like their SF to clank, or for those who like their fantasies with dragons and fairies. But if you're one of those who likes to feel like as though they've entered an entirely new world with the depth and the characters of this one, I say check it out. It's one of the best novels I've read in years.

  I highly recommend all of the above. And now that you know what I read, any further recommendations for me? (Oh, and I should also send a big "thank you!!" to the Sonoma County Library, without whom I would have spent considerably more money than I actually did.)

And if you have any further questions to which I may have answers, ask away.

Amazingly, I Agree...

...with Christopher Hitchens, which are words that I never thought that I would be writing. In this Slate article, Easter Charade - There's no resurrecting Terri Schiavo, Hitchens makes excellent points, ones well worth reading, despite the overload of coverage on this case. Specifically, he takes down the arrogance of the religious demagogues who have hijacked this tragic event for their own political reasons. One excerpt:

I hope and believe that we shall say, as politely and compassionately as we can, that we do not intend to pass our remaining days listening to any hysteria from the morbid and the superstitious. It is an abuse of our courts and our Constitution to have judges and congressmen and governors bullied by those who believe in resurrection but not in physical death.