Tiger Compatibility Watch
Upgrading to Mac OS X 10.4? Wondering which of your software programs are being updated for Tiger compatibility, or enhanced to take advantage of new Tiger features? Macworld News is maintaining a Tiger software update summary. Check it out.
Tiger Tip
Lots of people are giving out Tiger tips today, but here's one I haven't seen elsewhere: how to turn your own RSS feed into a screensaver.
- Launch Safari and go to your site. The blue RSS button must be displayed for the rest of this to work.
- Click on the blue RSS button. You should see the RSS feed display inside Safari.
- The last option on the right-hand bar is "Add Bookmark…" Click it.
- Click on the pulldown menu and scroll down to the bottom where you'll see a bunch of folders inside an "RSS Feeds" folder. Pick whichever one is most appropriate for your site and click "Add". You'll then notice that the "Add Bookmark…" option no longer appears.
- Launch System Preferences and go to the Desktop & Screen Saver preference.
- Choose the Screen Saver tab.
- Choose the RSS Visualizer.
- Click "Options…" Your RSS feed should appear in alphabetical order. Choose it.
Enjoy!
Just don't do it
A quick followup to yesterday's I suck? You suck! post:
Last night I was talking with Sean and a friend of his, and Sean mentioned that his friend was thinking about being a computer programmer. I said, "Don't do it — It's a crappy career choice!" and he looked stunned that someone was advising him against it.
I mentioned this now because every so often I get chewed out because I say that I don't believe that encouraging girls to become programmers is a good thing. It's not that I don't believe that girls should be programmers. It's that I don't think that anyone should plan for a career as a programmer.
Dashboard news
I was wondering why I was getting so much email about my Dashboard Resources page, and then someone told me that my Dashboard article (including a link to my page) is now online at Macworld: Discovering the Dashboard.
And yes, I managed to even get the obligatory picture of my cat into it.
I suck? You suck!
According to reports, Bill Gates recently said
Anybody who's got good computer science training, they are not out there unemployed. We're just not seeing an available labor pool.
Damn. I wonder if UC Irvine will reimburse me for all that money I spent getting my BS in Computer Science? Or if UC San Diego will return the fees I spent there taking classes on managing techies? Because obviously, neither was able to give me "good computer science training."
There's lots more good comments on this here, here, and here.
OTOH, if I have such poor skills that the two schools have to reimburse me, I do hope that it doesn't mean that I in turn have to reimburse people who've bought my books.
Featuring... ME!
If you go over to MacNewsWorld right now, their top story is Tiger's Dashboard Brings Widgets to New Dimension. Yep, that's me that's quoted in there.
Shiny!
You've heard us rave about Firefly and how much we're looking forward to Serenity, but now, you can go see why for youself: the first trailer was just released. Oh. My.
Bookmarklets fix
Love those bookmarklets I wrote about in this Macworld piece about a year ago, and are disappointed that the Dictionary one stopped working when you upgraded to OS X 10.3.9? Yeah, me too. Here's the fix:
Old:
New:
Thanks to Joe Maller, Buzz Anderson, and Jeffrey Schultz for their help with this one.
Thought of the day
You're a Mac geek, so you're planning on buying Tiger as soon as it's available Friday, right? Even though your current Mac is a little old because you haven't been able to afford a better one, you're going to upgrade its OS.
If that's you, wait a second, and think about it this way: if you buy just Tiger, its list price is $129. But if (after Friday) you buy a Mac mini instead, it's $499 — which means that you're really only paying $370 for the mini.
Think about that for a second: $370 for a Mac. Does anyone still say that Macs are too expensive?
Robot Chicken!
If you get the Cartoon Network, let us heartily recommend Robot Chicken, part of their Adult Swim late-night package. It's a bizarre 15-minute show that combines satire and stop-motion animation with action figures and dolls. It's really funny. We've also been recording Family Guy, which we missed the first time around on Fox, and we just started watching Cowboy Bebop. On the other hand, we saw an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force last night, and we must be the wrong demographic or something, because it left us cold.WWDC Call to Action
Based on the feedback from my It's not too late post below, if you're going to WWDC: please, go to the Contact ADC page and request that "Advanced Dashboard Widgets" and "Safari for Web Designers" not be put on at the same time. There's just too much overlap in the target audience for those two sessions.
Here's the descriptions:
134 Advanced Dashboard Widgets Thu, 2:00- 3:30
Bring your laptop for this hands-on session focussed on extending the capabilities of your Widget beyond what is possible with simple HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. You will learn to use Cocoa to access the powerful core technologies in Mac OS X from your Widget.
135 Safari for Web Designers Thu, 2:00- 3:30
Design and build web content to take advantage of the new features of Safari 2.0. We'll focus on standards-based web development to ensure compatiblity, dive into Safari's custom elements, learn about the new XSLT support, and explain the benefits of the extended plug-in model. We'll also demonstrate how to add rich user-editable elements to your pages and add auto-detect for Safari RSS.
Given that Apple's made it clear that the session times aren't frozen, what would it hurt for them to move one of these? If there's a better address or person to contact, let me know, but that ADC page looks like the place to start.
Real World Education
One of the most common complaints I hear from parents whose kids are in public school is that the kids aren't being taught useful, real-world skills. Sean just showed me one of his homework assignments to be done this weekend, "Write an email as if to a co-worker about your boss, using the following vocabulary words":
didactic
fickle
gullible
insipid
petty
incorrigible
officious
pompous
inane
willful
tedious
wanton
Sounds pretty real-world to me!
All entries © 1999-2008 Tom Negrino and Dori Smith