Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
Paul Thurrott is best known for his Windows sites, and his critical position on Apple. But Paul is a Mac person, and he's doing a great Tiger Feature of the Day series on his blog.
Anand over at AnandTech has also done an interesting review -- that's where I learned about Spotlight comments in the Finder (I almost never Get Info). I wonder if you can script modification of the Spotlight comments data.
Here's the morning update on Tiger. Thanks to readers and this MacOSXHint, I got my mail folders in the right place now. I also managed to get GNU Emacs up and running by grabbing the latest from CVS.
I've done a little exploring -- I added a bunch of Dashboard widgets (Earth to Apple - RSS feeds for the Dashboard, Spotlight, and Automator download pages). Things like weather, stock tickers, package trackers, known wireless points, etc. There's been a lot said about Dashboard, and a lot of people think that it's hype. From reading James' article on Dashboard, it looks to me like these Widgets are a very similar to "AJAX" based webapps.
Another thing that I've noticed is that things feel much snappier, at least in some applications. NetNewsWire seems much snappier and I was also running a fink source build in the background. But that might also be due to the memory upgrade that I did yesterday (and yes, I did the upgrade after I discovered the problems with the DVD-ROM).
Things I'm still having trouble with:
- Keyboard shortcuts to Mail.app AppleScripts - I have a few scripts that I used to trigger via keyboard shortcuts. In Tiger, it looks like all the mail scripts have moved to ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail. My scripts show up in the Script Menu, but the keyboard shortcuts don't work, and that's a big workflow interruption
Time for us all to get on Jabber and get off AIM. My jabber id is twl@jabber.org (no 150 user limit on Jabber)
I've done a little more playing with Spotlight, and I'm reasonably impressed. When you start to do AND/OR queries it slows down a bit, but it's finding all kinds of stuff. I'm realizing that I need to think hard about how tell Spotlight what *not* to index. There's a whole realm here for additional metadata oriented searching stuff. One thing that would help when you get lots of results is some way of previewing matching items.
More after the Bainbridge Bloggers Bash...
I don't know about Spotlight and Automator, but Apple only has a small percentage of all the widgets that are out there. If you go to a few of the community sites, they've got more widgets and RSS feeds.
I'm tracking (or at least trying to track) all the widget-related sites here.
Posted by Dori Smith at Sat Apr 30 17:45:43 2005
You can use Automator to do it. See the "Add Spotlight Comments to Finder Items" action.
Earth to Apple - RSS feeds for the Dashboard, Spotlight, and Automator download pages
They're not listed on the Apple RSS page, but they're at the URLs you might expect given those for the existing feeds:
http://www.apple.com/main/rss/downloads/automator.rss
http://www.apple.com/main/rss/downloads/dashboard.rss
http://www.apple.com/main/rss/downloads/spotlight.rss
Posted by Christopher Elkins at Sat Apr 30 22:08:44 2005
Thanks for the great pointer!
Chris,
Thanks for the automator tip and the feeds. It'd be nice if I didn't have to find out about the feeds in such a roundabout manner.
Posted by Ted Leung at Sun May 1 23:39:05 2005
Posted by John Klassa at Tue Jun 7 12:11:12 2005
To insert a URI, just type it -- no need to write an anchor tag.
Allowable html tags are:
<a href>
, <em>
, <i>
, <b>
, <blockquote>
, <br/>
, <p>
, <code>
, <pre>
, <cite>
, <sub>
and <sup>
.You can also use some Wiki style:
URI => [uri title]
<em> => _emphasized text_
<b> => *bold text*
Ordered list => consecutive lines starting spaces and an asterisk