It all started with an innocent email from TomTom saying that I will now be getting weekly speed camera updates. Hurrah! So, today I got round to downloading the updates and lo and behold! There was new application software available. Double hurrah!

So, download, install, TomTom bricked. ARGHH

I investigate and find the problem I have of hanging on the splash screen can be fixed by attaching to TomTom home’s remote display facility where you can operate the TomTom from your computer. Except, this facility has never been available in the Mac version of Home. Muttering under my breath I dug out the old Dell and connected up and at least it wasn’t a red-herring – problem solved.

Next, I noticed that MapShare, a feature that I wanted was now available. Humphh, not with the old maps I had. So out comes the credit card and I now have the latest maps. In a rush to get out, off I go.

On the way there I notice that TomTom traffic is off. No worries, a quick activate and it is sorted. On the way home I notice that I am not getting speed camera warnings. Getting home, I find it is another upgrade bug, and NOTHING I could think of would reactivate them. The TomTom advised me that I could BUY them in TomTom home. TomTom home said I already had the latest ones. Grr. I eventually lucked out by choosing “Download POI” from the TomTom itself and getting them that way.

MapShare? Forget it – seems it is only supported in TomTom Home V2, which isn’t available for Mac.

The last time I had these sort of issues (with my Dell and Microsoft), I chucked it and bought another brand. Not happy.

Most Mac software is in the magic “no-brainer” price range of $20-$30, which means I have a horrible tendency to just buy it. If I ever manage to write something handy for the Mac then it is a business model that I will adopt. There’s no thinking “Do I really want it, can it wait till next month, perhaps I’ll ask for it as a gift”, instead, “Oh! It’s only $20, I’ll get it NOW”. Unfortunately, this happens a few times per month and it all adds up. Oh well.

Productivity

• iGTD
• OmniFocus

Business

• Parallels
• OpenOffice

Utility

• KeePassX
• QuickSilver
• MacFUSE
• iBackup
• VoodooPad
• Unison
• Chicken of the VNC
• CoconutBattery
• iStat pro

Communications

• Adium
• Twitterific

Web

• FireFox
• Yaki
• Cocoalicious

Authoring/Design/Editing

• Adobe Photoshop Elements
• Coda

Personal Finance

• Moneydance

Fitness

• Ascent
• Garmin Training Center

Miscellaneous

• TomTom HOME

It appears that some Leopard upgraders are getting a taste of the infamous BSOD that Windows users have had the mickey ripped from them for ever.

Initial reports indicate that the main culprit is an application called “Application Enhancer”. Looking at it’s product page, it isn’t surprising at all that this program causes problems. It looks like a tool for hacking into low-level OS functions to change their behaviour so that other products in Unsanities portfolio, and other developers such as Logitech, can change underlying Mac OS behaviour.

Apple will be getting a lot of “it just works” NOT, comments for this, but how can an OS provider protect themselves from this sort of programs abuse. By nailing things down like the iPhone, I suppose, which nobody really wants.

So, it’s a consequence of having an open(ish) system, and a program that plays dirty. It would have been real nice if Unsanity had advised their users of the problem in advance.

Contracting in Warrington

I have spent the last few months working in Warrington, and it looks like my contract is going to be extended for quite a bit more. I have had a difficult decision, to carry on working so far from home with one hell of a drive each Monday and Friday, or to hunt for something much more local. The advantage of working where I am is that it is a big customer, guaranteed to pay their bills on time. The only disadvantage is location. That said, quite a number of my colleagues are long distance commuters. One does the journey from London daily. Now the darker, colder (I almost said wetter, but the summer wasn’t great either) weather is here, then getting up on that Monday morning for a four-five hour drive is less and less attractive.

Back to Gym and swimming

Good eating at the B&B has led to a gradual increase in my belt length, and I am starting to see the yo-yo weight loss/gain cycle swing back. So, refusing to give in, I have joined a local gym (in Warrington) and for the last few weeks have managed to get there 4 times per week. A couple of gym sessions and a couple of long swims each week should stave off the creeping waistline. In fact, I have already noticed a small decline.

Cycling at the weekends is on the backburner too, I’m afraid, as Alison has been unable to ride due to her running injury. So, the new cycle roof rack has hardly been used. Oh well, not long till spring.

Drupal odds and sods

I am still enjoying the Drupal CMS, and keep toying with moving this blog back. I have been experimenting with a site with more static pages and less timeline orientated, but still retaining some blog-like features and think that Drupal will give the best of both. I have also managed to do some freelancing on Drupal, so not diluting my skills with yet another system seems a good idea.

iPod Classic

I am saddened to keep hearing rumours that Apple may be dropping the iPod classic as the flash based storage devices have a lot of advantages. I see this, but the 160Gb Classic has enabled me to ditch an external brick I was using for camcorder footage and backups while away from home, so please, please don’t ditch it Apple, until you have at least a couple of hundred gigs of flash on a device.

I’ve been listening to all the whiners saying that iMovie ’08 is a backward step compared to iMovie HD and I can’t believe how myopic they are being!

When I got a Mac I was really looking forward to simple and quick movie editing, I have TONS of old footage from my PC days that I ended up moving to MPEG2 before selling the mini-DV camera. Could iMovie HD use it? No, not even after shelling out for the Quicktime MPEG2 component and Quicktime Pro. Using MPEG Streamclip I was able to get going without any further picture quality degradation, but I now had TWO copies of each video clip.

Did iMovie HD work with my newer JVC Everio? No. Again, MPEG Streamclip comes to the rescue, and I have TWO copies of each of those clips too. By now, I’ve shelled out on an external HDD just for video.

Now, we come to editing with iMovie HD. Can I browse all my footage? No. I had to import the clips I wanted for each specific project into iMovie HD. This import was real SLOW and if I used the same clip in two projects, I had to do the import twice AND iMovie HD created yet another copy each time I did this (within the project) and that copy used a HUGE amount of disk space. I could see myself buying yet another external HDD just to backup iMovie HD projects to. So, now I had THREE copies of each clip that I used in a project, on occassion more.

So, I just put off doing video projects – too much hassle.

Now comes ‘Movie 08 to the rescue.

• It can read all my Everio stuff directly
• It moves all my footage into it’s own library, but in the original format which I can get back. So, no longer multiple copies.
• Projects reference the library, so there isn’t a third HUGE copy within the project.
• It has a neat media browser built in, supporting events, keywords, date ranges, live previews, filtering.
• It’s FAST

OK, we’ve lost a few special effects, themes, transitions and precision editing – but we’ve gained a much more efficient design. I do hope Apple do address the “missing” features, but I am not going to be going back to iMovie HD because iMovie ’08 does what I need quickly and efficiently making video editing pleasant again.

My MacBook Pro is at the doctors getting a new bottom pan. So, while it is in I have decided to create a second account on Alisons MacBook.

It was amazingly easy to restore my backup made by iBackup onto Alisons computer. Within half an hour I had all my applications back, all my data back and everything working fine and dandy. I spent the next hour in a daze over how easy it was. Want to convert a seasoned Windows user to the Mac? Race him in restoring a computer.

Actually, nine hours later and I’m still in a daze. Sad, but true.

Oh, the applications weren’t just a li’l old word processor, etc, but an Apache/MySql/Php setup of Drupal, a Php development environment, along with everything else – mail, address books, bookmarks, documents, OmniFocus, iTunes, iPhoto, KeePass, blah, blah de blah. *EVERYTHING*.

The launch of the Windows version of the Safari web browser has prompted quite a lively debate on the manner in which Apple renders fonts vs the Microsoft way. It isn’t a subtle difference either. Both of the images below were taken off of a Windows PC.

This is the Microsoft rendering, using a screenshot from FireFox 2.0 showing typical plain text from the WordPress dashboard:

And, this is the Apple rendering using a screenshot from Safari 3 Beta showing the same text:

To my eyes, the Apple version looks much better, although I can see why some people complain that it is blurred.

Typography on computer screens has always been a difficult area. When the first desktop publishing systems started to compete with professional optical typesetting equipment there was much lamenting about the loss of the beauty of classic fonts. Early systems treated kerning and litagures with disdain, different size spaces for different contexts disappeared, font scaling lacked hints and fonts looked abysmal as different sizes and WYSIWYG was a joke as on-screen font representation was miles away from the printed output.

Gradually, we have seen computers taking on these points and getting closer and closer to print typography – which has decades of research regarding readability. On screen readability still is a difficult area though, as screen resolutions are still far short of print resolutions. Microsoft font rendering is optimised extremely toward clarity with a focus on aligning features to pixel boundaries. But is clarity the same as readability? I don’t think so. I find the Apple rendering much more natural and more comfortable to read, but am ready to admit the individual characters lack sharpness.

When screens are 300dpi this will become a non-issue, until then it is really a style choice, and I choose Apple.

The Mac is really spoilt for quality GTD apps.

I was going to write a review of Thinking Rock versus iGTD, but a couple of things have put me off the idea. First, they are both really good applications. Second, the non-native aspects of ThinkingRock would totally skew the review against it, even though it was that very same cross-platform capability that allowed me to use it on Windows and to benefit from it’s functionality for nearly a year.

I was using ThinkingRock on Windows, it is a really excellent fit to the GTD methodology, and helped me tackle complex projects and balance work, fitness goals and home projects well. When I moved to the Mac, I had a nose around and fell over iGTD nearly straight away.

iGTD is a really cool native Cocoa application that looks like it belongs on a Mac. A lot of thought has been put into interoperability with other Mac tools. You want an action based on the email you are reading – one keypress and it is in your GTD inbox; follow up on a web page you are reading, again one keypress. Have a random though you need to capture, one keypress and type it in – no hunting for the application. These aspects alone make it a antural part of your daily activity. Syncing to iCal, .mac and my phone is just icing on the cake.

And then there is OmniFocus. Oh, how sweet you look with your simple and uncluttered UI, the smooth screencasts showing how everything flows so neatly. You make iGTD look clumsy. A pity I can’t get my hands on you though, being in a closed beta.

I am going to be torn when OmniFocus is available, since iGTD does most of what I need. But, nested contexts and nested projects are not really how I want them, the nesting doesn’t have any obvious functionality apart from navigation. Actions don’t propogate up the tree, so I end up having to open projects to check there is nothing within them that is pending. And the screencasts of OmniFocus show it working just the way I want – BUT, the interopability aspects are going to be lacking in the early releases, and I am suspicious that Omni don’t have anything like the release turnaround that Bartek demonstrates, which is phenomenal. Another point is that iGTD is going to have a pro version (chargable) whereas OmniFocus will cost from day one. How will this influence development?

Interesting times are promised as these packages fight for dominance.

The Email app goes “whoosh” whenever you send an email.

After being pleasantly surprised with the very easy setup of iSync with my Bluetooth phone and iCal/Address Book/iGTD, and then discovering how mind-numbingly easy it was to transfer photos between my phone and the Mac, I never realised there was another piece of subtle phone/Bluetooth integration sitting there waiting to leap.

You can use Address Book to send an SMS. In fact, it receives SMS’s too, and can store them as notes against the associated contact, dial numbers and log received calls. If I’d only realised that I needed to click on the bluetooth icon on Address Books toolbar, too subtle for me!