Yeah, I haven’t posted in a while. Not for lack of things to write about either: I saw Up in 3D (loved it), I played around with a Palm Pre (enjoyed it), there’s a new iPhone, etc etc. I’ve just been incredibly busy lately. That being said, school is ending next wednesday, so I’ll have much more time to post about fun things. In the mean time, check out Little Wheel, one of the best Flash games I’ve played since Samorost.
A Series of Tubes
An archive of old posts.
Tag Archives: Internet
Bowtie and Coversutra – Match Made in Heaven
I’ve posted about CoverSutra before, specifically about its appearance. I didn’t like the default look of the search bar or desktop album art, so I found a collection of modifications that created an interface I liked.
A few days ago I discovered a program with similar abilities to CoverSutra, called Bowtie. It provides a window which one can use to control iTunes, and the bonus of Bowtie over CoverSutra is its skinability. It comes with 11 skins by default, but by looking around the MacThemes Forums, one can find many, many more great themes.
I was considering switching over to Bowtie completely, especially considering that it’s free, but it lacked a few things that CoverSutra has, which I think are very necessary. The first of these, and the most apparent to me, is the lack of a ‘hide from dock’ option, resulting in it always taking up space on the dock, even though it’s a very small app, and doesn’t really warrant a dock icon. A menu bar item, like CoverSutra uses, would be much better for this kind of application. This inadequacy can be remedied, however, with a small app called Dock Dodger, which can hide any application from the dock and cmd+tab switcher.
The other feature Bowtie lacks is the ability to search through the iTunes library, which is pretty much the core of CoverSutra. Upon this realization, it became clear that running Bowtie and CoverSutra side-by-side was definitely a viable option. Using Dock Dodger, I have Bowtie hidden in the background, so that I can use its interface instead of CoverSutra’s desktop album art (the Bowtie theme called ‘Wet Floor’ is really good for this usage), while I continue to use CoverSutra as my main music navigator.
As a final note, I feel I should mention that up until Bowtie, I still used my perennial favorite utility, Quicksilver, for my iTunes-related hotkey needs. CoverSutra’s hotkeys work great, but I found that there was no way to get the CoverSutra notification under the menu bar to appear when using CoverSutra’s own hotkeys to change the song, so I refrained from using them. However, Quicksilver hotkeys can be somewhat sluggish at first, and Bowtie loads faster at boot-up than Quicksilver, so I recently moved my play/pause and next/previous hotkeys over to Bowtie, and my increase/decrease volume & rating hotkeys to CoverSutra. This setup has treated me well so far, and I’m very happy with it.
Bowtie and Coversutra – Match Made in Heaven
I’ve posted about CoverSutra before, specifically about its appearance. I didn’t like the default look of the search bar or desktop album art, so I found a collection of modifications that created an interface I liked.
A few days ago I discovered a program with similar abilities to CoverSutra, called Bowtie. It provides a window which one can use to control iTunes, and the bonus of Bowtie over CoverSutra is its skinability. It comes with 11 skins by default, but by looking around the MacThemes Forums, one can find many, many more great themes.
I was considering switching over to Bowtie completely, especially considering that it’s free, but it lacked a few things that CoverSutra has, which I think are very necessary. The first of these, and the most apparent to me, is the lack of a ‘hide from dock’ option, resulting in it always taking up space on the dock, even though it’s a very small app, and doesn’t really warrant a dock icon. A menu bar item, like CoverSutra uses, would be much better for this kind of application. This inadequacy can be remedied, however, with a small app called Dock Dodger, which can hide any application from the dock and cmd+tab switcher.
The other feature Bowtie lacks is the ability to search through the iTunes library, which is pretty much the core of CoverSutra. Upon this realization, it became clear that running Bowtie and CoverSutra side-by-side was definitely a viable option. Using Dock Dodger, I have Bowtie hidden in the background, so that I can use its interface instead of CoverSutra’s desktop album art (the Bowtie theme called ‘Wet Floor’ is really good for this usage), while I continue to use CoverSutra as my main music navigator.
As a final note, I feel I should mention that up until Bowtie, I still used my perennial favorite utility, Quicksilver, for my iTunes-related hotkey needs. CoverSutra’s hotkeys work great, but I found that there was no way to get the CoverSutra notification under the menu bar to appear when using CoverSutra’s own hotkeys to change the song, so I refrained from using them. However, Quicksilver hotkeys can be somewhat sluggish at first, and Bowtie loads faster at boot-up than Quicksilver, so I recently moved my play/pause and next/previous hotkeys over to Bowtie, and my increase/decrease volume & rating hotkeys to CoverSutra. This setup has treated me well so far, and I’m very happy with it.
A Winner is You! ('You' being anyone who uses the internet)
Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama said last wednesday that if he is elected to the presidency, he will reinstate Net Neutrality for his first year in office. If you don’t know about Net Neutrality, it is a movement to keep the internet a level playing field for everyone, meaning that internet service providers (AOL, Comcast, RCN, etc) cannot block access to certain websites and give faster access to others. If this were the case, big corporations would pay ISPs to have faster access to their websites, and access to websites that cannot not pay up would be blocked.
This is obviously something that any normal person using the internet does not want. It goes against the first amendment to the Constitution, and would make it very difficult for websites like Zibland to continue to operate, due to inability to pay for good service like a website the size of CNN.com would be able to do. Senator Obama is apparently a very strong supporter of Net Neutrality, just another reason we should all be voting for him tomorrow.
Essential CoverSutra Mods
I don’t know how many people use Coversutra (a companion to iTunes that allows you to search for songs from the menubar), but ever since buying a license a couple of months ago I cannot live without it. It has become as essential to me as Quicksilver, in a very short amount of time. So far, there are two things I don’t like about it:
1. It seems to have a few memory leaks, as it quickly eats up a few gigabytes of virtual memory.
2. By default, it is ugly as hell:
I decided that I had to fix it, so I went on a search for a better theme. I found this one, which is untitled but made by someone named Dustin on the MacThemes Forum. It makes the search bar much prettier (or at least, less likely to blind you):
In addition, the Left Side Mod is pretty handy as well, as it allows the text on the desktop to be left-justified, instead of centered:
Essential CoverSutra Mods
I don’t know how many people use Coversutra (a companion to iTunes that allows you to search for songs from the menubar), but ever since buying a license a couple of months ago I cannot live without it. It has become as essential to me as Quicksilver, in a very short amount of time. So far, there are two things I don’t like about it:
1. It seems to have a few memory leaks, as it quickly eats up a few gigabytes of virtual memory.
2. By default, it is ugly as hell:
I decided that I had to fix it, so I went on a search for a better theme. I found this one, which is untitled but made by someone named Dustin on the MacThemes Forum. It makes the search bar much prettier (or at least, less likely to blind you):
In addition, the Left Side Mod is pretty handy as well, as it allows the text on the desktop to be left-justified, instead of centered:
Google Chrome Released
Today, Google released their very own browser, called Google Chrome. It isn’t available yet for Mac and Linux, but I tried it out on my PC and it is smooth. Installing was painless and quick, and it imported my Firefox history in less than 3 seconds, which was very nice, since I usually rely on my history rather than bookmarks on my PC.
Chrome’s address bar is called the OmniBox, and so far I like it way more than Firefox’s AwesomeBar. If you just type in words, without www. or .com, it will automatically do a google search (or whatever your default search engine is) for whatever you typed. In addition, if you type the URL of a search engine (www.youtube.com, www.yahoo.com, etc), and press Tab, you can then type the search term in the address bar. This is extremely nice, as Chrome doesn’t support the bookmark keywords that I rely on for searches in Firefox.
Another nice touch in the OmniBox is that if it auto-completes your URL, the part you typed is slightly darker than the parts it added (you can see this in the screenshot below).
Another cool feature is the ability to make standalone applications of web pages. This puts in item on your Desktop (and/or the Start Menu and the Quicklaunch bar), which will open a separate browser window for that site when you launch it. The window has no address bar or navigation buttons, it’s just the page and scrollbar. This is designed specifically for web-based applications, allowing you to have a separate application specifically for, say, a gmail account. It shows up on the task bar as the site’s title, with its favicon, as opposed to that of Chrome.
The ‘incognito’ windows are very cool as well, with a darker, more mysterious theme. While browsing in incognito windows, you won’t leave any trail (no history, no caching, no cookies, nothing), much like the Private Browsing mode in Safari. While I’m sure I can’t think of any reason someone would want to browse the internet like this, I bet many people will find this feature very enticing.
I don’t really like the fact that more and more Windows applications are ditching menubars in favor for drop-down buttons (see Windows Media Player 11 and Internet Explorer 7, among others). This is really disorienting, because there’s no longer a central place to access menus that’s constant across all programs. This gives the user a scavenger hunt every time they install a new application to try to deduce where the menus are, instead of being able to simply enjoy the application.
Apart from that one detail, I really like most of Chrome. It really is much, much faster than Firefox, and very pretty. The shade of blue Google used for the Titlebar happens to be my favorite color, which is very easy on the eyes. As soon as this browser comes out for Mac, I’ll seriously consider replacing Firefox.
New K2 Release
I just installed K2 Release Candidate 3 on the site, which should make stuff work better/look slicker (K2 is the theme this blog uses). So far the only difference I’ve found is that the archive scrollbar thing (the slick little scrolly thing which appears when you press ‘Older’…If you haven’t used it before, definitely try it.) now stays at the top of the screen when you scroll down, so you always have quick access to it. It’s pretty sweet.
Halo 3
I promised myself (and others) I was not going to write a post about Halo 3. But it’s like an elephant in the room or something. And the room is a closet. A closet in a small shack. And the Elephant is actually one of those freakin’ gigantic elephants from Lord of the Rings. So I’m writing about Halo 3.
The third game in the Halo mega-series (for the xBox and xBox 360), simply entitled Halo 3 is coming out tonight at midnight, local time. Those kind of release times are usually reserved for movies and iPhones, but this game is one of the most anticipated games of all time, so it gets a fancy release time. Midnight local. I (not owning a 360) sure as hell won’t be there, but if you own an xBox 360 you do not have an excuse not to buy Halo 3.
It already has some of the best ratings ever attained by a game on some review sites, with scores like a 9.5 on Gamespot and IGN, a 10 on GamePro, and a 98 on GameInformer. The marketing budget was gigantic, rivaled pretty much only by its predecessor, Halo 2. There have actually been some really great ads for the games, making themselves out to be post-Halo-war documentaries. “Museum”, “Enemy Weapon”, and “Hunted”. There are 2 more coming soon, and I’ll be watching.
Reflections on Windows OS Upon Recieving Invitation To Beta Test Trillian Astra (AKA Longest Post Title EVAR)
I was recently invited to join the Trillian Astra alpha test. Trillian was my favorite instant messaging program while I was a Windows user, and remained my favorite long after switching to Mac OS. So naturally, I was extremely excited to be invited to the testing cycle of the upcoming 4th major release of Trilly, called Astra.
However, upon launching it, I discovered that it is not really different from the 3rd version of Trillian, just a lot shinier (COUGH COUGH VISTA COUGH COUGH). Also, I remembered that I am almost never on my Windows partition any more, and getting Trillian again is pretty much pointless.
Not only that, I began to feel critical of Windows and Trillian as a whole, all over again. The interface just seems to clunky after the Mac experience. I tried customizing windows to be more like mac (I downloaded ObjectDock to obtain a dock for windows, and a Quicksilver ripoff duplicate -ish program to get that interface as well), but in the end the best I can get is a sad, deformed version of OS X. And trillian wasn’t the beautiful program I remembered, either.
The interface seemed so bland and complicated compared to Adium, which I used to hate with a passion. I remembered having a ton of fun with it, but using it now it just seems slow and packed with features I’m never going to use.
So basically, I’m giving away my Astra account to someone who will make better use of it, Matt. He’s a real Windows guy, and more power to him for that. We’ve had plenty of intellectual debates about the rival operating systems (“omg m$ windows sux” “no fag windows ftw, mac sux ass” “bill gates? more liek dollar bill gay-ts” and so on), but we’re still friends, so I’ll trust him with my Astra account. I bet it looks better on Vista anyway.