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One sweet thing about OS X 10.4 is the spotlight and more precisely, spotlight comments. It’s like tagging for for your computer files. But I am willing to bet that despite this uber coolness in OS X, most people do bother to use these spotlight comments, simply because it’s not a natural process to add them. In Finder you have to right-click (or control-click) the file, get info then add the comments in the appropriate field. That sucks, it’s slow, it’s too much work… therefore the average Joe will not bother.

I hate to be the ultimate Path Finder fan boy (though not ashamed to be so titled), but if you really want a productive experience on a mac, you have to lose the suck-ass Finder. Path Finder is all about productivity, and you can’t be productive if you can’t “Find” things quickly and easily, so making a key feature (spotlight comments) buried below the surface in Finder makes no sense at all. Enter Path Finder. I can’t remember what the default panel setting are for Path Finder but one key panel for me that always remains open and close to the action is the Attribute panel, the place where, among other things, you can set the file colors, name and of course the all important spotlight comments. I click on a file and there in the attribute panel directly below I add my spotlight comments.

By using the spotlight comments, you make the searching experience across the mac far more effective, but in addition you make searching using Path Finder invaluable. For example, my wife and I are working on a multimedia project that involves thousands of pictures. It is easiest and quickest if we just pull the images out of our camera, iPhoto, of off the web and leave them named as is, but sorting through them and picking the ones to be used here of there is a little tough. Renaming everyone with a name that applies to what we would like to use the image for would be even more daunting as no two files can have the same name. But adding a few ‘tags‘ or spotlight comments to each image as as browse through is both easy and quick and we can repeat ourselves as often as we want. When it comes time to find the images we need for the ‘party‘ section, for example, we use the “spotlight > selection” in the Path Finder search field and filter out all the files containing the ‘party‘ spotlight comment. Boom, done!

Technorati Tags: Path Finder, OS X 10.4, Tiger, Finder

Realmac Software Release RapidWeaver 3.6.3
Brighton, England - September 19th, 2007 - Realmac Software today announced an update to RapidWeaver, its award-winning website creation application for Mac OS X.

RapidWeaver 3.6.3 sees numerous improvements to the application, including:

• Greatly improved memory usage when exporting websites
• Fixed an issue with using the bold and colour attributes on a string
• Fixed some issues with the main view displaying incorrectly
• Option-Double Clicking on photos now opens the files in a Photo Album

along with various other fixes and enhancements.

For an in-depth list of new features please visit: http://www.realmacsoftware.com/ or the new http://iloverapidweaver.com/ website, designed by Realmac Software to evangelize RapidWeaver on the web.

Pricing & Availability
RapidWeaver 3.6.3 is a free upgrade for registered 3.6 users, and is priced at $49 for new users and just $25 for users of earlier versions. RapidWeaver 3.6.3 is available to download and buy from today.

System requirements
RapidWeaver is a Universal Binary, requiring Mac OS X v10.4.3 or later. A free trial copy of RapidWeaver can be downloaded from: http://www.realmacsoftware.com/

There are some seriously nice free icon’s out there, but unless you know what you are doing, an icns file is pretty useless for anything other than replacing some folder icons or system icons (not two things a busy, productivity oriented guy tends to concern himself with). For those that do know how to work with icns files, most will be painfully aware that there is no single easy way to convert those pesky black matted files into anything globally useful.

This is why, in my exhaustive search for the quick way around things, I figured out that the built in image converter in Path Finder turns this chore into a one-click wonder. Simply select the icns or icn (or one of those androgynous icon files with no extension) and click “Convert Image” (if it’s in you toolbar), or “Commands > Convert Image” from the menu. By default, png comes up for the save format which will preserve the transparency so all that’s left to do is click save and choose a destination. It doesn’t get any quicker than that!

Technorati Tags: Path Finder, Mac, icns, icons

I hate RTF (Rich Text Formatting)! There I said it. There is no more bloated bit of syntax around than RTF to accomplish simple task like “bold” and “italics” (because that’s all that Joe Bloe ever uses it for). That’s why I only ever use a plain text editor and that’s why my editor of choice is TextMate.

But recently it became clear to me that some people MUST have formatted text. To me this is not an issue; I will generally write up copy in Markdown and from there TextMate can translate that to HTML, XHTML, plain text, etc… because are my needs. But what about someone who needs to send a formatted email, or print a formatted letter, or… ugh… groan… send someone an RTF file?

Well flexibility is the name of the game for me. I take the copy written in Markdown and preview it in TextMate (control-option-command-p) and from there I can copy-and-paste the properly formatted text into an email, and RTF file and even a Word document and maintain the formatting all the while. But better still, being in Markdown still allows me to quickly convert to any other online markup language.

Technorati Tags: TextMate, Markdown, RTF, plain text

iTunes and movie rentals in the near future? What say we? Dave Watanabe, the developer responsible for NewsFire and xTorrent came across this interesting popup window when trying to report an iTunes bug… Interesting!

Technorati Tags: iTunes, movie rentals

So all the blogs in the land are abuzz with Apple news, new iPods and touch pods and classics… Let me be the first curmudgeonly bastard to say that these iPods look like crap! Seriously, do a direct comparison to the M$ Zune and I think you’ll find that the Zune looks better! YECHK! Seriosly, since when does Apple take design cues from Microsoft?

Here is my take; Apple hopes that by making all of the “lesser” iPods butt-ugly, they will sell more of the over-priced, under-powered, way under-capacity iPod Touch. I mean really… you make one model that’s practically a USB drive with a headphone jack (except slightly less useful) and two models look like slightly molded, warmed up lumps of asphalt. Then you make the iPhone look-a-like, iPod Touch, which, for slightly less money, you can do a mere fraction of what you can do with the iPhone.

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for everything that Apple does; I wish I were as successful as one whisker on Steve Jobs face, but sometimes I don’t get the fanaticism of my American uber-consumer counter parts. Did you here them cheer at the Special event when Stevo pulled the Nano out of his pocket and showed of it’s profile? COME ON! I’m more impressed with the smart pass I can use at Tim Hortons to pay for more morning java-fix… all that money in a 1 mm thick piece of plastic that fits in my wallet. Get real, it’s called the NANO! We should be surprised that it’s visible to the naked eye in the first place. My favorite Nano was the first one… who’s iDea was it to screw that up?

Technorati Tags: iPod, iPod Touch, iPod Nano, iPhone