Big, Big Things
Metaphor of the day: the Titanic, on its anniversary. (Thanks to Seema for the link.)
QuickSilver is up to Beta #22, though not much seems to have changed. You can read about it and other Launchers for Mac OS X at MacDevCenter.
But my big Mac discovery for the day is Celestia, a cross-platform 3D outer-space simulator. It’s not exactly user-friendly, but you Windows and Linux people should be used to that by now. I downloaded it for sci-fi writing purposes, though it has educational and entertainment value as well. It’s free and the documentation is linked on-site and also in the Celestia users’ forum.
As long as I’m mac-geeking, here are a few more mac links that have been piling up:
- Mandelbrot on Cocoa is a fun fractal explorer I may have mentioned before.
- Here’s a macosxhint about disabling command-Q for Safari, so you don’t accidentally lose all those open tabs. It didn’t work for me, but you can just add an extra key (like option) to the quit command using System Preferences | Keyboard and Mouse | Keyboard Shortcuts. Did I mention that one before?
- Trapeze will extract text from a PDF, for a price.
- OS X for geeks gives helpful mac advice from a geek switcher.
- I know I’ve mentioned the VLC media player before, but I’m plugging it again because it played a corrupt educational video for me that Quicktime wouldn’t play.
- MacOSXHints has yet more free backup advice.
- MacDevCenter has an article on DarwinPorts, an alternative to fink.