…my rock. I wasn’t watching my Firefox RSS feeds yesterday, and I totally missed the new Mac mini and iPod Shuffle. I had heard the rumors from Think Secret, though, so I wasn’t shocked by the headless iMac.
Here’s another Mac link dump. They’ve been piling up on my desktop.
I’m not so concerned about getting the evil PC to look like a mac, but I do want it to act like a mac. I want to hit my usual Mac key sequences and have the usual things happen. Lovely user interface things like QuickSilver (command-space) are just a dream (but for a not-so-cheap imitation see ActiveWords). Cutting and pasting is a day-to-day activity.
In short, I wanted a command key so I could hit command-c and command-v for cutting and pasting. This virtual command key would actually be a control key in disguise, since control-c and control-v are the cutting and pasting commands in the evil OS.
Windows does have a rip-off of the command key—the Windows key—but no one uses it. (Apparently it’s so unpopular it’s even left off the keyboard on some Windows laptops.) In any event, it’s in the wrong place (in Alt territory), and the Alt key is where the command key goes on a Mac. So I had a lot of rearranging to do.
Before I get into sordid things like regedt32, I should mention that in the OS of Goodness and Light, you swap keys by downloading the free keyboard mapper uControl.
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iPod accessory of the day: the iPod shirt
Despite John Gruber’s attempts to squelch flash-based iPod rumors (Flash Gordon, Dec. 2), mock-ups abound. The Cult of Mac has posted pictures of both a round yo-yo iPod and a credit-card sized iPod. John Gruber dismisses the yo-yo as well as yet another design, the screenless milano cookie.
Browser of the Day: forget Firefox - Camino is up to 0.8.2.
InterfaceLIFT has nifty Mac icons plus instructions on changing your system icons manually for those of us too cheap to spring for CandyBar.
Hello Kitty link of the day: Hello Kitty Laptop (with fuzzy pink mouse)
A few more links to dump:
[Update] And how could I forget? VLC 0.8.0 is out. I’m downloading it now.
I came across Jumsoft’s Process in the Apple downloads RSS feed. Process claims to be a “fresh face in the tired throng of outlining applications,” but I’m not tired of OmniOutliner yet, and as an outliner Process is mostly PR.
Process does look like a great organizer, though. If you want to organize a project and you have $25 to blow, Process may be for you. The 7-day shareware evaluation period wasn’t nearly long enough for me to take a chance on Process, not when I already have an OmniOutliner file set up for NaNoWriMo. I’d recommend that Jumsoft extend the evaluation period to the standard 30 days, and start advertising Process for what it is.
Note: There is content after the geeking, really.
I found a couple of blog entries about authenticating LJ RSS feeds so you can see friends-locked posts in NetNewsWire and better RSS readers everywhere: eclecticism (Reading protected LiveJournal entries via RSS) and
life - listed chronologically (LiveJournal RSS Celebration).
The LJ FAQ (Question #149) isn’t nearly as informative. It doesn’t mention putting the username and password into the RSS URL. I’ve been experimenting with leaving it out, and NetNewsWire will ask me for the password and save it in the keychain if I do. That’s probably a better approach.
Jerie was kind enough to lend me a test account to try it out, and it does all work. Rather than make everyone friend a sockpuppet, though, and since the RSS feed thing gives me a use for one for the first time, I made my own LJ account. I’m not planning to post anything there except possibly Stargate fic announcements, but friend the new me if you want me to see your friends-locked posts. I will still read your LJ RSS feeds even if you don’t friend me, and I won’t get offended or anything about it.
This entry inaugurates my new emacs category, which I’ve already stocked with some old emacs-related posts. (Emacs is the infinitely extensible text editor with a soft spot in its heart for elisp.)
The emacs extension of the day is tabbar.el. I was feeling jealous of cool new Mac text editors like TextMate with their drawers and their clickable tab-like buttons. How I wished that emacs had a pop-out drawer, or at the very least, tabs.
So I googled for tabbed emacs, and found the magic elisp file at EMHACKS. (Download it from the tabbar files section.) In just a few short moments, I had tabs!
Although it is documented, tabbar has no handy start-up guide for beginners. With the help of Zhou Chen’s Emacs Tools page, I figured out that I needed to add
(require 'tabbar) (tabbar-mode)
to my .emacs file just to get the tab bar to show up.
Next, I wanted to do a keybinding to get emacs to switch tabs with command-shift-left-arrow and command-shift-right-arrow, the way Safari and iTerm do. With the help of the emacs function keys info node, I found the right combination for my .emacs file:
(global-set-key [A-S-left] 'tabbar-backward) (global-set-key [A-S-right] 'tabbar-forward)
[The above may depend on (setq mac-command-key-is-meta nil). If you don’t have that setting, then try M-S-left and M-S-right instead.] You can also assign ‘tabbar-backward-group and ‘tabbar-forward-group the same way, but ‘tabbar-backward and ‘tabbar-forward will scroll through groups as well so I didn’t bother.
I didn’t like the way tabbar assigned my buffers to groups, so I wrote my own version of the tabbar-buffer-groups function and put it in my .emacs file, too.
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