Evil link of the evening: Ariel Sharon eating babies, from The Independent. You’d think it was still 1939 across the pond.
While stalking the wild Mac Rumor, I found some cool links. Check out this switch commercial, and its switch to Linux companion. MacEdition has an interesting article on the rapid changes Safari has made to OS X browser demographics. Watch TV on your mac with EyeTV from El Gato software.
New PowerMacs have popped up at Apple, along with much cheaper studio displays and the long-predicted 20″ model.
I’m still holding out for new iMacs with the swingy arms. The word on the information superstreet is February 3rd.
A reliable source has told MacRumors that the new iMacs are coming within a few weeks, with 15′”, 17″ and 19″ screens. I’m not sure I believe the 19″ story, since Apple has no 19″ item in its cinema display line. Also, 17″ is on the large side for the little half-sphere base - 19″ would be too much of a good thing.
I thought I’d spend the holiday writing, but instead I made my own color picker. It’s a table of all 4096 web-smart colors, but don’t go there. The page is half a megabyte, so it’s a bit of a slow download and will also run up my bandwidth quota. I’ve already hit 20MB today just testing it. The page looks like this:
The arrangement leaves much to be desired, but a better one will have to wait for another holiday weekend. When you click on one of the colors, you get a popup in that color, with the hex color value in black and white text. The cell size can be adjusted from 8 to 16 pixels.
To see what it’s like without a long download, try the little version (popup or full page), which gives those 27 colors out of the 4096 total which are closest to the web-safe color #6699cc.
If you like it, you can download the whole thing, unzip it and open it locally in a browser: color.tar.gz (32kb). The main page is the one with 4096 in the title. If you’re sneaky enough, you can even find the real page on-site and play with it at freeshell’s expense.
I should mention that none of the color pages have been tested on IE, only Mozilla and Chimera. Click at your own risk.
I couldn’t find an easy way to add palettes to the Mac OS X color picker, so I looked for on-line color pickers to help me design a seventh stylesheet for the blog. Here’s a nice page of on-line color picker reviews from the web-graphics.com color blog. I also took a look at Google Directory’s list of color pickers.
Here’s a 5-k winning blogger with the world’s simplest on-line color picker. He also has a bookmarklet for identifying the colors used in a website. Rather than steal someone else’s color scheme, you can check out these color scheming links.
A while back, Mac Edition called for more web colors and the web-smart palette was born at more Crayons, which also has a cool color weblog, through which I found a snarky essay on what I’ve always thought of as Eighties colors.
I’ve been looking around for a 2D version of more Crayons’ 3D color cube, similar to the nice color layouts of the 216 web-safe colors at Visibone, but so far, no dice. I haven’t found anything based on the 4096 colors but more Crayons’ own color slider and slices of their color cube. I’d like something I can run off-line, but they have no downloadable utilities and I don’t feel like pagesucking the entire site. So I think I’ll make my own 2D color palette. Later.
I’ve changed the style switching links to gifs, as seen in Talk to Oneself, who replied to my recent ping saying Mozilla had been fixed. Unfortunately, the babelfish translation didn’t throw any further light on the entry. (I shudder to think what babelfish will do to that sentence alone.)
Anyway, try out the images, keeping a couple of things in mind:
The LCARS styles work properly only in Mozilla-based browsers.
The page must be reloaded when switching to or from Technicolor because of the extra javascript.
The annoying part is how they go on referring to it as a free service. I get a lot of free services, and not a single one of them comes with invoices due. They’ll get $9.95 for what everyone else gives away free when they pry it out of my cold, dead fingers. This means I’ll go back to using Crosswinds as my mirror, since it’s back up, more or less, and I did finally get all my Voyager fic up there tonight before I heard this bad news.
The email has been resized to fit your screen. Emphasis on free added, though the capitalization is original. If you don’t see it, click “more.”
The news from this pretty Mac rumor site is that new iMacs with the swingy arms [insert arm swinging motion here] are coming out soon, perhaps as early as next week. They’ll look the same, but pack more of a processor punch. Prices are rumored to be going down as well.
This means I’ll have to put off my mac shopping for a few weeks yet.
I was looking through my logs earlier today, trying to figure out why my hits had gone up recently, and I found some foreign links. For example, Talk to Oneself 2 wrote about my styleswitcher. I ran it through Babelfish, along with the other two sites linked there, but that didn’t make it any clearer to me. If you go to the main page, the styleswitcher has been implemented with some nice little graphics. Unfortunately, the script has suffered in translation as well - it only works in IE. I tried a few Mozilla-based browsers and they were all broken.
Ad of the day: New big and Powerbooks from Apple
I think my Bryce demo is old - Bryce 5 is supposed to be native to OS X already. I guess that’s what I get for scraping the bottom of the Internet looking for free stuff. The hottest new free stuff is the beta browser Safari for OS X.2, which broke Apple’s all-time record for downloads today - 300,000 in 24 hours. (And you thought no one used Macs…) Safari is even faster than Chimera. My browser did pretty well against the other competition - IE whatever (I never open the thing myself) and Netscape 7. It was nice to see that I’m not the only hopeless Mac geek using Chimera. Mozilla wasn’t even mentioned per se. Safari is based on Konqueror, an open-source browser about which I’ve heard great things but have never used myself. I still won’t get to use it, though, because Safari requires X.2, which is 0.5 more operating system than I have on my trusty old powerbook.
I need to upgrade, and if I get a new Mac, the new OS comes free. (Shopping logic - you have to love it.) I’ve been thinking 17″ flat-panel iMac, but then there’s that new 17″ Powerbook. Yes, you could buy three or four PC notebooks for that kind of money, but then you’d have to use a PC, wouldn’t you? My Powerbook (a 333MHz G3, also known as Lombard or Bronze for the bronze keyboard) has been so handy over the years that I don’t think I could go back to being chained to a desk - certainly not if the same display is now in a Powerbook. Then again, the swinging iMac arm is very cool.
That’s the trouble with Macs - you want to buy them for looks alone, and once you have one it refuses to die even when the whole black-and-bronze thing is three years out of style. I don’t need a 17″ display to write stories, but there’s this little voice in my head saying save the economy - buy a Mac.
