software

Review: iWeb 1.0

February 1, 2006 By Lori Leave a Comment

I have read the mixed reviews. I have looked at the insanely redundant (yet CSS based) code. I have pointed and clicked my way to a pretty cool website! It is definitely worth the $79 price tag, especially considering that the price includes the entire iLife ’06 suite! (iLife also includes iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and Garage Band)

This is not a professional web design/development application, and anyone who is looking for that will not be happy with it. Design options are limited in many ways. Programming options are limited to what is built in. Generated source code is mostly lots of divs with tons of repetitive inline styling and NO semantic markup. If you need a pro wysiwyg web app, Dreamweaver 8 is the way to go.

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Filed Under: Geekery, Mac Stuff Tagged With: mac, software

Macworld 2006 :: Day 1 | Power Tools Conference

January 10, 2006 By Lori Leave a Comment

It is only the first day, and I am already having a great time at macworld. The expo doesn’t even start until tomorrow. The keynote is tomorrow at 9.

Day 1 of the dreamweaver power tools conference was great; even better than I was expecting. Dave McFarland (the guy that wrote the ‘missing manuals’ for the last few versions of dreamweaver) was running the presentation. He is a good speaker; very knowledgeable, interesting, entertaining, and flexible.

This conference is geared towards intermediate dw users, and I was afraid the level of the first day sessions would be too basic, but for the most part, I was wrong. I even enjoyed hearing about things that I am very familiar with, like CSS.

The way Mr. McFarland explained CSS to the people who were new to it, made me excited all over again about css. It’s great! I am a web geek, and would happily praise css to anyone who will listen, but in my usual life, most people I come across do not know or care about css.

I ended up learning much more than I thought I would. I still think it may be faster and easier to hand code basic page styles than to click through the dw menus and dialog boxes, but once the stylesheet starts getting longer and more complicated, I can see where using the new CSS tools in DW8 can save gigantic amounts of time, and make things much less confusing than trying to muddle through a giant css file looking for the cause of a style over-ride problem, or even just all the CSS that is relevant to a particular element or selection.

I was going to write more, but it is already the 2nd day and I must write about the keynote now.

Filed Under: Mac Stuff Tagged With: mac, software

¡Feliz Cinco De Mayo! … and Tiger

May 5, 2005 By Lori Leave a Comment

Today is 05/05/05. Cool!

Today is also my first day w/Tiger. So far, so good. Very smooth upgrade, even though I chose the ‘erase and install’ option. I transferred my user settings and apps from my panther clone on an external firewire drive after installing. Next time, I would install the apps manually afterwards, but truth be told, I was too excited, and didn’t feel like dealing with it. I had already found tiger compatible updates for most apps before the install. Only problem was virex, which i knew wouldn’t work; and I had to get update for sidetrack. I hated not having it, even for the 1/2 hour that it was gone.

Widgets are pretty cool. I downloaded one that is a rubik’s cube for the desktop, one for easy uploads to flickr, one that makes a user defined slideshow from flickr, jiwire hotspot finder, wikipedia lookup, and a color picker. I liked the included weather, dictionary, calculator, unit converter, translator, flight tracker, and tiger tile game, but have not yet figured out how to type on the sticky note.

Spotlight rocks as hard as they promised it would, and as of now, I have retired my ever faithful copy of Quicksilver application launcher. Safari RSS reader is WAY better than anything I was expecting! I’ve still been using netnewswire for subscribed feeds, but I’m using safari for viewing feeds that i click on.

I am SO excited for automator, but haven’t had time to play yet. Also haven’t tried new mail, ical, or address book yet. I wonder if they can sway me from Entourage…

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Filed Under: Mac Stuff Tagged With: mac, osx, software

Side Track 1.1

February 13, 2005 By Lori Leave a Comment

Side Track is a replacement driver for apple ibooks and powerbooks. It adds much needed functionality to the apple trackpad. Coming from the 5 button scrolling mouse on the pc, I was very frustrated with the trackpad on my powerbook. The worst thing was that if I set the trackpad for ‘tap to click’, and tried to type, the cursor would jump all over the place. Side Track includes a checkbox to ‘ignore trackpad while typing’.

Other things:

Set vertical and horizontal scrolling to edges of trackpad. You can also control the size of the area on the pad that is used for scrolling.
Set trackpad button to either regular click or ctrl-click (right-click)
Set each corner of the trackpad to a different mouse button or keystroke combination. For example: I have bottom left corner set to ctrl-click, bottom right corner set to ‘hide’, top left to ‘back’, and top right to ‘forward’. Very handy.
Custom settings for applications.

Requires OS X 10.2 or higher.

Shareware – 30 day free trial. $15 to register.

Some people have experienced the ‘cursor freezes on wake from sleep’ bug. So far, I’ve only had one problem. After installing 10.3.8 OS update and turning off computer, cursor was frozen when I turned it back on. I had to turn it off, and back on. Since then, all is good, but I haven’t turned my computer off again since then.

Side Track does seem buggy at times, but still worth using, even w/the bugs. Messing with the settings can help some (or make things worse!).

It may take some time to get used to using it, but if you have any frustraton at all with the regular trackpad, side track may fix things, as well as adding a bunch of other very useful features.

Filed Under: Mac Stuff Tagged With: mac, powerbook, software

Smell-o-mints

February 7, 2005 By Lori Leave a Comment

Smell-o-mints is a very fun, free mac program. It is a periodic table of the elements. You can click on each element in the table for more information, and if you want more in-depth info, you can click a link and go directly to that elements wikipedia page.