I like to check my email frequently, and I like to listen to the radio, and I like to cook. Consequently the computer spends a lot of time on the worktop in the kitchen. Consequently, my two-year-old son ends up getting his grubby little hands on it more often than I would like.

Thankfully, there are some Mac developers out there who have found themselves at the mercy of little people of their own — and coded something to entertain them.

My son’s favorite for the last year or so has been BabyBanger, a delightful little application that prevents him accessing anything important by taking over the whole screen. He can bash away on the keyboard as much as he likes, and every keypress will throw up another colorful shape on the screen, complete with its own sound. He’s been playing this on and off for nearly half his short little life and is starting to ask for something else to play on the computer.

AlphaBaby is similar, to the extent that my little boy thinks it’s BabyBanger. It adds more shapes, prints letters as well as shapes, and can scatter cute stars around the screen when the mouse button is held down. It’s suitable for slightly older kids who have started to learn their alphabet. More advanced letter-learners might appreciate Kids Play too.

With a little supervision, my boy enjoyed making pictures with TuxPaint, but this program is more for older children who have some basic mousing skills. It’s great fun to use and not at all intimidating. Any child will love to spend half an hour or so in front of this simple app, and the interface is so simple they will need little adult supervision.

Even older children might like to try their hands with OK-Writer to write a story or poem, or perhaps multimedia playground Kidwidget.

To teach little ones about using the internet, you can buy a kid-friendly email client called KidzMail that prevents them seeing spam (it can be told to only accept mail from specific addresses) and has a very simple interface. There’s also a browser, KidsBrowser 3, which uses the Safari engine and has a host of special features.

There is an argument for showing children how to use grown-up software from an early age, so they get used to the complexity of “normal” applications, and I’d agree with that to an extent. But for showing very young children what a computer can do, and why they should treat the hardware with care and the software as a tool, these child-oriented apps are a great starting point.

Any other top tips for kids entertainment on the Mac?

When you stop to think about the large number of Mac rumor web sites, and the vast array of rumors published thereon, it’s astonishing that the Apple legal team aren’t themselves the big story more often.

As it is, they’ve swooped on alleged distributors of trade secrets with some festive lawsuits. And this act in itself further fuels the rumor sites’ front pages with more speculation.

None of the web sites said to be under threat have made any public comment on the original Mac Observer story, but every other rumor site, and pretty much every serious news service, has joined in.

What is Apple trying to do here? Some speculate a smokescreen; taking legal action about this might throw others off the scent of other recent rumors, such as the tantalising mock-ups of a flash iPod that appeared on The Mac Mind (dissected by Engadget readers) a few weeks ago.

Then there’s the crucial point, made by News.com, that in order to win in court, Apple has to more or less admit that the leaked information was correct. Doesn’t this do more damage?

And there’s the other action, taken against people spreading illegal copies of Tiger around the place (reported by Computerworld).

The speculation is misplaced. Apple is doing this because it wants to find the moles, and stop them burrowing any further into its titanium-plated box of secrets. The fact that doing so only adds to the feverishness is an unfortunate side-effect, but not something that will do the company any harm. The same applies when admitting the rumors are true: who cares? The information concerned is public domain now.

The choice is to keep quiet, and risk further leaks, or make a fuss, and ‘fess up.

Perhaps this all throws some light on why Apple doesn’t take legal action more often; it must love the fact that the rumor sites are there, churning out stories every day that hype up the company and its products to a hungry audience. Why spend money on stealth marketing, when your customers can do it for you?

It’s only when people entrusted with trade secrets start spilling them on to the web that you need to unleash the lawyers. Grrrr.

What does a rumor site owner need most of? Dedication? Money? Courage?

With the release of OmniOutliner 3 recently, I had the opportunity to make a side-by-side comparison between it and the new outliner on the block, TAO. I’ve written about both apps here before, and I think each of them is an excellent piece of software.

OO3 deserves the praise it gets because it is, without any question, very high quality software. The guys at OmniGroup have put such a lot of work into making it a useful and beautiful tool for manipulating thoughts, and it shows. Open up an OO3 document and it just looks gorgeous.

But TAO always draws me back to its arms, even though it has far fewer features. Why? Because I think it’s a better writing environment, and I’m a writer by profession, so that matters to me.

My todo list is essentially a list of things to write. Using TAO, I can keep the list in one place, along with all the drafts as they progress. Rather than having to remember where each file is, I can keep them all in a single (admittedly, pretty huge) TAO file and work on each one as I get inspired. I find this an extremely productive way of working.

But there’s one problem with TAO as well, and that’s that it isn’t BBEdit. Lots of the things I write, both for personal satisfaction (OK, blog posts) and for profit (articles for O’Reilly Network) need to be created in HTML, and that’s one thing that TAO does not support. I tend to write everything using the oh-so-simple Markdown markup, then use a script to convert it to HTML. BBEdit makes this whole process swift and easy and, well, just really nice. Writing for the web made very simple indeed.

This system makes me very reluctant to move away from BBEdit. After experimenting with TAO for several days, today I exported the resulting outline to text and edited it in BBEdit. By using split editor mode, the quick find function, and setting plenty of useful markers, I can use a single (pretty huge) text file as my “outliner”, todo list (urgent tasks are at the top) and writing space. My beloved Markdown script is only a customized keystroke away, and I am a happy writer once again.

There’s only one problem with BBEdit, and that’s that is isn’t TAO. While using TAO, I fell in love with the outliner concept and the wonderful ability to collapse and expand sections of text, like sections of my brain.

So here’s what I want: BBOutliner. If BBEdit supported the folding feature found in some of its rivals, that would probably be enough. How about it, Bare Bones? Go on. Go on, go on, go on…

What dream application do you want for Christmas?

Ho! Ho! How many times this season have you either forgotten to turn on your holiday lights, wasting all that time you spent decorating, or left them on all night or during the day, wasting all that energy? Based on my experience, and from just looking around the neighborhood, you’ve done it more often than you’d like.

A common solution to this problem is to use a simple light timer. That’s not a bad approach to automation, really, and will suffice for a lot people. (Here’s a tip: Use a power strip to control multiple sets of lights with just one timer.)

But if you’ve been itching to try out X10-based home automation, holiday lights afford you the perfect “excuse” to get your feet wet. You’ll get a flavor for what it’s like with a minimal investment. Here’s what you need:

Start with an X10 Mini Timer. Compared to the timer mentioned above, it offers a lot more flexibility and features for just a few dollars more. For example, you can use it as an alarm clock, and it has four separate timer functions, each with two schedules per day. But perhaps its greatest advantage is that you don’t have to physically connect the lights to the timer box — instead it sends X10 commands over the power lines. This means you can easily control multiple sets of lights, each with their own schedule if you wish, and during the rest of the year you can use it to control other things — such as a coffee pot, indoor lighting, or a cooling fan.

You’ll need an X10-capable appliance or lamp module for every item that you want to control. If you’re just automating a strand or two of lights, use one appliance module and a power strip to turn them all on at once. If you also have a motorized snowman and a rotating, flashing, and blinking wreath, you may want separate modules for each of those, too. Thanks to the versatility of the X10 timer, you can put each on a separate schedule with ease. One important note, make sure that you use an appliance module for anything that shouldn’t be dimmed, like an electrical motor, and many low-power holiday lights. If you use a lamp module, and it’s accidentally dimmed, it might cause damage or create a fire hazard.

If you don’t need all the fancy timing capability, and just want your lights to come on when it’s dark and go off at sunlight, there’s a solution for you, too. Instead of the mini-timer, get a Photocell Mini-Controller. This inexpensive box will handle it all for you, and you can use it to manually send X10 commands at any time.

So there you have it, a short shopping list for a “smarter” approach to holiday lighting. Give it a whirl, and you might just get hooked on automation. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Suggestions solicited. How do you throw away a trashcan?
Our poor trashcan has recently been attacked by foxes and submitted to various other indignities of time, aging and the normal lifespan of trashcans. Recently, I’ve wondered–how do you throw away a trashcan? Do you put a big sign on it saying “This trashcan is, itself, trash” or “Take me, I’m garbage”? Cut it up into pieces and stick it in a garbage bag? This is a regular Rubbermaid trashcan that we use to supplement the city-issued unit.
I look forward to hearing ideas on this subject.

What are you ideas on getting rid of a trashcan?

Related link: https://www.oreilly.com/catalog/ipodtuneshks/

I recently bought The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (The Audiobook): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction from the iTunes Music Store. Since the purpose of this purchase was to fill my grueling two-mile, fifteen-minute commute to work, I needed to burn the audiobook to CD (I do have a Griffin iTrip, but I’ve been experiencing way too much interference to make that listening experience reliable or enjoyable). I immediately came across a stumbling block that anyone who has bought an audiobook from the iTMS will no doubt already be familiar with.

When you buy an audiobook on CD and import it into iTunes, it’s conveniently broken up into short, easily digestible tracks. Not so with the same audiobook purchased from the iTMS. When my my new audiobook finished downloading, the whole book was crammed into just two tracks:

Though these unweildy tracks offer the ability to automatically bookmark your place, this “feature” quickly becomes annoying when you want to jump to a chapter or passage you’ve already read and want to return to. But that’s an annoyance for another discussion. Though the one hour and seven minute second track is annoying for other reasons, at least it will all fit on one CD. The problem at hand is with that two hour and forty minute first track, which just won’t.

So, what’s a boy to do? If you’ve spent any time with editing track information in iTunes, you can probably guess my makeshift solution. It’s an inelegant hack, but it’s all I could come up with:

1. Start listening to the unwieldy track somewhere close to an hour into it (some end point that a standard audio CD will accommodate) and find a reasonable stopping point (note the time).
2. Select the track and choose File > Get Info (Command-I).
3. In the Options tab, change the Stop Time from the default (the complete track):
   
   
   
   to match the break you’ve chosen, like this:
   
   
   

4. Create a playlist containing that track and burn your first CD.
5. Now, repeat this process for each of the CDs you’ll need to burn the entire audiobook, shifting the Start Time of subsequent CDs to match the Stop Time of the preceding CD.

Whew! I managed to burn my audiobook to CD. But in doing so, I realized another annoyance–namely, that more granular track information actually is available in those huge unmanageable chunks iTunes gives you. For some reason, they’re just hidden and unnaccessable until you burn a CD. When I burned my first CD (one track: Start Time 0:00 and Stop Time 58:27), here’s what the track information ended up looking like on the CD:

So, here’s my plea to all you hackers out there: does anyone have a solution, some way of revealing the secret track information hidden within these audio behemoths before burning to CD (i.e., when that information is actually useful)?

I imagine Hadley Stern would agree with me that an interesting, nonobvious solution to this problem would be a prime candidate for inclusion in a future edition of iPod and iTunes Hacks.

Got a hack?

Related link: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/editors/fitzgerald_1204.html

Earlier this week, I sent a message around to the O’Reilly editors list in which I suggested that Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence should be required reading for every editor and every author who can get their hands on it. It’s a real shame that it’s out of print; I would have loved to include it in every new author packet we send out.

The collected letters between F. Scott Fitzgerald and his editor, Maxwell Perkins, illustrate the various aspects, intricacies, tensions, and ultimate value of the ideal editor/author relationship. Every conceivable aspect of this relationship is detailed in the book, and there’s gold on almost every page.

My original message, along with a few responses, has just been added to O’Reilly’s From the Editors List page. If you’re interested in learning the terms of Fitzgerald’s publishing contracts, discovering his various working titles for The Great Gatsby, or getting a priceless, behind-the-scenes look at the crafting and delivery of content as a collaboration between editor and author, continue reading here. You’ll also find a couple more great recommendations for required editor/author reading in the responses.

Letters to the editor: we value your feedback.

Related link: https://www.ups.com

Whether ’tis the holiday season or just the last-chance-before-the-fiscal-tax-year-ends season, it’s time to shop–and to track your purchases after hitting the Submit button. You know that button. The one they warn you to hit just once? Soon the order confirmation letter appears in your in-box, followed (if you’re lucky) by the shipment confirmation with your UPS tracking number.

It’s time to track.

There’s nothing more glorious (for low values of “glorious”–your mileage may vary) than watching your purchase as it travels from the manufacturer’s warehouse into the shipping depot and then to the local depot and then onto the truck for delivery. Soon the bell will ring, you’ll sign for the package, rip it to pieces and be playing with your new tax-deductible yet highly-technical toy.

Some vendors do things the right way. They include a direct URL that you can click to open a tracking page in your favorite browser.

Many vendors do things the wrong way. They give you the tracking number and you’re on your own. Sure, you can pop over to UPS, enter your country name, click on Tracking, promise on your first born child to follow the rules, edicts and conditions of UPS before being allowed to enter the holy inner sanctum of package tracking–or, you can do things the easy way. Here are three:

Easy way #1: Make your own link.

Look at the following URL. Do you see where it says YOURTRACKINGNUMBERHERE? Simply substitute your tracking number for those words.

https://wwwapps.ups.com/WebTracking/processInputRequest?sort_by=status&tracknums_displayed=1&TypeOfInquiryNumber=T&loc=en_US&InquiryNumber1=YOURTRACKINGNUMBERHERE&track.x=0&track.y=0

Easy way #2: Google.

Google rocks, but you already knew that. To track a shipment, pop over to Google, enter the tracking number and search. Google knows UPS tracking numbers. Click on the first link of the results–the one that says Track UPS Package.

Easy way #3: e-Mail.

It isn’t my favorite way of tracking packages, but it’s pretty convenient–particularly when you’re on the road with a handheld and limited screen space. Send an e-mail to totaltrack@ups.com. In the body of your message, put the tracking number or numbers–one per line. In a few minutes, a UPS daemon will respond with the current tracking information for your items.

Got other ways to track? Let me know!

Efforts to port parts of KDE to the Microsoft Windows platform prompted this question on Slashdot:
Open Source on Windows - Boon or Bane for Linux?

As a person who uses both Microsoft Windows and Linux boxes on a daily basis, I think Open Source for Windows is a good thing and blog about it on my own site now at then when I spot an interesting FOSS application for Windows:
Open Source for Windows blog

My take is that if Microsoft Windows has an estimated 90 to 95% of the desktop world and a good chunk of the server world, Open Source can get more noticed by more people and bring great applications and server options to the Windows world.
I’d be hard pressed to function efficiently without WinSCP, Python, VNC, putty, JEdit and a bunch of other Open Source applications being available for Windows when I’m using that platform. So, I’d sure hate to see Open Source ports stop heading towards Windows.

What’s your take about Open Source applications being made available for Microsoft Windows?

Recently, I became frustrated with the selection of backup tools available for the Mac. At the time, I wanted to use a tape drive to backup user data. I had an Exabyte VXA-1 kicking around the office. I’m not sure if the drive itself was broken or if Retrospect’s Mac OS X drivers for the tape drive were defective. Either way, I couldn’t get it to work. Shamefully, I admit that implementing a good backup scheme went on the backburner for a few months. Then, I thought of a way to use disk images to make incremental backups.

At the time, I was using Mike Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner to make a daily clone of the server’s drive to a portable FireWire hard disk. This worked quite well, but I only had one FireWire drive to use. So, while I could get a daily backup, I couldn’t get it off site in case of a disaster. Being that I’d recently started re-reading Unix Power Tools, I was in a scripting mood and decided to use the find command and hdiutil to roll my own backup system.

The basic idea is that I call my bash script each night (easily accomplished with cron). When the script starts up, it calls find to search through a couple of folders for any files that have had their ctime or atime modified within the past day. Files meeting those criteria are copied to a staging location in /tmp.

Once all of the files are collected, I use hdiutil to create a read-only disk image of the staging folder. That disk image is then moved to a Backups folder in /Library. The next morning, I use Disk Utility to burn the latest disk image. Once a month, I burn a complete backup of the data folders using .Mac Backup (because it’s convenient. You could easily use the Finder if you so desired). I throw the DVDs in a binder and bring them home. Then, I bring each day’s disk image home and add it to the binder. Rinse, repeat.

One nice little bonus is that I have about a month’s worth of disk images in /Library/Backups to work with. So when one of my users accidentally deletes last week’s TPS report, I can easily open up the past Friday’s disk image in the Finder and drag the file back into place. Quite convenient and saves me a trip home to bring in that day’s CD. If you’d like to see my handy work, you can find the script here.

What kind of tricks are you doing with disk images? Have a piece of Mac backup software you prefer?

I noticed a couple of Python-related releases over the past few weeks that haven’t been mentioned here. So, here’s the three I’m hoping to get some time to take a look at soon:

Released Nov. 30: Python 2.4
The announcement for this one mentions

Notable changes in Python 2.4 include improvements to the importing of modules, function decorators, generator expressions, a number of new modules (including subprocess, decimal and cookielib) and a host of bug fixes and other improvements.

Released Dec. 13: Python for .NET 1.0beta4
Its author (Brian Lloyd of Zope Corp.) describes it like this:

Python for .NET is a near-seamless integration of the Python runtime with the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). It lets you script and build applications in Python, using CLR services and components written in any language that targets the CLR (C#, Managed C++, VB.NET, etc.).

Released Dec. 13: IPython 0.6.6
Fernando Pérez describes it simply as

An enhanced Interactive Python shell.

It has ports for Linux (of course), Mac OS X, and Windows (plus a few others).

But, hmm, I wonder when we’ll see another release of IronPython?

Got Python?

Anyone who has tried to write their masterpiece will tell you that one of the main enemies of creativity is time. Another one is the internet. I speak from personal experience here; writing The Great British Novel is all too often abandoned in favor of exploring a few dull weblogs and reading some dull email.

To really get creative writing done, I need to filter out all the distractions and let the words flow. I need an editor with fullscreen mode.

Recently there was some discussion on 43 Folders about Ulysses, a text editor aimed at writers that includes an excellent fullscreen mode designed for just this sort of situation.

In fact, flicking through the comments on that 43 Folders post, you’ll see that a lot of people said they considered the fullscreen mode the best feature of Ulysses - and had been exploring other options for achieving the same effect.

I’ve been playing around with some simple fullscreen-alikes too.

TextEdit template as a fullscreen editor

It’s simple to knock up a template in TextEdit that is near-as-dammit fullscreen. OK, you still see the Menu Bar, and have to hit Command+Option+D to make the Dock go away, but the result is perfectly good enough. In fact, you could set up almost any editor to achieve a similar effect — see the TextForge screenshot below.

TextForge, one of my favorite editors, with a screen-sized window and its lovely white-on-blue editing theme

But as far as I’m concerned, the best alternative is the brand-new, still-beta-but-hey-it-works version of MacJournal 2.7, which includes a superb fullscreen mode right out of the box! Um, disk image. Look:

Green on black, just the way it Should Be

Delicious green-on-black text; proper fullscreen effect, with no Dock and no Menu Bar in sight. This really does cut you off from the rest of the world; you have to make the conscious choice to hit Escape and go back to the normality of your Desktop. But of course you won’t, will you? You’ll be far too busy writing.

I’ve got so many great editing tools now, it’s hard to know which one to use

Despite being pipped to the scoop on this by m’learned colleague Mr Bornstein, allow me to tell you about something new from Google.

Tumbling through the quiet of a Friday afternoon comes yet another clever beta test from the guys at the Googleplex — Google Suggest

The premise is pretty simple. It looks like a standard Google search box, but when you start typing search terms into it, some Javascript mangling happens in the background, and a list of suggested searches appears that you can navigate with your arrow keys.

Golly, do they mean me?

The more characters you type, the fewer the suggestions. Of course in some cases it might be quicker to simply type what you’re after anyway, but if you’re unsure how it’s spelt, or are looking for other options, this is an excellent way to search.

So far I’ve only tested it in Firefox on my Mac, where it worked fine. It’s possible that performance may vary, depending on browser choice and connection type.

It doesn’t suggest rude words. We tried that already.

Finally, and with less fanfare than the release of its sibling application, Firefox 1.0, a few weeks ago, the email client called Thunderbird has reached its coming of age.

You can now download Thunderbird 1.0 from Mozilla and try it out on your Mac.

My first impressions are pretty favorable, on the whole. The look is much sleeker than I remember from previous versions, and more in tune with the outward appearance of Firefox.

I really like the three-vertical-panes view, which is a great way of reading and managing mail at the same time, but on my little iBook screen it uses up too much screen real estate (as in, all of it) to be useful.

Best news of all, is that everything works much faster now. Last time I downloaded one of the beta versions (this was several months ago), every task from launching the app to creating a new message meant an agonising wait. That’s all gone now, and the interface is snappy and responsive.

There’s plenty of interesting extras to keep even the most cynical of software obsessives happy for a few hours, trying things out.

I love the Message Grouping feature, which lets you cut through the clutter of a typical inbox (OK, my inbox) and drill down to stuff that matters. Customising it is easy, and presents all sorts of intriguing possibilities (using Thunderbird to manage projects and todo lists, perhaps?)

There’s also a built-in RSS reader; I haven’t tried this out myself and I wonder whether it’s really necessary in a mail client. That said, at least one acquaintance of mine has been raving about it, pointing out how useful it is to treat RSS feed items like mail messages.

There’s not much to be unhappy about with this release; some users may find the lack of import options a bit troublesome. Thunderbird can import from Eudora and Communicator without a problem, but for many users of Entourage and Mail, there’s no built-in support. Mac OS X Hints has a hack for importing Mail archives into Thunderbird. Just promise me you’ll back up first.

Got any Thunderbird tips or tweaks to share?

With the official Thunderbird 1.0 out, and the wonderfulness of its RSS capabilities, I’ve re-examined the quickie RSS subscription parser I wrote back in September. My qualms back then was there was no way to alphabetically sort your subscription list under the “Manage Subscriptions” screen. The same code is still applicable - point the following bit of Perl at your feeds.rdf (located a few levels down in your Thunderbird profile folder), and replace the original RDF bag with the newly alphabetized output (the script is also available here):

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings; use strict;
use XML::Simple; my $xml = XMLin(shift, KeyAttr=>"dc:title");
my @titles = sort{ lc($a) cmp lc($b) } keys %{$xml->{"fz:feed"}};
foreach (@titles) {
  print " <RDF:li RDF:resource=\"";
  $xml->{"fz:feed"}{$_}{"dc:identifier"} =~ s/&/&amp;/g;
  print $xml->{"fz:feed"}{$_}{"dc:identifier"}."\"/>n"; }

But, to the lament of many, Thunderbird still can’t read or output an OPML file of your subscriptions for use in other aggregators or simply to publish for visitors that want to read the same things you do. With a quick modification of the above script, we can generate an OPML file based on your Thunderbird subscriptions pretty easily (the script is also available here):

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings; use strict;
use XML::Simple; my $xml = XMLin(shift, KeyAttr=>'dc:title');
my @titles = sort{ lc($a) cmp lc($b) } keys %{$xml->{'fz:feed'}};
print "<opml version=\"1.1\"><head></head><body>n";
foreach (@titles) {
  my $url = $xml->{"fz:feed"}{$_}{"dc:identifier"};
  $url =~ s/&/&amp;/g; # sbp is immortalized here.
  print "  <outline text=\"$_\" xmlUrl=\"$url\" />n";
} print "</body></opml>n";

Unfortunately, this is still export only - I’ve not been able to determine how to properly import subscriptions from outside Thunderbird (ie., without using the “Manage Subscriptions” interface). It’s easy as pie to modify the feeds.rdf file (as per the alphabetical sorting, above), but Thunderbird doesn’t seem to listen to newly added data; it’ll allow the changes internally, but won’t actually do anything with them - no downloading, no appearing under “Manage Subscriptions”, nothin’. I suspect there’s another file somewhere that contains the “master” information for feeds.rdf, and if you’ve got any tips or hints on where that is, leave me a comment below.

For the truly lazy, the above script can even be modified into a service for those without Perl installed. If a user uploads their feeds.rdf file to a website, for example, someone hosting the following script could automatically translate the RDF into OPML by passing “url” as a GET parameter (the script is also available here):

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings; use strict;
# did we receive a URL in GET?
use LWP::Simple 'get'; use CGI qw(:standard);
unless (param('url')) { print "Content-type: text/plainnn";
  print "No URL parameter was passed. Try ?url=, bub."; exit; }
# can we download the URL?
my $data = get(param('url'));
unless ($data) { print "Content-type: text/plainnn";
  print "Unable to access this URL. Sorry, bub."; exit; }
use XML::Simple; # can we parse the XML?
my $xml = eval { XMLin($data, KeyAttr=>'dc:title') };
if ($@) {  print "Content-type: text/plainnn";
  print "Couldn't parse. Sorry, bub."; exit; }
# continue on as with our other scripts.
my @titles = sort{ lc($a) cmp lc($b) } keys %{$xml->{'fz:feed'}};
print "Content-type: application/xmlnn";
print "<opml version=\"1.1\"><head></head><body>n";
foreach (@titles) {
  my $url = $xml->{"fz:feed"}{$_}{"dc:identifier"};
  $url =~ s/&/&amp;/g; # sbp is immortalized here.
  print "  <outline text=\"$_\" xmlUrl=\"$url\" />n";
} print "</body></opml>n";

For an example of its use, check out the URL click here - it’s an export of my current Thunderbird subscriptions based on the feeds.rdf file. (I have seen some oddities with user submitted files containing multiple dc:title elements - these will not be properly parsed by the above code).

Have more information about feeds.rdf? Let us know!

Related link: https://www.mozilla.org/press/mozilla-2004-12-7.html

Mozilla’s Thunderbird mail client has reached the 1.0 release point. I’ve been using Thunderbird when ever I’ve found myself on a Windows box for quite a while now and finally took the plunge on my Powerbook, finally walking away from Mail.app. Thunderbird and Firefox make an amazing duo, both for those who need to squeeze the last drop of functionality out of their email and web clients and newbies alike (I switched my parents last weekend).

Related link: https://gamestudies.org/0401/

“Game Studies is a crossdisciplinary journal dedicated to games research, web-published several times a year. Our primary focus is aesthetic, cultural and communicative aspects of computer games. Our mission - To explore the rich cultural genre of games; to give scholars a peer-reviewed forum for their ideas and theories; to provide an academic channel for the ongoing discussions on games and gaming.” Volume 4, Issue 1 is out and contains the following articles:

• Social Realism in Games
• Play Along - An Approach to Videogame Music
• Living a Virtual Life: Social Dynamics of Online Gaming
• Loading the Dice: The Challenge of Serious Videogames
• A Meaningful Read: Rules of Play reviewed
• Game Studies - Review: Germans at Play

Got your own favorite game theory rag? Let us know!

Some people are of the view that Apple should make its operating system work on non-Apple hardware.

The argument goes like this: Windows has a reputation for being, shall we say, problematic. Businesses spend millions of dollars every year just trying to keep their Windows-based machines free of malware, or coaxing them back to life once they’ve been infected. If a CTO or IT manager could be convinced that using Apple’s software might save him and his team time, and therefore money, they might consider switching from Windows.

Therefore, this argument concludes, Apple is missing out on a vast fortune by keeping its software locked into its hardware. It should free up the OS and reap the rewards.

But there’s another, equally valid, counter-argument. One of the main reasons why Mac OS X works so well is because Apple has such tight control over the hardware. Apple engineers don’t have to worry about the multitude of system configurations that Microsoft engineers do; they know in advance what kind of hardware setup their software will be running on, and can design it accordingly, for optimum performance.

So if Apple were to make OS X available for use on Wintel machines, it would be shooting itself in the foot. The complexity of hardware would soon show up weaknesses, and thousands of users would bombard the web with tales of how their installation of OS X on an x86 box failed miserably.

Two sound viewpoints, each a reasonable prediction. What’s a computer company to do?

Over here in the UK, we have a standing joke about something called “the third way”. It’s supposed to be a new political path for a nation to tread, something between traditional conservatism and traditional socialism, the political memes of the last 50 years. It’s a half-way position; a compromise.

Could there be a valid third way for Apple and the x86 architecture?

We already know that Darwin, the heart of OS X, is an open source project and will run on x86. It has no GUI of its own, but will run common window managers like KDE and Gnome.

So here’s one third way: Apple could create a new, separate operating system for x86 computers. It would not be a port of OS X, but it would have the Apple branding all over it. Just as with Linux distros, the basic OS would be free; but Apple could still sell a boxed version for a reasonable price (cheaper than OS X, and cheaper than Windows, of course).

Why? Why go to all that trouble? To show that there are alternatives. Those troubled CTOs and IT managers? They’d have something they could turn to that, to all intents and purposes, would be almost a Linux distribution. But they’d be able to say to their bosses and fellow vice-presidents: “This is Apple for PCs. We get to use reliable Apple software, without having to pay a premium for Apple hardware. This could save us a fortune.”

The sales pitch would be: “This is a reliable alternative to Windows, provided by Apple.” It would not be: “This is OS X for PCs.”

And then there’s another third way: hook up with one of the world’s biggest PC hardware companies. Team up with none other than IBM. Now that would get some attention.

Pretend you’re Steve Jobs. What would you do?

Well, by happy accident it seems I missed out on one teeny weeny aspect of the OO3 beta testing programme: the NDAs we signed have been scratched, so we can start talking about the app in public now. Phew.

OmniOutliner will be released in two flavours: version 3.0, and Professional. I’ve been using a copy of the latter, so all these comments are based on my use of that.

This is a significant upgrade, there’s a great many new features that expand the abilities of OmniOutliner, rather than simply updating existing features. Consider how OmniWeb’s recent releases have impressed reviewers; the application has earned a reputation as a powerful browsing tool for professionals, one that is worth paying money for, even in a market dominated by free alternatives.

OmniWeb has unique features that no other browser developer has even considered. OmniOutliner Pro is now following the same path.

The new Inspector panel

A document window

With Named Styles, you can apply a style to a document, or even just a row or column. Individual rows can now have their own gutter color, and there are three new summaries available per-row (minimum, maximum and average).

The File menu now lets you open one of your Document Templates. When recording audio clips directly into a document, you can choose from no less than 14 compression methods in the Audio Preferences.

Notes can now be displayed inline, along with the rest of the document - a potentially useful option for many writing tasks, at least in my working environment.

The whole thing looks so much nicer. Just moving through a document highlights each entry with a cool rounded highlight color. Email addresses and URLs appear in their own little curved blobs; the experience is very pleasing to the eye.

The only problem I had with OOPro was on opening a particularly large outline file (actually, the exported OPML of my efforts to use TAO as an all-purpose writing tool). Opening it took quite a while, and making edits within it was slow. However, I think this has more to do with my iBook’s RAM and processor configuration than it does with OOPro itself.

Hands up if you like outliners

Outliner fans will no doubt be in excited anticipation, following the news that a new version of OmniOutliner is on the way.

This versatile and well-designed app has been undergoing a great deal of development and tweaking and there’s some great new stuff for outlining addicts, long-term users of OmniOutliner, and newbies.

I’ve been lucky enough to be taking part in the beta test, and although the NDA forbids me from revealing what’s new in OO3 until it is released, some of the cats are already out of the bag in MacNN’s report.

There are impressive new options for styling and layout, and some very smart new ideas, such as folding within documents and direct audio recording (a la Microsoft Word’s Notebook feature, but OO3 does it so much better).

If you’re one of the people who got excited about OmniOutliner’s ability to morph and extend itself through third-party scripts and applications, you’re going to love this new version. Keep a close eye on omnigroup.com for details of a public beta.

What features would you like to see in OO3?