Tao of Mac

Dec 5th 2005 · 2 min read

Scribing

Spent a very large portion of the day sitting at a desk facing a wall, with my earphones on and zero gadgetry on sight. In short, taking inordinate pains to make sure I wasn't distracted from my main goal for the day, which was finishing yet another position paper by tonight.

Considering that I got interrupted anyway (by both ordinary humans and rdesktop's current propensity to hijack my mouse and keyboard while in fullscreen mode) and still managed to crank out around ten pages of dense two-column text, I can't say it wasn't a bad yield for a day's work. Or rather, a day and a bit of my evening's.

I look forward to proofreading it tomorrow (always best to do that sort of thing with a fresh eye), fixing whatever I find lacking and send it on its way.

Writing - and by that I mean proper writing, not filling out meaningless templates or replying to e-mail is still one of the things I like doing the most (and a skill that is woefully undervalued in engineering professions, where three sentences are still considered a user manual), so I can't say I'm complaining.

Well, maybe I am, a bit. Compared to what awaits me over the next couple of days, sitting in a corner writing is heaven.

Some news, then:

  • Dominic Evans wrote in to point out , a very nice looking Aqua port of the DTP application with the same name. It seems to require manual installation (mostly dropping a few frameworks in your Library folder, nothing too complex), but it is still under development, so that's reasonable. It is also a very nice example of the potential of using Qt to convert existing applications into native ones, and just the kind of thing I had in mind when I started paying attention to the KDE ports a while back.
  • Anyone serious about on the is well advised to read the Ars Technica review of , which is crammed with interesting detail, screenshots and short videos. Me, I'm definitely going to have a second look at iView Media Pro after reading this... Sure, it's in a different league, but it will probably be a better fit for my current hardware and immediate needs.
  • Xen 3.0 was released today, another step in the race towards all-out hardware virtualization. Me, I'm waiting for VMware on Intel.
  • Audacity was recently updated, too (to 1.2.4b and 1.3.0b)
  • Adobe started bundling Macromedia software with their Creative Suite. Any hints on how this will pan out for are most welcome, since that is just about all I use these days.
  • If you're looking for UI design guidance in Portuguese, I wholeheartedly recommend Ivo's site (and not just because he uses for doing wireframes - he also explains the whys and hows of UI design in a simple, straightforward fashion).
  • keyboardcast would have come in very handy a few years back, and is something to keep track of if you're an active sysadmin (I have a vague recollection of a  equivalent, but I may be mistaken).
  • There are all sorts of rumors about Calendar floating around, so I'll just wait and see. Nevertheless, I hope it will make cross-platform sharing viable without tying all my data to a baby-blue Ajax interface...