MacBreak
MacBreak Weekly

Over the past few weeks, I've been having a lot of fun participating in the MacBreak video podcast and its little brother, the MacBreak Weekly audio podcast. Leo, Alex, Scott, and the rest of the MacBreakers do a swell job with these shows, and I've enjoyed getting to nerd out a little with them.

If you haven't caught these already, here's a quick catchup of episodes I've been on in the last month or so (reverse chronologically):

Bokardo » Apple Making Huge Social Software Push?

Via Andy, here's a thought-provoking post that draws from a mosaic of current and forthcoming features (including Wiki Server, iCal Calendar Sharing and the nifty-sounding Teams) to suggest that Apple's moving toward some interesting directions in social software and enhanced functionality for teams.

Joshua writes:

Notice that all of these features are about enabling communication as much as they are about creating content. It’s about getting the right information to the right person at the right time through interaction with their friends and associates. That’s how we do things out here in meatspace, so that’s how we’ll do things in cyberspace as well.

I think this is good news for Apple. As the proliferation of telephones, cellphones, chat software, blogs, and social networking sites have shown, there seems to be a market for this social software stuff…

I've received a minor surfeit of email since yesterday asking me to talk a bit more about Path Finder and why I think it's so swell. Here's a few fast reasons for my own affection.

Path Finder 4
Originally uploaded by merlinmann.

Cocoatech: Path Finder 4

I'm very happy to share that PathFinder 4 is now out and available for download at Cocoatech's site. I've been beta-testing this badboy for a couple months now and can happily confer upon it my official okey-dokey. It's one badass Finder replacement that power-users will find pretty foxy.

I may try to do a longer review in the next week or four, but I wanted to be sure and spread the word -- the tabs, the search/filter by string, the improved interface widgets -- dang, there's a lot to like here. Turn on as many or as few of the drawers as you need, and make yourself a happy little MacBatcave. Life inside a single Finder window is closer than ever. Great work, guys.

Be patient if the Cocoatech site is a bit slow -- I predict people are going to be downloading and buying the crap out of this.

Groby Unplugged » Blog Archive » Making a better iCal

Robert Blum has come to my rescue with this handy little iCal hack -- it automatically adds an alarm to new events. It's currently hard-wired with a "one day before" alarm (happily, also my preferred default from Entourage), but Robert plans to add some flexibility in the 0.2 release next month.

(It still kind of amazes me that this feature isn't baked right in to iCal, but I'm wildly grateful to Groby for picking up the slack.)

macosxhints - 10.4: OS X 10.4.3 update released

MacOSXHints covers a few of the 500+ 10.4.3 updates that are worth not missing. Two that popped out for me:

• If you use Mail, you can now set your own font family and size for the mailbox list. My message list and mailbox list are finally in the same font!
• Also in Mail, when you forward or reply to a message, they got rid of some of the extra blank lines (though they left the one at the top, above the quoted text)

I'll take all the Mail.app updates I can get. Now will someone please make MailEnhancer work again!

Paranoia, Part I

I have, I must admit, become one of those people who waits a week before running OS X updates. I used to be "that excited guy" until I learned a) new cuts of Safari almost always break one or more of my (and Pimp My Safari's) must-have plugins (Saft, SafariStand, PithHelmet); b) there's nearly always at least one deal-killer booger that sends me into two days of hair-pulling kernel panics, restarts, font removals, DiskWarrior runs etc. (Yes, thanks, I actually have modded almost every aspect of my setup in incredibly haphazard ways.)

As ever, kids: do yourself a favor and run a Safety Backup using SuperDuper. If anything goes kerflooey, you can do a perfect rollback to the snapshot of your disk before updating, then you're back to work with almost zero downtime. Seriously, just get in the SuperDuper habit just in general.

Paranoia, Part II

A propos of nothing, here's my current backup and SuperDuper schedule:

iPod Nano, 2 GB

While I don’t really “move” much except to place orders for food delivery or to occasionally evacuate my bladder, my girlfriend runs a lot and for long distances. She loves to have music with her but hates lugging the deck-of-cards-sized 40 Gig iPod I bought a couple years ago (for, I don’t know—like, $1800 or something). She has an iPod Shuffle, but it recently started acting really squirrely plus it never had quite the capacity she’d have liked. But, friends, the iPod Nano I got her for her birthday has been an especially huge hit. Big time. And now I want one, too.