A Good Week (or so) for Software
It’s not often you get a week(ish) full of software presents, but these past few days have been Christmas in codeland:
Brett over at Ranchero released NetNewsWire 1.0, which I feel a little sentimental over after downloading every freakin’ public beta and filing some bugs towards better Blosxom weblog editing support. NNW, in addition to be the best RSS newsfeed reader in the metaverse, now posts to just about any type of weblog you can think of, and from an interface that takes full advantage of Mac OS X’s Cocoa programming/interface enhancements. I use it to post to this blog, and the info junkie in me would go through nasty Trainspotting-style withdrawal without its elegant RSS browsing.
Speaking of OS X, Apple released a largely bug-fix update for OS X, bringing the version up to 10.2.4.
Apple also updated two of its spiffy Macworld betas, the KHTML-based ultrafast Safari browser and their Quartz-enhanced (read: “really pretty”) X11 implementation. I haven’t used the X11 client extensively, but Safari is rapidly maturing, and is now able to handle my online banking site, totally negating the need for any other browser on my system. It’s still not perfect, but lead programming Dave Hyatt is working hard.
Rael and the gang not only got out the door a stable version of “Blosxom”:, the weblog engine that powers this site, but they hacked together a superclean Mac OS X install package that can have you hosting your own Blosxom blog from your Mac in minutes! I’m still waiting with baited breath for the Blosxom 2 beta code so I can experiment with comments and TrackBacks here.
I try not to mess with the OS X appearance too much, in part because endless appearance hacking is a waste of time, but in part because the interface is gorgeous out of the box. But I’m not crazy about the default icons, particularly in conjunction with the understated graphite theme that Apple provides as relief from the candy colors of the default Aqua scheme. Fortunately there’s Panic/Iconfactory’s recently updated Candy Bar, the latest revision of which supports “iContainers,” system-wide icon themes. I’ve made one of RAD.E8 “Snow.E 2” icons, which are smooth, clean, and snowy while keeping the general Aqua gloss: perfect for iBook users. In the same vein, don’t forget the Iconfactory’s iPulse system monitoring tool, which is worth the meager asking price in utility and creativity. Whew, that’ll have to do it for now: too much stuff to play with!