Archive for November, 2007

cd ~/EDIT-XTREEM’s Blog: echo ‘Terminal’

Published on November 20, 2007 in Apple. 4 Comments

Within those daunting 300 new features of Leopard, I noticed one section that caught my eye. There were new features in Terminal, Apple’s behind the scenes shell app that also allows you to do SSH and other types of connections. It is not that frequent that Apple adds features to an application such as Terminal, but I guess in an attempt to round that number up to 300, they have added a few unusual ones. In this article, I will outline most of the new features, and give you my opinion on them, providing a few screenshots.

Inspector

First off, I am going to take a look at the Inspector. We are familiar with the Inspector from Preview and the Finder, but it has now been added to Terminal. It does not add much functionality to Terminal, but it does allow you to change the Terminal window name, the window size (measured in columns and rows), and view your active processes in Terminal. All in all, the inspector is not a very useful feature.

Themes

“Themes” is another useless yet cool feature in the new Terminal. These are basic themes, some even semi-transparent for your Terminal window. There are 7 pre-made themes, but I am sure with a bit of clever work, new themes can be added with some custom styles. I personally, think that the themes make Terminal look less geeky, but I do not think they add any functionality, and if anything, are just a distraction.

Tabbed Windows

Probably my favorite new feature in Terminal is tabs, rather than having many cluttered Terminal windows, you can simply have one window with tabs. Similar to Safari, these tabs can be re-arranged, dragged in and out of the window, and be individually closed. I really like having the non-cluttered Terminal, as I find it helps me concentrate at the task I am trying to perform, rather than being overwhelmed with the many windows I have open.

Conclusion

The new update to Terminal in Leopard adds some solid functionality, while keeping it a very stable and consistent app. I think that some of the new features are gimmicky, such as the themes and the Inspector, but I think that in the longrun, once the power of these features is fully usable, they will be useful tools to have, and many users will enjoy having them. Since I am a avid supporter of the Delicious Generation, I do like the addition of the themes to make this otherwise plain app have some color.

Thanks for reading this post, if you have any comments, please post them below, and let me know what you think. I would also like to thank Connor Cimowsky for helping me edit this post.

Get Things Done; Things First Looks

Published on November 18, 2007 in First Looks. 18 Comments

Cultured Code recently posted to their site about a new app they are working on called Things, it is a GTD application, but is very different then all the other GTD apps. The moment I saw the interface, and organization structure, I knew that it would be an amazing application to help me get more organized! So I quickly sent them an email. Right away I got a reply by Jürgen, the lead developer and founder, who ever so kindly added me to the alpha list. At that point I was so happy, and I couldn’t wait to try it out. So I went ahead and downloaded Things. After a few minutes of conversation with Jürgen, and some questions, I began to love the application. I created projects, for all my various projects I am working on, I made some team members, and I began to write out tasks I need to do.

So, What is GTD?

Getting Things Done™ (commonly abbreviated as GTD) is an action management method of The David Allen Company, and the title of the book which describes the method by David Allen.
GTD rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of the mind by recording them somewhere. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks. What distinguishes GTD from other time- or action-management systems is the idea of grouping tasks by the context (defined as a place or set of available resources) in which they are to be performed.

– Quote from Wikipedia

What is different about Things than other GTD apps?

First of all, Things is not just a GTD app. In fact, users don’t even have to know what GTD is. First and foremost, Things is a task management application with a very gentle learning curve that nonetheless scales very well when entering hundreds of to-dos. I believe that the scalability of Things is a direct consequence of us trying to follow the spirit of Allen’s book instead of the cult. There is an interesting trend in today’s GTD apps where contexts are presented as dual to projects, forcing unintuitive changes of view modes upon the user. We don’t do that. The way Things helps in making best action choices is actually closer to the book than to the current interpretation on the web. But the beautiful thing is, users who know little to nothing about GTD will just see familiar interface metaphors.

As you can tell, Things is not your ordinary GTD app. It combines an amazing interface, tons of unique features, and a dedicated development team. I continued to ask the Things team about the app, here is another one of my questions;

What is your favorite feature of things so far?

Some time ago we were joking that the most important features of Things are those it doesn’t need. So my answer would be “Simplicity”. We worked incredibly hard to make it simple. I cannot remember how often we revised it significantly, even completely starting all over again. Often we made features obsolete by changing the fundamental approach. And we are not finished yet. There will be more powerful stuff coming, but not at the expense of simplicity.

So there you have it, Things, an amazing, simple, and beautiful GTD app for Mac. I can not wait to see the development of Things continue, and I congratulate the Things development team on their amazing progress. And make sure to check out the Cultured Code website, and signup for their mailing list to get some exclusive looks and betas of Things.

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To Apple Care or Not To Apple Care; That is the Question: Followup Part 1

Published on November 14, 2007 in Apple. 2 Comments

After getting an overwhelming number of comments in my post, ‘To Apple Care or Not To Apple Care; That is the Question’, I have decided to post a followup. Due to the number of comments, I am going to post a few parts to this followup, stay tuned for the rest!


Nowhere in this article was resale value mentioned. When buying a two-year-old used computer, which one would you pay more for? The one with absolutely no warranty coverage whatsoever, or the one that still has a year of AppleCare left? If you’re planning on selling your Mac after two years, the AppleCare could easily pay for itself, even if you never had to get a repair (as long as you don’t void your warranty through liquid spill or impact damage).

This is totally valid, I having a good experience with warranties in the past, would not even consider one with out a warranty. This is a completely important point for me, and without the warranty I would be scared to buy it. If anything goes wrong, It would come down to me to fix it, or get it fixed, both at a heavy cost.
Continue reading ‘To Apple Care or Not To Apple Care; That is the Question: Followup Part 1′

Lights.. Camera.. Action… Final Cut Studio 2 Review

Published on November 7, 2007 in Apple and Reviews. 5 Comments

For video editors on the mac, there are a few options. Those doing home videos usually stick with iMovie, Apple’s editing program included with iLife. But those that want to do more advance things, or even want to become professional usually turn to Apple’s Final Cut Studio. Apple released the second version of Final Cut Studio in mid April this year. It includes 6 main applications, Final Cut Pro 6, Motion 3, SoundTrack Pro 2, Color, Compressor 3 and DVD Studio Pro 4. This is the first major release to support the Intel Processors, a .1 release was made available as a crossgrade, but it was not a full release. There have been tons of upgrades to all of the applications.

In this review I am going to cover all 6 of the applications included in Final Cut Studio 2.

Final Cut Studio 2

Continue reading ‘Lights.. Camera.. Action… Final Cut Studio 2 Review’

To Apple Care or Not To Apple Care; That is the Question

Published on November 6, 2007 in Apple and Reviews. 105 Comments

When buying a new mac many people are faced with the hard truth. Macs aren’t cheap, nor are repairs. As you tell the sales person what you would like, or you click the add to cart button on the website, you are promptly presented with a choice, AppleCare. AppleCare is Apple’s extended warranty program. All new and refurbished macs come with 90 days of complimentary telephone support and 1 year of repairs. If you run in to an issue after that 1 year, and you are not a member of AppleCare, you will get some pretty big bills to fix your mac. Or, you could buy AppleCare, for a few hundred bucks (based one what type of mac you bought, and where you live), Apple will take care of all the faulty parts, problems and such to your mac. Of coarse if you drop it or have water damage or that kind of problem, they aren’t going to fix it.

So the question remains, “Should you buy AppleCare?”. In this post I am going to tell you my opinion, get some other users opinions, and tell you what they have done for me.
Continue reading ‘To Apple Care or Not To Apple Care; That is the Question’