I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this.

A comment on that post suggests that installing “Mirror”, a completely unrelated Dashboard widget, would somehow magically make the noises stop. I gave it a shot.

It worked.

My question here is: why in the world would that work? It makes absolutely no sense to me at all. Weird.

I’m still going to make daily backups, deep magic bedamned.

I call mine FATMOUSE.

Seriously, Macs do all this stuff already, and more. You should try one out.

Funnily, in this New York Times article about the new Walkman, I can’t find the actual name of the unit mentioned anywhere. The word “Walkman” appears 14 times, but “iPod” is used 19 times. That’s gotta sting.

Anyhow, I want a nano. Later. I guess they’re running out already. Teehee.

How about (this would work, too) something like Pixelpost, only with catalogue pages that will display clickable thumbnails for a whole month. Something like that would be sweet. Like candy.

I’m starting to think I might just have to suck it up and build it myself, but if you happen to know of software that does stuff like this, please post a comment here. Note 1: I have a Mac desktop and a Linux server, so whatever it is has to run on that. Thanks! Note 2: If you happen to know of a WordPress plugin that does something roughly like what I’m describing here, please post a url.

Update 1: Windows takes for-frickin’-ever to update.

Update 2: Apparently my “disk defragmenter module” has encountered a problem and has to close. I “Don’t Send” an error report. Rebooting.

Update 3: The first batch up updates didn’t include SP2. Updating again. I am wearing a dull stare.

Update 4: Rebooting again.

Update 5: Got distracted by work for a while. Checked Windows box. It came back up ok. Decided to let Windows have Automatic Updates, as I just don’t care any more. Windows told me I had no antivirus software installed, and told me to “Click this balloon to solve this problem.” I do not click. I do not believe it.

Update 6: It’s late. I’m going to bed. I’ll continue on with this tomorrow.

In other news, I’m thinking about subscribing to flickr. You can check out my free account (with all 8 photos!) if you like. From what I’ve seen, flickr is pretty good for features, including funky stuff like an iPhoto plugin (third party), email-from-phone facilities, RSS feeds, automatic slide-show creation, etc. I’ll play with it a bit more, but I’m probably already close to my 20mb free account upload limit. Flickr is a Yahoo site. It surprises the heck out of me that there is no Google flickr-alike. Given that they host videos and basically everyone’s email at this point, I figured it would be a no-brainer.

Anyhow, that’s all for now. Time to see if I’ve set this widget up to publish properly. Note: this is certainly no replacement for ecto, so I doubt I’ll hang on to it for long.

First, the bad: If you’re signed up to a metric crapload of feeds like I currently am and you set NNW to update automatically every 30 mins, NNW will eat your entire CPU if you let it. I’ve cranked the number of concurrent downloads it’s allowed to use to 2, which helps, but not a lot. I’ve also set it to autoupdate every 2 hours instead of every 30 mins.

I’m also paring down on the number of feeds I’m subscribed to. I currently have 1423 unread items in my feeds, and there’s just no way I can keep up on that much news. I need to finesse the list with extreme prejudice.

Now, the good: My wiki has RSS feeds for the Recent Changes and New Pages lists. I, obviously, subscribe to these. NetNewsWire displays these items beautifully and lets me view the entire diff for each change cleanly and at a glance. I love it. Here’s a screenshot, click for full size:

Top of the list mind-blowing features:

• .mac synchronization ability, including subscriptions and read status. This means I don’t have to do any complicated import/export calisthenics to get my subscriptions on my desktop into my laptop, and vice-versa. If I read something on my lappy, it will remain “read” on compy after I sync.
• Smart lists — I can create a smart list that will show me all articles, for example, that have “Mozilla” in the title from all my feeds. This is utterly brilliant.
• One-click feed subscription when using Safari to read the web. Up in the address bar, an “RSS” button will show up if the page has an available RSS feed (this is somewhat eccentric, mind). Clicking that button brings up NetNewsWire which prompts me to accept the subscription. This is so much easier than the weirdness I had to do before. I just wish this worked with Firefox.
• “Sites drawer” — minor feature, really, but a nice one. The NNW guys have compiled an extremely long list of categorized feeds that you can subscribe to without having to go find them yourself. I’ve now subbed to more feeds than ever before, including several of which I’d not previously been aware.

Those are the core mindblowers right there. The rest of the app is very, very nicely designed, and does everything I’ve tried to do with it (save one minor quibble which is just me being picky and annoying since it involves a feature I wouldn’t have dreamed of, never mind expected before).

If you have a Mac, particularly if you have multiple Macs and a .mac account, I strongly recommend this application. The smart lists and sync capabilities alone are worth the price of admission ($24.95 USD per license, which I will be paying shortly).

Now, about these widgets. Let’s say I decided I wanted a Google search widget. To get it widget, I have to find it (not hard), trust it to be non-malicious (I’m paranoid, so this is a bit edgy), download it, install it (it doesn’t do that automatically), then start it. Assuming it starts and does what it’s supposed to do, it then sits on the Dashboard and quietly sucks up system resources waiting for me to give it something to do. When I do decide I want to use the widget, I have to hit F12, click on the widget to focus, usually click on it again to get my cursor into whatever text box it’s supposed to be in, then type something, then click on the widget again to make it go (or hit enter), then either hit F12 or on an empty spot in the Dashboard to get back to my desktop.

Alternately, I could just click the Google button on my Firefox quickbar, type something in the webform (which happily autofocuses my cursor in the right place), then hit enter.

Maybe you’re seeing my confusion here. There are eleventy billion widgets out there that do things people can already do very easily in their web browser. Google searches, Ebay searches, Amazon searches, LiveJournal updates, etc etc. Widgets do not make these things easier or more convenient, so…I say to you, “Wtf?”

HHGttG: The Movie

I finally went to see the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie. I remain ambivalent. I didn’t hate it, by any means, but I also didn’t particularly like it. The new Marvin is cute, yes, but didn’t quite convey the utter pathos of the Marvin in the TV Series. The movie’s Ford simply doesn’t hold a candle to the TV Series’ Ford. I actually dislike the movie’s Zaphod, while the TV Series’ Zaphod remains one of my favourite ne’er-do-well characters of all time. Also, for obvious reasons*, I do not like Vogons and am somewhat upset that they were given such a central role in the movie. All in all, I found myself wishing the parts that overlapped the TV Series were more like the TV Series, and the new parts just didn’t have the same comedic zing I’m accustomed to in Adam’s work.

As someone else (somewhere) said: It started as a radio show, so dialogue is everything. They butchered the dialogue, and so a lot of the “funny” just got mislaid. That said, if the rumours are true and they do turn the movie into a trilogy (of however many parts) I will go see them all. In the meantime, however, I will be rereading the books and rewatching the TV Series (now out on DVD). If you haven’t seen the TV Series, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you shell out $25 and order the DVDs. It’s really, really funny.

On Tiger

The novelty of the new Tiger features has worn off so I can be a little more objective about it now.

Dashboard: The eye-candy is nice, but overall the usefulness is low. Widgets tend to eat system resources like crazy, so I’ve minimized the ones I have running to: World Clock (x2), the Dictionary/Thesaurus, and the weather widget. The others don’t provide enough actual value to make up for the system resources they suck up like little sponges.

Spotlight: I use this all the damned time. Cmd-Space brings up the Spotlight search, type in the name of an app, then hit Cmd-Enter and the app will launch. This is what I largely used Quicksilver for, so I’ve been able to get rid of Quicksilver, freeing up more resources for other things (like browsers and email clients and things I actually use all the time).

Smart Folders: I haven’t really mastered these yet, so don’t use them too much at the moment. Where “too much” actually means “at all”. I need to sort out how to use Automator to meta-tag my files in bunches. Once I do that, Smart Folders will become much more useful to me.

BluePhonElite (3rd party): My trial ran out and I haven’t purchased a proper copy yet. Downside: I have to use my phone’s keypad to write SMSs. Upside: my phone’s battery lasts 3-4x longer when bluetooth is turned off. I doubt I will buy a license.

DragThing: Cute, but largely pointless. I used it for a little while to make really complex docks full of things that would let me organize and launch all kinds of applications. Spotlight’s search-then-launch feature obviates the need for that. Got rid of it and freed up more system resources. My regular dock is also back to a nice manageable size of 12 icons (Finder, XChat, Firefox, Thunderbird, iChat, AdiumX, SubEthaEdit, Terminal, Calculator, iCal, System Prefs).

Guild Wars

I picked up Guild Wars last weekend and have been playing semi-regularly since. It’s a very fun game, but also very different.

First off, there’s no monthly fee. This is Highly Compelling for the obvious reasons. I finally unsubscribed from World of Warcraft after not logging in to seriously play for 3-4 months. During that 3-4 months, in spite of putting in roughly 4-5 hours of play time, Blizzard hit my credit card for roughly ~$80. Screw that. No monthly fee means no serious commitment, no pressure to “get your money’s worth”, and so forth.

Second, everything outside of common areas (towns) is an instance. That means when you’re out being an Intrepid Adventurer doing quests and killing critters and getting loot, you (or your party) are the only players there. No killstealing, no camping spawns, no random jerks being jerks, etc. That part of it plays exactly as a single- or limited-multiplayer-game would play. Common areas are for recruiting people into your party, trading, chatting, etc. I actually complained about this in Anarchy Online, but it doesn’t bother me in this game. I’m not sure why.

Third, if forced to describe it by comparing it to other games, I would have to say it’s like a cross between DiabloII, NeverWinter Nights, Dungeon Siege, and a MMORPG.

• Henchmen make it like NWN

.

• The loot system and linearity of areas makes it like Diablo II
• The Henchmen and linearity and loot and general appearance of avatars make it like Dungeon Siege
• The MMORPG part makes it like a MMORPG.
• None of these comparisons really do it justice.

Anyhow, it’s fun, it’s different, it’s free online play. If you like these sorts of games at all, I recommend it highly.

Full 1600×1200 version if you clicka onna thumbnail here…

If any widget developers out there are listening, I’d love (and pay a reasonable fee for) a Daily Crossword widget. Also, Bejeweled, BookWorm, Scrabble, and maybe a Lemonade or Plant Tycoon-style game. (Games are useful!)

Spotlight: very cool, very useful. Smart Folders: insanely cool, insanely useful. Now, my question is: why the hell can’t I click a button to turn my Spotlight results into a Smart Folder? I call “major oversight” on that one. If it is possible to do this, could you please tell me how? It’s annoying me. Note: it’s the only thing about Spotlight that’s annoying me. Otherwise, all good.

The rest of my day has been spent:

• Sorting fonts into Collections.
• Adding Keywords to iPhoto and tagging my photos.
• Creating and playing with Smart Folders.
• Downloading and trying out DragThing.
• Updating apps, including BluePhonElite, QuickSilver, and OmniOutliner Pro (Spotlight enabled!)
• Trying to see if I can live with Safari (so far, no go).
• Trying to see if I can live with Mail (so far, no go).
• Setting up a .mac account (in spite of the price), and syncing stuff between compy and lappy.
• Setting up and syncing my Motorola v551 via iSync and doing a little dance when it worked perfectly.
• Downloading piles and piles of new desktop wallpaper because I’m addicted to having new wallpaper every day.

Basically, I’ve just immersed in the whole Tiger/Mac experience for about 36 hours. Sort of a geeky way to spend a weekend, I suppose.

5:22pm: Installation DVD Check is 82% finished.

5:23pm: Preparing for Installation. Lots of DVD drive activity.

5:25pm: Installation started.

Aside: Reading Mind Hacks on my Safari Bookshelf on the desktop while this process goes on.

5:29pm: Time remaining says “About 40 mins”.

5:31pm: Time remaining says “About 27 mins”.

Aside: I hope this doesn’t eat my data.

5:34pm: I take some pictures of my workspace.

5:40pm: Time remaining says “About 4 mins”.

5:47pm: Optimizing System Performance.

5:48pm: Restarting lappy!

5:52pm: Restarted. Now it’s thinking. Some more thinking.

Oo! Set up assistant!

6:01pm: Losing my mind. The Dashboard is SO WICKED.

Signing off for now…more updates from lappy when I install on compy…

Here are some reviews. I’ll be updating this list as more come out…

• Tiger Leaps Out in Front – Walt Mossberg, WSJ
• From Apple, a Tiger to Put in Your Mac – David Pogue, NYT
• Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger: A Review – David Adams, OSNews
• Tiger: It’s Grrrrreat! – an unfortunately titled review by Glenn Fleishman, InformationWeek

I’ve mentioned this before, of course, but I’m pretty excited about the whole thing. Silly, perhaps, but whatever. I embraced my geekdom many, many years ago.

Spotlight and Smart Folders (S M R T!) are the really important bits for me. I’m so looking forward to having a Folder of Images that contains subfolders for PNG, JPG, GIF, etc. A Folder of Documents that contains subfolders for Pages, Word, Excel, Keynote, PDF, Text, etc. Etc etc etc.

Also, Tiger’s iSync is supposed to fully support the fancy new phone I got last week (Motorola v551), which will also be very cool.

I fully expect to be spending much of this weekend messing around with this stuff. Finally, a proper OS upgrade that doesn’t fill me with fear and loathing. The future is now!

Aside: I’m posting this with the newly updated Ecto. It’s pretty slick what with the nice UI changes and stuff.

For fun, I’ve been hacking around trying to design a MediaWiki skin from scratch. It’s…a little complicated. There are a lot of bits and pieces that all have to get jammed into the skin somewhere, which makes it hard to really create something clean and streamlined. I considered cleaning things up a bit by hiding chunks in DHTMLified menus, until blizzard reminded me that hiding things from users is Bad. Scrapped that plan, and hacked together a new mockup. The new one is much better, although doesn’t get rid of the navigation column (which was my original drive for this). Alas.

Next trick is figuring out how to implement it. This is actually the hard part, since I intend to do it all properly using CSS positioning. That’s not so hard in itself, it’s just the cross-browser stuff that could be a pain. Yes, I really am doing this for fun. I’ve been messing around with web stuff since 1997, and I still get a kick out of making a webby things that are cool and work.

In other news, boolean and I have pre-ordered a Family Pack of Tiger licenses. Five licenses for four machines, and one left over for when we finally succumb and get a Mac mini. Some Microsoft-loving journalist reviewed Tiger, and decided that “Tiger isn’t a long-term play, however. Despite its lengthy development time, and promises of ever slower Mac OS X upgrade releases in the future, this new system isn’t a big enough upgrade over previous OS X releases to warrant much excitement”.

Whatever. You can read the full feature list for yourself. I’ve been thinking about it and have realized that Spotlight, with its Smart Folders, is going to change how I use my computer. Dashboard and the Automator are also going to have a massive impact on my daily work habits. The rest of the features are just bonuses, for me.

Speaking of upgrades, Firefox 1.0.3 was released on Friday. Go get it. It includes nine security fixes that you really should have.

Also, Update.mozilla.org (the primary home for Firefox, Thunderbird, and Mozilla extensions, themes, and plugins) has relaunched. Check it out, and get some new toys for your browser while you’re there.

My current extensions include:

• Web Developer
• Adblock
• ColorZilla
• SmoothWheel
• Sage (although I use Tbird for RSS feeds now)
• SpoofStick
• StumbleUpon
• GreaseMonkey
• mozcc
• ScrapBook
• Wikipedia Firefox Extension

I’ll have to check out what else is available now. What extensions do you have installed? Leave a comment!

This is one of the mixed blessings of working out of the home, I suppose. At my old job, I’d just call in sick and stay home playing World of Warcraft all day, taking sporadic naps and just making sure I got lots of tea. Now that I work from home, however, if I’m well enough to play World of Warcraft, I’m physically also capable of working. Mental fitness is a whole other story, of course. I’m already starting to think I’d be best to just get a NeoCitran in me and call it a day.

Later I’ll adjourn to the sofa with the laptop and some tea for a healthy dose of Food Network background noise.

Check this out: iWork Community. I love it when people share stuff. Not much there now, but I could see that becoming a valuable resource over time. I need to make a new template for invoices, if nothing else.

First, Mac OS X Tiger is coming out on April 29th. There are all kinds of details about it over on the Apple site. I am excited about this. Hopefully, boolean and I will be able to get a family pack or something, since we somehow ended up with four Macs in the house. Not quite sure how that happened.

Second, I cannot remember the last time I was actually excited about an OS update. As far back as I can recall, Windows updates have always just made me angry, to the point with Windows XP SP2 I opted out entirely. Linux updates never really made much difference in my life because I just never really cared enough about it to notice. Linux didn’t annoy me quite as much as Windows did, but it also didn’t really change how I worked. Instead of spending a lot of time fighting with bad UI design I got to fight with a basic lack of UI design (bad UI design makes me angrier, because someone does that stuff on purpose). Either way, I spent way too much time fighting with instead of using the technology on my machines. I am officially too old and too busy for that any more.

Mac OS X is a much different story. I’ve only been a Mac user since November 2004, but I’ve been using computers since sometime in 1982(?) So, out of roughly 22 years of computer time, I’ve spent the last four months using Mac OS X. I am already quite adamant about not wanting to work another way now. You can pry my PowerBook out of my cold dead hands, and all that. OS X has significantly changed how I work, and I am almost brimmingly exhuberant about the whole thing. Mac people aren’t cultists, I’ve realized, they’re just really happy with their technology and want to share the joy. So, really, start socking away some looneys in the change jar and get you some of that.

Third, I decided to throw $80 at the OmniOutliner people for a family pack upgrade from OmniOutliner 2 to OmniOutliner Pro 3. Verdict: It’s worth it. Already my TODO list is more organized and manageable than ever before, and I can see using the app to do documentation, planning, presentations (it exports to Keynote), shopping lists, project planning, etc, etc. Formatting and control is much improved over version 2. I really like it when good software isn’t stupidly expensive.

iTunes pleases me. In the same vein, iPhoto pleases me. Yesterday I decided to finally clear the SD card on my little baby Canon. I plugged it in to the USB port on the back of my keyboard (those are damned handy), and iPhoto automatically opened, set up the import, did the import, and cleared the card all with a single mouse click.

While in California, I picked up a copy of iWork ($79 USD). I haven’t looked at Keynote yet, but Pages is really slick. It’s a full-fledged desktop publishing system akin to Word, only without the eye-stabbingly bad UI. The default UI is all most people need for most word-processing tasks, and it’s just nice and simple. It also has some extremely nice templates, and exports to PDF very nicely. All good.

Oh, in related (ie: software) news, I’ve started maintaining my TODO list in OmniOutliner. Another very slick, very useful, very usable bit of software that just does what it’s supposed to do without getting in my way.

It says something about bad software when one of the defining factors of good software is that it “doesn’t get in my way”. It sure is neat when technology verges on being transparent. I think this is why I like FireFox so much — the default configuration is nothing more and nothing less than what most people need to get around on the web, but there are piles of extensions that allow you to easily add what you want or need (but nothing else).

We sure have come a long way, and yet there’s so much farther to go…

* (While writing up this entry, I’ve also ripped Tom Waits’ Foreign Affairs, and Beautiful Maladies. Not quite sure why they weren’t already in my collection, but they are now, hooray!)

Extra bonus this trip is that I got to see my other friends phik, blizzard, and zab. A good time was had by all.

In a somewhat random moment, I managed to hit an Apple store this afternoon. I wasn’t expecting to make it to one this time, but blizz and zab and I were looking for somewhere to have a quick bite, and lo, there was one right there. I picked up copies of Diablo II, NWN, Dungeon Siege, and iWork. Hooray! Lots of geeky-good RPGs for the lappy, and a nice new word processor as a bonus (I have yet to need presentation software, but I guess it’s good to have anyhow). I will post reviews of all of these sometime after I’ve had a chance to play with them a bit. I’m pretty excited about Diablo II being Mac-friendly now. So much silly fun to be had!

Off home tomorrow (it takes basically all day to get from here to there, what with the time change and stuff). If I’ve got my wits about me, I’ll remember to hit the Duty Free at the airport before I head back across the border (which means Chicago, I guess). For now, a sedate evening at this strange little hotel.

Good times.

I am a recent convert, of course. Once upon a time, not so long ago, I said something along the lines of, “I hate iPods“. The problem, of course, was that I had never actually used one. Then, I did.

It was at that point that I realized that computers, portable gadgetry, and the software that runs it all doesn’t have to suck. This was a major revelation. Like suddenly experiencing a headache-free day after a lifetime of migraines. Now, of course, I love iPods. I also love iTunes. (I’m currently using iTunes to listen to David Byrne’s radio station.) I own my very own iPod (40g 4th generation) now. I have come alarmingly close to buying both an iPod mini and an iPod shuffle, but have managed to resist so far. If they ever issue an orange 6gb iPod mini, I will probably cave in.

This is where the halo effect kicks in (iHalo). Shortly after buying my iPod, I found myself buying a G5 PowerMac. A few months later, when I was changing jobs (finally), and was asked what sort of laptop I needed, I giddily requested a PowerBook. And thus, the conversion is complete. We are a pure Apple household at this point, save for two legacy Windows machines we keep around for gaming (but use less and less).

It’s not just because iPods are cool, of course. Macs are solid hardware running UNIX with a phenomenally well-designed and easy-to-use front end. They really are the best of all possible worlds, unless you start wading around in the ideological mosh pit surrounding free software. I’m not going to go there, however, since right now I’m just happy to have a computer that doesn’t suck.

Anyhow, if someone asked me what computer I would recommend, be it for hardcore hackery or simple web surfing, I would strongly suggest getting a Mac. Even more so now with Mac OSX Tiger on the way. Oh boy!

Anyhow, there you have it. I’ve got two brand new custom smart playlists set up and more on the way.

1) Napster is a digital music delivery service. iPods are hardware. Please, for crap’s sake, at least compare it to the iTunes Music Store. In order to “challenge” the iPod, Napster would have to include the player, the player-machine synch software, and the store all in one (beautifully designed) package of “it just works” interoperability. Oh yeah, it would have to include a fast and high-quality ripping system, and some brilliant cataloguing/playlist-creating/rating software.

2) iTunes lets you purchase and download music in a single transaction with no followup or communication between you and the store regarding that purchase ever again. When you purchase a song through the iTunes Music Store, here’s what you get, from the Apple website: “You can burn individual songs onto an unlimited number of CDs for your personal use, listen to songs on an unlimited number of iPods and play songs on up to five Macintosh computers or Windows PCs.”

Now, the only sticky bit there for me is the “up to five” thing at the end. That’s a limitation I don’t understand, but it also doesn’t really matter. The “unlimited” cds and iPods is what counts for me.

Napster works very, very differently. When you subscribe to Napster (for $15 USD/mo or whatever) you gain access to an unlimited quantity of music from their library. Until you stop subscribing. When you stop subscribing, the Microsoft-designed DRM system that’s tagged your music kicks in and those music files “expire”. They stop working. So, for $15/mo you rent music, and if you stop giving them money, your music gets repo’d and you’re SOL. You paid for a service, period. There is no “product” involved in this exchange.

Yes, iTunes does only work with iPods. People get pissed off about this, but I look at it the same way as I look at my Mac: OSX only runs on the Mac, and the Mac only runs OSX (well, technically I could put Linux on there I think, but that’d be silly). When I bought my Mac, I bought the whole package — hardware, operating system, software, AppleCare warranty, the whole shebang. When I bought my iPod it never once crossed my mind that I couldn’t use other software to load it up. I don’t care. I guess other people do. I suppose that’s where Napster comes in, sort of, kinda. Or something.

3) iTunes is much more than just a store. I use iTunes to rip my own CDs. This process works as follows: I put the CD in the drive. I click the “Import” button. The End. iTunes takes care of ripping, cataloguing, and synching that music to my iPod. It is, literally, a one-click process. And I love it. In fact, that one-click process is what inspired me to buy an iPod, which in turn inspired me to buy a Mac. I am an unparalleled example of the Halo Effect in action.

Napster is a music rental service, period. I don’t know how it stands up, design-wise, and I honestly don’t care. I’m not going to rent my music. It doesn’t help me with my existing music collection. It …bah, it’s just a half-assed service that promotes quantity over quality and leaves you with nothing in the end.

There are a lot of articles that cover this whole Napster thing, and many of them seem to be as disdainful of the whole thing as I am. The Register covers why Napster sucks, without comparing it to the iPod/iTunes combo at all.

Silly people. This isn’t a challenge, this is just sad.

• Connoisseur 1.0.3
• A Cook’s Books 0.9.3
• MacGourmet 1.0.3
• Cookware Deluxe 2.1
• iCuistot 1.1
• Shop’NCook Shopping List and Recipe Manager 3.0.1
• i-Recipes 1.3
• Computer Cuisine Deluxe 4.0

After another evening of messing around with these things, A Cook’s Books is back at the top of the list, and is close enough to what I’m looking for (for now) to possibly earn my $15 USD ($18.80-ish CDN) registration fee.

Here’s where it excels:

1) Data entry isn’t painful. This is a huge selling point that cannot possibly be under-valued. I have many cookbooks. I have many recipes I want to enter. Sitting down and fighting with the data entry system every single time I want to enter one of these is not going to earn you my love and respect. Or $15.

ACB has a single-page recipe layout with straightforward ingredient entry tabbing, and a single large text box for entering directions. I really prefer this layout to the multipage layouts other applications favour. There’s also a handy same-page area for entering recipe notes and a picture (I have to start taking pictures of my food).

2) Quicklists. These are dynamic lists based on a number of user-specified criteria. I have a “Noodles” list that contains every recipe that has “noodles” of any description in the ingredient list. I also have a “Dinners” list that contains anything I’ve categorized as such. I could do a “Dinners – Chicken” list, or a “Chinese” category list, or a list by Author name or Source, and so forth. There is, of course, the ever-handy “Show All” option.

3) Full text search facility. I’m not very bright sometimes and need this sort of thing to help me. It has it, I’ll use it.

4) Full week menu planner facility with integrated (and half-decent) shopping list generator. The shopping lists are generated to text, which means I can email them to myself (I do things like this a lot) or stick it on my Treo, or whatever. Plain text sometimes just wins.

5) Decent recipe print system. I don’t want to print a full colour glossy with photos and pretty colours, I just want a plain print out that I can toss in the recycling bin when I’m done. I’m not a timid cook, so my hardcopy recipes/cookbooks inevitably get stuff on them — butter, coffee, water, knives, saucy spoons, grease, garlic blobs, etc. Clearly I can’t do something crazy like take electronics into that sort of environment (although the Mac mini was a fairly compelling kitchen system for a few minutes there), and I’d really rather not destroy my actual cookbooks, so a throw-away printout is exactly what I’m looking for.

Drawbacks:

Only one serious one, and it’s really not that serious: there’s no HTML export. I don’t really need an iPod export, or email/sharing facility, or what have you, but ultimately I would very much like to be able to dump my recipe list to a web location so I can access it from whereever I happen to be. Ideally with a fully integrated index, table of contents, and set of quick lists. At this point, however, I will live without that, because the only application I looked at that does HTML export is Connoiseur 1.0.

At some point, I suspect I will revisit this whole morass, possibly to the point of sitting down and developing my own (or working with some of the other programmery-type cooks I know to create something spectacular). For now, I just want to be able to get this stuff in the system so I can stop having to make up my shopping lists as I go. I also delve my cookbooks for inspiration as often as not, so having one right here on my desktop (with all sorts of helpful delve-enabling features) is pretty keen.

Ok. That’s that for now. Next up…trying to figure out how to export Delicious Library stuff to HTML. Fun fun.

PS: I still love the hell out of my Mac.

Great idea, nice relaxing way to spend part of an evening while the pasta sauce simmered and I drank a Mike’s and unwound from an otherwise annoying day. Gathered my cookbooks together, started with the Pork Noodle recipe I printed out from the INTARWEB the other day, and began.

I got three clicks in and hit my first snag. Hrm. The tab key doesn’t do what you want it to do, so you have to actually *click* on each little box for each ingredient then move your hand back to the keyboard to type. Each ingredient has four things to enter, requiring mouse-keyboard hand movement four times per ingredient. This recipe has, roughly, twenty ingredients. Excuse me while I put this stick in my eye.

I decided to persevere long enough to get this one recipe entered. It was not to be so. During the arduous process of entering the ingredient list, I made the mistake of trying to add a new type of measurement to the measurements field (“clove(s)” as in “cloves of garlic”). This managed to trigger a series of really stupid UI problems that just aren’t worth living through.

Cmd-Q to Quit and dragged that baby to the trash. Time to begin the search anew.

It’s starting to dawn on me that I might have to build my own recipe management application. I do web junk for a living, see, and I want my recipe collection accessible online via the INTARWEB, so…really…rolling my own web-app would probably be the smart thing to do (this is one of the few places where I would say that “rolling my own” is a good idea — I am a big proponent of not reinventing the wheel, but all these wheels actually suck). There’s just some stuff I don’t know how to do right now (although the main problem just got designed out entirely in my head just now while I was typing that), so…we’ll see.

Diving back in to PHP wouldn’t hurt, really.

Just for a lark, I decided to see how much it would cost to cobble together a similarish smallish-form-factor system using standard PC parts and software. I used the least expensive Mac mini (standard configuration) as the base, and got my PC hardware and software prices from PC Cyber (local place, good people, best prices in Ottawa).

The Mac mini includes:

• 1.25ghz PowerPC G4
• 256Mb PC2700 DDR RAM
• ATI Radeon 9200, 32Mb DDR video card
• 40Gb Ultra ATA1 harddrive
• DVD ROM/CD-RW combo drive
• 10/100baseT ethernet
• 56k modem
• OSX Panther
• iLife (iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand)
• Quicken
• Case (microscopic form factor)
• Labour for assembly, 1 yr warranty

The Intel-based system I cobbled together includes:

• Intel Celeron 2.4ghz CPU (arguable but that’s what I picked)
• MicroATX motherboard with onboard audio (no Firewire)
• 256Mb PC2700 DDR RAM
• ATI Radeon 9200 32mb video card
• 40Gb 7200 harddrive
• LG 52x DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive
• 10/100 base T ethernet card
• 56k modem
• Windows XP Home (OEM edition)
• Windows Media Player
• Photodex CompuPic Pro photo management/editing software
• Steinberg Cubasis VST 3.0 music production software
• Quicken Home Edition
• Antec Aria SFF Case
• $50 for assembly and 1 yr warranty

The Mac mini retails, as is, for $629.00 CDN before tax and shipping.

The smallish form factor PC here, with software, is $998.99 CDN before tax and shipping.

Apple is doing a lot of winning right now.