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iCal World

iCal World could be your one-stop location for calendars and applications for your iCal.

Heuristic evaluation template for OmniOutliner

Michael post his OmniOutliner Heuristic evaluation template. This is going to be a well used template, too bad I don't have a Mac at work or it would really be well used.

For the unwashed, the OmniOutliner is a Mac outlining tool that is fantastic for todo lists, building outlines for work, us outlines with categories, etc. I tend to think in outline format when I really try to structure ideas as a foundation for easily understood communication. One of the great things about Outliner is the ability to output wonderful HTML from your hierarchial outlines. I have done this a couple times and pulled it into Dreamweaver MX code view to see beautiful XHTML with validating nested unordered lists. It was such a wonderful site to see an application that generates validating code and well structured information at that.

Upgrading Flash 6 on Mac OS X

I was having problems getting Macromedia Flash to upgrade on my Mac OS X (Macromedia has not spent the time on this as they have for the Windows world) and it would not upgrade. I really wanted/needed Flash 6 for some very valid reasons and I was finding many enterprise sites using only Flash 6 (not that they were using Flash 6 functionality) accessible files. I spent a couple weeks with no luck. I found the hint to manually delete the flash files from the library directories prior to running the upgrade. Magically I have Flash 6 now running wonderfully on OS X.

Redesign explained

You most likely have noticed. There has been a redesign here. This new site is nearly all XHTML and using CSS box model. Going through this process introduces one to all the bug that browsers have that you need to work around. I found that IE 5.5 and up on the PC is horribly buggy and does not follow standard box model too well. Netscape 7 on the PC is the best browser. On Mac OS X the best browser has been Navigator/Chimera and IE 5.2 (through this Chimera became my favorite browser on most any platform).

You dare ask why the redesign? Well it was well past time. The last design had been around for a year or so and the CSS was giving me fits. I really wanted cleaner markup and I wanted to have a font size that scales. I believe that the font scales on all web standards compliant browsers and platforms. It should even scale on the PC's IE 5.5 and 6 browser (this has had broken functionality since day one, if you need a browser to scale font sizes properly get a real browser, one that is Mozilla based will do just fine). I am trying to remove the thin white line under the logo graphic and above the menu bar, it is showing up in IE on the PC and on versions of Mozilla on the Mac (Please contact if you have a solution).

I also wanted a better layout that would permit a cleaner layout. I moved the global navigation to the top bar and it uses and unordered list and CSS to put it in line and give it the roll-over (I stole part of the code from Scott and tweaked it). I also moved the local navigation to the left, which has been a joy as it is near the scroll bar and has made life a little easier. The right navigation may also be a place for other goodies. The right navigation has also helped me on the links page as there are a ton of links and I wanted a sub-navigations (yes, the links page is going to be getting an over haul in the near future with some needed integration with other elements in the site). The redesign also give the opportunity to introduce some small photos or images on the pages and not have other colors overwhelm them.

The box model drove me crazy, but I created some cheats I hope to share in the near future, once I get some minor tweaks around here done. The redesign was done solely on the TiBook and using a combination of the Macromedia MX Studio (Dreamweaver MX is a decent text editor, but I could not find a way to have it show a passable rendering of the pages in its own browser) and BBEdit. I started the process with outlines in Omni Outliner (a tool that rocks and is unparralled) as well as Omni Graffle to put together some wireframes to help me sort out the layout and functionality. This set of tools has been one of the best combinations I have used, I wish I could use this combo at work. I really am missing Adobe Photoshop, which may become my next software purchase, as it is a great tool that saves time.

Please, please write wit questions or bugs found. Thank you. I did this for me, but I hope you enjoy it.

Yo, what a change

Last night while watching West Wing I saw my favorite Apple switch ad. This had Yo Yo Ma extolling how he, as a technophobe was able to use a Mac.

OS X FTP/SFTP

I think I found a FTP application for Mac OS X that I really like. Transit is the FTP/SFTP interface for me. I like the drag and drop element to the interface. I had been using Fetch, but not knowing from the interface where items were being downloaded too was annoying. I also really wanted SFTP as I like using SSH rather than telnet. Very happy day.

New TiBook to increase productivity

Apple releases a 1GHz TiBook it also can house a SuperDrive and has an ATI 9000 graphics card with 64MB RAM. This is insanely impressive. Did I mention I really have not been needing my PC and have been living off my TiBook at home? Mine will be a year old in January and I still love it and still believe it is the best computer I have ever owned or ever work with. I have loved desk top computers for their flexability and power and still crave one, but definately not a Windows product. I know think about all the wasted hours of productivity that Microsoft has put people through. If the wasted hours could be recaptured or people had been productive would that be billions of dollars? Would that be how much closer to the cure for cancer? Would that be what? At home I have one or two hours a week lost on MS and work is about an hour a week lost to a bug. A co-worker watched her Word document rewrite itself with gibberish the other day. A few hours of productive time lost. But, this is a documented bug in XP OS and XP Office with no real cure, just turn off functionality. Maybe if we donated the money wasted we could have feed all the hungry? All the hungry in the world.

Mac has better Zoom

Oddly enough I am getting nearly a 1.1Mbps download (a 19MB software upgrade in well under 2 minutes) and 730kbps upload on my Mac using DSL. On the PC it is 820kbps down and 730kbps up. Can you guess which machine I am using? I had not used the PC in nearly a month until last night. It was a completely frustration experience. Only one time in seven reboots did it ever load all the "start-up applictions".

Zoom Zoom

Ahhhh.... This past month has been horrible to be with out my own e-mail accounts and or broadband. I have more than a handful of digital friends I keep up with, e-mail, and chat with on-line and not really having access was no fun to say the least. I am behind on e-mail and other things I had taken on, accept heartfelt appologies and know I am doing what I can to catch-up.

I am really not understanding how folks use dial-up, particularly with Yahoo offering a $29 per month offering and Covad offering about the same price or less. I can understand not being DSL accessable, but if you are it is well worth the effort. Trying to read even CNN on line was painful. With broadband I can check local movie listings in Watson and see a clip (oh what a wonderful idea, I have not done this in months).

RSS in the near future

The RSS feed is in the works here and should be ready by the anniversary of the tool, which is October 31st. There have been many upgrades to the application that runs this site in the past year, but one that I really wanted was RSS. I have it running on my laptop and it needs only one tweak and then to get dropped into my main posting page. Did I mention I am loving having my a my development tools and full webserver with all the application elements running on my TiBook laptop again?

Update on lack of broadband progress

I am still with out most of my outbound e-mail capabilities for my usual accounts. I can see all the inbound e-mail, but I am mostly devoid of responding, which is driving me crazy. This will get resolved once DSL arrives, I am still waiting on Verizon to get their act together and tie the phone number to the address. The last residents of the house has DSL running at a really good clip, but nobody can see that until Verizon understands their role in the world.

We finally got satellite TV today, which is a huge improvement over cable. Why? Much better picture, much better sound, cheaper, and channels like Tech TV and BBC America. The downside is the current placement of the dish, on the right hand corner of the roof on the front of the house. It could be a good reason to remove the tree that is creating this issue or to get the dish moved when we paint the eaves.

I spent today trying to figure out why we had no phone signal, well it turns out the PC modem fries the phone lines. I was waiting for contractors to come and fix a furnace, closets, and the dish guys. All the contractors were stuck in the traffic related to trying to find the DC shooter and we calling the often to let me know of their delays. The shootings really have not un-nerved me as the odds are long that I or anybody I know would get shot. I am much more aware of my surroundings, much like living in the UK in the late 80s with the IRA bombings and such.

I was put off from doing some work for a while today as the CD I burned on a nearly up-to-date security patched Win 2k box would not be acknowledged in the Mac. This is odd as it is how I move files out of XP Home (miserable version of XP). I finally got the CD to run in the PC (I finally had a reason to assmble it after nearly 2 weeks in the house) and reburned them on a CD, which did run on OS X. This little task and figuring out that the PC modem has phone voodoo here caused the loss of a couple hours. I knew I should have pulled the box of blank CDs out of the packing box they are in.

I am trying to focus on getting a couple reviews done, user/usability test a new site, get back to writing some articles, and putting our office together.

AppleTechs gets moving again

Damien has his AppleTechs running again. This has been on hold since late April and it will be so nice to have this back and running again as both of these sites are great resources for Apple users.

Apple security

Just in case you thought Microsoft was more secure than Apple...

iCal ideas

A weblog on iCal seems to be a good resource for the new Apple application. [hat tip Adam]

OS X blog from one of the sources

Mac OS X's product manager, Ken Bereskin has a weblog with good stuff. [hat tip Andre]