I’ve been waiting years for this.

Not a big fan of the other changes and features that came with version 10 though.

I just lost two years of comments and files hosted here. Long story.
My desktop blogging apps had my posts (from the last two years) backed up which I’ve now just re published (so I apologize for all the old content showing up in the feed).

I’ll be tweaking the site and going through small problems here and there, but for the most part the site is the same, except with less comments.

Live and learn.

The most noticeable issue with this mouse is how prone it is to scratches. This thing is like the first iPods in that regard —actually it’s exactly the same and it collects scratches as bad as those guys did. The white glass surface is the wrong material to be using. It may be possible to clean and polish, but wait, am I really considering polishing the magic mouse after two weeks of use? Sigh.

In actual daily use, the mouse performs great in all my tests.

The laser tracking lives up to the hype —this is my first— tracking movement on a large variety of surfaces. It’s also very accurate and I haven’t had a single issue with it disconnecting from bluetooth automatically. It’s been as reliable as a wired mouse.

Left and right clicking work as you would expect if you were using a mighty mouse; that is to say, you have to lift one finger to make the correct click. With both fingers on the device it will always recognize a click as a left click.

I was worried the scrolling wouldn’t work as promised when I got this mouse, that something would go wrong and make it somehow as stupidly silly as the nipple in its predecessor, but boy was I wrong. The multi touch sensor does a great job recognizing my finger/fingers when moving them up or down on the mouse, and with momentum scrolling enabled, it is the best scrolling experience on a computer I’ve ever experienced.
I assume that this, in part, is Apple’s way of making up with all us mighty mouse users.

I also wondered about the lack of a middle click option —not the lack of side/expose buttons, seriously people your mac has hot corners, use them!— but I figured that software hacks to implement the much loved middle click (aka new background tab button) weren’t too far away. Sure enough, here it is (implemented as a three finger click).

Battery life, as with all Apple products, clearly will not live up to the advertised capacity (of 4 months). Mine is sitting at 62% left.

Overall, I’m loving it.

• iChat
• iTunes
• Transmission
• Safari
• On the Job
• Transmit
• Colloquy
• Mail
• Quicktime
• NetNewsWire

I’ll pass this on to Carla who just got a mac about a month ago.

A couple of hours later, i needed to delete some files so i emptied the trash. I wasn’t aware my Preferences folder was in the Trash, i didn’t put it there on purpose.

The Finder asked if i wanted to really delete everything in my Trash, and i said yes since i thought all i had were the few files i was deleting. But when it started to delete shit, i noticed it was deleting a huge folder (there were like 2000 files being deleted). I figured i had other stuff in there.

And then i opened Safari to check my Flickr, and it looked fucked up, it was in Spanish and i had to log in to Flickr. What the fuck man?!.

After looking around, i realized all my preferences in all my applications were gone. I opened Mail and all my messages were gone. Fuck.

Fortunately, a couple of weeks ago the Ubers suggested that i backed up my system with this program, and i did it just for kicks. Well who would’ve known i’d actually need to restore anything? My shit is kind of back after restoring that back up.

Fuck the Trash. How can it delete the Preferences folder without specifically warning me?!. Jobs, What the fuck dude!

When you install Adium, it will register all the IM protocols, without asking. Bug or not, the developers are working on a new option to do this.

A simple preference to change this, just as Safari lets you switch the default browser, should be built into iChat. But alas, Apple doesn’t think so.
And thus, it is very irresponsible for the Adium developers to assume if you’re installing it, you will use it for everything. Considering it doesn’t support the basic audio chats, and how it lacks in file transfers.

I can only speak of Adium, as it’s what i have noticed, perhaps the other multi protocol IM clients for Macs do the same.

Enter “More Internet”
You can easily set iChat as default for AIM urls with this utility called “More Internet”. It’s a preference panel that let’s you change default programs for certain internet protocols.

We shouldn’t have to get a 3rd party application to change the default IM client. Adium needs to stop registering itself for everything without asking. And Apple needs to let you do this from iChat.

I got into an argument yesterday about the usability of keyboard shortcuts and simple mouse clicks.

QuickSilver

We all know and love QuickSilver. That cool application which is mainly used as a launcher, but let’s you do much more, triggers for example, allow you to create a shortcut for a certain command, or a combination of them. So, you can use QS to quickly launch the applications you need in a couple of keystrokes, giving you the liberty of removing the launchers from the dock.

Colin posted a picture of his dock after booting, and it’s completely empty, he uses QS to launch everything he needs. Cool.

However, i feel there are more benefits of keeping the applications on the dock but to just launch them. It may just be me, but, there are times, when i rely on the dock to keep my productivity high.
I may have a lot of things to do, and at some point i get distracted and wander off in my computer to do other stuff, and just forget what i had to do in the first place.
Here’s when the dock comes in handy: i have the habit of checking the dock every few minutes, be it to see how many unread emails i have, how many items are stocking up on NetNewsWire, or who is talking to me on iChat.
Sure, you can still do this if you launched the programs with QS and didn’t keep the icons there, but to me the coolest feature of the dock, is that it shows you exactly what’s running and what’s not.

Picture this, you’re a busy guy, and have Mail not to play any sounds when mail arrives, or to check automatically for emails, since you need to be productive and email will distract you. But for whatever the reason (you forgot to open it at boot, it crashed, etc.) it is not running. Now if you rely on QS to launch stuff and don’t keep the launcher in the dock, and you’re really busy, you won’t even notice it’s not running (after looking at the dock) and keep on doing whatever distracted you in the first place; but if you had the launcher in the dock you could easily tell it wasn’t running, and with a simple click (or two letters in QS) you’d open it. Flying you back to productivity land.

That’s the reason i keep all the applications i use sitting in the dock, regardless of their status. So that i can get back on track.

Keyboard versus Mouse

The argument was not about this “feature” of the dock though, but rather of launching apps with a single click, or with a few keystrokes.

There is no winning team here, and you can switch sides easily as well. Some love using the keyboard for everything, while others are more fond of using a mouse. We should consider the computer you’re using. In Colin’s case, he’s on a laptop (if i’m not mistaken), and so it makes a whole more sense to use the keyboard as much as possible (that is when you’re using the laptop on the go), but i think it’s a bit different when you’re on a desktop.

There’s the reasoning of using the mouse being easier than typing in the keyboard, and the one of speed.

I believe it’s easier to use the mouse to click on something in order to accomplish a certain task.
While it may be slower (considering most of the time you’d have to move your hand to the mouse; though if your hand is already on the mouse, the keyboard would be slower) most of the time, there’s no arguing about comfort or ease of use. Certainly point and click is both comfortable and easy.
Not to say typing is not as comfortable or just as easy. I guess it all is in essence a matter of where you are. If you’re set on the keyboard, or on the mouse.

To sum it all up, in every other task but launching applications i’d say a keyboard shortcut’s user would be faster (since that was the point of the discussion) than a mouse clicker. A clicker has to digg through menus to do something, while the keyboard user has the shortcuts to avoid menus.

Luckily, we don’t have to choose a side. Most computers have a keyboard and a mouse.

This is where the original discussion took place.