Tag: Apple - Page 16 - UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

So who’s the closet Opera lover at Apple anyway?

$No, I don\'t want to use Opera, thank you.$ No, I’m not talking about fat ladies singing, I’m talking about the most marginal web browser that somehow manages to keep hanging on. I guess it has a niche with certain non-traditional devices. (It’s the web browser on the Wii for instance.) But I don’t know anyone who has ever used it regularly on a computer, and I also don’t know anyone who still has it installed, just as a curiosity (or even more justifiably, for testing purposes).

Yet, someone at Apple must love Opera. I just got a new MacBook and I’m presently going through the ritual of tweaking settings so, for instance, all of the web-type files (.html, .php, .js, .css, etc. and no that last one isn’t a filename extension) open in my text editor of choice — which at present is TextWrangler, the free version of BBEdit. I’ve used BBEdit for years when my employers were buying it for me, but now that I’m on my own, I took a careful look at the feature set comparison chart between the two, realized that I rarely, if ever, used any of the features that BBEdit had but TextWrangler didn’t, and decided that it was ridiculous to pay $125 for features I don’t use, when I could get the ones I do use for free. So there you have it.

All of which has nothing to do with the reason I’m writing this today. My point is, as I was going about the business of telling Mac OS X to use TextWrangler for these file types, instead of opening .html files in Safari, .php files in Dreamweaver (which I only have because it came with CS3), and .js and .css files in Dashcode, I noticed in the list of possible applications not one but two versions of Opera. Neither of which (I verified) is installed on my Mac. So what the hell are they doing in the list? For one of the file types, the only options it offered were the two Opera versions plus TextWrangler. WTF?

Technology Large and Small

Here I sit in the living room, tentatively tapping out a blog entry on a tiny on-screen keyboard in the new iPhone version of WordPress. (So far, so good.) Meanwhile, the kids are watching a “Lazy Town” DVD on our new, gigantic 42-inch LCD HDTV, purchased last weekend. It’s an interesting study in technological contrasts. These days, everything’s profoundly huge or tiny, depending on the need for mobility. Nothing too deep, I know, but it’s cast in bold relief for me at the moment. Plus, it was a good excuse to test the iPhone app… and to post a photo of the giant television.

No, iPhone, my house is not located in the middle of the Arctic Ocean

It goes without saying that I love my iPhone. I can geek out on just about any Apple device but the iPhone trumps them all. Yes, when I first heard the rumors circulating early last year that an Apple cell phone was in the works, I dismissed and denied them. “Impossible. That sounds totally stupid and Apple would never do something that totally stupid.” Of course, not only was I staggeringly wrong in my assumptions about the device, but by the end of the keynote I was already coveting one.

Fast forward to March of this year. Although no official word had yet come out that a 3G iPhone was on the way, it was fairly obvious. Nonetheless, the time was right, and I had to move on it, so I bought an iPhone while my window of opportunity was open. I certainly haven’t regretted it, and I admit I’m pleased that the 3G isn’t a revolutionary leap forward. That its most interesting feature — the new software — is fully compatible with the old iPhone means that not only did I not regret not getting a new iPhone this past weekend, it meant that in some sense I did get a new iPhone this past weekend. And it’s what I was waiting for since March.

But, sadly, the most peculiar flaw in the iPhone’s software, for me anyway, endures.

The Google Maps app has a cool little button that, when tapped, triangulates your current location from cell tower and public Wi-Fi hot spot data. Awesome. And it almost always works. But the one place I’ve discovered so far that it absolutely does not work is in my own house! For some reason, whenever I’m at home and I tap that button, I am dropped deep in the frigid depths of the Arctic Ocean beyond the northern coast of Alaska.

Now, given the fact that the map uses (*gack!*) Mercator projection, it’s darn near impossible to tell where exactly that’s supposed to be when you get that far up there. My guess is it’s simply dropping me into the default location it returns when both latitude and longitude come up null… probably 90 degrees north 180 degrees east (i.e. the “upper left” corner of the map, at least in terms of the coordinates they actually plot).

I am decidedly unhappy about this, far beyond any rational justification. That’s because it taps into my absurd and long-standing fear of blank spots on maps.

I think Psystar is mocking itself now…

I hadn’t been keeping up with the saga of Psystar this week, so I assumed they’d crawled back under their rock. No, apparently they’re still promoting this asinine open Mac concept of theirs.

This photo of their headquarters says it all. Yes: their “Open Computing Headquarters” is “Not Open to the Public.”

Brilliant. But that barely scratches the surface of this twisted story.

I have to admit, after the last I’d read about them, I’m incredibly surprised to see that they exist in a physical location at all. I get the distinct feeling that their presence is more temporary than those fireworks stands that pop up along the roadside in rural Wisconsin in mid-June.

Removing the Leopard Dock’s “shininess”

I know there were already dozens of blog entries the day after Leopard “dropped” with instructions on how to remove the shiny Dock, but I’ve actually been living with it peacefully and almost liking it.

But now at my new job, I’m not sure if it’s the saturated color on my iMac display, the particular desktop image I’m using, or some strange combination of those and other factors, but the Dock’s reflection was painfully (yes, painfully) shiny and distracting, so I just had to look up how to get rid of it.

Apparently there’s a whole cottage industry now around customizing the Leopard Dock’s appearance, but all I really wanted was the simple look you get when you have the Dock on the left or right side, but when the Dock is resting nicely on the bottom where it belongs. It was surprisingly difficult (in that I had to do three whole searches and then hunt through a few links on the first page of results of each) before I found (again) the simple command line instructions to accomplish this task. And in the interest of saving myself the trouble next time (if there is a next time), I’m posting them here:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock