P.S. (Pretty Sweet) » Software

Concurrent IE

allie — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:06:39 +0000

Finally had a chance to try Jeremy Smith’s how-to for running Internet Explorer 8, 7, and 6 concurrently, and it works flawlessly. I didn’t even receive any of the DLL errors that he cites in his post.

Please Note

allie — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:22:19 +0000

Note to self (and anyone else using Wordpress): Don’t give your posts numeric slugs. It makes perfect sense, really, but you cannot have a page permalink like domain.com/2009 — or even domain.com/section/2009. It thinks it’s a blog archive and throws a little tantrum. Awesome.

Finally!

allie — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 23:10:26 +0000

I don’t often use Word for Mac and think to myself, Gee, what a delightful computing experience! (Usually, the sentiment is closer to, *&$#, are you ever going to finish “optimizing font menu performance”?!) But I recently upgraded to Office 2008, and I had to convert a DOC to PDF today — something I usually dread because PDFMaker fails, oh, about 90% of the time and I end up using Preview to convert to PDF and then putting in hyperlinks manually in Acrobat. Today, I thought that I’d skip PDFMaker altogether and go straight to Save As, and there, waiting to greet me, was a format of PDF. Hallelujah! Does this have anything to do with the fact that PDF finally became an open standard last year?

Name That Movie

allie — Mon, 11 May 2009 06:53:07 +0000

We need a Shazam-esque app for movies. How many times do you turn on the tv and flip through to a movie and have no idea what you’re watching? If I’m at home I can use a guide, but I’m usually watching movies on tv in hotels or similar places. Sure, I can get onto IMDB and look for Clooney’s movies from the approximate era of the one I’m watching, but isn’t that the film equivalent to Googling a line of song lyrics?

Zenbe Count Confusion

allie — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:17:51 +0000

I’ve managed to convert most of my “life tracking” to digital systems — address book, calendar (that was a big hurdle), etc. But list-making is an ongoing struggle. I blame it on the inadequacies of available tools, but at the end of the day, I find that I’m more likely to actually get things done when I write them out by hand. Of course, it’s still beneficial to have master to-do lists (for tasks, errands, etc., but especially for long-term projects, “someday” tasks, and “don’t forget this” lists). I used Backback for awhile, and I still use my Backpack for other things, but without iPhone integration, it doesn’t cut it for daily list making. I’ve gone back and forth on Zenbe Lists, but over the last several weeks, Zenbe and I have gotten into a good rhythm. However, I’ve had constant confusion on my list counts, and today I finally figured out why. In the iPhone app, the task count shown for each list is displayed as completed of total — i.e. 4/5, where 4 tasks are done. From the web, the task count is incomplete of total — i.e. 1/5, where 1 task is not done. The best part: I cannot find a single place on the Zenbe website to submit a support ticket, a feature suggestion, or, well, any kind of correspondence. I can understand not wanting to do costly and time-consuming support for a free product, but shouldn’t there be some method of contact?

iPhone Calendar Holidays

allie — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 08:20:48 +0000

My only major irritation with the iPhone has been the calendar. In the beginning, I subscribed to my Google Calendar through iCal and then synced to my phone. Of course, then you can’t add or edit entries. (And since you also can’t edit entries through the mobile gCal website, I found myself scribbling down appointments on scraps of paper in my purse. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of a paperless calendar system?) A few months ago, I finally found a way to sync my gCal with my phone via Exchange. But it only syncs calendars you created — not subscribed calendars, like holidays and moon phases. When you’re using Exchange, you can’t sync anything from iCal to the iPhone (which I don’t understand… why are they mutually exclusive?). I tried MobileMe for all of five minutes before I realized that it didn’t solve my calendar problem either. Today, I: a) subscribed to the gCal holidays public calendar in iCal; b) exported it from iCal to .ics; c) imported into my own gCal; d) synced with NuevaSync. Now I have an eternity of holidays that repeat on a predictable schedule (Columbus Day, Christmas, etc.) and at least a few years of Easter.

Nueva

allie — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:27:19 +0000

I found NuevaSync on Saturday, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that it has changed my life. Being able to enter and modify appointments directly on my iPhone instead of having to wait until I’m at my computer… How did I survive with it any other way?

SDK

allie — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:27:36 +0000

July 11 cannot come soon enough. To-do lists, AIM and Flickr apps running natively on my iPhone, among others. Fifteen days and counting.

Butterfield

allie — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:18:39 +0000

“Over the decades as the company grew and expanded, first into dyes and punches, into copper, corrugated steel, synthesized rubber, piping, milling equipment, engines, instruments, weaponry, and so on, I still felt at home, because tin was the core of the business.” Whoa.

Polyvore

allie — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:11:15 +0000

For whatever reason, I found a lot of things today that started with the prefix “poly,” but Polyvore is certainly the most interesting. Create collages from images of just about anything.

iPhone Goodness

allie — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:52:18 +0000

I cannot even express how excited I am that I can set a custom icon for any iPhone webclip. There are things that I buried on the second (or third) page of my iPhone menu just because they’re missing icons. Oh yes, it’s true. Other iPhone goodies found today: 17 useful bookmarklets, some icons (Graphr), some more icons (Ikony) and even more icons (AisleOne).

Widgets

allie — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 20:01:07 +0000

Since I installed OSX 10.4 on my Mac, I’ve used but three Dashboard widgets: calculator, stickies and weather. Today, I cast memory usage to the wind, went widget-crazy and added five new ones: HTML entity lookup, PHP function reference, Delivery Status, gMap and (probably the most useful) Show/Hide for hidden files.

Photosynth + Surface

allie — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 00:02:35 +0000

Microsoft has been quite busy lately trying to keep up with the Jobses: Photosynth (very cool demo, although demos like this always leave me wondering how the software really performs with average user-input data) and Surface.

Molly to the Rescue

allie — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 01:30:39 +0000

Molly signs on to improve interoperability and standards compliance in Internet Explorer. “It is my desire that persistence coupled with diplomacy will assist us all in moving to a time where interoperability becomes the heart of the Web again.”

Outlook 2007

allie — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 16:32:20 +0000

As if designing HTML emails wasn’t difficult enough already… Thanks a lot, Outlook 2007.

Multiple IE

allie — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 03:23:32 +0000

I’ve been using this mighty handy Multiple IE and highly recommend it for installing and running various IE versions concurrently.

Form Fields on Mac

allie — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 00:45:10 +0000

Ever since I first starting using Macs in OS9, I’ve wanted to tab between form fields on web pages and dialogue boxes but always found, to my great distress, that checkboxes, select boxes and buttons were skipped. Eureka! A solution! (Am I the only one who didn’t know this was possible?)

Firefox 2: Solved

allie — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 22:33:01 +0000

Bless you, lifehacker, for showing me how to move my Firefox 2 tab close buttons (among other things).

Firefox 2

allie — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 22:56:14 +0000

Firefox 2 hit the FTP servers today, and I must admit that the migration of the tab close button will take some getting used to. (Of course, I’ve been using the beta and I still haven’t adjusted, so perhaps it’s hopeless). I preferred the placement in the top right of the viewport; I will admit that I rarely, if ever, actually used the button, but now the button is decidedly in my way. I’ve closed half a dozen tabs by accident today, which of course is merely an indication that I am tab-jumping much too hastily, but that is besides the point. Alas, all relevant browsers — e.g., Safari, Firefox, IE7, Opera — now have the close button on the tab.

Good Agile, Bad Agile

allie — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 18:52:39 +0000

For anyone who has ever suffered through so-called agile software development.