Adam Jury

NetNewsWire is a great RSS client for OSX. It was acquired by NewsGator in late 2005, and since then has continued to improve and be awesome-r.

And now, it’s free, along with NewsGator’s other consumer products, including a RSS client for Windows, an RSS Outlook plugin, and a RSS client for some PDA platforms. NetNewsWire creator Brent Simmons is very pleased with this new direction.

I’ve been a happy paying user of NNW since early 2005, and it’s very cool that more people will be exposed to it from now on.

I tried installing Leopard a few weeks ago on my main production machine. The machine needed a reinstall anyway, to clear up over a year’s worth of cruft, so I figured I may as well upgrade to Leopard at the same time. The first week or more was fine, and then InDesign CS2 spontaneously developed a problem — it would crash whenever the “file open/file save/etc” dialog would open. I switched over to using the “Adobe Dialog” for awhile, but that didn’t consistently fix the problem. I did the usual InDesign fixing steps: deleting preferences, making sure the drives didn’t have errors, etc. Deleting prefs would temporarily fix things, but a few hours later the problem would reoccur.

So last night I backed the drive up, reinstalled Leopard, and reinstalled just CS2 and a few other minor essential apps. It worked fine, again, for a few hours … and then it developed the exact same problem.

Leopard has been [mostly] fine and fun on my laptop, but I don’t have time to dicker around with my main production machine. It’s just not ready for my prime time: whether that’s the fault of Apple or Adobe, I don’t care. I’m reinstalling Tiger now.

Some months ago I posted about deep/safe sleep does not work on my MacBook Pro under 10.4.10. I finally got around to testing it on Leopard today, and surprise surprise, it “works” in an even lesser way than before; there’s no sign at all that it’s restoring from the saved image, and the only part of the computer that works is the power button.

This doesn’t actually bother me all that much, because I very rarely get into a situation where I run my battery all the way down, but I’m sure it bothers some people.

What really bothers me is my DVD-R stubbornly refusing to burn any dual layer DVDs, but it seems like only about 2.3 billion people have this problem, so Apple can’t be damned to fix it.

I’m dorking around with OmniFocus, a new GTD [Getting Things Done] app. Seems pretty slick so far! I’ve found that GTD has yet to survive the extreme time crunches I get into sometimes, but there’s always room to improve productivity.

I didn’t really notice until I upgraded to a new larger monitor a few months ago that the icon for Apple’s Preview application is of a young child holding up a fish. Cue instant revulsion — I don’t like children randomly showing up in iconography that does not directly relate to children. So I jumped into Photoshop and got rid of the young child, replacing him with a delicious redhead. Much better!

However, it would be much cooler if, the first time one launched Preview, it also fired up Photobooth and took a couple snapshots [or let you feed it previously-existing snapshots] and integrated them into the Preview icon, properly blending/blurring them under the thumbtack, and then instantly installing that icon for you.

The first patch is out, and it seems boring but didn’t make my MacBook Pro explode.

The OSX 10.4.11 update brings the final version of Safari 3 [minus webclips!] to Tiger users, and if you have the Windows beta installed, Apple Software Update will offer you Safari 3 for Windows, as well. It doesn’t seem to be available for Windows on apple.com, yet.

So, I think I fixed Wacky Leopard Bug #2, or, at least, the symptoms of it. The fix turned out to be simpler than I expected, as I simply had to reset the Keychain according to Apple’s instructions. Honestly, I’m not sure what this did or why the old keychain wouldn’t work, but in this situation, it’s not a big deal: there were few to no passwords saved on the computer. However, it is pretty strange to me that this situation happened during the bog-simple upgrade of the powerbook, which was running a virtually clean install of 10.4.10 before the upgrade.

Badass widescren mail plugin for Leopard.

This little hint is handy for those who connect to computers via VNC that don’t properly show up in the Finder.