Hold that tiger

[austin_dern]

As I walked past the MRT station an attractive young woman in short, shiny dress gave me a plastic bottle of purple gelatinous goo and a brochure. This is unusual for me. Assuming the brochure describes the contents, it's styling gel. I don't do much with my hair besides keep it with me. I wash it daily, and every few months have a (specific) person from New Jersey cut it, but impose no other demands, which is why my hairstyle so resembles a guinea pig's. The brochure calls it ``Xtreme Gel'' and here, again, I'm approximately as extreme as a post office substation. Amusingly, it's BrylCreem Xtreme Gel, which flows like ``Alan B DuMont Xtreme Television Receivers.'' The brochure includes a four-step guide to applying extreme hair gel, no step of which is screaming.

While I saw some of the OS X Tiger unveiling, I didn't buy a copy -- too big a crowd and I'm not so eager for appealing widgets as to buy the point-zero release. But it looks neat. The various widgets appear on-screen (though not on iBooks) with a ripply-water effect, and include things like airplane flight trackers (which requires an Internet connection, so I could not use it to track the flight I'm on), weather forecasts (Singapore's to be hot and muggy, with afternoon thundershowers), a dictionary (which has ``coati'', ``volant'', and ``zeugma'', though not ``nocent'' or ``xerotic'') which I couldn't figure how to copy text from, and a thingy able to translate ``My hands are soaking in dishwashing liquid?'' into French (``Mes mains imbibent dans le liquid de vaisselle?'') and almost into Chinese (it couldn't figure out ``dishwashing'').

It also comes with a lot of support for ``RSS,'' which a lot of computer-oriented people seem to feel strongly about, although I don't have any idea why or what it does. The letters just sort of started appearing a year or two ago, like complaints in Livejournal friends lists about ``Quiznos'' commercials, and figuring out what for never seemed that urgent. I guess it's a good thing, since it comes with a simple but pleasant icon.

They moved stuff around in the ``Get Info'' window, too, putting comments on top. I can't figure out if they put back in the option to, once you've opened the info window, have it report the information on whatever item is selected, instead of sticking to the information of whatever was selected when you called ``Get Info''. Back in 10.1 or so they had it so the ``Get Info'' updated as you switched files, and I really liked that and can't seem to get it back. Too bad.

Trivia: McDonnell's original contract for Project Mercury was for it to produce 12 capsules for a cost of approximately US$18,300,000 and a fee of $1,150,000. Source: This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury, Loyd S Swenson Jr, James M Grimwood, Charles C Alexander. NASA SP-4201.

Currently Reading: Beyond the Quartic Equation, R Bruce King.

Comments

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

Let's hear it for short, shiny dresses!

Wait, that wasn't the point, was it?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I do favor them, though not for my own clothing.

There've been more shiny pants worn by women lately here. Maybe there was a sale on gloss spray.

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

See, I don't wear anything shiny. One must be careful of shiny stuff, because it not only can it easily lead to looking very tacky, but it can exaggerate less-than-optimal body contours. I may, however, allow myself one semi-shiny article of clothing at Anthrocon, just to bedazzle the raccoons, rats, and ravens in the crowd. Maybe during the game tournament I'll be MC'ing.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That's probably the safest crowd to try out something shiny and perhaps a bit dangerous, yes. I noticed some fabrics in a home furnishings store near here that look remarkably like the stuff used for slightly more outrageous outfits from the original Star Trek, and I'm torn between wanting to see if there's some way I can do something with them -- one looks like the pattern used for The Cage-era off-duty uniforms -- and knowing that even if I tried, I would never accomplish the making of something that was actually clothing and wearable by me.

[buran.livejournal.com]

RSS = Really Simple Syndication. Basically, it's a way to do newsfeeds - automatically downloads headlines so you can quickly see what's available. And RSS isn't an OS issue -- it's an individual-app issue. Safari now has built-in RSS. Big deal. I've had RSS running in specialized apps for a while, or in Firefox.

RSS - a Whatis.com definition - see also: RSS feed, RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary (http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,290660,sid26_gci813358,00.html)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I see, thank you ... I suppose it's nice to have, but I don't think I'm going to get all that worked up about it one way or the other.

[buran.livejournal.com]

I think it's an example of hype. Tiger really does run nicely and smoothly and I'm happy with it and Spotlight and Dashboard are pretty nice, though a lot of the improvements are in tuning, better backend, and so forth, so there are fewer new "wow!" things the users can actually see. So they mention relatively minor stuff.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I see what you mean ... looking over the list of improvements looks like a decent list of structural improvements but nothing all that really exciting or fun. There's only so much to be done with new graphics formats either. I'll get around to upgrading at some point, certainly, though do want to give it a few weeks for the worse surprise bugs to get shaken out.

goo.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

search is the biggy here.. and image manipulation from more basic levels.

Re: goo.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Improving the search system would be marvelous. I liked the find-by-content stuff, but it takes, like, two weeks to build the index, at which point it's obsolete again.

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Seek option-command-I, you do, yes. ^_^ (I admit, I somewhat preferred Puma's behavior in that regard too. Handy for a quick check of a couple files, rather than (as I often do, forgetting that functionality) a pair of cmd-I operations)

Ah, so comments are now at the top? That makes sense, given their new prominence, being part of the data Spotlight indexes. (And quickly, it would seem, rather than having a Sherlock-style batch operation running periodically. When a file's altered or created, it's tagged for reindexing) The Slashdot comments thread I linked to is worth a glance, for a look at how extensive its impact may be.

As for RSS - I didn't really "get" it for quite a while, with most of the readers just feeling too clunky for routine use. But then along came NewsFire (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/15873), which facilitates keeping up to date with hundreds of news sources perfectly easily. Very good app, though it's now gone $20 shareware. For the misers and church mice, there's the recent Ensemble (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/26241), which resembles a flyweight version of NewsFire, and MiNews (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/16986), whose UI doesn't appeal to me nearly as much, and doesn't yet support Atom feeds (a similar, but different, RSS-like format). Both the latter are freeware, though not open source.

The key aspect of RSS which appeals to me is simply the ease with which one can glance at headlines from a very large number of sources, previewing the article, or loading the whole thing into a browser window. (FWIW, OmniWeb also offers RSS/Atom support, but it lacks that nimble edge of something like NewsFire. One feature I use much more within OW is periodic checking of irregularly updated pages, like Fur-Piled and Closet Coon, which I'll want to bring up in a browser anyway, when new work appears)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, my, yes, option-flower-I is exactly what I wanted. I didn't know it was, pardon me, an option. Turns out a lot of the menus take on slightly different features when you hold down option too.

Last night I got to wonder whether the different panels of information windows might be movable, so you could put what you liked in what order you like ... I don't know if they do that, but it'd seem reasonably easy to implement. At the very least it'd be no harder than setting a customized toolbar is.

I suppose I see the value of RSS, for some applications anyway, but I feel justified in keeping my response somewhat reserved.

[chanspot.livejournal.com]

One of the biggest benefits of RSS, as I see it anyway, is threefold: the standardization of presentation of data from a variety of sources. This leads to three things:
1. Less "content hunting" through multiple sites' confusing layouts
2. Fewer ads, at least when scanning the headlines from your RSS viewer--you can always filter them out, and I'm not sure RSS supports them anyway
3. Easier access for the visually impaired. I imagine screen readers, et al, will have a much easier time with this standardized format

^^

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Getting the content of a web site out of the hands of Web Site Designers is a good thing, certainly; there's some weird compulsion which makes them eventually redesign a perfectly useful site until it's illegible. Maybe when the Americans with Disabilities Act lawsuits start taking down the worst sites there'll be some recovery ... As for ads ... well, a reprieve from them is nice, but I don't expect that'll last.