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?

[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)

goo.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

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

[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)