Dashboard picture display?

One of the most popular Konfabulator widgets is Picture Frame but I haven't been able to find anything like that for Dashboard. Anyone have any leads? I can't believe it doesn't yet exist.

Plug

It's possible I am the last person online to do this, but I finally have a blog of my own.

Yahoo Buys Konfabulator

And makes it free. From the Press Release:

"Yahoo is counting on the widgets to make users more curious about certain topics, services or events, ultimately driving more traffic to its Web site [...]"

Already widgets.yahoo.com is live and free downloads for Windows and Mac are up. I don't know what the uptake of Tiger is (We're still not running it at the Jenson/Wong household) but I know people still running Konfabulator on Tiger waiting for their favorite widget to be ported to Dashboard or who want to run the same widget on Windows as on their Mac.

Delicious Library

Let's hop in the Way Back Machine ™ for a moment.

The Delicious Library is now available and should not be confused with the also amazing del.icio.us bookmark service. It's $40 a crack and to really make it as cool as possible you will need some sort of device, be it digital video or hand-held bluetooth scanner, to read the barcodes on your books, CDs, DVDs or video games. Even with that caveat, this looks to be a killer app.

That was me in November of 2004. Just today I bought a copy of Delicious Library. It's a long story about why, but that is neither here nor there. The fact is, it does rock and I feel it's worth every penny of that $40. I couldn't quite pull the trigger on the $175 Bluetooth scanner, but it was tempting. In one day I've managed to get my entire DVD collection and PS2/Mac/PC games scanned in. I also got a good jump on the books, although the wife has half a room full of paperbacks. The CD collection, well...lets just say that I got a good start today.

One of the coolest features is the ability to drag from Amazon links from Safari (or Firefox) into the library to add an item. Since I'm using an iSight as my scanner, this was a huge time saver, especially with the music. It also groks links from the Amazon UK store, which is good news for everyone with large collections of UK import CDs (read: me).

I'll admit that the catalyst for finally taking the plunge was this Drunken Blog interview with Wil Shipley (via The Linked List of course).

OSCON 2005

Speaking of open source, I'm going to OSCON this year, mostly on the Python track. Anybody else?

Saskatoon: bearing fruit, sort of

Last winter I started a fork of Smultron called Saskatoon (note the weird-berry-names-starting-with-S theme). Some great people signed on to the project and we hacked away for while; but after a couple months it got very quiet. I got a new job, and people have lives, and TextWrangler went freeware, and Smultron got updated... So, I could have just pretended it never happened, but instead we're releasing the Saskatoon source code today. Since we never had a binary release, this isn't strictly necessary under the terms of the license, but there's no reason not to do it. Some of it may be of use in Smultron or other projects. Certain features we were implementing still don't exist in any open source Cocoa text editor. And I feel obliged to publicly close the thing here where it started.

I learned a lot along the way and I plan to jump into another open source project again very soon. It's likely to be a web framework rather than a desktop app, and something already established rather than a new fork.

Thanks to everyone who contributed. It was fun for me, and I hope it was fun for you.

Irrational Exuberance?

Don't get me wrong...I get a kick out of reading anecdotes about people "dumping" Microsoft as much as the next geek. But sometimes they're a bit over the top, in my mind at least.

Today, the Web is where the action is. It's the new OS. This means I can safely return to my old flame - the Mac - and yet still experience most, if not all of the hot new applications that are being built on AJAX on my new 15" G4 PowerBook. In addition, I don't have to put up with patches, viruses, spyware, slowdowns, bloated registries anymore.

Patches for OS X come out all the time. I would be worried a bit if they didn't, because I accept that software is made by humans and humans are, if nothing else, fallible. Slowdowns? Two words: Spinning Beachball of Death. I've taken to never allowing Safari to "remember" form information about a site since my last reset (which solved my Safari slowdowns). Bloated registries? No, but you should check out all the detritus in ~/Library/Preferences sometime.

Viruses and spyware are much, much less common. But I wouldn't say they were non-existent...although I don't have any anti-virus software installed.

Would I pick OS X over XP? Any day of the week, no contest. Is OS X free from the flaws that seem to plague Windows? Yes and no, as I've hopefully shown. All I ask for is some rational exuberance. That being said, welcome to club Steve, we have jackets.

James Tauber on Headless Tiger

James Tauber: "This page is for my notes on running non-Server Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) remotely via ssh. Feel free to add information in the comments."

Building OS X binaries from Linux

DistccPPCKnoppix: "DistccPPCKnoppix is a Knoppix distribution that contains distcc servers for both Linux x86 and OSX ppc compiling. With it you can utilize your extra x86 computers to build Linux x86 and OSX PPC binaries." (emphasis mine)

Distributed cross compilation for mere mortals. Awesome.

While You're Waiting...

10.4.2 “Addresses” lots of “issues”. -- John Gruber via the Linked List

While that installs you should take a moment and read about jwz's adventures in OS X land. If anything is Forwarding Address material, this is.

TextWrangler 2.1

My favorite "free beer" text editor for OS X, TextWrangler, has been updated to 2.1. The list of fixes, changes, and improvments is long and detailed, though there isn't any particular item that jumps out (except for perhaps that cmd-opt-doubleclick trick). Anyway, here's the download link. Requires 10.3.5+.