The new theme is also going to mark a whole new version of themak.org, the move from the brilliant PALGN free hosting to an ASO shared hosting plan where I will also move this blog from WordPress to a hand made django weblog platform.

I now only have 4 exams left until I’ve finished with my GCSEs, and I feel fairly confident about how I’ve done (which is good) and I’m now only a few short days away from purchasing my guitar and hosting package.

1. My Adium set up: as you can see this offers little clue as to who’s online apart from their avatar(display picture, buddy icon etc.) However, I find that this approach uses far less screen space than having their name displayed. Growl is highly utilised with this approach as I assoiciate their icon when they log in, or mouse-over to find it. It’s also set to auto-hide on the left hand side of my screen.
2. iClip4, this is essentially a multi-clipboard, which; for me is essential. I use it at the bottom of my screen where the Dock would usually go, and although it’s slightly sluggish on my PPC mac mini- it’s reasonable.
3. The precise location of the dock- right and bottom aligned. (Using deeper) Small icons, hiding on and no magnification.
4. Cytv this lets me watch tv on my ibook, whilst the tuner is plugged into my mac mini.
   
5. Letterbox Mail plugin, because I spent too much time in Outlook 2003 before switching. Quicksilver and Visor. Emminently neccessary. Visor especially for living in a terminal window.

In the mid nineties a product between Apple and BT sprung up, the Apple Interactive Television Box [wikipedia] this was to fufill BTs desire for a set top box that was connected to and received content from the internet. Or more specifically; certain BT servers. This would work over ADSL and serve the user with television and games etc.

Apart from its obvious similarities with the yet unreleased iTV from Apple. Being another set top box which uses content from the internet on television, however this is buffered on a macintosh computer. This I beleive is more similar to the BT HOME HUB[homehub webpage].

The home hub is a device which acts as an ADSL router with wireless VOIP handset, and also sets out to fufill many of the aims they had for the ITVB- albeit without the all in one aspect. But most importantly it has in its future plans an online television distribution system.

So, in conclusion; to say that the iTV is an updated ITVB is short sighted. The Apple Interactive Television Box (to give it its’ full name) has led to Apple and their parter in the matter BT to re attempt this internet linked video box just over 12 years later, is not a re-hash but merely re attempting when the market is right.

Maybe this is the Goliath creating his David, pondering this question: “Will google start to inherit from searchmash, or is searchmash going to become google.

Me? I quite like this new look google it has more flair, where I finally get my desired #1 for themak, instead of a placeholder site with a dot com after it.

1. Stories.
2. Better support for privacy settings.
3. The ability to edit those things that are locked from first upload.
4. A wordpress plugin.
5. The bulk uploader.

And thanks to zooomr for the qouta reset.

Here’s a quick teaser of the website that I’ve been working on for a while.
As to what it does, I’m not telling quite yet.

Oh and .

For inter-service compatibility, there is none to beat AdiumX. Being open source I can always run the latest version on the svn tree- not suggesting this as a smart thing to do. The SVN version occasionally has it’s glitches but on the whole is very stable. Just before writing this article I ran svn update and recompiled from the latest build (17291), actually a later build as that one wouldn’t compile.

Adium is an open source Instant Messanger with full support for XMPP, Yahoo, MSN, AIM, gTalk, bonjour and several other protocols. Originally it used libgaim for this but now it uses a mix of libgaim, libezv and joscar- with smack soon to be used for XMP (this will have jingle support and will eventually allow Adium users to talk with gTalk users.

Adium 1.0 was released in 2001 by a student called Adam Iser, but was re-written to form AdiumX (originally planned to be Adium 2.0). Adium uses OSX’s built in html component (WebKit) to display each chat, and this allows for easy themeing of the chat window with only knowledge of HTML and css). Also the contact list is easy to theme and in the SVN version will hide on an edge of the screen and can be configured to only show as little or as much user information as it takes to show who’s online.

Adium has full out of the box support for Growl, a universal notifications protocol for OSX. Which allows you to be constantly informed of when someone comes online or sends you a message. Also possible is to have notifications read out using the system voice.

On any other platform, the choice for a good powerful tabbed web-browser is fairly easy; Firefox. But on OSX it looks nasty:

1. It uses custom widgets.
2. It uses Aqua and a menu. Not unified.

So I looked for an alternative, deciding against Safari because I didn’t like it and eventually settled on Camino.
Camino shares a lot with the Firefox project, a need to create a seperate Navigator only version of Mozilla- but for OSX will full native widget use and utilizing OSX only features.

Unfortuneatly Camino has recently suffered development stagnation with long waits between versions and lacks the support for extensions that Firefox has. Otherwise Camino is a very stable and useful web browser with a solid and standards compliant rendering engine.

My future browsing choices:
Camino is a solid browser but with little chance of seeing a version 2 anytime soon, I’m going to look at the emerging alternatives:

1. Firefox 3.0 Minefield
2. Shiira 2.0 currently in beta

Firefox.
Firefox has all the cool features found in firefox that make it highly probable that it will regain it’s crown as king of the Browsers. However:

Shiira.
The early beta of Shiira 2.0 shows much promise and has many new and interesting features that turn up the heat for other web browsers. (Shiira has quite a long way to go yet, as some settings are greyed out and some parts still in Japanese)

Mail.app

It could be said that there is only one real choice for an email client for OSX: Apple Mail. For one it comes pre-installed with OSX and secondly; it genuinely is the best email client available.

The roots for Mail.app lie in NEXTSTEP and NEXTMAIL which bears great resemblance to the current Mail.app- especially the contact photographs and the way attachments are handled.

There are several features in Mail which set it apart from other Mail clients:
Use of a systemwide address book.

• Smart Mailboxes.
• Image handling.
• Expandability.

Address Book.
Unlike Outlook or any linux email client, Mail uses an Address Book which is universally present for other applications. This means that if I add a contact using Mail, I can also add IM accounts to that card and set up my IM software to add their picture automatically. This Address Book, being present as part of the OS not the mail client allows its data to be used by other applications with ease.

Smart Mailboxes.
Smart Mailboxes utilize spotlight and act as a way to sort messages, with a Smart Mailbox set up for emails sent regarding certain projects, sent photos or attachments.

Image Handling.

When you are sent an email with image attachments, you have the option to view the images as a slideshow. In this slideshow you have the option to navigate between images, to view a contact sheet or to add them to iPhoto.

Expandibility.
With its’ plugin architecture and AppleScript, Mail allows for lots of expandibilty. Three notable plugins are:

• MailTags.
• Letterbox.
• GrowlMail

MailTags is a productivity app, allowing messages to be assigned to projects and to dos.
Letterbox is a simple hack which forces Mail to display in a three column way instead of the default.
Vs.
And GrowlMail which is part of the growl notification framework, allows for a growl message to be displayed. This allows for you to get a grasp of the emails content before switching to Mail and needs no interaction.

Future.
The future looks good for Mail in OSX with the addition of HTML stationary, a system wide framework for RSS, TODOs and support for Notes. Whereas some people have concentrated on the pure evil that is inherant in HTML emails, my question is how will this affect the slideshow and import into iPhoto features of Mail.

Seems that support is reliant on Core Image, so yay for my iBook and nay for the mini

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Zooomr

Zooomr has been described by some as Flickr on steroids, and certainly has a plethora of unique features which Flickr is lacking. Although on the other hand Flickr has many features not in Zoomr and far better documentation.

The things that I would like to see in Zooomr are:

1. More versatile searching.
2. A bulk uploader.
3. A wordpress plugin.
4. The ability to edit tags from the browse page (or inspector).
5. Better documentation and help.
6. Easier lighmat for non googlemap areas.
7. A way to mark a photo as favourite.
8. Being able to flag a photo as offensive.

Oh no are you attempting to execute a possibly untrustworthy executible which may or equally may not be mallicious!
The need for security is great in times like these. But asking the user repeatedly is confusing for newer users and pointless, those at danger will click yes, and there will eventually be a bypass mechanism- ruling the feature useless.

But first- count the dialouge boxes:

That’s not to say that they should all go, 4 is just clearly over-zealous. Asking the user for confirmation all the time will tire soon and alienate people new to computers, and irritate those that already have experience.

The big three. [CMD, Notepad, and Paint]

The command prompt is something that must look amazing on Aero Glass, it better- it’s horrendous without it.

Notepad, and indeed it’s slightly larger brother wordpad have received little love from Vista, also paint has nothing new to offer.

Conclusions:
Vista beta 2 has a lot of new innovations but does have some gross UI inconsistancies with parts that are entirely new and others which are directly from XP. Also it offers the sincerest form of flattery to Apple- It would be unwise to compare it to OSX as the latest version has yet to be released even any official news. There’s also far too much in the UI that is to be found by accident, such as the alt key showing the menus. Although on the other hand Office 2007 is very nice, with a user inteface that is more consistant with the Vista look and feel than most of Vista.

-Update:
Lifehacker has a nice set of screenshots which nicely summarizes the UI changes for those unable to install it.

And no, wordpress is not the easy option.