Apple

Hell ... this will be an expensive vacation: Apple stores selling iPhone 3G without a contract. At least the journey to the US is well timed ... By the way: Is there a halfway decently priced pre-paid data plan for mobiles available in the US?

Omnigraffle is one of my favourite tools. It´s one (if not the most important) reason, why i prefer to use MacOS X. People knowing Omnigraffle recognize at 10 miles distance, that most of my figures in my presentations were made with Omnigraffle.

The Omnigroup made an addition to their portfolio. I wasn´t aware of the program before, but i think it you will see the results of this new tool in my presentations, too: OmniGraphSketcher. It´s a tool with only one job, doing excellent looking graphs with a few mouse clicks.



Really fscking easy to create a graph ... the demo screencast is really worth a look and my own test took me fewer than 30 seconds. I´m impressed.



PS: The data in graph is nonsense ...

The Onion reports about the introduction of the new MacBook Wheel:



This is the notebook for the twitter generation - you don´t want to type in messages longer than 140 chars this way ...

Looks like i´m using too many small tools ...



from right to left: Spotlight, Clock, Language Setting, Volume, Airport, Bluetooth, Monitors, Spaces, Time Machine, PPPoE, Dial-In networking, Accessability, iSync, Growl, Caffeine, Twitterific, Nokia Uploader, Adium X, Jing, Camouflage, smcFancontrol)

The days of the Minority report alike GUIs getting nearer - gadget application by gadget application. FluidTunes (written by Majic Jungle Software) for example allows you to control your iTunes with gestures in front of your iSight:

PDF articles with multiple columns look good on paper, but they are a major pain in the a... to read on a display under 22 inches. There is a small little tool called Tofu, which rerenders documents in a way, where you just have to scroll horizontally instead of scrolling vertically to the beginning of a column again.

You can even cut´n paste a webpage on the window to get a columned version of the text:

You loose parts of the layout, but it´s much easier to read ....

Stefan Domanske of domanske.de pointed to a little interesting tool. Maybe you are aware of the technique of mindmapping for gathering ideas. I like this concept, but so far i prefered to use pencil and paper for this task as there was no really focussed and simple tool for it, at least not for the operating system from Cupertino. In the article "Mindmapping am Mac" Stefan talked about Mindnode. It´s a tool for MacOS 10.5 and it just does Mindmapping with a really clean interface. It´s near to the experience of using the oldfashioned paper because of the simple and clean interface. I really like this tool.

Mindnode is available for free on the website of the project, albeit there will be an Pro version in the future for purchase.

What is habituation? When you borrow a portable navigation device from your brother, try to scroll through the menus and twitch through the maps like on your iPhone and think at first: "Fsck ... the display is broken" ... i want an iNav!

You know, that a brand is well established in the marked, when the approx. 3-4 year old boy on the lap of his mother on the adjactent seat says: "The man has an iPhone". At least i think the boy mumbled something like that ...

I have a personal test for the market share of the Mac OS X plattform. I like to sit in the first wagon of the train. To get into the on-board restaurant i have to go to half the train. On this way i count the types of notebooks. 4 years ago, a Mac was a really rare sighting. On my train trip back from Berlin to Hamburg today, i´ve counted 13 notebooks, 7 of them were from Apple. I was somehow undecided about the move to the Intel architecture, but it seems that this move had paid off for the people at the Infinite Loop.

Apple published an update for Mac OS X yesterday: 10.5.4. This update isn´t as large as the last one, but it still contains some important bugfixes. You will find the combo updater and normal updater at the usual locations.

There is a new update for MacOS X 10.5. You find the release notes for 10.5.3 in the Knowledge Base: About the Mac OS X 10.5.3 Update. And the release notes are looong ... Okay, you can download the combo update at Apples Download site. You just have to download 536 MB. In the case you already use 10.5.2 you can use the smaller Updater - just 420 MB

White case, a black spot above the LC display, the typical monitor dongle at the side. This looks like a MacBook. Jonathan is a Mac user...

I want this at home:

Multi-touch is definitely one of the "next big things" in user interfaces. Work for a few minutes with an iPhone ... or: simply look at the video and you will understand. And Lux looks promising to bring that to your Mac soon. My personal favorite was the moment, when they controlled Google Earth with gestures

Your old notebook has severe thermal problems because of a defunct fan or something like that and you need a last boot. This may be an effective solution for you: How to rescue data from an iBook with thermal problems