Apple

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

The problem with the X300 ... it runs this mediocre operation system from Redmond. Dear Levono ... you could make it smaller, you could make it faster, you could even make it silver and cool-looking ... your problem is the OS.

(via: fakesteve)

Cringely has a really interesting opinion about the recent acquisition of PA Semi by Apple. He thinks, that this move will lead us to an Apple system, where even the CPU is a custom-build circuit from Apple optimized for MacOS X. The arguments for his ideas sound quite reasonable.

I have to keep this "New Soul" from Yael Naim from my ears. When i hear this music, i have the strong urge to search my credit card and to buy a notebook ....

I revived my twitter account a few days ago, whe i discovered, that my prefered feedreader (Netnewswire) is capable of sending URLs to twitter with a single command. So i use twitter as a public clipboard again for links i do not want to put on del.icio.us. Yesterday i´ve found yet another really neat tool for my iPhone: Twinkle. Twinkle is a Twitter-client for the iPhone, but with a spin. You can add location informations to your tweets (the messages in twitter). Resulting from this information you can query for tweets that were published by people near of you:

Yet another reason, i´m glad that i didn´t purchased a Macbook Air yet. Now it´s up to others to explain the TSA that the MacBook Air isn´t a stylish bomb designed by Jonathan Ive