Monday, February 11, 2002

I was checking the weather today and heard that the NOAA is switching their speech synthesis program. Samples of the old and new voices are here. Even the old one sounds better than what I listen to every morning... perhaps it's not in place all over the country? 11:45:05 PM | reply [] Got an email today that ICeCoffEE had been entered in Apple's Macintosh Products Guide. Neat. Also, last week MWJ had some really nice things to say about my software, unfortunately I can't link to them because you have to pay for a subscription. (Which I highly recommend, BTW. It's the only computer-related periodical I subscribe to any more, and I learn many things in MWJ that I don't anywhere else.) 7:21:06 AM | reply [] MT-NewsWatcher 3.2 is Mac OS X native, and still free. Simon, you rock. Having worked on some free apps for distribution recently, I don't even want to think how many hours you have poured into MT-NW, all without compensation (and John Norstad before that), but I really appreciate it. MT-NW is one of my favorite Mac applications, precisely because it comes so close to my ideal of a wonderful Mac application. 6:53:04 AM | reply [] I took a break from reading to make some changes to the template... Now the RSS and email links aren't stranded at the bottom of the page. The calendar is at the top of the page, eliminating the right sidebar with its huge amount of wasted space. This area is used for a good purpose on the Desktop Website Home Page, but not on the public pages. And now people with less than gigantic monitors should be able to read the entire width of the page without scrolling. The last updated date is gone from the weblog pages because it doesn't seem to change (it read February 6, when I had obviously been changing both the template and content many times since then). In its place is a hint to look at the calendar, since I've discovered not everyone knows what it means. And I killed the vertical bar that appeared on the story pages; it looks a bit cramped now, but mostly not. I wish Radio was clearer about its upstreaming activity; it just needs to say "done" when it's finished with your request, instead of leaving you hanging. 6:28:42 AM | reply [] Continuing Palm troubles today. It seems as if the problems I was experiencing yesterday with the sync starting but refusing to continue were actually hardware issues with the cradle. I've replaced the cradle temporarily with my GoType! Pro keyboard (cheap, actually only $40 if you buy the "Author's Bundle", and incredibly useful—a great combination). Everything just worked. Wish I could say that for the proposal I'm working on. Back to reading... 2:49:56 AM | reply [] Decided to put off the ICeCoffEE 1.2 release for another week. It's crashing in Terminal still, not reproducibly (sometimes I can launch 20-30 URLs before it crashes, there's no seeming pattern) but very definitely. I don't know what the problem is. 12:14:56 AM | reply []