Wednesday, October 23, 2002

Brent Simmons writes about switching from Eudora to Apple Mail, IE to Chimera, and dumping the Flash plugin. "Have I missed Flash? Are there other uses for Flash I'm sad about missing out on? Nope. I don't miss Flash in the least tiny bit." I use both Eudora and Mail (the beauty of IMAP), have switched almost entirely from IE to Chimera except for the very few sites I visit that use Java or the Windows Media plugin, and finally dumped the Flash plugin today: it causes about 99% of my Chimera crashes. Unlike Brent, I do use and like Flash when it's put to creative uses rather than ads. One little-known feature of QuickTime is its Flash compatibility: starting with QuickTime 4, QuickTime version n supports Flash version n–1, which is sufficient to play the majority of Web content. QuickTime appears to do a much better job than the Flash plugin, and permits you to resize or navigate back and forward in Flash animations, great when you have a big screen (Flash is a vector format after all, so most animations scale smoothly) or want to watch just part of an animation. So, now when I really want to watch some Flash, I just view source, copy the .swf URL, and paste it into QuickTime Player's "Open URL" dialog box. 1:15:00 PM | reply [] I'm back to using Archipelago (yay!). See this thread for discussion of the somewhat nonstandard commands required to ensure that your posts aren't made published prematurely. 12:44:24 PM | reply [] Updates to two of my favorite Mac applications were released today. Path Finder 2.0 is a Finder replacement by Steve Gehrman, and Drop Drawers 1.6 is a tabbed launcher by Gideon Greenspan. Path Finder is a major revision of SNAX, the product of six months of very hard work. It significantly improves dislpay speed, adds a ton of new features including approximate parity with the Jaguar Finder, and most importantly has a nice new icon (those of you beta testers who saw the "original" Path Finder icon will know what I'm talking about ). Drop Drawers isn't quite as indispensible for me as it was before I started using LaunchBar. I hardly ever use Drop Drawers to launch applications directly any more, but for dragging and dropping, starting scripts, quick access to all running applications including background processes, or as a space to store temporary clippings, it's terrific. Version 1.6 finally appears to fix an annoying bug where Drop Drawers would go deaf to keyboard shortcuts, improves drawer opening speed (not that the old version was particularly slow), and adds drawer transparency. Drop Drawers has a huge amount of flexibility lurking under an elegant, drawing program-like interface. 12:40:34 PM | reply [] Michael McCracken writes about some great Emacs minor modes, hide/show mode and the Emacs Code Browser. I wish there was some way to collapse everything at once in hide/show mode; I'm still looking for decent automatic folding support in Emacs that doesn't require I reformat my source code. The Emacs Code Browser is really nice: it takes over an entire Emacs frame, parses your code as you type, and adjusts its context to match the file you're working in though it does limit you two edit windows per frame (in Emacs parlance, a window is a pane, and a frame is a window—confused yet?) It essentially does correctly everything Speedbar does wrong, so if you've used Speedbar and been disappointed, give ECB a try. I had some installation troubles because of the XEmacs 21.5 beta I was using. Make sure you update to beta 9 to get package installation (sort of) working, then install the latest eieio, semantic, speedbar and c-support packages. hs-minor-mode is included in the c-support package (see hideshow.el for some sample key bindings and mode hooks, taking care to fix the 'minro' typos); ECB is not yet packaged. Note that the site-lisp directory is dead. Packages you install (say, the ECB one), put in .../lib/xemacs/site-packages/lisp. Subdirectories of this directory are automatically added to the load-path, and site-packages/lisp/site-start.el works like you'd expect. 12:39:40 PM | reply []