OmniWeb -- my new better OS X browser

OmniWeb

I'm trying out OmniWeb these days. It has one amazing feature and several excellent features.

The amazing feature is workspaces. I loved tabbed browsing -- at first. Now I can't live without it, but it annoys me. On both Firefox and Mozilla I end up with a slew of windows, each with its own tabs. If I lose track of a tab, I wander through windows looking for it. In OmniWeb the Workspace gives me a hierarchical view of windows and tabs and lets me even rearrange the tabs between windows. I can display a mini-view of a tab to get more information than the tab title.

In the "just excellent" department I'd include their pop-up text editor for forms. Instead of making do with Blogger's textedit box, I have my own little editor. Slick and easy. It looks like OmniWeb has more than a few of these niceties.

Overall OmniWeb's rendering resembles Safari's -- they use the same web toolkit. Not quite as nice as Firefox and not recognized as Firefox by Blogger. On the other hand, OmniWeb doesn't suffer from the keystroke lag I get with Firefox on the Mac -- AND Mac services work with OW, they don't work with Firefox. Not to mention Firefox fonts and font spacing look pretty bad on my Mac.

Overall OW feels like a much better version of Safari. Worth paying for!

Slovenia - Quicktime VR panoramas

QTVR - CELOZASLONSKE PROSTORSKE SLIKE - FULL SCREEN VIRTUAL REALITY PANORAMAS

Visit virtual Slovenia -- at warp speed.

USB Geek -- the power of a platform

USBGEEK.COM

One of my favorite themes is the power of platforms. Provide a standard one can build on, and one can move worlds.

One of the most accidental standards anywhere has been the USB power connector. Not the data channel, the power. A standard plug, 5V, a few amps. Given that standard one can do a large number of interesting things. Too bad the Firewire equivalent didn't catch on; 12V would have been nice.

This store is dedicated to showing what can be done with that platform.

Recording music to a Mac

Macintosh Audio Recording

This is the 4th in a great series of Macintouch reader reports. Others have featured voice recording, this one tackles series music recording. I don't know the domain, but I'd bet this rates as a pretty authoritative review.

Macintouch has a unique approach to authoring content. I'm surprised others have not tried to copy it.

OS X Installer has an option that describes the pending installation

macosxhints - Preview all files that Apple Installers will install: " It may just be me, but I just noticed that the installer has a 'Show Files' option in the 'File' menu that, when selected, shows all the files and where they'll be installed. This appears to only be enabled when you're in the 'Installation Type' step. Very handy to pre-examine what'll be installed. "

I need a real blog editor -- like MarsEdit

Ranchero Software: MarsEdit 1.0 Beta

Today I realized that both Faughnan's Notes and Faughnan Tech blogs were formatted incorrectly. This happens often when I don't close a blockquote. Surprisingly, it's not easy to find the malformed post, but it wrecks the page display. I spent about 30 minutes slicing and dicing. It was 30+ posts back in one blog.

I need a real editor.

Fortunately there are several great OS X editors, like this one's predecessor. One of them should do the job. Oddly enough, there are few if any mature editors for XP.

EyeTV: Issues with analog VHS digitization

EyeTV Reviews and Owner Comments

iMac G4 800Mhz, 356MB Ram
- OSX 10.35
- eyeTV 200, vers 1.5
- formac FW ext drive 250 GB (for recording)
- Grundig GV 470 S S-VHS video recorder attached to eyeTV via S-VHS and audio cinch cables

Hi Mike, in addition to my earlier reports on eyeTV 200 I performed more tests, again only transferring VHS tapes to mpeg2. I did not record any live TV, neither did I use the programming features for TV shows. Alas, the results of my testings were again sobering.

My findings are as follows:

Converting 1st generation VHS (good to perfect quality) was not working flawlessly. In half of my recordings heavy block artefacts would occur on any given moment, which would last for minutes if left unstopped. Most of the time this only happened in recording mode.

On 2nd generation VHS (ie, copies from VHS to VHS) the results were almost always wasted due to artifacts.

It seems that eyeTV needs very bright and sharp feeds to render correctly. Since I was converting my music video collection lightning conditions were admittedly extreme: dark spots on stage, brightly lit artists, camera flashlights etc.

BTW: Research in discussion groups on the internet revealed that direct-to-mepg2 video rendering applications in the PC world are sensitive to this problem as well. Only digital video (DV) feeds seem to bring good quality results. Big drawback is the time needed to render DV to mpeg2 for burning DVDs. Here PCs (and probably G5s) are in advantage of my (slow) G4 system. I never tested Miglia or Formac products which offer analogue video to DV rendering, neither do I own a digital video cam to verify rendering time. But since I don't have to edit a lot in my recordings (titles, cuts, advertisements etc)--which is the DV advantage over mpeg2 video--this option never interested me anyway.

and

ElGato Tips for EyeTV 200 VHS Encoding Problems

To fix the VHS encoding problems with EyeTV 200:

1) Using EyeTV 1.5, go to EyeTV > Preferences > Devices... > Encoding > Custom > Edit...
2) Change GOP Structure to "I, P Frames" or "I Frames Only"
This should minimize or completely remove such encoding problems, by allow EyeTV to recover from glitches in the signal gracefully.
By the way, "I Frames Only" allows for frame-by-frame editing, a much requested feature.

Nick F.
Technical Support Specialist "

Hmm. Looks like some serious technical issues here. EyeTV has a money back guarantee, so I'd have to be ready to test and return. Pass-through on a digital camera seems to give the best results as near as I can tell.