Sunday, September 25, 2005

Firefox 1.5beta on OS X: Crisp!

Firefox 1.5 beta One is out for OS X:Mozilla Firefox Project (Development Information).

It's impressive. I tried Camino 1.0a yesterday, but it had too much type lag on a slower machine to be useful. In contrast, Firefox 1.5 is very snappy. It feels much faster than 1.0 on my old G3 iBook and it's even faster than Safari.

Camino's aesthetics weren't the best either. Fonts and buttons were a bit off. Firefox looks at least as good as Camino (neither can rival Safari though).

I think Firefox 1.5 will be quite astounding.

Saturday, September 24, 2005

A clever product: cellboost disposable battery for iPod

I'd forgotten my firewire cable, and my 3G iPod was running down. I was facing an undefended airplane trip!

Panic set in, but I caught site of this at an airport store -- for $10. It worked perfectly. It doesn't lock onto the iPod so you can't wave your Pod around -- the battery will go flying. It worked well in my headphone case.

They claim 8 hours of life. Based on the size and heft I suspect it's a LiOn battery internally. I think they have a very good shelf life, so one of these will probably see you through a few separate crises. I'm carrying one in my luggage from now on!

Friday, September 23, 2005

iFill: stream radio directly to the iPod

It's in beta, but a very cool service. Good for listening to NPR ...I wonder if it will do commercial skip ... (that would be radical)

iFill - Griffin Technology

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

RapidWeaver: a personal web management tool for OS X

I still do my web work using FP 98 on XP. I'll change over someday. On OS X there's nVU and now Rapidweaver (which has gotten good buzz): Realmac Software - RapidWeaver

At last: a SOHO document scanner for OS X

This is potentially quite interesting, a document scanner for OS X:
Macworld UK - Apple Expo: Fujitsu comes to Mac: "Fujitsu announced its brand-new desktop colour image scanner - 'ScanSnap for Macintosh - at Apple Expo.

The 'ScanSnap for Macintosh' is a compact, upright desktop A4 image scanner. It also offers the capacity to scan documents into accurate PDFs using Fujitsu's software, which also lets those resultant PDFs be fully searchable by Mac OS X's Spotlight search feature.

The machine scans 15 pages per minute (A4, portrait, 150dpi) in the one-sided simplex mode and 30 images per minute in duplex mode (A4, portrait, 150 dpi), scanning front and back pages in just one single pass.

The scanner automatically recognizes whether documents are black & white or colour, and even deletes unwanted blank pages.

It ships with a 50-page automatic document feeder (ADF) and is about the size of a UK phone book. It supports output resolutions of 150, 200, 300 and 600dpi, with an optical resolution of 600 dpi.
This is for documents, not images. I'm going to look at it.

Digital TV: much easier to capture to a computer

TVMini - Watch Digital TV on your Mac

This tiny device is all that's required to capture broadcast digital TV and capture it on a computer. Good for PBS?