SOHO Organizer: a Palm Desktop for OS X

Wow. I didn't think there was any life left in the Mac Organizer world, but the makers of StickyBrain have a Cocoa build desktop out: SOHO Organizer. It's new and hence likely treacherous, but there's a one month download trial. Costs $100. Hmmm. I'd like to see how well the task management works.

Aperture review: non-destructive editing for JPEG and TIFF

I was surprised to see that Aperture does non-destructive editing for JPEGs and TIFFs as well as RAW. Overall this is a very clear and valuable review:>

Art of RAW Conversion #022 @Digital Outback Photo

... Non-destructive editing Aperture does not modify master files but stores all modifications as a separate parameter set. Thus, you may have several versions of an image (master file). This is not new in RAW converters (e. g. RawShooter offers snapshots for this task), but Apple extends this concept from RAW files to JPEGs and TIFFs, as well ? it?s primarily intended to be used for files from your digital camera or scanner, but may be used for other files, as well.

I'm waiting for the promised patch release with some cautious optimism. I may even buy at that time.

Lock screen in OS X: Show keychain status in menu bar

MacDevCenter has written a brief tutorial on the OS X Keychain. It doesn't completely demystify the keychain (I'm still a bit unclear about what it means to unlock or lock an entire keychain), but it helps. I like the idea of showing the keychain status in the menu bar; as a side-effect I also get a convenient 'lock screen' shortcut.

MacDevCenter.com: A Look at Keychain Access (and Why You Should Care)

... If you choose to go down this route [lock keychain], you may quickly run into one of the disadvantages of being over-careful about security: websites and email clients and all sorts of other applications start pestering you with dialogs, asking you to enter your keychain password every single time something needs to be done. To avoid this, return to Keychain Access' preferences panel and check the "Show Status in Menu Bar" option.

Now you've got quick, easy access to your keychain controls from the menu bar, and you can lock and unlock whole keychains without having to mess around inside of Keychain Access itself.

Note that there's also a Lock Screen command, which may come in handy if you have to leave your machine unattended for short periods of time. It will ask for your username and password before letting you get back to work.

Another good policy is to create several keychains. One for boring day-to-day stuff--this might as well be your default login.keychain file, one for Secure Notes, and extras for any passwords and certificates that you need to keep extra secure.

Using the Keychain for secure notes is a bit silly. Much better to create an encrypted disk image to hold that sort of thing, and mount it as needed. Just be sure NOT to store the password for the disk image in the keychain!

Creating buttons for OS X (Photoshop required)

Random Tech: Beautiful Aqua Button Template and Tutorial

PDNOnline has a fairly detailed overview of Aperture

They've put a good review together. Biased towards the positive certainly, but it's not hard to see where they ran into problems. After reading about the pending update I'm hopeful I'll be moving to Apterure withing a few months: Putting Aperture Through Its Paces: Part I

Another OS X cache related problem

OS X caches cause no end of trouble. This one caused a 'corrupt font' error in Office:

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about the Apple Macintosh

...So you would think it was a file in my home directory. Wrong! The culprit was Apple's system level font cache, which caches fonts by user. Deleting /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/(uid)/, where (uid) is my user id (just check with get info if you don't know your id - yours is the one you own) solved the problem.

Google and Firefox: getting more serious? Two extensions

Google has published two useful extensions to Firefox, one related to blogging, the other to spotting phishing scams. I've installed both. Interesting by itself, but is this an early sign of a more vigorous Google/Firefox collaboration? I don't remember Google previously delivering anything for Firefox before IE.