iWebSites: now I need to look at iWeb

This donationware utility (via Macintouch) reminds me that I iWeb came with my iLife 06 package. I'd sort of forgotten about it since it was so .Mac centric (which meant I had to decide whether I cared for .Mac, which could take me years at my current cycle capacity). Thanks to iWebSites I can assess iWeb on its own merits.

iWebSites Home

When Apple introduced its clever iLife web design software, iWeb, they left out one important feature: the ability to load and save multiple web sites. There isn’t even an “Open” menu item under the File Menu! You can create multiple “sites” that are somewhat independent of each other, but they still exist as one file (”Domains.sites”) and cannot be separately uploaded onto different web servers or into different .Mac accounts.

Gigapixel wars: how much information is really out there

A photo of Delft is over a gigapixel resolution. You can do quite a bit of cropping of such an image.

Pick any spot, then zoom in. Eventually you'll get to the image limit. It's easy to read the license plates of cars that are barely visible in the original view. Imagine being able to search a mountain for a lost person by taking a single image, then allowing thousands to search it by computer.

There must be tens of thousands of 'screens' in this image at the highest resolution. Delft is a quiet town, but somewhere in there one must be able to find something at least a little bit improper. Try picking a street, then walking it using your mouse. Let me know if you find anything!

LaunchBar 4.1 is out

TidBITS has a nice summary. I've been using 4.1beta for ages, I guess I'll get around to updating. Every so often I adopt a new Launchbar feature, but the core functionality is hardwired to my fingers. A terrific product, I've never really been tempted to try anything else. Why mess with perfection?

How to crater XP: print a google map from IE

Here's how I cratered XP. It didn't just lock up, it died. Nothing worked, no keyboard entry, nada. I had to power cycle.

1. Enable the obscure print background setting for IE (advanced options).
2. View a Google Map in Hybrid view (sat and map).
3. Print to Adobe Acrobat (probably works for regular printer as well but I don't have time to power cycle my desktop.)

When you do the same thing in Firefox you get a smear of blurred color, but neither FF nor XP craters. Interesting lesson about the stability of IE.

The best printing browser, hands down, is Safari. IE and Firefox used to be tied, but I'd say FF is ahead now. I'll have to try this experiment with FF and Safarin on my Mac and see what happens there.

I think Google Calendar might generate PDFs to print via a PDF viewer. Given the state of the browser, Google Map probably needs to do same thing.

StickyBrain and Yojimbo: CoreData is the key difference

StickyBrain 4.1 beta brings serious features to the table - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

My main question when comparing the two will be which uses a more accessible data store. Yojimbo uses OS X CoreData, StickyBrain uses its own database store. Point and game to Yojimbo.

No more single vendor data stores. CoreData is something we can get at.

Aperture: good news

Two pieces of good Aperture nows.

First, Version 1.11 is out. I hadn't expected it for a month yet. Given the history of this product a 1.11 release weeks after the 1.1 release is a sign that Apple is serious about squashing the quality issues.

Second, Gruber has a believable story on why the 1.0 release was so awful and why it's likely Apple will get on top of the problem.

Automator does something useful? iPhoto browser

macosxhints - 10.4: System-wide iPhoto browser