OS X Leopard: my one wish

Leopard will be preannounced in the next few months. I have only one wish for it. No, not XP virtualization -- we have Parallels and that will suffice for me.

I want a remote access capability that's at least as good as Microsoft's ancient remote desktop protocol. This is a capability Windows has had built-in (XP Pro) for eons. True, Apple has something called 'Apple Remote Desktop', but I've never seen it in action. I don't have a trusted source to tell me if it really works for remote control. Not to mention that it costs more than a new version of OS X.

I believe Jobs has decided not to do this (ever?), and I expect to be disappointed. Other than that, there's not much in Leopard I'm likely to care about. (Vista? Surely you jest.)

Phil Bradley on search engines - from Exalead to Grokker

Phil Bradley is a Library science guy who blogs about libraries and search. I've read him for years, he's great. Now that Google's Firefox sync has made bookmarks useful again I'm using his web pages to rebuild my collection of search engine links. I always start with Google, but if Google and Google Scholar and Google Government disappoint, where should one go next? (Ok, so he doesn't discuss Bloglines Search yet ...).

Phil has two great resource pages on this topic:

• Search Engines on Squidoo: Squidoo is some kind of social network ranking site ...
• tabular representation: Same material, very succinct presentation.

I'm picking a few of my favorites from the collection, like Exalead (Bradley's fave), Brainboost, MSN Encarta Search, Dogpile, Thumbshots, Clusty, Ask.com, Wisenut, Yahoo Mindset and Grokker.

Update: Turns out I've written about this before! What's new is I can now sync these bookmarks across four machines - painlessly.

Bloglines Advanced Search: this is very cool

Bloglines was acquired a while ago by Ask.com, a 2nd tier search engine. Bloglines has its issues, but it's never sunk to the level of Blogger. It remains my primary blog tracking and reading tool.

Today they announced a new blog search suite, including Bloglines | Advanced Search. The neat part is they've delivered something I once asked Alta Vista to do -- back before there was a Google. The key is constraining search to a trusted subset of sites. If Alta Vista had followed my advice they might been able to fight off Google!

Bloglines offers the option of restricting search to one's blogroll. In other words, instead of searching all blogs, you get to search the blogs you like. No spam blogs of course. This is so valuable I may add back some of the very geeky blogs that I quit a while back. For pre-purchase reviews of technical products, in particular, this may be significantly better than a Google search. I'm going to see if I can embed the search box into my blog pages.

Replacing a defective Tungsten E2 with an old Samsung i500

My Tungsten E2 is dying - 10 days past the 90 day warranty. The Amazon reviews of the T/E 2 are scathing, and there's no shortage of quality issues with the Palm TX (1 year warranty) either. I'm disgusted. The PDA marketplace is dying -- what's a geek to do?

Reminds me of the Newton users gasping until the Palm arrived. Windows Mobile has always been awful and I don't want anything to do with the "modern" Palm hardware or software. I might try BlackBerry, but in the meantime I've an ancient smartphone (Samsung i500) that runs PalmOS 4.1 (the last good version).

I'm thinking that since DataViz's BeyondContacts will work on a Samsung i500 I'll dump ePocrates and squeeze my data onto that old Smartphone. Then I'll exercise my AMEX extended warranty and get the money back for my Tungsten E2.

Maybe I can limp along with that praying that Apple brings their smartphone to market before 2020, if the Samsung dies I'll just have to survive with a Blackberry.

Embedding a public events calendar in a website

Google's Calendar can be embedded within a public site. A nice complement to Google Spreadsheet for a sports/events site.

Parallels Desktop and Take Control

Tidbits, a reliable source, has a glowing review of OS X Parallels Desktop . They mention that "if you purchase 'Take Control of Running Windows on a Mac', there's a coupon at the end of the ebook with which you can save $10 off Parallels Desktop".

Basically anyone who wants to run XP on OS X should buy Parallels and the eBook.

OS X Get Info (cmd-I): summary version and standard version

A great summary of the Get Info command (properties) from Tiger:

Macworld: Mac OS X Hints: The many faces of Get Info.

… In versions of OS X prior to 10.4, if you selected multiple items in the Finder and hit Get Info, you’d get a nice summary window showing the size of the items in the Finder selection. In 10.4, however, that behavior has changed, with (of course) an exception. If you select 10 or fewer items in the Finder and hit Command-I, you’ll get (up to) 10 distinct Get Info windows. This change is a welcome one, for it makes comparing more than one file or folder quite simple.

If you select 11 or more items in the Finder and hit Command-I, you’ll get the 10.3-style Multiple Item Info window—a single window containing summary information for the selected items…

… If you want to see the summary info window for any Finder selection, regardless of the number of items in that selection, hold down the Control key, and then pick File -> Get Summary Info.

Or Control-Command-I.