A interface makeover for Twitterific

A lot of people are really impressed by Iconfactory's Twitterrific, a Twitter client. I like it myself, but I think it's small and cute UI could be even smaller and cuter.

Here's the original Twitterrific:



And here's my idea:



The changes aren't huge, but I have reasons for them. First I wanted to drop the embedded rounded boxes which just added to the window size. I also didn't like the unnecessary rounded horizontal rule that would show up in "short" mode. The entry box needed to be bigger and stand out more.

The "characters left" counter is surprisingly literal in Twitterrific. I replaced it with a Safari-style text box/progress bar which fills up with blue from the right as you type.

Inquisitor - search box enhancer for Safari

You know how Firefox's search box completes as you type, gives you the option of picking the search engine to use on the fly, and shows suggested search terms? That's a cool feature. If only Safari had something like that.

Well, if you were willing to fork over $5, it did; David Watanabe, a developer of fancy-schmancy Mac apps, created a Safari plug-in called Inquisitor. It replicated the above functionality in a more graphic way than Firefox. This worked well, though not always perfectly, and not everyone wanted to part with $5 (the very nerve of the developer...!)

Ok, no more excuses. If you use Safari, head on over to the Inquisitor website and get a FREE copy of the new version. It has all kinds of sweetness all over it. Here's what it looks like when you search for things with its help. It's completely and fully rad.



Apple should just buy Inquisitor, CoverFlow-style. David deserves more than donations and Safari users deserve Inquisitor.

iPod Shuffle sync speed problem (2G version)

My friend Dino wanted a small, no-nonsense music player for jogging and such and I recommended the new Shuffle, out today. It's tiny, it's simple, it's beautiful.

Dino also asked me to show him how to work this in iTunes (he's got a PC and listens to CDs). We hooked it up, picked a playlist of about 20 songs, and hit Autofill...

...and spent the next 10 minutes staring at the "Updating..." screen. It took about 20 seconds to transfer a single song! This definitely smelled fishy, so I resynced the Shuffle with my PowerBook (thinking it was an issue with Dino's USB port), but the slowness persisted.

I found the answer on Apple's support forums, and here it is in case you don't find it there yourself:

When you connect the iPod and click on it under Devices, under the Settings tab, there's a checkbox to "Convert songs to 128 ACC", meaning, to reduce the quality and filesize to fit more songs on the cute li'l thing. Nifty, but also quite unexpectedly slow. Unless you absolutely need loads of songs for your gym run, you'll probably prefer better transfer speeds.

New Pizzle

I treated myself to a new iPod Nano (PRODUCT) RED (which is a red iPod Nano product) and I'm loving it - the thing is hilariously small, light, and thin, the battery lasts forever, and the screen is sharper and brighter than Mark Twain.

I'm also liking the new iTunes, version 7. I haven't experienced any problems reported by many others, so I can only recommend it. The new iPod options interface is a very welcome change - the gray dialog box of v.6 was getting very, very cramped. I hope they play with the looks of it a little more to make it less webpage-like (I suggest making it more like the beautiful Apple product pages), but it's a nice little iPod Central.

Another welcome addition is a nice, big picture of my iPod. However, I was ever so slightly disappointed to find that it was a generic gray instead of red like my actual iPod. Couldn't this be figured out from its serial number? C'mon, Apple....

...And sure enough, with yesterday's iTunes 7.0.2 update, this feature was added. Here's what my wine-red little toy looks like in iTunes now:

Tangerine awakening

Tangerine is a trendy new Mac app with a simple and useful premise: generate "mood-based" iTunes playlists. This is done by analyzing the iTunes library and picking songs in the user-selected BPM and intensity ranges. If I want a rock-out or exercise playlist, I pick high BPMs and intense beats; for chill-out time, I would pick the opposite.

Most non-Mac users will mock our appreciation of nice application icons, but I honestly don't care - let me profess my love for the Tangerine icon here and now. It's superb. The app itself looks pretty swanky too, though for my taste, it mimics too many iTunes features I might as well use in iTunes (if Tangerine were, say, a plug-in instead of a standalone app). But that's not really a complaint, just a side note.

Analysis of my 3,800-song library took about an hour and a half on a PowerBook G4. That's not stellar, but it's also not like I needed that punk playlist immediately. After this I went to create my first playlist - something fast and intense, my weapon of choice for dishwashing, dusting, and other household chores. I went for a BPM range of 130-200bpm and above-average intensity. I was surprised to find only these two settings (including a distribution curve).

The results were sorely disappointing. Included were a number of scratchy 1930s jazz cuts, and some of the mellowest tracks by Tricky, Can, and Beck (trust me, they were pretty darn mellow). I pushed both the BPM and the intensity up and got similar results - while some of the tracks were what I would put in the "fast and intense" category using my cerebral analyzer, they made up 10-20% of the generated mix.

Just about the only way I was able to create playlists that matched my expectations of fast/slow and mellow/intense was by picking from one of my carefully assembled iTunes Smart playlists. Which had me wondering why I was using Tangerine at all - a quick comparison of purely random iTunes lists using a somewhat selective playlist and Tangerine playlists seeded from the same pool with the added BPM and intensity revealed no appreciable difference between the two.

Maybe I was doing something wrong. Or maybe my music library is wacky somehow. In any case I found that Tangerine, while pleasant to use, did next to nothing for me - and not because I'm not in its target market. I have dozens of Smart playlists I regularly use. They were one of the things that impressed me the most about iTunes.

Sorry, you sexy citrus - maybe next time.

Kodak CX7430 pictures crash iPhoto...

I've never had this problem in iPhoto, and I've been using it for years with dozens of different cameras: when I tried importing pictures from my friend's Kodak CX7430 today, it silently crashed every time. It didn't matter if I imported one picture at a time or many, and each picture did it. Moving the pictures from the camera to the Mac and then importing didn't fix it either.

I tried re-saving these in Photoshop. No dice - if the problem was with EXIF or other metadata in the files, a simple re-save wouldn't have changed it anyway.

My solution was to create an action that saves an image in the TIFF format, then run it as a batch action on all the images. The TIFFs were imported fine (same thing if I now converted them back to JPEG).

The funny thing is, I've imported pictures from this camera before. The only thing that's different now is that I ran the fifth 2006 Security Update just last night.

Memento mori to self

Google Calendar just made me aware of my mortality.

Usually I take full advantage of the calendar's no-sweat event creation - click a date box, type in something like "7pm dinner with Elizabeth Hurley at Consciousness Blossoms, Palm Harbor, FL" and it's automagically created at the right time and place. Today I went to add an annually-repeating event, so I clicked edit event details, opened the When section, noted that it repeats every year, and was given the usual option of ending the cycle at some point in the future.

Only this is an event I'd like to keep on my calendar forever... which, when you think about it, is really the next 50 years, maybe.

Thanks, you morbid freakin' software!

iSquint help

iSquint is a cute (and free) little OS X app that will convert your home videos, ripped movies, and footage of dancing cats to various iPod-friendly formats. Drag in the files, adjust settings if you don't trust iSquint to do its thing, and you're all set. Not the kind of thing one would need help with. But just in case you do, check out iSquint's Help menu...


(Click for full-size screenshot)