File-swapping Tools Are Legal
Eric Blair links to this New.com story. I didn’t expect this, and it’s great news.
Archive for April 25, 2003
Nisus Writer Express
Nisus has released a beta version of their Cocoa rewrite of Nisus Writer. As much as I’m glad that Nisus Writer is still under development, I can’t get that excited about the product because it hasn’t yet caught up to Nisus Writer 4. As with OmniGraffle, the interface is palette-heavy, although the palettes are in a drawer. When did the menu bar go out of fashion? Palettes should be for frequently used settings where I need direct feedback. I don’t need a palette for setting the number of columns in the document; I’ll do that once!
FontSight
Just as I was pining for the menu bar, Stone Design released FontSight, which brings back the Font menu. It doesn’t work in Carbon applications, but most Carbon applications have Font menus, anyway. Hopefully it will evolve into a MenuFontsX. MenuFonts showed previews of fonts in different sizes, and you could type the first few letters of a font’s name to jump to it in the menu.
MORE to Keynote
EquationService, if you haven’t seen it, is a handy free application which produces PDF images with PDFLATEX or CONTEXT that can be dragged and dropped into Keynote or almost any other Mac OS X application. The main advantage over using TeXshop or similar is that you can typeset a single equation to get a small PDF image containing only that equation, rather than an entire page. The interface sucks, however, and I sent the author some changes which I hope he incorporates.
Watson 1.7
I hope people like the new SiteSearch tool. When people talk to me about Sherlock 3, what is undershadowed by The Controversy is the fact that there were hundreds of plugins out there for searching sites, which people liked, that don’t work in Jaguar! A lot of Sherlock’s original purpose of “meta-searching” is no longer pertinent, thanks to Google, but the ability to search a targeted site conveniently was abandoned when Apple changed gears. Yet those plugins are still available out there in Web-land, and many of them actually still work…not in Sherlock 3, though…just in Watson, and, I think, Interarchy.
Frankenstein
John Gruber analyzes the Dan Gillmor article that’s been getting entirely too much coverage. I’m sick of Carbon vs. Cocoa and which group contributed what to melange that is Mac OS X. Gruber’s best point is that much of the great Mac software has historically been written by small developers. The only (non-Apple) applications from big companies in my Dock right now are Internet Explorer and Photoshop Elements. In a few minutes I’ll be starting up FrameMaker. I doubt this ratio has changed much for me over the years.
Quote of the Day
Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.
—Donald Knuth
