DaisyDisk Live Updates Icon While Scanning

DaisyDisk (Mac App Store Link) is a utility for scanning hard drives and presenting the used space in a beautiful interactive map. It's a great app, and it works wonderfully well. But it wasn't until today that I noticed the amazing attention to detail by the developers.

While scanning on of my hard drives, I noticed that the icon updates itself with the scanning progress on both the Dock icon and the icon used when cmd-tab is invoked. Sadly, I was unable to get a screenshot of the latter.

Dock icon at 45% of scanning complete

Dock icon at 70% of scanning complete

Google Chrome for Mac (retro-post)

This was written when Google Chrome was just released for Mac in 2011, but it sat in my Drafts folder since I never got around to writing a full post.

Chrome has since become a permanent addition to my dock, so it's interesting to see my thoughts when it was first released. I've added annotations for some of the items in hindsight.

Likes

• animating tabs
• delete to go back to previous page (I still use this alot and get annoyed when a browser doesn't support it, *mumble*Safari)
• themes (I liked them at first, but stopped using them after about a week. The clean look is much nicer.)
• speed (It's still a really fast browser)
• the video is cool: http://www.youtube.com/googlechromethemes
• child tabs open next to parent tab, grandchild tabs open next to child tabs, new child tabs open between child and grandchild tabs (Safari now does the same thing for child tabs)
• status tabs popup on the bottom when loading or mousing over a link
• unified search field (Safari 6 has this now as well.)

Dislikes

• opening lots of tabs shrinks them. Much better in safari. (This is still relevant. Also, Safari 6's new Tab View is much nicer.)
• the website icon takes up a lot of horizontal space. Safari's centered text is much better. (Still relevant.)

Relativistic Baseball by XKCD

This is what makes Tuesdays awesome.

What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?

For the latest one, go to http://whatif.xkcd.com

Laziness or Busyness

I haven't posted here for almost a year, but I've been pretty involved with a ton of projects at work. I spent quite a bit of time building an HSPA+ Network for my company. We did that in about 5 months, which has to be some kind of record.

Other than that, I've been focused on other things. Hopefully, I'll be back on here a bit more for all 7 of you that read my blog last month.

Cheers.

Snarkety Snark Snark

I loved this: http://chadolson.me/2011/09/mike-elgan-doesnt-know-how-apple-makes-money/

via www.theangrydrunk.com

MYTH: Apple is a marketing company

The best rebuttal I've seen for this myth:

"Apple Is A Marketing Company" at Brian S Hall's blog

Other company's commercials focus on pizazz and marketing. Apple focuses on people using its products. Marketing my ass.

Great Printable Productivity Tools

Productivity Tools by David Seah.

There's so much good stuff here.

Manu Samoa Prayer

‎"Our players who art in Blue, Rugby be thy game.
When full-time come, thy will be done, in 2011 as it was in '91.
Give us each game our daily victory, and forgive us our previous shortcomings...
As we forgive those who coached in '07 (and after '91).
And lead us not to knock-out round failure, but deliver us from World Cup drought.
In the name of Fats, Birtwhistle and the Holy Samoa islands.
AMEN!"

GO BLUE!
(via Mark Esau and family)

Twitter Mobile now available for Bluesky customers in American Samoa

Announcement tweet:

http://twitter.com/#!/twittermobile/status/104598670225309696

This was actually a lot of fun to set up. It was really cool working with the team at Twitter, and actually implementing a service to interface with something as big as Twitter was really gratifying.

The only downside is that I've been killing the battery on my phone with all the texts.

Movist

I have three apps on my Mac for playing movies:
- Quicktime (included in the default install)
- VLC
- Movist

Movist is currently my default video player for everything except wmv files which VLC tends to do better on. But other than that, Movist has quite a few advantages over the other two.

If you have several video files in a folder that are parts of the same clip—such as movie1.avi, movie2.avi, and movie3.avi—Movist will automatically play the next one when the first one finishes. The only caveat is that they have to be named the same with number suffixes.

You can also turn the volume up to 4x the normal maximum. Quicktime is obviously stuck at 1x and VLC only goes up to 2x. This is a boon to laptop users since the smaller speakers aren't very loud to begin with.

It's a solid app and definitely worth a look.