It is with regret that I have to post this. I have been trying to visit a couple of sites that do not seem to be responding. After searching in a Famous Search engine, as well as not so famous ones, I can’t find anyone noting or mourning their loss. They are:
SiteLink and Dexly.
SiteLink, if you are indeed gone, was like a combination of MacPicks and MacSurfer. It has been around for many years which is why it surprises me there is no comment about the loss. Farewell SiteLink, whereever you are. The great Trash Can in the Sky.
As for Dexly, it was a site much like KillerStartups and NeoBinaries in that it tracked new Web2.0 sites and provided a place to comment on them.
To paraphrase Mad Max’s ex-feral companion; They exist now, only in my memory.
Vanished without a trace (except the Wayback Machine)
Trackpad tip
The two-finger trick for contextual menus, or right-clicking as it is more commonly known, is an effective substitute for a second mouse button.
Also trackpad hot corners and sidebars are great if you know they are there but until we can make trackpads with little LCD displays in them to indicate their presence, they can infuriate the uninitiated.
I finally realized that you can invoke the right-click by starting with your two fingers on the trackpad and then clicking the trackpad button, or you can hold the trackpad button down first and then tap your pair of fingers.
Very nice.
Dead Logic Board on a MacBookPro
If your MacBookPro boots up one day and it looks like the above picture, with your screen completely covered in a checkerboard pattern, then you need to get your logic board replaced
Login as Network user
Now this is interesting for admins… Let’s say you set up your Macs to authenticate against Active Directory (AD), but you tell them not to bother deriving the Network home from the UNC path
Then you login. When asked , you do not create a Portable Home Directory (PHD) on that particular Mac.
What happens there is OS X gives you access to the computer/hard drive but you have no Home Folder.
The icon for the Mac HD is replaced with the Home icon.
You can’t save files to the local drive because you haven’t got any permissions.
Therefore if you do things this way then you would have to set up an automount, perhaps in NetInfo or using AppleScript or Automator. If the latter, I imagine you would need to put the script/action or an alias to them in the User Template, so when someone new logs in they can mount a share and have somewhere they can save files.
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Firefox add-ons madness
I have become addicted to Firefox add-ons. Currently I am trying out Fleck and JumpKnowledge in the annotation area. Closely related is GroovyNotes for sending a page straight to another user.
In the bookmarking division we have Kaboodle and AddThis. Kaboodle lets me bookmark sites, then tag and share them but based on the default categories it seems to have been designed with wish lists in mind. AddThis, on the other hand, lets me send my bookmark directly to a number of bookmark sharing sites such as delicious and shadows.
There’s also SimpleDelicious which provides a menu of your del.icio.us bookmarks by tag. Only problem is when I select one it doesn’t load the page into the browser. I’m also trying uber-addon BlueOrganizer, now I understand some of the things it does.
Competing for attention in my contextual menu is HyperWords which lets me select any string of text and search for it on Yahoo, Google or various dictionary sites. Very nice as Firefox isn’t cocoa-based and thus doesn’t support Apple’s Dictionary.app .
Now what I really need is something like Foxmarks but for add-ons, so when I am on different computers I can synchronize the add-ons!
ScribeFire and MindMeister
I’m trying out ScribeFire, a Firefox Add-on, to upload this post./
I wanted to post to Vox but it doesn’t auto detect Vox’s API.
I don’t know what URI I am supposed to give it.
Please ScribeFire team, add Vox support!
Anyway the true content is that I am trying out MindMeister.
Looks promising, but I am unable to create children of children. Maybe its becasue its a free account .
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Hypertext editor back from the grave
I can’t believe it! Eastgate System’s StorySpace hypertext editor is back from the grave! I found it while looking at the alt.hypertext FAQ on the FAQ Archive.
http://www.eastgate.com/storyspace/index.html
I used to sell this many years ago. Probably about two copies. But it seemed quite capable software. It was replaced to some extent by mind-mapping software that can export to HTML such as Inspiration, and of course your standard web tools like Dreamweaver.
So close but…
Emulation. When you absolutely, positively had to run Windows. Possibly a networking issue, but maybe there was an app you needed to run. Most likely you just didn’t bother to find out if there actually was a Mac version, and did you contact the company? Unlikely.
Insignia SoftWindows
Now the funny thing that happened here was that Virtual PC, formerly the #1, got bought by Microsoft, made into a PC version and now given away for free! but only on that platform. Current #1 would therefore have to be Parallels.
Couldabeen for presentations
When we had choice in the matter, you could buy
Aldus Persuasion (later bought by Adobe)
Then Adobe gave up on it, and decided that Acrobat would be the way to go, because they could do all this slideshow-type stuff in a PDF. However you would have to create your content in one of their other apps.
Current champ: Microsoft Powerpoint
Contender for second place: Apple Keynote
Couldabeen for CD Burning
Back in the day there were two real choices. The one that didn’t make it was:
Gear.
Today’s #1: Roxio Toast.
Others that didn’t make it: WaveBurner, Discribe
