Yasu Coding Begins!
It’s official. Coding on the new 2.0 version of Yasu has finally begun. My goal is to hopefully have it ready for release by early November (in order to coincide with another “something” that’ll be coming up – more on it later), so that means nose to the grindstone in a major way with everything else I’ve said “yes” to.
I considered making a list of all the nice new features I plan to include, but opted against it since that would only spoil the surprise for the users. Suffice it to say, the sophomore version of Yasu will be nicely matured, while keeping the ease of use the application has become known for.
I would like to share this though. For those I may have scared when I pondered making Yasu “nagware,” fear not. I don’t plan to do it – at least not yet. Even though I could comfortably quit my day job if I were to get just $5 per download (that’s a whole lot of downloads…), I’m still going to leave it up to the user to decide if it’s worth spending their money on or not. (Man, if that wasn’t a blatant beg for donations, then I don’t know what else is going to do it…)
Okay, enough groveling. Time to get back to work.
Oh TTP! How the Mighty Have Fallen…
Well… It’s certainly nice to finally have my laptop back. It only took 3 days – and 4 attempts – for TechTool Pro to fully optimize my paltry 60gb hard drive. I’m more than a little disappointed in the utility at the moment.
I own version 4.0.4, which, as Micromat says, is Tiger compatible. I am aware that a 4.0.5 update is available, but I refuse to use their silly e-drive option. In my opinion, it’s a HUGE waste of valuable disk space. Besides, if your drive really goes belly up, there’s probably not a whole lot the e-drive’s gonna be able to do for you anyway. Nope. I’d rather boot from a CD to do my maintenance because it just feels right to me. But since I don’t feel I should have to shell out another 25 bucks for a whole new CD that only contains a “dot-oh-dot-one” revision, I’m stuck with 4.0.4. I know it didn’t even cost Micromat half that much to produce the updated disc. Price gouge anyone?
The point of this rant? None, really. But I guess I’ve learned that there’s a memory leak the size of Texas in the 4.0.4 optimization app, because, of the 4 times I had to re-run it, it came to a grinding halt after a few hours of operation and then caused the machine to reboot itself. I considered not completing the optimization after the first failure, but it made me very nervous to have a half way optimized drive. I’m still a bit concerned that some little bit of data that I’m going to need at the most critical moment in my life may have been lost. But what really has me baffled is I’m not sure why this happened on my portable, because the same version has worked fine in the past on all the desktop systems I maintain. Go figure.
Needless to say, I’ll be steering clear of optimizing the hard disk of my laptop with TechTool Pro 4.0.4 until I can get my hands on the latest CD version.
Yet Another Site Redesign
Never one to be satisfied with something for too long, I found myself on a site redesign kick last night. The original plan was to only tweak a few things, but me being me, a few things turned into several which turned into many and then finally became everything. Before I knew it, the clock struck “you’ll-have-a-heck-of-a-time-getting-up-tomorrow-thirty.” The late night was worth it though. Personally, I really like the new look and feel. It’s far more open and accessible than the previous iteration. What’cha think?
Yesterday brought a new project that I’ve dubbed “PseuDock,” a scriptable background application which is used to kill the Finder and Dock in order to lock a user out of the UI for one reason or another (e.g. – kiosk mode). The app is the result of a question from an individual that I’ve been helping out with a project. So far, it’s come along nicely, and once I solve the issue of disabling the Apple Menu items, I’ll be putting it up on my software page.
Yasu is in the works & I’m getting real close to the point of actually writing code. I’ve considered a lot of recommendations and ideas, adding this option, or that functionality, etc. But I keep coming back to “less is more.” There’ll be a few new things, but nothing radical. The original idea of Yasu was to keep it as simple for the user as possible. That mantra continues in the new version. More on it soon.
I Love Finding New Things
I was fiddling around with Keynote yesterday, prepping for a user group presentation (more on that when it gets closer) and came across one of those “Gee, I didn’t realize it was there” OS X moments.
I went to change the default font of the theme I was working with, and by sheer happenstance (a missed click trying to drag the font panel out of the way), I discovered the hidden “font preview” feature of the font panel which is part of most any Cocoa application that works with type.
As you can see above, if you click and drag the tiny little indentation/button downwards, it’ll reveal the usually hidden font preview pane. As you change the type face/size/color, it updates to reflect your choices, though it seems that it won’t display the type effects (drop shadow) when applied, but that could be a Core Graphics thing that my iBook doesn’t have.
Sometimes it’s the simply simple things that impress me about OS X.
Apple Engineers Are Geniuses…
I know it’s old news and all, but I just had to cough up my own review about Apple’s new Mighty Mouse. I finally got payed for my contribution to the August issue of MacAddict’s “50 Bugs” article, so I decided to pick one up along with an iSight camera and a new game (RailRoad Tycoon 3) on Friday.
After 3 days of using the mouse, all I can say is “Wow…” I’m totally blown away at the simplicity and ease of use. I’ve had no real troubles adapting to the scroll ball. In fact, using it has become very much second nature already. I think it’s much less work than a standard scroll wheel, and yes, if you get your timing down, you can actually scroll diagonally. Way too cool.
As for the left and right clicks, it took a little thinking about to get right at first since I’ve been working with a Logitech MX 310 dual button mouse with scroll wheel the last three months. I’m pleased to say that with a minimal conscious effort in the way I move my hand, I’ve easily adapted to the left/right click of the Mighty Mouse. All it took was learning to lift my index finger just the tiniest bit, nothing more. I still manage to miss a click every now and then, but it’s getting better all the time.
I haven’t used the two side buttons much, and contrary to what some may think, you must use both at the same time to invoke a “click,” which doesn’t quite feel natural to me yet. I find it’s easier to move my hand to squeeze with the thumb and middle finger than it is with the thumb and ring finger. I’m still up in the air about it.
Clicking the scroll ball as a button toggles Dashboard (the default setting), and is a feature I find really slick. I realized that I’ve avoided Dashboard for the simple fact that the keystroke of “fn + F12″ on my iBook is a little too out of the way for my liking. Yeah, I know, I could’ve changed it. Call me lazy…
Anyway, the bottom line… I think Apple engineers have done a decent job with this piece of hardware. Not only is it good looking, but there’s a cool psychological thing in having my “rig” back to all Apple hardware. If you’re still on the fence about picking one up, I’d urge you to go for it. You’ll probably be glad you did.
