a multi-tasked stream of consciousness or perhaps just emails to myself
I updated my entry on Plucker and OS X (which has drawn an amazing number of people here…) to include the latest and actual OS X installation for jPluck, which enables Desktop capabilities…
UPDATE 2/24/03…Just go here and download the OS X installation for jPluck. You will still need Plucker for your Palm.
Tabbed browsing and form AutoFill has made it into the latest internal beta of Safari, Spymac has learned.
The beta (v62) allows testers to open up new sites in elegant “tabs,” preventing the need to open multiple windows — though Tabbed Browsing has to be activated via the hidden debug menu.
[Spymac]
Have not had the pleasure yet of auto-fill, but the tabs function is way cool and more elegant than in Chimera or Mozilla/Netscape. This beta is a tab less stable, but I can be forgiving enough to handle the rediscovered functionality.
This past week I have been messing with a couple of tools: Zoë and POPfile.
POPfile, pre-checks, classifies and buckets my mail into the following categories: Commerce, Lists, Newsletters, Personal, Spam and Work
Mail then checks POPfile and can immediate sort spam to Junk as well as handle my other buckets in ways I want via rules.
Zoë also checks POPFile and messages it missed during the day are imported nightly or on demand. Zoë (mostly) skips flagged as spam messages from the x-header info assigned by POPfile leaving a (relatively, minus the rogue spam) clean database to locally search as my archive. Within Zoë you can see by date, subject, or person what communications have transpired. Mail can currently only search, but not cross reference, so this is a powerful addition. Zoë includes a fantastic tool in the way of a bundle file so from directly within Mail, you can link into Zoë by clicking on people or dates…
Zoë can also handle RSS… You can view your mail in newsreaders, or import your subscriptions (text or opml) directly into Zoë. You might like this to store and archive all messages from the sites you read locally, since newsreader tend to have a short memory.
How it all works….
POPfile is amazing!
Classification Accuracy
Emails classified: 971
Classification errors: 62
Accuracy: 93.61%
But not that simple an install… On Mac OS X you must read this. It will walk through the details. Following them through step by step should get you going… In just about 2 days I am batting 100% filtering to Junk in Mail. POPfile score more critically based on the bucket success and so far I am at just over 93% accuracy. A few more days and I should be very close to 100% there as well. I also turned the quarantine function on within POPfile for my spam bucket which kills web bugs and graphics on those messages. I did add an additional rule (beyond one for each bucket) to capture the quarantined messages since some of them slipping through.
Zoë is also a very cool tool, though I tried to push it further than it can go at this point (v. 0.4). I POP into POPfile and use Zoe for SMTP… any message I send is catalogued in Zoë which is very cool. Many messages I receive are not immediately in there, until after an import. Not a big deal for now… Things got funky when I realized that Zoë also had a pop server.
I tried to set up a workflow like this – Mail => Zoë => POPfile
Issues –
It is very tricky to get this to work. In theory it does work, but Zoe actually sends every message into Mail every time you check…argh. (I have been told that by leaving mail on server in Mail this can be avoided) I also noticed that Zoe (somehow) did not capture some messages I received in Mail. I know that might seem impossble, but it is the reality. Pretty sure it is a bug, which has now been reported.
Otherwise, using things as I originally set them up, I am working very efficiently in email. The new tools I have added to my workflow have made a significant difference in the way I manage messages.
PS – SpamFire, which I previously raved about has been put to rest based on much better I feel the control and performance is with POPfile. Your mileage may vary…
AgentArts has release a pair of iTunes scripts that automatically sort out your MP3 library. “Make Playlist Like” is a script that will build playlists of MP3s by artists similar to a selection; “Cluster Artists” will make a series of playlists based on all the tunes in your library. Both rely on AgentArts’s database of artist similarity, which also powers the back-end for eMusic’s recommendation system. I couldn’t get Cluster Artists to work on my 5400 MP3s, but I’m sure they’ll address that eventually.Link
Very Cool indeed! Can’t wait to integrate this with my iTunes / SliMP3 set-up… have to do that tonight!
“ZOE can [now] be directly integrated with Apple’s Mail.app by turning every email address and date into hyperlinks inside Mail.app itself.” (!) [Xspot]
This could be the coolest Mail utility ever! I can now click on dates and addressees in my mail and bee linked into my own (literally on my machine) web of connections. In seconds I can see links between contacts, key words, dates…see where this is going??? whoa. I did a backup (got hit hard by emila before…) of all my Mail before I installed this, with optional Service and Mail.bundle for total system integration.
I will report back on this one as I learn more… wow!
don’t ask why you would, but I just realized that when your iPod is connected in manual mode you can hit play and the music there plays through…
Select your iPod from the Source list… you should see the tracks on it. pick one and hit play. This just happened to be by accident actually but after trying it on a few tracks, it really does seem to work. I checked out the same songs in my main library file and they were not playing while the iPod was.
As I have already discussed, SliMP3 rocks! One of the coolest features for Macs is integration with iTunes. This means that you can have it read your iTunes library file as the way it sees how your music is catalogued. (You can also just have it scan your folder with music as well…)
I was having an issue with how to work this since I want SliMP3 to read the library file of a user that is not normally logged into our home computer (me vs. my wife). SliMP3 has no issue actually reading the file, there is just no way to update the library if you rip a CD or add tracks through the other user. I discovered this tip at Mac OS X Hints, which recommended user aliases to a publically accessible shared folder.
While this totally works for sharing the library between users, it did not allow for SliMP3 to see the alias…until I changed it to a Symbolic Link. They are basically the same in purpose, but unix (and as it happens…SliMP3) likes symbolic links better than aliases.
Now I have A SINGLE library file shared between the user accounts that continuously updates the SliMP3 server. This is killer…
Because my wife and I will be sharing the same library file, I wanted to make it easy to see what had been added recently, other than sorting by date added. Thanks to smart playlists in iTunes, we now have the option to see what was added this week, the past two weeks and the last month. All of these are accessible via SliMP3 – immediately as they change!
btw – the SliMP3 is hard at work on many additions to the software including a potential overhaul to the Web UI, based on an email from a user (to the user list) yesterday. The note was passed to the dev list and has already caused quite a stir. Check out the proposed revised look…
This is how things are supposed to work. Customer interact with companies who listen and encourage improvements to products based on how people use them.
Would you like to stream your music collection to yourself, regardless of where you happen to be, home, work, internet cafe? I know I would… and now I can. The best part is that it was free and easy to do.
There has been a lot of talk about different tools to control iTunes from a remote system, but they all involve playing the music back out on the server, not where you are. SliMP3 solves that issue and takes it even further!
Here’s what you need for this project:
Dedicated, connected machine (Mac,Linux, or Windows) with MP3 collection connected or inside another computer, with an internet connection and an MP3 player and browser you might also consider the SliMP3 hardware which connects directly to your stereo…(you will need additiional networking gear, like a wifi bridge for this)
The app installs as a preference pane in OS X and can be set to run on login or startup, making it possible to access your tunes even if the machine is waiting for someone to login. Once it is installed, things get configured and run through your browser. If you have the hardware, you can remote control the hardware with the browser, or the supplied remote control. (I don’t have it yet…waiting on the digital-out version.) Once you set the location of your tunes, either with the location of you iTunes library — which it reads for Playlists! — or simply your music directory, you can begin a queue. In iTunes, you can open a new stream
That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. You can create massive random shuffle lists by artist, genre whatever. It rocks!
A comprehensive overview was done by Tom’s Hardware, which covers the hardware and software in fantastic detail… There are also user and dev groups at Yahoo Groups — search for slimp3.
“In Mac OS X it is easy to save a document as a PDF file by simply opening the Print dialog and clicking the Save As PDF button. With the release of Mac OS X version 10.2.4, you now have the option to process the saved PDF file with AppleScript scripts that can perform a variety of tasks such as adding the saved file to a compressed archive, or including the PDF in an outgoing email message.” [AppleScript Info]
This is totally cool and yet completely frustrating. I can get this to work!
UPDATE – I had a space at the end of my Folder name which prevented these otherwise simple instructions from working. Doh!
I’m noticing immediate and significant performance improvements since the upgrade. I’m not sure whether it is from the Finder, or what, but so far this is great!
A new app called Earphoria allows you to share your iTunes library over Rendezvous. It automatically discovers all the Earphoria users on your network and allows you to stream their MP3 collections.
Works like a champ!
One of my favorite features of NetNewsWire is that it’s scriptable. There’s even a Scripts menu, so you can add your own commands as scripts.
Here’s a little two-line script that lets you subscribe in NetNewsWire to the frontmost window in Safari.
tell application "Safari" to set s to URL of document 1 tell application "NetNewsWire" to subscribe to sIt gets the URL of the front window in Safari, then it tells NetNewsWire to subscribe to that URL.
When NetNewsWire gets a subscribe command it automatically does RSS auto-discovery.
In other words, you could just be on the home page of a weblog in Safari, run this script, then NetNewsWire will (most often) find the RSS feed for that weblog. (If it exists, of course.)
You could put this script in NetNewsWire’s Scripts menu, or maybe put it in the global Script Menu, or even put it in the Dock.
And then there you have it, an easy way to subscribe to a site in NetNewsWire while you’re in Safari.
(By the way, you could probably modify the first line of this script to work with other browsers. It may not even need modification except for the name of the application.)
Just wondering if anyone else ever has this problem…
I have noticed that Mail.app does not like to hide. Of course, it does not happen all the time, but when it does it is very frustrating. This seems to happen with both the key command shortcut as well as the menu. Has anyone else experienced anything like this?
UPDATE – I have been noticing that the app tends to “hide” the viewer window leaving Mail.app the active application.
Update…Now everything seems to be working… so frustrating!
Post 10.2.4 all seems well
iScrobbler is a MacOS X port of AudioScrobbler — the media-player plugin that collaboratively filters your playlists with other users. It’s still under development, but it looks like it’ll be available for download RSN.
In case somehow you missed it…
The fastest and easiest-to-use web browser ever for the Mac. [Mac OS X Hot Downloads]
NetNewsWire 1.0 is shipping!
Many thanks go to all the beta testers and people who helped with their ideas and encouragement. Thank you! [inessential.com]
Just one of those things that has to be seen… I definitely dig it.
Konfabulator is an OS X control-panel for desktop widgets, web-services and a lot of other junk, besides, with a beautiful UI. It’s like Watson or Sherlock, but it’s free and it’s got a wide-open API so developers can add their own widgets to the panel. I’ve only played with it for five minutes, but I’m hooked. I wish there was a way to float the widgets in the foreground, set their transparency and resize them, though…
(Thanks, Matt!) [Boing Boing]
Brent Rocks! Making it easier to work the Lazyweb…
NetNewsWire 1.0b14 adds a new command to the Services menu: Subscribe in NetNewsWire.
When you select text—the URL in the address bar of Safari or Chimera, for instance—you can choose the Subscribe in NetNewsWire command to subscribe to the site associated with that URL.
NetNewsWire of course uses RSS auto-discovery to find the RSS feed, if the selected URL doesn’t point to the RSS feed.
Other changes in this release include support for Blosxom sub-sub-folders, sub-sub-sub-folders, and so on.
More details are on the change notes page.
From [MacSlash]
Here’s what the next version will be:
a stand-alone application that manages network accessible music libraries able to generate and manage playlists for your favorite mp3 player able to communicate with and control your mp3 player using AppleEvents Rendezvous-enabled built with a robust indexer and XML format that properly handles non-ASCII characters completely free of any Apple proprietary code or interface use completely open source under the GPL
more at iCommune.net
We all use and love Safari, it’s already a great browser. Organising bookmarks is easier than ever before, but wouldn’t is be nice if the bookmarks you add on your iMac at work, would show up on your PowerBook at home? Now it’s possible with JeepSafari. Think of it as iSync for Safari.