Status-Q

Now that Tiger, Apple new version of Mac OS, has been released, those of us with developer licences can talk about the cool new stuff, and there are more new articles and websites to read this weekend than ever before.

Anyone with an interest in the underlying techie details as well as the visible might enjoy John Siracusa's 21-page review at Ars Technica.

A very significant new feature for me is not much talked about - the ability, at last, to rotate external displays and use them in portrait mode. This is a godsend for anyone who spends a lot of time reading or writing pages of text. I'm not sure whether it's supported on all Macs or just those with certain graphics chips, but it works on my PowerBook.

A friend recently joked that there was a discernible patten in my life: Any organisations I was involved in starting, I would leave just before the web site said anything meaningful!

Well, this was true of Ndiyo, but now, thanks to sterling efforts by John & Seb, the new site is live. More information will no doubt follow soon!

We've been almost ready to launch for a long time, but things like being mentioned on Slashdot tend to concentrate the mind.

The London Underground lines overlaid on a satellite image. (Click image for bigger version).

Ooh. Now, I really want one of these.

I have a lot to do in my gadget competition with John since he bought his Prius, but I think this might just allow me to overtake!

I'm often worried these days that something I see and find interesting on the web won't be available if I ever go and look for it again, or it'll be in some premium-rate archive and I've never yet stumped up the money for any of those. (Publishers, are you listening?)

Mac users, of course, can capture anything as a PDF using the built-in facilities of the Print dialog. But if you want to start doing some really nice things with your PDF files, you want to play with PDF Services, a little-known but rather handy feature of Mac OS X. This MacWorld article will get you started, and there's more information on Apple's site here.

The potential of this is starting to come home to me as I play more with a preview of Tiger, which will instantly index the text in any document you save to your disk. Including PDFs. It may not be long before I automatically capture the image of every web page I read.

I mentioned the Adobe/Macromedia merge a few days ago. There's a nicely sarcastic translation by John Gruber of the FAQ that Adobe issued about the merger.

The very latest (2005) PowerBooks have a motion sensor built in to them. It will park your hard disk heads if you drop or bump the machine. But that's not all it can be used for....

Ah, nostalgia - I came across this TechnoFile article by Jim Bray talking about the Broadband Phone project we did back in 2001/2. I'm sure I knew about the article at the time, but it had slipped my mind.

It was a fun project, the technology worked really well, and it is, alas, now confined to the annals of big-corporation history. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose....