Various Links Related to Words That End With ‘ck’

Thursday, 9 October 2003

Dock

Giles Turnball recently wrote a fun article for O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter, asking “What’s on Your Dock?”. He asked for Dock screenshots from a few various Mac users, including yours truly. A slew of people linked to the article and published screenshots of their own Docks, and the whole thing turned into a nifty way of discovering obscure useful utilities. Someone new to Mac OS X, with little idea of where to start looking for useful third-party software, would do well to check out the apps appearing in these Dock screenshots. If you’re into it, Michael Tsai points to a few others (and shows his), and the reader comments at Kottke’s site contain a bunch more.

Dick

As mentioned in Turnball’s Dock article, my preferred app launcher is Objective Development’s LaunchBar. LaunchBar is both clever and original, and I highly recommend it. And judging from how frequently it appears in other people’s Docks, it’s also quite popular. Popular enough, in fact, to have been shamelessly ripped-off by a Windows developer.

Lick

Mark Morford’s column from the October 1 SF Gate, “Lick Me, I’m a Macintosh”, is the best description of the I-just-got-a-new-Mac experience I’ve ever read:

And yet. You can’t help but notice. Apple seemed to really put some serious work into this, into the details, the packaging, the shape and texture. The rich black box, the clean unobtrusive font, the silver sliver inch-wide side-shot photograph of the PowerBook itself on the box lid.

No screaming colors and no garish cartoon graphics and no massive corporate logo and no bullet-point exclamation points listing the outrageous features you’ll never use and you’re like, wait a minute, what they hell does Apple think they’re hawking here, art?