Linked List: October 30, 2007

Tuesday, 30 October 2007

Another option for those looking for a third-party mouse driver, recommended by several DF readers. ControllerMate is a lot more than a mouse driver, though — it’s a “controller programming tool that allows you to customize the behavior of your HID devices — keyboards, keypads, mice, trackballs, joysticks, gamepads, throttles, among others.” The “programming” is done visually. So in addition to doing things like specifying a custom mouse acceleration curve, you can remap the keys on your keyboard. Very impressive, and it’s just $15.

California Kleptocrats Auctioning Airport Confiscata on eBay ★

The bastards at OAK have taken two mini Leatherman tools from me; now they’re selling them on eBay. (Via Nat Irons.)

James Gosling: ‘Solaris and OS X’ ★

Java on Mac OS X has gotten so bad that James Gosling, creator of Java and Sun’s developer platform CTO, has switched from a MacBook to a notebook running Solaris. What an outrage that the best platform to develop for Sun’s Java is Sun’s own operating system. Sounds great:

There is one area that’s a problem: when I close the lid on my laptop, it keeps right on running. It doesn’t suspend. I have to manually shut the system down.

AppleScript Release Notes for Mac OS X 10.5 ★

This one sentence alone makes it a major upgrade:

AppleScript is now entirely Unicode-based.

But there’s a ton of additional good stuff — I think it’s safe to say this really is a “2.0” release, the biggest linguistic upgrade to AppleScript ever. (Still no sign of the updated AppleScript Language Guide promised by Apple, though.)

SteerMouse ★

Archrival to USB Overdrive from Japan; also $20.

USB Overdrive 10.4.8 ★

I’m getting a lot of email asking what Logitech mouse owners should do if they want to use their extra buttons but who don’t want to install Logitech’s APE-powered Control Central software (which doesn’t work entirely on Leopard, because APE doesn’t yet work on Leopard).

I’ve been using Alessandro Levi Montalcini’s $20 USB Overdrive for years. In addition to giving you additional control over buttons, it allows you to set far faster mouse tracking speeds than Apple’s mouse driver. If you’re frustrated that Mac OS X’s fastest mouse speed is still too slow, USB Overdrive is worth a look. The latest version is certified Leopard compatible and adds support for Bluetooth mice.

Anil Dash on Leopard’s ‘Windows Blue Screen’ PC Icon ★

There does seem to be a karmic element to the fact that some problematic Leopard upgrades — even if they’re not Apple’s fault — result in a “blue screen”.

Java Developers Unhappy With Leopard ★

I fail to see why anyone (other than Java developers themselves) would care.

The Superest ★

Fantastic comic contest between Kevin Cornell and Matthew Sutter.

Aperture Vs. Lightroom: What Do the Pros Use? ★

John Nack on a survey of 1,026 professional photographers in North America regarding their RAW processing software:

66.5% using the Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in

23.6% using Lightroom

5.5% using Aperture

To be fair to Aperture, it might be helpful to remove Windows users from the equation for a moment. Even after doing so, Lightroom’s usage among Mac-based pros is still nearly double that of Aperture (26.6% vs. 14.3%).

What’s really interesting is that Lightroom’s use among Mac-using photographers wasn’t just higher than Aperture’s — it was higher than the number of Lightroom users on Windows. I think Mac users are more likely to try new apps.

Input Managers on Leopard ★

Allan Odgaard has the lowdown on InputManager support in Leopard:

Contrary to most rumors, input managers still work on Leopard (at least on my pre-GM seed), but for an input manager to be loaded there are now a few requirements it needs to fulfill.

The confusion over this is that during the pre-release seeding this summer, input manager support in Leopard changed quite a bit. For a while, they really didn’t work at all. In the shipping version, they work, but installing them now requires administrator authentication (so the potential problem where they could be installed silently behind your back, as with Smart Crash Reports, is now closed). But they’re officially unsupported, don’t work at all in 64-bit apps, and are “likely to be disabled in a future release”.

Inside Leopard: iCal ★

Dan Miller:

In the new iCal, double-clicking an appointment causes an inspector box to pop up right next to the appointment itself; to edit appointment details, you click an Edit button in that inspector box. (You can also select the appointment and hit Command-E.) That might seem like one click too many to some users; some might also object to the fact that the inspector box obscures part of the calendar.

It’s greatly annoying to me that events don’t open in editing mode when double-clicked. Cmd-E is good to know.

New Ricoh GR Digital II ★

Nice evolutionary update to my favorite pocket-size camera. Same lens as my original GR Digital, but now features “a new processing engine said to ‘dramatically’ improve high-ISO noise performance”. Also features much-improved RAW performance. Glad I didn’t wait for this when I bought mine back in April, but I highly recommend it to anyone in the market for a point-and-shoot — although with “availability in a month or two”, it might be cutting it close for Christmas.

Apple Sells Over Two Million Copies of Leopard ★

Not a bad opening weekend.

Girardi Is Yankees’ Choice for Manager ★

I was pulling for Mattingly (and pulling for Torre to stay before that), but like the sound of a manager with an engineering degree from Northwestern.

The Talk Show, Episode 12 ★

Dan Benjamin and yours truly, talking about Leopard and baseball.

Hulu Blog: Beta testing begins for Hulu ★

The comments are brutal.

Hulu Example Videos ★

Hulu, NBC and Fox’s joint online video venture, is in private beta-testing, but its URLs are easily guessable. This Slashdot comment links to this sample page of 10 embedded Hulu videos. The quality is great for web-page Flash video, certainly better than YouTube. But that doesn’t help if you want to watch them on your, you know, TV set — or on a portable device, or full-screen at a decent resolution on your computer.

Update: Apparently they’re preventing non-U.S. IP address ranges from accessing the video; at least one DF reader in Great Britain got an “Unfortunately this video is not currently available in your country or region. We apologise for the inconvenience” message when he attempted to view the above samples.

Jackass of the Week: NBC Universal’s Jeff Zucker ★

NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker claims Apple “destroyed the music business in terms of pricing”. As John Paczkowski points out, the going rate for digital downloads pre-iTunes was zero. Zero.

So while they sit around until hell freezes over waiting for Apple to voluntarily just start sharing iPod hardware profits with entertainment companies for no good reason whatsoever, that’s what they’re going to get for video now, too: zero.