Linked List: February 6, 2009

Friday, 6 February 2009

PearC: Der PC Mit Mac OS X 

German PC-maker now selling machines with Mac OS X pre-installed. Spiegel magazine reports that the company does not fear legal consequences on the grounds that they don’t think Apple’s Mac OS X license agreement applies in Germany. The article is in German; here’s a Google translation. (Thanks to DF reader Utz Westermann.)

Rich Animation Using CSS in WebKit 

You have to be using a recent WebKit nightly build to see the examples in action — but they already work in the shipping version of MobileSafari for iPhone OS. Impressive as hell. It’s pretty much exposing a big chunk of Core Animation to web developers.

On The Job 3 

My thanks to Stunt Software for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote On The Job 3, the new version of their excellent time-tracking and invoicing app. It looks cool and works smoothly, but it offers powerful features like support for multiple currencies, customized layouts for invoices, and idle time detection for the time-tracking.

From a UI design standpoint, On The Job is a delight to explore. There are a ton of thoughtful little touches. And that bee has got to be in the running for best app icon of the year.

On The Job costs $40, but through the end of this week, you can save 20 percent using the coupon code “FIREBALL”.

Tags 1.1 

Interesting new $29 utility from Gravity Apps. Tags implements what is effectively a system-wide cross-application universal tagging system for Mac OS X. The UI is like Quicksilver or LaunchBar, in that you can invoke it from anywhere with a keyboard shortcut. But what’s novel is that you get to apply the same set of tags to everything from files in the Finder to Mail messages to Safari bookmarks. The tagging data is stored as file system metadata, and is thus searchable via Spotlight.

It’s not clear to me whether they’re using Mac OS X’s xattr metadata system in a way that’s strictly according to Hoyle, though — Tags is writing its metadata into Apple’s Spotlight namespace, because that’s the only way to get it indexed by Spotlight. To my knowledge that’s not officially supported.

Can’t say I care for the paper-y visual appearance, either. Reminds me of the old Drawing Board theme for the Mac OS 8-9 Appearance Manager.