30May2008
Posted by techpriest under: Mac Reviews.
Times is a brand new, and quite possibly revolutionary RSS reader for mac. Part of what people are calling the “Delicious Generation” of Mac apps (apps which try unconventional and innovative new interfaces and go beyond the traditional development model), it shifts the RSS paradigm into a new area.
Times moves away the statistics, “Read, Unread”, email style app, and moves towards a newspaper interface. Complete with page curl effect, Times turns your RSS into a virtual newspaper, with primary, stories, headlines, secondary stories and side columns.
Times is a leopard only app, and takes advantage of some leopard only features to make it’s user interface possible, such as Core animation. On certain mac models, where GPU (graphics) power is low, such as the macbook and the mac mini, Times intelligently switches to a “page slide” effect instead of the page curl, no user intervention needed. The idea of “read” and “unread” stories is completely optional, thanks to a tick-box that allows you to turn off the marking of newly downloaded stories as “unread”. Times also features an innovative, and as with the rest of the app, very visual, “stack”, for marking stories for later use or reading, replacing the tradition “flagged items” method.
My only discrepancy with Times is it’s relatively unknown trial restrictions, these restrictions are fairly unclear when you take the app for a test-drive, and it would be nice if the 30 day trial was a true trial.
Overall, Times is a great app, i now use it as my main RSS reader, it fits the anecdote of the digital newspaper that was used to explain RSS in the early days, and helps move RSS forward.
Times has an Across The Pod Rating of 4/5, a single license costs $30, from the developer, at Acrylic Apps.
4April2008
Posted by techpriest under: Uncategorized.
Yesterday, Microsoft announced that sales of Windows XP would be extended to ”June 2010 or one year after the general availability of Windows 7″. This effectively destroyed Windows Vista, as with all the bad PR, terrible reviews, and compatibility icons, it was unlikely anyone would actually purchase Windows Vista of their own accord, when rock solid, tried and tested (not to mention relatively non-resource-intensive) Windows XP was on sale right next to it. The only potential sale avenue that Vista had left, was bundled with PC manufacturers machines. In another move, Bill Gates announced today that Windows 7 (the OS currently billed as the replacement for Vista, as well as Microsoft’s next generation platform) will be available in “the next year”. This effectively makes sure that Windows Vista, has become the new Windows Me. If history continues to repeat itself, Windows 7 will be a far better and much more solid platform. Windows 7, along with competitors such as the Mac, Linux, and the often forgotten Solaris, will continue onwards. A headline might read “Vista Declared Dead, Long Live Everything Else!”.
3April2008
Posted by techpriest under: Site News.
The site takes a huge step forward today. We are bringing in two new contributors. Firstly, John Foster, of Macbreak Tech, Pixelcorps.TV, and Beerschool. Secondly, we have Dave Metzener, of Switcherblog. With more contributors, the site will just continue to get better. Hope you all like it!
2April2008
Posted by techpriest under: Uncategorized.
In Episode 5, we discuss a multitude of topics with John Foster and Alex Lindsay. It includes discussions on One bit is more than one bit, airports, Ejumacation, clear card, the Mac Mini Drobo and more.
30March2008
Posted by techpriest under: Uncategorized.
Google Analytics has been providing me with data on where the sites visitors hail from, and I’m proud to say the list includes (apart from our home territory in the United Kingdom), California, Colorado, Wisconsin, Florida, Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Thanks for visiting, and remember comments are always welcome!
30March2008
Posted by techpriest under: Uncategorized.
Still trawling the web for that “one” Wordpress theme that i really like. So far i’ve found the Autumn Concept and Chronicles themes to be good, but learning the CSS needed to change their colour schemes is going to take a while, in the meanwhile, welcome to the whirlwind. Where time is short and themes are plentiful.
29March2008
Posted by techpriest under: Uncategorized.
Well. The latest round-table discussion got recorded, it should be out soon, and i’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. However, once again, I’m beginning to question my niche. Not so much the niche of what i cover, but what comes first, the blog or podcast? I do like the idea of a combined publishing effort, similar to TWiP (This Week in Photography) but i am beginning to prefer blogging and just providing the podcast as a little extra. What do you think? Comments Appreciated.
22March2008
Posted by techpriest under: Uncategorized.
WooHoo! First Post on the new site! Things are going to change a lot over the coming weeks and months, but all the old posts and comments have been imported, and the new site is here…
22March2008
Posted by techpriest under: podcast episode; podcast news.
After a few months work, a lot of emails, and strangely enough, a lot of ichat usage: the next Across The Pod episode is officially in the works. It will be a round-table discussion with me, Alex Lindsay and John Foster. It should be good, we are recording on the 28th march, and the show should be released a few days after that.
21March2008
Posted by techpriest under: Uncategorized.
Word processing is a traditionally utterly mundane task. Just lay out your document exactly the way it will appear on paper, write it, and print it. Microsoft word is the titan of this area, dominating well over 70% of the market. However, a few growing niche alternatives exist, such as Apple’s Pages (’08), which i switched to recently in order to leave MS word behind. It was an easy transition, and the prowess of pages at its job astounded me. Pages is still fundamentally a “word processor” though, and after i discovered a piece of software called “Scrivener”, i have left pages behind too, in favor of Scrivener.
The actual typography and writing tools of Scrivener are very polished, and a very handy full screen mode offers distraction free writing when needed, but this is besides the point.
There is something fundamentally different about Scrivener compared to other software products in its class- Scrivener is designed to write content. In many cases, the finished product is not what you see, as i write this, i don’t need to write it in the exact same fashion that it will appear on the site (something which effectively, all word processors do), i just need to have good writing tools. Scrivener offers a variety of templates for novels, radio drama’s and plays, as well as the obligatory “blank”. The key to the operation is the one-window nature of the application. Within one window (and quite importantly, one application) i can store an entire project, its chapters, notes, and even research i have done for the article. This is what sets scrivener apart, scrivener is not a word processor, it is a content processor. Later, when you want your work exported to the required format, scrivener’s export function takes care of producing an exported file to the users specifications. Regrettably, Scrivener can not handle files from Apple’s Pages directly when importing. What is most frustrating is seeing the potential scrivener has, but only being able to access what it has now, to really complete the package, Scrivener could really do with some templates for other types of contents such as columns and online articles, as well as an additional plug-in to directly post Scrivener articles to web-sites (such as wordpress and moveable type) via the XML-RPC standard. Overall, Scrivener is a revolution in content creation, but could do with just a tad more work.
Star Rating: 4/5
Link to developer