Posts tagged: MACOS

Late last year the Xiph QuickTime Components project took up where the moribund qtcomponents.sourceforge.net had left off – great news for lovers of open audio formats like Ogg Vorbis. (Vorbis encodes music at higher quality than MP3 at equivalent bitrates, and is unencumbered by patents and licensing.) The latest release of the components, earlier this month, features Intel compatability and preliminary support for FLAC (a lossless encoding).

The thing that makes this project so useful is that QuickTime components can transparently provide services to any OS X application relying on QuickTime – such as iTunes. So while you can’t play Ogg Vorbis (or Speex or FLAC or…) files on your new iPod, you can play them in iTunes. Getting there.

A new “bleeding edge” version of TextMate appeared this evening, featuring extensive improvements to the bundle infrastructure. (If you’re not sure what this means, read my earlier post on how bundles are the heart of TextMate’s stupendousness.) Allan Oddgaard has put a lot of thought into the balance between distributed bundles and user customizations, and has developed some really elegant solutions that allow you to benefit from improvements in the bundles (some of which move at a rapid clip thanks to motivated community developers) while retaining your specific customizations.

I got an e-mail from Steve Cook today.

For a couple years now I’ve been using a great little utility Steve wrote called Jumpcut. It’s what I call a “clipboard stack” – it records multiple cuts/copies and allows you to paste them back out in whatever sequence you wish. And it does all this without requiring you to use the mouse – essential.

(I was led to Jumpcut by a comment on this post of mine from June 2004. Thank you, “sal paradise,” whoever you are…)

So the other day I downloaded a talk from Google Video for offline viewing/listening. (It’s by Jacob Kaplan-Moss, one of the lead developers of Django.)

I have a Mac, and Macs are great at video and stuff! Not like those dumb old Windows computers!

Hm.

Two and a half years ago I wrote a review-like essay on six weeks spent using FreeBSD and KDE as my primary desktop system – when I was between PowerBooks.

As hinted at in a recent post, I now have a second machine alongside my 15" PowerBook. It’s an old Dell Inspiron 4000 running bleeding-edge Ubuntu 6.06. This includes GNOME 2.14 with the Deskbar – which gets compared to Quicksilver but is more like a hybrid of Spotlight and LaunchBar.