Archive for the 'Personal computing' Category

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Safari heralds return of Yellow Box for Windows?

Published on 13 June 2007 in Personal computing. 1 Comment

The most interesting development at WWDC 2007 [macrumors.com] was the release of Safari for Windows. Does this mean Apple maintains non-Mac ports of the OpenSTEP / Yellow Box / Cocoa frameworks? Being able to compile Cocoa apps for execution on Windows would be very handy.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about read Cocoa and the Death of Yellow Box and Rhapsody [roughldrafted.com] or Apple Rhapsody Yellow Box for Windows [mac-guild.org].

Of course, Apple has ported other Mac applications to Windows, most notably QuickTime and iTunes. Yet they are both Carbon apps (on Mac OS) and presumably use some in-house UI library on Win32. Safari is the first Cocoa app to be ported to Windows since Apple withdrew non-Mac platform support for Web Objects.

Urdu on my Mac

Published on 3 June 2007 in Personal computing and Snippets. 5 Comments

Thanks to Kamal Abdali’s Urdu on the Mac I’m now able to type Urdu on my Mac. No more messing about switching between the various Apple-supplied Arabic and Farsi keyboard layouts.

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Ocado delivery confirmation e-mails include iCal

Published on 3 June 2007 in Internet, Personal computing and Snippets. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Ocado now send an iCal file for the delivery time with their order confirmation e-mails. Neat!

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Weaning myself off Google; earning iPoints for searching

Published on 12 April 2007 in Internet, Journal and Personal computing. 1 Comment

BBC News reports on search companies renewing their attempts to compete with Google. The article caused me to remiss on life before Google. Like most people I don’t even think about what search engine to you use anymore, reaching for Google has become an automatic reaction. The combination of the accuracy of search results plus the clean, uncluttered layout meant there was no reason to worry about using other search engines.

The article did prompt me to go back and re-discover some old search engines and I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only do they still exist but have been thoroughly revamped. In fact, I’ve actually decided to switch to Dogpile (UK) as my Safari home page! Why? Well, firstly, by aggregating results from MSN, Yahoo and Ask as well as Google it seems to find a few hits that get missed by individual search engines. I also earn iPoints just for searching!

The Google functionality I miss most is the ability to load a cached version of a page. Though I could work around that with some AppleScript.

We’ll see how long this lasts…