Dr. Drang:
As for spreadsheets and presentation software, the only competition I’m aware of is Excel and PowerPoint from the MS Office suite. I’ve never used PowerPoint and haven’t used Excel in almost 20 years, but David Sparks says their AppleScript support was better than iWork’s even before the purge. Now Apple is essentially pushing its power users toward Microsoft. It’s a funny world.
This week, Stephen, Myke and Federico talk about OS X Mavericks, break down the news from Apple’s fall event and complain about GarageBand.
The part about Mavericks is a nice commentary to Stephen’s review and my article on the latest OS X. Get the episode here.
My daily drive should ideally be a twenty five minute drive with light traffic and usual stop lights. It’s not. It’s a route filled with heavy traffic, other drivers doing dumb things, and constant stop-and-go rigamarole. Until you start quantifying it with hard data, how much time we really spend in our vehicles doesn’t sink in. Tired, coffee fueled, and addled by our daily commutes, it also isn’t immediately apparent how much we forgo basic considerations that benefit our vehicles and other drivers.
The Automatic Link, a white and silver dongle that plugs into the on-board diagnostics port of your vehicle, tries to make accessible driving data that’s otherwise reserved for black boxes. It turns any car into a smart car, which chimes when you commit various driving faults while gathering data during your commute.
What companies like Nest are doing for the home, Automatic is trying to do the for the car.
Maps for iOS 6 wasn’t well received, prompting an apology from Apple and a brief App Store campaign that featured alternatives such as Google Maps. Apple’s core problem: they just didn’t have the data or the mapping prowess to compete with Google, the previous maps supplier and a popular provider for search, directions, and transit information. Apple’s strategy was to provide a core Maps experience, letting developers ship apps on the App Store that could take the spotlight for reviews and transit info.
For the past year, Apple has been trying to hire a number of “Ground Truth Experts” while acquiring companies like HopStop and Embark. They’ve made lots of improvements to Flyover, revisiting popular tourist spots to patch messy data. It’s a continual work in progress, but one year later, I expected to see more progress.
Hazel is the key element of my paperless workflow and several other automation scripts I run on my Mac, such as photo backups. One day, I will get around describing my paperless system (which I have tweaked and perfected over the past months), but, today, allow me to link to version 3.2 of the app, which adds support for tags in Mavericks.
You can now create rules that check for tags in matched files and apply tags automatically. This is great if you want to process a bunch of files automatically and tag them instead of moving them into a folder. Hazel can pick up tags you’ve already created on your Mac, as well as create and replace existing tags if you want to type a tag’s name manually in Hazel.
Interestingly, Hazel can still set color labels (I assume for Mountain Lion users?) and it doesn’t show a tag’s color inline when editing an action – for me, it just displays a blue “token” for the tag with a white label. It’s really a minor issue – I have been testing the public betas with Mavericks support and they’ve been working well for me.
You can get Hazel here, and check out our review of version 3.0 and some of my workflows.
What the Mac Pro video puts on display is Apple’s unique talent for bringing together disparate manufacturing technologies to produce incredible precision at extremely high volumes.
Apple’s Mac Pro video was probably the coolest part of yesterday’s event. Greg Koenig has analyzed the video and explained what’s going on. Fascinating.
I am not a web developer but I regularly use the Safari Web Inspector when I think I know what I’m doing to understand how the Internet is made.
The Web Inspector has been rebuilt and redesigned with Safari 7. Here’s the post from the official WebKit blog from June about it; and, here’s Apple’s webpage.
I think that Stephen did a solid job with his Mavericks review. It covers all the changes in OS X and it’s fun (check out the screenshots and footnotes for proof).
It’s a great way to prepare for Siracusa’s review.
I’ve been using the old version of David’s OS X tip every day for the past four years. For Mavericks, there is a new solution in Mail, and David made a screencast.
