It’s been awfully quiet here for the past few weeks, but it’s because I’ve been quite busy. One of the things I’ve been busy with is learning German. And I’ve just found the most useful plugin I could hope for: a dict.cc plugin that sits right in the Mac OS X Dictionary.app. It is absolutely great and will replace the EnDe widget I’ve been using so far.
So I just have to fire up Dictionary.app or use the widget, and I have an ultra-quick translation. You just type in your word in English or German and it will give you the translation in the corresponding language right away.
It’s only compatible with Leopard since Tiger’s version of Dictionary.app doesn’t support plugins.This is one feature of Leopard I never thought I’d love 
I don’t want this blog to become just a repository for links to articles written by other people. But when I hardly have the motivation to write something of my own (this something wouldn’t be clever anyway), and when someone else comes up with a gem, I have to give you the link.
Influential Mac developer and astute businessman Wil Shipley is expressing his views about Apple, the iPod, the iPhone and iTunes. His thoughts are very sharp and I couldn’t agree more.
Continue reading ‘Apple, the iPod, iPhone and iTunes: comments by Wil Shipley’
I used to be the sort of person who thinks: why would I pay for a software if I can get the same, or rather the same result, for free?
While I still look around for free software, and definitely love it, I think I’ve come to acknowledge the value of paid software.
Continue reading ‘Blogging with MarsEdit’
There is a quite interesting post on Phil Ryu’s blog in which he explains how he thinks Apple is getting rid of the Aqua look-and-feel to move to a new space-themed UI experience.
Though I haven’t had a chance to try Leopard, I am personally not a big fan of this Time Machine / Space look we see on the demo videos of the Apple website. Phil Ryu is predicting great things, saying:
I think that OS X’s interface, over the next few years, will adapt the most radical facelift for the desktop OS since the jump to a GUI in 1984.
Now, that’s not a light statement, but I hope he’s right because it really looks like Aqua is slowly but surely dying…
Following a blog post earlier today, the answer is yes, Apple did update its dotMac service.
The answer to the other question is no, I’m not disappointed at not having renewed my membership. As I was saying, Apple would have had to go a long way to make the offer worthwhile, but I don’t think I could be happy even though they did upgrade the service quite a bit.
But let’s go back to this later on and see what exactly has been announced today.
Continue reading ‘Apple Special Event today’
I’m writing this before it actually happens later today: ever since I left dotMac last week (because I’ve decided not to renew my account), I’ve had this feeling that Apple is going to update the dotMac offer real soon.
Yesterday, dotMac users reported that they’ve received an email from Apple telling them that the service would be unavailable for 2 hours today. First, it’s rare enough for Apple to actually warn users before maintenance happens. Second, Apple has announced some time ago that there would be a special event today, meaning they’ve got some new stuff coming our way.
Now, it’s not very difficult to make the link between the two and guess that dotMac may be updated.
Should I be disappointed at not being a member anymore? I’ll have the answer later tonight, but to be honest Apple has to go a long, long way to make the offer worthwhile. 99 € a year is a steep price…
