My Habari

In a word, RUBBISH. The newest MacHeist is up and running and basically it's a really poor showing this time around. See the last time was an AMAZING collection of applications that included Pixelmator and VectorDesigner. This time around you have some of the same applications and a few random new ones as well, but NO killer application.

Don't get me wrong I REALLY rate Awaken, use it every day, I really like Coversutra, use that every day (tried using Cha-Ching but couldn't really get to grips with it at all); crucially all three of these applications were in the previous MacHeist that was held not 3 months ago. What is the application in that bundle that would make you excited? Seriously? It's not there. Unless they start adding some good stuff, there is no way that this Heist will be as good as the previous one and for good reason. Who exactly are they trying to get on board on this?

On a personal note, there is really no application out there that I want, apart from maybe a better FTP application (there are a couple of good ones knocking about but I've not decided which one i should go for) and a better torrent client (transmission is doing exactly what I want and the development is constant so hopefully there'll get some basic UI issues sorted out and add being able to search and add torrents from within the application itself and I won't need a new torrent client either).

Elsewhere.brokenkode.com (powered by Asaph) is a an images dumping ground for things that inspire me and has been up and running for a week or so. I'll hopefully get around to skinning this as well, but I've got to say that Dominic really did a good job on this little application and can't wait to see future iterations.

Late last year I made the move to a mac and while there was a bit of getting used to certain things I've been really very happy with everything that it's offered me in terms of getting on with computing in general. However the thing that I've missed the most is Firefox with all of it's plugins and general speed and open source goodness. I tried Camino and i've got to say it's good in some respects but trying to get any of the blasted plugins to work was a mission in and of itself. It just seemed to me like it wasn't really there in terms of both backing and development as Firefox, which is just as well. So for the last couple of months I've been using Safari, and while I like a lot of stuff in Safari, I think there is room for improvement.

Enter Firefox 3 Beta 4 which was released earlier this week. DAMN that's MUCH better.

I've installed GRApple Yummy theme, which is basically a correct integration of the theme into Leopard and I'm away. Firefox 3 is faster than Safari at loading up, it's slowly starting to get all the various plugins updated as well and crucially it now also looks the part as well. I've not really played around with the browser much yet but one of the more welcome additions is the fact that now I can look for plugins and themes from within Firefox itself rather than going to the mozilla website and searching. It's inspired me so much so that I installed ScribeFire straight away and I'm writing this from within there which I've never done before, just because I can.

So the guys over at Pixelmator have just released yet another update on their excellent little image editor. Now the thing that has impressed me more with this little editor isn't soo much the actual editor, because the truth of the matter is I don't think it has got what I need (which is surprisingly a small list) what's impressed me most is their diligence in releasing new updates for the software each and every month on around the 20th or so. While some people on the forums expect them to be releasing things on a daily basis, I really like how they've decided to release once a month and see how much stuff they can cram into that month before releasing it to the world at large.

It just means that I've got something to look forward to from them and makes me happy to see that they are developing constantly to improve on the editor. What you can also notice from their updates log is the fact that as time has gone by, they've definitely been getting better at closing out issues as the lists have become larger and larger.

Does Pixelmator get my thumbs up as a Photoshop killer? Honestly not yet but as three minor requests that would make this editor my choice one, which I can't imagine as being too difficult for the sole coder (I think it's only one guy doing the coding right?) to deal with, however it might not be a major priority at the moment. Here's the list:

1. Rulers and Guides - Listen if I'm going to be doing any digital work of any description I need these things. So I need to be able to add guides, move them about and snap to these guides. The ruler set to pixels as a minimum before you move onto something else is fine as an initial release if you're thinking doing everything else will take too much time. Maybe limit the functions to their most basis before expanding might be a good idea?
2. Text Function - Yeah this is pretty poor. Now while I might be ok with the limited font functionality how I would really like to have a full text box that I can resize as a minimum rather than being able to just put some text in a straight line. I know it's a really minor thing, but in my eyes it's what separates a good image editor from a great one. If you can add this into the next iteration that would be AWESOME.
3. Folders for Layers - Not sure how difficult this is but again this is one of those things that makes organising my layers something manageable as opposed to a complete and utter free for all.

I'm not going into any more detail as I'm sure the other things will come in time, however if I can get the above items by March I will love you guys forever.

I've got a question which I was hoping somebody would help me with. I love Google Reader, I really do, loads of great things about this little application to like, in the same way that I like Gmail as well. My only problem with it right now is one function that is not present and I was wondering if others are having the same problem as well, and if there is any easy way to rectify this (like a greasemonkey script or something similar. Basically the way I read my feeds doesn't allow me to read EVERYTHING in one go. Which is fine, no problem. Those items i've not read remain unread. The problem is that when i get back to reading things the newer feeds get placed at the top (which is fine and dandy) but all of the read items are mixed in with the unread ones. So what happens then is that I have to spend a long time scrolling down to the previous items.

Obviously sometimes (read: most times) i can't be fucked and so i just 'mark all as read', which really defeats the object doesn't it. Anyone have any ideas how to get around this, or is knows whether or not google might be looking to sort this out, or where I can send my email towards?