OmniWeb is on sale this whole month for just $10, down from its normal price of $30 (TUAW clued me in). I have been back and forth between different browsers recently. I used Firefox for a while, but then switched back to Safari because Firefox didn’t render text as well and because it just didn’t have that native Mac application feel. But Safari has crashed on me lately every time I have tried to bring up a contextual menu, and it is slow as death. It eats RAM for breakfast.
I can’t really believe that I just paid for a browser, as I’ve never done that before in my life, but OmniWeb so impressed me that I bought it within the first five minutes of using it. The feature list is extensive – live previews of tabs, multiple workspaces, ability to set viewing preferences by site, an integrated HTML editor/viewer of sorts, and an absolutely gorgeous interface. Its also extremely intuitive; every button is exactly where you’d expect it to be. Don’t pass this one up!
I’ve always wanted something like this. Daniel Jalkut of the Red Sweater Blog has created an AppleScript to randomize the color scheme of the terminal. Just drop it in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Terminal and it will show up in the script menu under “Terminal Scripts.” Click on it until you find a color scheme that pleases you.
There are two cool hacks that I came up with for this script. Both involve changing ~/.bash_profile (or the startup script for whatever shell that you use). If you don’t have a file named .bash_profile in your home directory, then create one. AppleScripts can be invoked from the command line by using the osascript command, and we can use this to our advantage in two ways.
- Every time we start up a new terminal, randomize the color. Simply add the line
osascript ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/
Terminal/RandomColorTerminal.scpt
somewhere in your .bash_profile (all on one line).
- Set an alias to the above command so that we can change the color very quickly without needing to navigate to the script menu with the mouse. To do this, add the line
alias newcol='osascript ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/
Terminal/RandomColorTerminal.scpt'
to .bash_profile (all on one line). Now, whenever you type newcol at the command line, you will get a new color scheme.
I’ve finally put down the $19 necessary to become a member of Daring Fireball. Ever since John Gruber, creator and sole contributor to Daring Fireball, announced that he was quitting his job to write full-time for the site, I’ve been thinking about joining to support his work. His writing about all things Apple is some of the most cohesive and eloquent prose that can be found on the internet.
All of the content on his site is free, so the membership is more of a donation to support his writing. However, with the membership comes a subscription to the RSS feed of his “Linked List,” a separate blog of sorts where he posts really insightful links about a number of different topics. Last week there was a free trial period for this feed, and I was disappointed when the time ran out, and was considering purchasing a membership. But it was this post that I read this morning that finally convinced me.
One of my favorite articles that John ever wrote was Windows: The New Classic, right after Apple released Boot Camp. While most people were still scratching their heads trying to figure out why Apple would ever want to allow you to run Windows on a Mac, this article made it seem like it was the logical next step. He writes, “This is a move of supreme confidence — Apple relishes the comparison between Mac OS X and Windows XP.” Clearly some have seen the light, as recent market share gains have shown.
You really don’t have any street cred with other Apple fans until you read Daring Fireball. The RSS feed for the full posts is free, so I urge you to try it out.
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