iMac
iPad
iPhone
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iMiss
i miss Steve Jobs

If you’re building native extensions for python or ruby on a Mac and you get an error like:

The other day, for no reason in-particular, I was thinking about Mac FTP programs. I had used Interarchy (formerly Anarchie) for years. But around version 9 Stairways sold it to Nolobe (employee buyout) and after that it started to crash. So I switched to Transmit. Anyway, I was thinking about FTP programs and wondering what had happened to Interarchy, since it hadn’t been updated in a while, when I got an email form Nolobe. They’re having a fire sale. Literally. Their offices were destroyed by fire two years ago. So that’s what happened to Interarchy…

After the introduction of the iPad last week a lot of hackers (in the Hackers and Painters sense) published a lot of blog articles bemoaning its closed nature - e.g. Tinkerers Sunset. They sound like the Four Yorkshiremen from Monty Python.

QuickCursor is a cool Mac utility that lets you easily edit the text in a web page via a real editor application. You just select the text box in the web page, click the QuickCursor MenuExtra to select an editor, QuickCursor will copy the contents of the text box to a temporary file and open the file in your editor, hack on your text and when you save the text is copied back to the text box in the browser. Doesn’t seem to work in Firefox but Safari works fine. It’s open source too. Very cool. See the…

In 1983 Steve Jobs in a characteristically brilliant speech introduced the Mac as the solution to IBM’s dominance in the PC industry. “IBM wants it all.” He says a few times. A clip of the speech is available on YouTube (embedded below):

Ommwriter is a new full screen editor for the Mac. What makes this one different is that it includes ambient sounds (think new age relaxation and aromatherapy), very subtle keyboard sounds and interesting backgrounds. In my brief test, this post was written in ommwriter, it works well but I did find the ambient music to be too loud relative to the keyboard fx. It would be nice to have a control on the relative levels. But this is about minimalism (the fewer controls the better) and it’s only a beta release. It’s a very interesting project and it…