For all you hiptop IRC users who aren’t so blessed as to have a native client, Brian Gottlieb has written an another AIM to IRC gateway I wasn’t aware of, with multiple channel support. Too much software to try, too little time.
ZOË 0.4 was released today, both producing and consuming RSS. View RSS feeds in your email client via ZOË's built in POP server; view ZOË-stored email messages in NetNewsWire. Even edit messages in ZOË’s store with NetNewsWire’s weblog editor. Scary, but cool.
I haven't actually got it set up myself yet, but here's an image Raphaël sent me of this weblog in ZOË:
and bridged to a message in Mail.app:
As the Borg theme implies, “Resistance is futile”.
Thanks to MacFixIt, I resurrected the internal FireWire ports on my desktop Power Mac G4, which I had given up for dead after a failed tape drive installation attempt back in May. I had tried using the motherboard reset switch before, but apparently it’s key that you hold it down for a few seconds. (I did so several times, just for good measure.)
My med school midterms are in a week, and I have a lot of research work to get done, so Pester 1.1 is having to take a back seat for a while. I may release another beta without fixing all the bugs yet, since I've added several new features. The Read Me file was getting very long, so I’ve built in a “contents” window; thanks to a NSSplitView bug it ended up taking far longer than I expected.
The color hiptop is coming! The color hiptop is coming! To Europe, at least. The article is amusing in that it suggests the trend towards increased mobile data services is coming from the US; it used to be that we were last to get new mobile technologies. They'd inevitably be cumbersome, overpriced, poorly marketed, and fail. As is, I still would prefer my inexpensive, fast, convenient and easy-to-use grayscale hiptop to the latest expensive, cumbersome, over-featured, color, soon-to-be-obsolete Nokia or Sony Ericsson model.
[Don't think I'm not watching you, Wes. You ripped off my attempted wittiness in Tuesday's blog entry. 
]
Apple's article on JavaScript in Mac Browsers, like the rest in their Internet Developer series, is comprehensive and well-written. (If only the technical notes and Q&As were anywhere near as good…) The most startling observations for me were that iCab does a better job of JavaScript than OmniWeb (despite having far less development effort behind it), and that Opera 6 and earlier do not support page reflow: Opera 7 does, but is not available on the Macintosh. For a browser which claimed to be as standards-compliant as Opera, this seems a very significant omission. The last version of Opera that I used much was version 3, since it was the only full-featured browser that worked at any reasonable speed on the Pentium 100 with Windows 95 I used at a previous job.
Some readers of this weblog may not be aware that I use Radio to read my RSS feeds. All the RSS machinery in Radio is available to be modified; without it you wouldn't have extensions like outlining and categorization, as provided by myRadio and soon activeRenderer.
As the number of RSS feeds I subscribe to doesn't seem to be decreasing, hierarchical and categorized views can help. I find a browser- and weblog-integrated aggregator much more useful than a desktop one such as NetNewsWire. Typically I read through a page of stories in Radio's aggregator under Chimera, Command-clicking on each link that looks interesting to open it in a background tab. Then I read through the open tabs, click “Delete” to get the next page of stories in the aggregator, and repeat. With NetNewsWire currently, I could open the links in the background, but when (unfortunately, not “if”) Chimera crashed I'd have to figure out which articles I had read and opened links from. Radio's batch-deletion approach handily sidesteps the issue. Finally, I like the mostly passive experience of reading through the news in a single Web page, rather than the active approach of having to press the space bar repeatedly to browse.
However, the integration advantages of a Web-based aggregator on the Mac can and should disappear when the Safari SDK is made available. Windows users have had similar opportunities for years through the embeddable IE control.
10:04 PM