Mark asked me to pick him up from the Airport today. I thought it would be a nice opportunity to test out the Flight Tracking widget in Dashboard. (click to play)

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One of the new features of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) is Dashboard. Instead of talking about what Dashboard is, I want to show you a poorly documented feature (and nice eye-candy) that Apple placed in the Dashboard.

While I’m told to think of them as desk accessories/Konfabulator for Mac OS X, I prefer to think of them as Sherlock 2/Watson done right. That is because Dashboard widgets are basically HTML web pages + Javascript + optional Cocoa binding. As such, most dashboard widgets are simply web views. This means that sometimes your dashboard widget may be displaying something that needs updating from the web and it isn’t. Instead of complaining to that the widget developer was too moronic to include a control for widget reloading, you can reload your widget manually by hitting Apple-R.

When you do so you’ll be given a nice little Core Video eye-candy (click the picture below to “get” it).

“I felt like a dope, I thought we had missed it. We had to work hard to catch up.”
—Steve Jobs, CEO Apple, Inc. on digital music Fortune

Mark mentioned that he’s planning on buying an iPod Shuffle and later blogged that iTunes is missing features like skins. That hit me as a blast from the past.

Skins was one of the features that got axed when Apple bought SoundJam from Cassady & Greene to create iTunes. A program called Audion supports that and a wealth of other features for those people who need their daily dose of feature creep in their music player. You can read the excellent history of the player that almost was.

I remember buying MacAMP and later SoundJam MP. I remember being really pissed when I found out that iTunes would be introduced and SoundJam would be shelved. I remember skins. Ahh, let me tell you about those days…

They sucked.
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Well I wanted to get Caitlin’s blog up and running. Then it hit me I had to allow her to edit her blog without the command line. Sure it is easy getting the Linux box to talk to the Mac Apple Fileshare, but how to get the Mac to work with the Linux box? She can do remote control with Chicken Of The VNC but what about file transfer? I’ve stopped using FTP in 2001 when the wu-ftpd bug turned a whole bunch of my company boxes into DDoS zombies. Besides, the password is unencrypted. And I am tired of going through the Apache configuration file hoops in order to set up WebDAV again.

What to do?

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When my Powerbook G4/800 was stolen last year at Amsterdam, I gambled that Apple would have an interim release in January 2005 and announce a Powerbook G5 as early as June 2005, so I purchased my Powerbook hoping to tide me over for a revision B Powerbook G5 in 2006 at the earliest.

A couple weeks ago, Apple announced a kitchen sink release for the Powerbook. You can tell that they are running out of things to put in by what they put in—what used to cost money now comes standard. The speed bump is reminiscent of Apple circa 1999.¹

One nice new feature is the two-finger scrolling: Mac notebooks don’t have the integrated pointer/scroller that the Thinkpads do, nor do they have scroll zones like some other tank-sized laptops. The solution that uber-geeks use is SideTrack, which effectively acts like the latter and can be tricked out to do much more.
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