Command-Tab

Friday, September 9th, 2005 at 5:51 PM

It’s been a while since I’ve written about an application here, so I’ll start things up again with Pacifist. In a nutshell, Pacifist lets you explore and extract the contents of .pkg files, which are installed with Installer.app in the Utilities folder. It has proved valuable a number of times while investigating where a package has installed its files. Sometimes you may only want a specific file or component out of a .pkg, and Pacifict can pull this off with ease, as well.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 9th, 2005 at 5:51 pm and is filed under Apps, Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Thursday, September 8th, 2005 at 10:57 PM

Possibly setting a speed record for shortest time from announcement to dissection are some Japanese folks who completely disassembled a brand new iPod nano just for you to gawk at. To them I say arigatô gozaimasu.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 8th, 2005 at 10:57 pm and is filed under iPod. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Thursday, September 8th, 2005 at 9:18 AM

Yesterday brought several new items from Apple, including a new iPod model, an iTunes compatible phone, and a slight upgrade to iTunes.

The new iPod, dubbed “nano,” is pencil thin but still sports the same features as it’s lager counterpart. The iPod mini is no more, and the iPod Photo is gone as well (or was the Photo part of the previous revision?). The new iPod lineup is simply: shuffle, nano, iPod, and U2 iPod. The nano is available in white or black. While I’ll have to see one in person to make the final decision, I think the black looks ultra sleek.

Apple partnered with Motorola to make the iTunes phone, however you can’t actually download music from the iTunes Music Store with it on the go. It just syncs music just as the iPods do, likely over USB. For the $250 the phone will run for, I’d much rather get a comparably priced iPod.

iTunes 5 got a new look, and I’m not sure I like it yet. I’m certainly not the type of person to downgrade to 4.9 — having the newest version of everything is what I live for — but it makes me wonder what’s going on at Apple in their UI department. First Mail, now iTunes. With every upgrade, Apple’s applications manage to adopt a new and unique interface…which is not to say that they look bad. It just sets a poor example for developers. Apple has a whole human interface guideline, yet they don’t follow it themselves. In any event, I’m just happy something was free the day of the announcement.

Update
- iTunes now accepts applications from indie artists. Cool!
- A review of all the announcement goodies at DrunkenBlog
- Some surprisingly unique commentary from John Gruber

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 8th, 2005 at 9:18 am and is filed under iPod. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Wednesday, September 7th, 2005 at 11:09 PM

AnandTech has a great little article on the inner workings of Google’s search appliance, Google Mini (a rackmount server which indexes your intranet). I knew for some time that the device existed, and I’d always been interested to know what’s inside and how you configure it. It’s worth a look if you’re curious. For all the Google related posts I do, you’d think by know I would have a dedicated category for them…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 7th, 2005 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.