I’m testing DashBlog as a way to post entries to my blog without a browser open. I had tried MarsEdit before, but I didn’t have Panther at the time, and MarsEdit wasn’t free.
With DashBlog, it’s built right into the system as a Dashboard widget and available at any time with the press of a button. Plus, I don’t lose my content when Dashboard goes away (but I might when the Dashboard process shuts down).
The only thing left to check? Does it actually work?
Update: Looks like it worked.
Okay, this Tiger UI review by Andrew Orlowski required something be said. I won’t go into the boolean operators issue that has already been resolved by Charles Arthur and others. My complaint is with glib remarks like:
Saving an MP3 that you’ve loaded from a web page and played in Safari now requires an additional $29.99 payment for Quick Time Pro.
I’ll tell you what, Andrew. Send me $19.99 and I’ll unlock File > Save As for you. Better yet, send me a one-time payment of $9.99, and I’ll unlock Cmd-S.
It’s Free Comic Book Day today. I doubt I’ll make it out to the stores today. That’s kind of the last thing I want to do (i.e. a bit like going to Memphis on National Elvis Day, if there even is such a thing).
Regardless, it has made me want to update my collection. I rarely find the time to read them, but what I do do is try to keep my catalogue up to date. I only manage to find time to do it every few months. It’s all I can do to keep up with what’s going on in the comic industry.
What I use is my own home-brew database that I built way back in the days of ClarisWorks 1.0 and later converted to FileMaker, the format in which it exists today. I’m starting to find FileMaker lacking some fundamental RDBMS features. I’ve toyed with the idea of converting once again; this time to MySQL or PostgresSQL, but FileMaker’s easy-to-use form management features keep bringing me back. I’ve considered ODBC, but I don’t know the first thing about it, and I’d want something that’s free, well-used, and heavily supported, with lots of documentation for the combination of Mac OS X, FileMaker, and MySQL.
I’m not making it available for anybody, but I thought I’d post a few screenshots of how it looks. Keep in mind, the last design revision was from some time in 2000 or 2001. It needs some TLC.
Update: Exhibit didn’t create thumbnails. I’ll look into that.
Update: Fixed thumbnails. Apparently, Exhibit assumes all images will be JPEGs. PNG images work now. Haven’t tried GIFs.
Update: I’ve noticed that I still get a few hits a month to this entry. Everything still works as of iTunes 7.0.2, except the tip about setting upcoming songs to 0 (zero). It would appear that in version 7, Apple broke that ability and now Party Shuffle stops playing if upcoming is set to 0. I’ve sent in a bug report and suggest you do the same. For the time being, I set upcoming to 5, the next smallest number. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog post.
Update (6 Sep 2007): Eureka! It would appear that as of version 7.4, the Party Shuffle bug I mentioned above has been fixed! Yippee!
I’ve been using iTunes since 1.0. Before that, I was using SoundJam MP. I thought I had learned it all. What I’m about to say next may seem obvious to some of you, but I sure didn’t think of it until a few weeks ago.
I have several thousand songs. I also like to have all my songs rated. The problem is I still have a few thousand that aren’t rated. When Smart Playlists came out, I thought I had the perfect solution: make a live-updating smart playlist of all unrated songs (or the ones I want to rate for the time being), let it play in the background, and rate the songs as I listen to them. If you’ve tried it, you know it’s a sound idea, but it just doesn’t work. As soon as you rate it, iTunes removes it from the playlist and proceeds to stop playing the song. Another problem is if you slip up and apply the wrong rating; iTunes makes it pretty damn hard to find the song to undo it.
So I chalked it up to something that would likely never get fixed (e.g. is it even a bug that needs fixing?) and relegated myself to updating the playlist manually every so often.
Then Party Shuffle came out. I thought, “How quaint. That’ll come in handy once I finish rating all my songs,” and never used it after that except to show it off as a feature that some other players don’t have (omitting the fact that I don’t use the darn feature myself). I don’t remember what triggered the flash of inspiration, but I was talking with a co-worker, comparing music players of different platforms, saying iTunes does pretty much everything I want, but it had this one annoying behaviour that I wished they could fix.
It occurred to me that Party Shuffle can save a short list of previous played songs, as well as upcoming songs. What would happen with my Unrated smart playlist? Later that night I tried it out, and set Party Shuffle’s source to my smart playlist. Voila! That was the solution to my problems. When I rate the song, it gets removed from the smart playlist, but not from Party Shuffle, and the song continues to play. Plus I can go back a fix any misapplied ratings. It does exactly what I’ve been wanting to do for ages, and it was just sitting there unused.
For maximum effect, set upcoming songs to 0. More than that and you could get duplicates once the source playlist gets small enough.
Now if only they could do the whole Ogg thing natively.
Update (22 May 2007): I just saw on The Unofficial Apple Weblog an entry about a program called AutoRate that attempts to automatically rate your songs based on how many times the song has been played and how often it’s skipped. Might be handy for those of you out there that are either too busy or too lazy to rate your songs by hand. I’d be interested to know people’s results. I still prefer my method, though (but I’ll admit it does take time).
I’ve written some PHP, HTML, and CSS to generate a graphical rating using images. I need to browser test this first, as it relies on the CSS overflow: hidden declaration to work. Also, I ended up using a table, as I couldn’t figure out how to get images, spans, margins and/or floats, to give me what I wanted. Feel free to try it out for yourself. It’ll take me some time before I incorporate into the site.
My apologies to Arthur C. Clarke.