Interesting piece about Terence Young creating the James Bond movie character with actor Sean Connery:
Terence Young: James Bond’s Creator?
Personally I only like the old Bond movies with Sean Connery up to “You Only Live Twice” and I really like the Young pictures (“Dr. No”, “From Russia with Love” and “Thunderball”) best; Thunderball, despite its quirks, being one of the most stylish movies of all times.
Via Daring Fireball.
I actually really like NetNewsWire. It is the most beautifully designed newsreader for the Mac, IMHO. Unfortunately it has some severe flaws in its basic features. I missed some news entries recently just because for some feeds …
… NetNewsWire is not able to update the feed correctly, so it won’t show the latest entries.
For one feed NetNewsWire even claimed the latest entry to be about a year old, while the feed actually was up-to-date.
This kind of behaviour of course renders the app almost completely useless. The whole point of an RSS reader is to get the latest news. So I can’t but call this a catastrophic bug (for a newsreader, that is).
I have switched to Vienna for the moment. It is a pretty good replacement (and free).
Update:
It is even worse. Although Vienna (unlike NNW) gets the latest feed entries, both apps – NNW and Vienna – sometimes do not load updates to feed entries. So if a blog entry gets changed, you won’t notice unless you visit the blog website. That is totally inacceptable! I am currently evaluating NewsFire.
Update 2:
Though NewsFire does not notify you of changes (like the other apps) it at least gives you the correct (i.e. updated) text when you read an entry. So I am sticking with NewsFire!
Safari does not update rss entries as well. Maybe it is PubSubAgent that sucks and all three apps (NNW, Vienna, Safari) rely on it. I do not know but it is bad! Luckily there is at least one working newsreader left.
Update 3:
Well at least the Safari issue almost certainly has something to do with PubSubAgent. If the feed is bookmarked entries will not get updated. If the feed is just reloaded it is completely refreshed, including any changes to feed entries. So, Safari users, don’t bookmark your RSS feeds or you might read outdated news!
Update 4:
NewsFire has two minor flaws. Firstly it does not notify changes of entries. Secondly it was not able to load one feed I had on my list. So, unfortunately I had to conclude that it was very difficult to find any fully functional RSS reader for the Mac. Fortunately I found the following listing: »Top 9 Mac RSS News Feed Readers and News Aggregators« and right the first entry is a hit: »Shrook«. It is not a beauty and has a funny name, but it does it all: find new items, notify changes and — most importantly — display the up-to-date version. It even keeps a change log. I guess my RSS nightmare is over.
Update 5:
Vienna is actually capable of checking for updated feed entries but it is an option that needs to be set. To enable the function do the following:
defaults write uk.co.opencommunity.vienna2 CheckForUpdatedArticles -bool yes
I actually really like iMacs. They are beautiful and sufficiently powerful machines that can do pretty much all that you want to do with a computer. But…
One fundamental problem of the iMac is (or at least can be) the noise it produces.
It’s not that an iMac is particularly loud or noisy. But they do have fans and hard drives and some of them are plagued by display noises like a high pitched tune or a crackling or buzzing sound.
The screen noise problem could be the same with every other computer. (In fact I have already returned two other displays because of their whining noises.)
With the noise that comes from fans and hard drives however the iMac has a particular problem because the fan and hard drives are standing right in front of the user, behind the display. Thus an iMac has to be particularly silent to not be heard by the user. And that is a problem. You can hear the iMacs I know quite clearly. A modern and silent »normal« PC in contrast cannot be heard at all because all components that make noise are located behind or under the desk.
So personally I would like Apple to produce an ordinary headless PC: cheaper than the PowerMac, faster and more capable than the Mac Mini. An iMac with a separate display, so to say.
Google has announced that it will axe its Google Wave product due to insufficient demand. Wave is a real-time communication system that could potentially replace e-mail, instant text messengers and collaborative text editors. It also has a plug-in system to include further functionality.
Some think it is the extended or mixed functionality that lead to Wave’s lack of success. IMHO Google Wave has an excellent feature set.
I think Google Wave basically lacks just one thing: a native client.
You just can’t replace native app functionality and system integration with browser pages. HTML 5 won’t change that fact either. John Gruber is right when he says Wave is a very Google-y product. In this case Google’s browser-centric approach was just the problem.
Addendum:
To prove my point, just ask yourself: Would you use Twitter without a Twitter client?
The just announced Apple iPhone 4 has a new 5 MPix camera. Now, 5 MPix cameras are not uncommon but Apple did not do what most other manufacturers do. They did not just stuff more pixels into the same sensor size. No, Steve Jobs even took the time in his iPhone 4 presentation keynote (00:51h) to explain the fact that if there are more pixels on the same sensor size, this means a smaller sensor area per pixel, and that means each pixel can capture less light (less photons).
The website 6mpixel.org explains this phenomenon.
So Apple did not only increase the pixel count but also increased the sensor size to keep the sensor area per pixel the same. This is just one of the reasons why I love Apple products.
