Ars is one of my favorite sites. I regularly read the articles and forum. However today, in reaction to Safari 5′s new Reader mode I really think they jumped the shark.

There is something contradictory—some might say hypocritical—in Apple’s actions. At the same time someone in Cupertino is building a completely unblockable ad platform for the iPhone and the iPad, someone else is working on ad supression tools for that big open Web that Apple supposedly loves so much

There was a very insightful comment in in the comments to the article I enjoyed:

Forget hypocrisy, but what I find very ironic is that online tech journalists are crying foul because software innovations are threatening their old-fashioned business model. I’m sure the former staff of defunct print magazine employees will get a kick out of this.

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I don’t have much more to say about recent events regarding Apple.  Clearly I think Apple’s been getting some bad press.  Some deserved, some undeserved.  Some just comes from being a market leader now rather than a more niche player.  However there is something I just have to get off my chest.

It is not censorship to decide you don’t want to sell something!

It is not censorship to decide you don’t want to add a feature!

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3D seems the topic of the day at CES with two channels (ESPN and Discovery), 3D Bluray players, and 3D TVs. The most interesting thing is Panasonic’s 3D Camcorder. I’m skeptical about 3D TV right now. But I am surprised they are able to release everything simultaneously like this. No Dish announcement for the channels although DirectTV is broadcasting them at no charge starting in June.

So I’ve done little the past two months beyond read lots of blogs. (Due to my triple pneumonia I was hospitalized for) One thing I noticed is how many complaints there are over OSX’s delete keys over Windows. I’d have to agree that this is one area Windows does better out of the box. However it is fairly trivial to fix this.

If you, like me, use forward delete a lot and wish Apple had a forward delete on their laptops don’t worry. Go get Double Command. It has lots of nice keyboard modifications. My favorite are making the Home and End keys work like Windows. (I honestly don’t understand why Apple kept the old Sys 9 method which isn’t nearly as useful) For forward delete there is a setting that turns shift-delete into forward delete. Very nice for editing. Yes fn-delete works as well but it’s harder to hit. (For me anyway)

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OK, I know OSX Hints will have a slew of Snow Leopard hints over the next couple of months. But here are a few that folks have mentioned to me that might be helpful.

Finder Column Sorting

This has been a bee in my bonnet for some time. I thought Snow Leopard didn’t fix it beyond the old Leopard then someone pointed me to the Arrange By menu. Not only can you change the sorting but there are great shortcuts!

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If you’re forever getting frustrated typing special characters in HTML check out CharTyper. Kind of like Keycaps on the Mac but it generates the HTML code for the special character. It’s very useful.

Also see this unicode to HTML converter. It doesn’t handle tags but it is surprisingly good for converting your unicode text for those cases where you absolutely need ASCII HTML. I’ve used both a lot over the years and they have permanent bookmarks in my browser.

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TextMate is currently my editor of choice. For a long time I was a BBEdit fan but until recently it had really fallen behind. (I’ve heard the latest version is quite good though) Given a choice (at the time) between using XCode, paying to upgrade my copy of BBEdit, or buying TextMate, I went with TextMate. Now TextMate does have a few flaws. (The lack of real Applescript support for the text window and a slit pane window drive me bonkers) The author has been doing a rewrite but no one know when it’ll be out.

Where TextMate shines though is its thorough integration with the shell and its ability to call scripts, such as Applescript. (See, for instance, http://macromates.com/screencast/applescript-1.mov">this screencast showing how to run Applescripts from within TextMate instead of Script Editor.) It also has a lot of advanced editor features such as code completion, keyword tagging, and so forth. There’s a great tutorial online for using TextMate I’d suggest you check out. It’s very powerful and once you get used to it you’ll never want to leave it.

Over the next few posts I want to talk a bit about Python and TextMate though.

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An other new blog?  What?  I thought you were doing philosophy.

This is not going to be a regularly updated blog.  It’s more a place to put tips, notes, and the like that I get emails about.  Plus it’s a place to store these things so I can access them if I’m on the road.

So it’s not going to be the typical punditry blog.  I may post a lot one week and then go a month without posting.  Enjoy.