Tadaaaaaa!
After several days of hard work (and some weeks of planning in the initial phase) I’m proud to present my newest project:
www.stylemac.com – Fresh Apple Design & Tech News

Stylemac features Apple and Design related and even Windows users might
find the one or other interesting tidbit as design news are mostly
cross-plattform anyway.

There are some interface glitches left, which I want to correct as soon
as possible, though that means after I’m back from Stuttgart, as I’ve
to fly to Stuttgart again tomorrow.

I just moved the TagBag! Widget over
to the new page, as it makes more sense for it to stay over there.

I hope you’ll enjoy the page nevertheless, I’ll try to settle at
something between 5-10 news posts a day, and would love to count you
among my readers ;)  or at least write some comments quoting your
opinion about the page.

I’ll of course continue to post here at terhech.de as this is my
personal blog (it’s just that I have little personal to say from time
to time)

Noo. I’m not an addict yet. honestly.. hopefully

But isn’t that cool retro stuff?

I’ve been playing around with the new Apple Mighty Mouse since
yesterday (got it at work immediately after release), and I thought I’d
share a small review in case somebody who reads this blog is currently
on verge of buying one of those gadgets.
The mouse looks great, and perfectly accompagnies anything from the
Apple Product palette. The packaging is nothing special compared with
other Apple products, there’s a small disc and one needs to install a
driver and reboot Mac OS X in order to use the full mouse-functionalty
(Basic Functions work out of the box).
The Mouse still looks like a one-button mouse, and feels like one too.
Apple build a technology that can distinguish whether you’re doing a
left or right click by sensors, and here’s problem one I have with this
mouse: I always keep my left finger on the button when I right-click,
and since my finger sits on the button the mouse thinks I’m doing a
left-click. So as long as you have your left finger on the button (and
not lingerin atop it) you can’t right-click. That’s, imho, a bad
solution and makes it a bit impractical for me to use the right mouse
button as I currently can’t change my right-click behaviour although I
tried, it’s rooted too deep
The next problem I have with this mouse are  the squeez-buttons.
They’re at a position where I can’t reach them with my thumb, not even
if I try hard: I have to change the position of my whole hand on the
mouse in order to press them, and since that’s not really good for any
workflow I reckon I won’t use these buttons much. I even tried to
change the position of my palm on the mouse so I could just reach these
squeeze-buttons only to discover that this position didn’t allow me to
use the scroll-button anymore. Which brings me to the next thing: The
scroll-ball. I find the scrolling a bit slow (although I set it to
full-speed in the preferences), and I find that I sometimes have to try
twice until it starts to scroll. The mouse-wheel on my old logitech
here works better, albeit it can only scroll on the y-axis. The ability
to scroll x and y is a great enrichment to my workflow and I love it,
it just could be a bit faster, scrolling in photoshop is so slow that
it’s faster for me to change the tool and scroll by pressing the left
button.
As a conclusion I can say that I wouldn’t buy this mouse myself, now
that I have it here at work. I’d rather go for one of those 7Button
logitech beasts which offer x/y scrolling as well (although I’m not
sure if that logitech x/y scrolling is supported under mac os x).
If however, my palm would fit this mouse (which it doesn’t) I’d
probably be quite happy with it (and given that I could right-click
with my left finger on the mouse)

http://flickr.com/photos/niallkennedy/21370503/in/photostream/

See that Mac Mini on the Couch? Whats it doing up there? If you
click ‘previous pic’ a couple of times you’ll see new pics of Longhorn
& IE7

Can’t resist but smile a bit

“

Microsoft’s Roz Ho and Adobe’s Bruce Chizen both took the stage to reaffirm their commitment to the Macintosh platform
“

and

Jobs also discussed a new technology called Rosetta, that he described
as “a dynamic binary translator.” It runs existing PowerPC applications
on the Intel platform, he said. Jobs described Rosetta as
“lightweight,” and said “it’s nothing like Classic.”

Jobs demonstrated Rosetta by running Microsoft Office applications,
Quicken and Photoshop CS 2 — all unmodified PowerPC-binary versions,
unlike Mathematica — on the new Intel-based hardware.

//
and now for those new iPods he was talking about.. I need a new one…

Weird stuff, don’t know what to write about this.. Lets hope that some
of the more important Software-Companies like Adobe/Macromedia or
Steinberg won’t stop their development for developing 2 CPU Branches
for a not-so-important base like Mac doesn’t pay off..
I’m still a bit puzzled, hadn’t expected this.. Although it’s a nice
move for the future, cheaper faster macs.. And Wine should work like
mad

“We are very far along on this, but we’re not done,” said Jobs. “Which
is why we’re going to put it in your hands very soon, so you can help
us finish it.”

Cocoa-based applications will require “a few minor tweaks and a
recompile.” Carbon-based applications require “a few more tweaks,”
recompiling, and “they’ll work,” said Jobs. And projects built using
Metrowerks’ CodeWarrior need to be moved to Xcode.

well, he sounds a bit.. pleading.. doesn’t he? I guess must be a sub-optimal feeling standing up there right now..

I just found out that Apple updated their Dashboard listing,
they’ve got a lot of Widgets now, and all these Widgets are neatly
sorted into a couple of Select-Boxes which allow quick access. Nice,
I’ll go and see if I find some cool new Widgets now…

Futurismo Zugakousaku has some really awesome Quartz Composer examples
on his site, showing off Tiger technologies.. They’re all in Quicktime,
and some are even downloadable to test them out.
I’ve been playing around with Quartz Composer too, but my main interest has been the gpu-accelerated stuff.
But these examples now are’re a real show-off. And be sure to open them
in Quartz-Composer to see how easy it is to build such things.

http://www.zugakousaku.com/index.cgi?quartz&samples&en&

In this interview, the new CEO of Intel says the following tidbit:
Pressed about security by Mr.
Mossberg, Mr. Otellini had a startling confession: He spends an hour a
weekend removing spyware from his daughter’s computer. And when further
pressed about whether a mainstream computer user in search of immediate
safety from security woes ought to buy Apple Computer Inc.’s Macintosh
instead of a Wintel PC, he said, “If you want to fix it tomorrow, maybe
you should buy something else.”

Great, isn’t it. All the Mac Zealots while love that, and all
the Gates-followers will probably go mad. It’s just new fuel for a
never-ending fire
But. At least he’s honest.

//
Some might argue why he didn’t propose the use of Linux, but that might
be related to the shattered multi-distribution problem. Linux isn’t
Linux, but that’s a whole topic of it’s own, and pretty much every 2.
IT-Journalist already wrote his/her blurb about it. So I’ll keep my
uninformed mouth shut..

Story over here

Ok, I .. kinda like podcasting, it’s just that I really don’t use it
too much. I used to download the one or other file and listen to it
while jogging, but not too often and now that somebody stole my iPod
even that’s history.

But what I like is how Apple seems to be more cutting edge now. They
always play with the latest technologies. RSS Screensaver in Tiger, RSS
in Safari, Quartz-Composer alone, Scripting Quartz composer in
Javascript an so on. It’s kinda the tech nerd’s dreamland, I love that.
They’re certainly listening to their user-base.