If you recently got a Magic Mouse either because it came with your new Mac or because you got excited by the hype and bought one, only to find that the dratted thing is missing the third and fourth buttons which you had so cleverly bound to Expose and Spaces, there is good news. A free application calledMagicPrefs lets you not only add this functionality to the Magic Mouse but lets you define gestures and perform other kinky mods that should be worth a lot more than the millions that Apple paid to acquire Lala.

UPDATE: TUAW has a pointer to another free tool called BetterTouchTool.

It is difficult not to fall in love (insofar as such emotions have been called love) with Posterous, the fast-growing mini-blogging service, especially in comparison to its bigger competitor Tumblr. In contrast to the insider ethos that Tumblr (ironically, currently the larger service) actively embraces, Posterous eschews the superficially hip for the genuinely productive, when it comes to features.
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Say you are not a PC. And you use MySQL in some manner that is compliant with the rules and ordinances of your community. And you are part of the dying breed that considers web GUIs nice and all, but a native client application is where it’s at. Then, the go to tool on the Mac for your MySQL interaction needs was CocoaMySQL. And if you thought the awesomeness of this tool could not be improved on, you didn’t reckon on SequelPro, the son of CocoaMySQL. And the hits keep on coming. The latest version (0.9.6) delivers on the SSH tunnelling capability that has always existed as a teaser in the UI. Did I already say awesome?

Did I say file transfers? That’s an injustice because DropZone can do more than file transfers. It can zip and email files, install apps, upload pictures, post them to Twitter or Posterous (did I tell you about Posterous? well, that’s the next post), print stuff (though you really shouldn’t be killing trees in the 21st century), generate short URLs via bit.ly … and all that for less cost ($10) than it took me to type up this list (what, you don’t think my time is worth $1/minute?).

And if you are capable of coding in Ruby, then DropZone provides a well-documented API using which you can write your own extensions. I plan to write one (though I am not a Ruby programmer) that uploads dropped files to a WordPress blog (using XML-RPC)… using the WordPress provided mechanism (XML-RPC) is useful because uploaded files (images) then show up in the built-in media manager (uploading such files via FTP, SCP, etc., will not have this effect).

Every year MacHeist offers tightwads an opportunity to score a lot of software for the Mac for next to nothing. One of the applications made available this year was an interesting new RSS/newsfeed reader for the Mac called Headline which retails for $19.95.

At a time when NewsGator has let loose NetNewsWire (not just the Lite version) for free, and was quickly followed suit by NewsFire — and the brilliant Vienna has always been free — is it possible to make a go of selling an RSS reader for ~ $20? Aren’t desktop clients passe in this new age of web applications (in this instance, Google Reader)?

Well, Doseido, the makers of Headline, think so, and I wish them the best. They are not alone in this game. There’s NewsLife, Endo, and other optimists as well. Does Headline deliver $20 worth of goods?

The problem for Headline, as already noted, is what it is up against. In a different world, $20 seems a fair price for a useful piece of software. But not in a world where NetNewsWire is free, not to mention a whole other universe of AIR apps like the amazingly slick if CPU hungry Snackr.

What is worse, Headline, despite its very pleasing and useful pop-out preview, sorely lacks certain simple features, which makes for constant irritation, given its natural use as a news alert tool. What I mean by that is that Headline’s ability to pop-up as a small window, as and when new articles are available, and provide short previews, makes it a good tool for “as it happens” alerts. This is the one differentiator that makes Headline interesting to me. But for such usage to be productive, Headline needs:

• Open article in background: if Headline pops up 15 new articles, you need the ability to scan through them, opening ones on you want to read in detail in your browser, but doing so in the background, so you can continue scanning the headlines. Unfortunately this is not possible. This could be a limitation of the mechanism for invocation of the browser (Safari, in my case), but the experience is annoying.

• Choose and act on a range of headlines: say you scan through the list and want to mark a bunch of articles as read. Or even hide them altogether from your view. That’s not easily done. In order to mark an article read, you have to visit the item in the list and stay on it for a second or more (perhaps an understandable precaution to avoid marking something as read just because you “arrow”ed over it). And to hide read articles, you have to trick the app by selecting a different option for the filter (top left) and then selecting “Unread”. Your only other resort is to “Mark all as Read” (Command-Option-R).

• Other issues: if the apps refresh kicks in while you are on an item, the screen scrolls to newer items and the one you were reading disappears in the list (though its preview remains in the preview pop out). Headline also seems to get confused when my laptop is alternated between monitors with different screen resolutions.

Headline is an interesting idea and a beautiful implementation (aesthetically speaking). But the limitations of its UI make the cost questionable. If all you need is a pop-up alert for updated news feeds, you can consider the free tool FeedPopper. If you would like something a bit more detailed and fancy, you can bite the CPU bullet and consider Snackr. For most use cases, NetNewsWire will most likely do the trick.

Remember email? The Internet application that would send you messages from various sources that you could view in a sophisticated interface that let you filter, highlight, search and perform other functions on these messages? That was an awesome idea wasn’t it? Too bad its dead.

Today, conversations occur in a zillion fractured places: Facebook, blog posts (comments on blog posts), Twitter, Tumblr, so on (Posterous is a happy exception, but more on Posterous in a separate post). Which means you have to visit these individual sites to keep track of who is saying what in response to something you said. Well, not entirely, since many of them provide RSS feeds, which in this context, can be considered the equivalent of an email message — many RSS readers even mimic an email interface and conversely many email applications (Apple’s Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird) are very capable RSS readers.

Nonetheless, a problem remains: you still need to subscribe to RSS feeds (where available) for each of these conversation threads. Some of these sites do not provide RSS feeds at all, or some provide truncated feeds which require you to click on a link to visit the site to read a response (hey, they need the eyeballs to generate revenue), and by its very nature (or its implementation thus far) this is a subscribe model, not a publish/respond one.

RSS feeds of conversation threads do have an advantage: they let you easily subscribe or unsubscribe to threads based on your level of interest. Anyone who has been on a mailing list for a good bit of time (especially a political discussion list) knows the value of this capability! However, the pain involved in adding and managing subscriptions, especially in the case of blog posts littered all over the Internet is quite daunting.

Fortunately (or perhaps not as we shall soon learn) services have sprung up that provide simple tools that let you track responses to comments on blogs and a few of them are listed and discussed below, and their current status will reveal that the situation may not be so fortunate after all.

Co.mments

Joined the dead pool. RIP.

Bloppy

Bloppy got sloppy. Forgot to renew their domain and its parked!

A pity since it was the best of the available options and included email notification. Remember email?

BlogFlux Commentful

This service is so buggy that their Join/Login screens lead to Apache error pages.

coComment

Few things you can say for coComments: their domain has been renewed, site is alive, and their login screen works. But the buck stops there. In order to use the service you need to use a Firefox extension or a bookmarklet. Unfortunately the bookmarklet throws up an error “The coComment script could not be loaded”. So if you use Chrome, or Safari, or Opera you are mostly SOL.

Yacktrack

Yacktrack takes it one step beyond coComments. It works. There’s a bookmarklet, clicking on it brings up a relevant form … all good. But for some strange reason, even if you sign up for a YackTrack account, the access to your searches/entries is provided via RSS per search/entry. So, if you added comments to 50 independent blog posts, added them to your YackTrack list (“dashboard”), you cannot really get updates for all of them via one RSS feed. The point of the service eludes me… if I wanted an RSS feed per post that I commented on, then I could just have subscribed to the comment feed per post!

Update: see comments from the YackTrack developer below on the purpose of the service.

Backtype

Backtype is slick. Looks like one of those dandy new Ruby on Rails UIs. This is a great site for gathering all your comments together in one place, or as an alternative if Google Alerts somehow does not cut it for you. It’s a “conversational search engine”. Which doesn’t always suit nicely the needs of someone trying to just follow comments on a few blog posts (for instance, backtype notifies me via email of new comments on posts I am subscribed to, but does not include any text from those comments). The vagueness of my comment reflects my inability (quite possibly my own weakness) to figure out how to work this beast to my needs.

Closing thoughts

Apart from these, there are a few other options: some blogs provide a built-in mechanism to be notified of additional comments. You could also, as mentioned above, subscribe to the comment feeds for blog posts. You might even wish to just set up a Google Alert of some sort to track the post. But right now, there doesn’t seem to be a well-suited mechanism to quickly add blog posts to track and be notified (preferably via email) of comments against them.

If you know better, please educate us in the comments!

Correction: backtype does include details in its new comments notification. Given this bit of info, I think backtype is a pretty good solution to this problem.

Apple has had a Safari 4 Beta out for a few weeks now. Should you wish to try it out on your Mac, a word of warning: installing this version utterly messed up my Mail, in particular my IMAP accounts. I blew away all traces of the accounts and recreated them from scratch in Mail. That didn’t help, nor did any of various other cleanup operations. Uninstalling it made my problems disappear. It is possible this problem is specific to me (such a critical problem would have raised louder howls!) or I am misdiagnosing it (one is a browser and the other a mail client). So usual acronyms apply: YMMV, FWIW.

Some interesting new features in Safari 4:

• Offline support (HTML5)
• New JavaScript engine (Nitro)
• Cover Flow for bookmarks and history
• “Top Sites” — new tab options like Google’s Chrome
• Tabs on top like Google Chrome (what where they thinking?!)
• A JavaScript debugger and profiler

Available for Mac OS X and Windows, if you want to brave it!

UPDATE: The problem was incompatibilities between Safari 4 and one of my Mail Plugins (Proxifier), which I was not using anyway. I removed /Library/Mail/Bundles/Proxifier and all is well!

I’ll admit I didn’t have a clue what reCAPTCHAs were about, and turn out its a very neat idea:

CAPTCHAs work—for digitizing old, damaged texts, manuscripts

Over the course of history, humanity has suffered some horrifying damage to our collective cultural legacy in the form of books and other text lost to accident or neglect. The digitalization of text holds out the promise of permanently preserving the written word in an archive that can be distributed widely and kept safe from accidental damage. This presents archivists with a challenge: the works that are most in need of preservation are likely to already be damaged or distorted, making the use of automated scanning and text processing less likely to succeed. Researchers are now reporting on a successful way to identify the words that computers can’t handle: turn them into CAPTCHAs, and get people to do the work.

[ Link ]