Macintosh

I’ve finished the initial version of Mii Transfer. It’s still pretty ugly, but functional. You can save a Mii from your remote to a binary .mii file which is compatible with sites such as miieditor.com or miiplaza.net.

It’s available for download at http://www.mcdevzone.com/files/MiiTransferX.tgz.

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Macintosh, Wii

I’ve always found Safari to be slower than other browsers, especially if it’s been running for a while. It also slows down other applications as well. Macenstein confirmed this, with some figures to back it up. Dave Hyatt gives some insight into what could be causing the slowdown. On the other hand, I find that Camino & Firefox also have the same effect.

A few days ago I tried Opera and found that it doesn’t slow down as much and it uses much less CPU time, so doesn’t slow down other applications. However I finally got annoyed with its quirkiness last night and switched back to Firefox. I found that using an unfamiliar browser and missing the extensions I use regularly slowed me down and made it more difficult to work.

After reading Low End Mac’s praise for Opera 9, I decided to take another look at it. I’ve tried Opera before, but I always end up going back to Firefox because of some annoyance. This time I’m going to give it a real chance.

The first thing I notice about Opera is that it’s FAST. Much faster than Firefox, Camino, or Safari. It also uses less memory and CPU time, so as a result my machine feels much faster. It’s still kind of quirky, but it doesn’t feel quite as alien any more. I still miss Firefox extensions, especially browser sync & del.icio.us.

I’ve been using SOHO Notes (and previously StickyBrain) for many years, since their .Mac promotion. Lately I’ve been getting annoyed with it, in particular the very annoying startup delay when it opens the database. I have a review copy of DevonTHINK so I also tried that, but the major drawback is it doesn’t support .Mac sync.

I’ve been looking at Bare Bones Software’s Yojimbo for a while, so today I finally took the plunge and bought it. My major sticking point all along was how to import my data from SOHO Notes. I realized it was simple: select all notes and export to separate files. In Yojimbo, I was able to import that folder with everything intact.

Today I decided to take the plunge and look for a good GTD application. If I’m going to use it, it has to be convenient and easy to use, or I won’t bother with it. The first one I tried was Ghost Action, since I saw the announcement for it today. It looked really nice, but I decided to check out a few freeware applications. I also hoped I could find something that’s available via a hot key or menu extra rather than having another application in my dock, but I couldn’t find one like that.

Next I tried Thinking Rock, which I immediately hated because of it’s non-native feel (since it’s written in Java) and the huge window that takes up the entire screen. I then tried Frictionless, which looked nice at first but I found it buggy and too confusing with all of the different windows. It took me several minutes to figure out how to create a project, since it was completely non-intuitive.

I finally went back to Ghost Action and decided to stick with it, since it’s the easiest one to use and the most Mac-like. I also like that it syncs with iCal and will sync between my iMac and MacBook Pro.

TJ has posted one of the best wrap-ups of the Month Of Apple Bugs (MOAB).

It’s obvious that MOAB was nothing more than a personal vendetta against Apple. If they were serious, they would have reported the issues directly to Apple and given them an opportunity to fix them. Furthermore, many of the bugs were related to third-party products rather than Apple software.

Apple may not be perfect, but they’re a lot better than Windows. For every Apple bug they can come up with, there are at least 100 more serious issues affecting Windows or IE. Why not a ‘Month of Windows Bugs’? In fact they can easily make it a Year of Windows Bugs.