So much for an available update as rumoured on the net…

Note that there is NO NEW FIRMWARE available at this time. Hopefully Nokia doesn’t count on selling the new firmware to us in form of another €400 device and an “including the new feature pack 1″ sticker on the box.

As firefox keeps crashing more often and demands more resources, it’s time to move back and simplify by reverting to SeaMonkey, the old-new Netscape-Mozilla Suite branch. Less extensions cause less clutter and installer properly presents an option to install just the browser, or as it’s called, the navigator. Then it’s time for some house-keeping (see below) and the browser is clean and simple and above all just works!

Go to Edit :: Preferences, select Appearance and deactivate Print, Bookmarks, etc…

How to get rid of the irritating SeaMonkey icon to the left of the address bar? Quite easy, too. Go to your profile directory (e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\**UserName**\Application Data\ Mozilla or SeaMonkey) or you know what, just search for the file “userChrome-example.css” on your computer, yeah, that’s easier. Now edit this file and exchange

/*
* Eliminate the throbber and its annoying movement:
*
* #throbber-box {
* display: none !important;
* }
*/


with

/*
* Eliminate the throbber and its annoying movement:
*/
#throbber-box {
display: none !important;
}

hence undocumenting the part of CSS responsible for the throbber. Now save the file into your chrome directory with the name “userChrome.css”. That’s all. Enjoy a clean and simple app (screenshot of a clean browser interface with the throbber button missing included). Hopefully future versions come like this by default.

By the way, installing a browser-only version will still leave the address book tab in the sidebar (F9). To remove it search for “panels.rdf” in your profile and delete

<RDF:li RDF:resource="urn:sidebar:panel:addressbook"/>


and

<RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:sidebar:panel:addressbook"
NC:title="Address Book"
NC:content="chrome://messenger/content/addressbook/
addressbook-panel.xul"
NC:exclude="navigator:browser" />


to take care of that.

Note: don’t you love the fact that there is no need for a second ‘google search’ box in the right hand corner? All is nicely integrated into the address input box.

Keywords: remove button, animated button, animation, seamonkey, loading button, loading animation, get rid of loading button, put away, hide button, hide logo

Canon’s Digital Photo Professional has a few unpublished shortcuts, I’ve recently found out, which are very handy. I’ll list a few below.

In the quick check tool hit the SPACE key to switch between the fit to screen and the 50% views. Excellent, no need to use the mouse! By the way double-clicking the photo will also do this, in case you insist on using the mouse, but would rather not move over to the button area each time or preview the photo in full screen mode.

Also, in the quick check tool you can rate photos by repeatedly hitting the V key. It will cycle through rating 1, 2, 3, and clear.

If you select photos you’re about to ‘quick-check’, use the left and right arrow key to jump from one photo to the next.

I’m still desperately looking for a shortcut to the view before and after in the edit mode. I’ll update this blog entry as I find new useful undocumented shortcuts.

Update on Mac OS X: DPP ver. 2.2.2.3 does not support such shortcuts and one has to use the mouse. Moving in quick check tool is possible by using the arrow keys while holding the Option key–so one needs two hands (!). Sorry to find that although DPP 2.2 for Mac OS X is a fast universal binary, it still has shortcomings compared to the Windows version.

In Mac OS Tiger when files are copied to a disk image (virtual disk , extension .dmg) Spotlight doesn’t index the files. In order to turn indexing for these virtual drives run Terminal and enter:

sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/volume_name

After Spotlight finishes indexing the volume it finds much more than just file names!

Index information is always stored in the disk/volume in question, therefore no additional resources are used when the disk image (.dmg) is not mounted.

But this is not all. If you try the above trick for storing an archive of your email messages (since Tiger all separate .emlx files) Spotlight won’t find anything. Don’t be fooled, .emlx are, in fact, indexed, but they are excluded from the search results.

There is a trick…

Go to Finder, start a new search, choose Other from the first drop-down menu and choose Raw Query. This opens the doors to a whole new world of searching! An example query is in the attached screenshot. It finds all emails with the words “Hannes” and “gut”. The query for this is the following:

(kMDItemTextContent ==Hannes && kMDItemTextContent ==gut)

The infinite possibilities for queries are discussed in Apple developer pages, try Query Expression Syntax or Spotlight Metadata Attributes

Remember that these searches can be literally infinitely combined and even saved in smart folders, I suppose. Fathom the possibilites…

Finally after months of experimenting with settings, color profiles, photo management and manipulation software (including, of course, Adobe Camera Raw as well as Phase Capture ONE Pro) I realized all of this is unnecessary.

Shoot in RAW. Then use Canon’s Digital Photo Professional to tweak the photos. It works non destructively (just like Aperture) and saves all the Raw manipulations in Canon’s CR2 Raw files. When done, export these tweaked and perfect RAW Photos into JPEGs and import into iPhoto for nice previews, slide-show and fast photo management anyway.. Then import the CR2 Raw files, which served as the basis for those JPEGs you just exported out of DPP.

This way you have all in iPhoto, the Raw files which you can still tweak and change in DPP at a later date and the JPEG reviews for slideshows, CDs, websites, whatever…

So easy. So cheap. Just a little open-mindedness and good will.

I mean, I love Word, but heck, their help assistant, no matter how cute and beautiful, just doesn’t get it!

Explanation: There doesn’t seem to be a way to delete a single full page from an MS Word document…

The news on Mac OS being developed in parallel to run on Intel in addition to the PowerPC processor stunned me. I can’t even be ashamed for not foretelling that despite the rumors, because a completely different processor architecture supported for 5 years just ‘in case’? That just doesn’t make sense! Apple is fairly small and 5 years ago had enough work just with keeping it alive and persuading people to jump on its new OS for which there was very little support and close to no applications. Hardly a situation to run a parallel development of this untested OS for Intel ‘just in case’!

I guess I’m a bit disappointed, too, to hear the famed RISC processor to go from Apple, from Macs. Intel is just ubiquitous, no frills processor. But it works and works for less money than IBM’s G5, I guess. Consumerism may be part of the death pill that PowerPC received. Afterall look at the 3G iPod transformed into an uglier 4G with no transparent red underlit touch buttons. It went from a specialty product, from an ultra cool, if not the coolest at the time, gadget, to an ordinary consumer product that serves the purpose.

Nevertheless, events are a stroke of a genius from the strategic market point of view. Steve Jobs just never stops surprising us…

Finally I found the link to BlogThis. It’s bookmarklet, a pretty active bookmark that can be added to any browser. Click Blogger Help : What is BlogThis! ? to find out how to ‘install’ it.

Yesterday I found PimpMySafari, a very neat page with helpers, plugins AND bookmarklets for Safari. If you get a hold of the basic javascript variable passing, it’s easy to create new ones, too!

You can write plain text files on a mac in a format readable on windows. Mac, Unix, Windows, all use different HEX code to end the lines. Therefore a line ending on a Mac will show on Windows as an empty box. Paragraphs will show as a huge chunk of text.

With smultron, found @ smultron.sourceforge.net, you can set the editor to the line endings of your desire. Now it’s easy to exchange plain text files between a mac and an iPaq, for instance!

MacDevCenter.com: Apache Web-Serving With Mac OS X, Part 5: “Along with the bosses abhorred, benefits scored, and welcome awards, mouths floored and derision ignored, nothing deplored and happiness poured, computer love has been restored, and with no principles discord! Hail the mighty Fnord! (Yes, I could go on.)”