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My good friend Craig Hatting called me the other day to ask what programs he should download onto his new Macbook (which he won, lucky guy). I thought that this kind of information would help others, too, so I’ve decided to make a blog post out of it. Here are 10 Free Mac OS X applications I can’t live without (if you like them, please consider donating to the authors).

1. Gmail Notifier lets you check your mail without logging into Gmail
2. Adium allows me to keep in contact with all my MSN, Yahoo, AIM and Gmail Chat buddies, all in one program.
3. Quicksilver allows you to launch programs super fast, among other things
4. Notepad Widget allows me to write down all kinds of things that I need to remember in the dashboard.
5. TimeOut forces me to rest my eyes at certain intervals.
6. NetNewswire Lite is a newsreader that helps me keep up with my favourite web sites without having to visit them one by one.
7. Fetch Art automatically fetches all the artwork you don’t have for your music in iTunes
8. Firefox is my favourite web browser
9. NeoOffice is a Mac version of OpenOffice. OpenOffice is a free office application suite. There’s a spreadsheet, word processor, database, presentation program and more included.
10. Windows Media Player allows you to watch all those weird videos people send you in the mail.

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Being interested in web accessibility has given me a new awareness of the difficulties disabled people face in trying to navigate daily life. I was very pleased to see this sign in one of my local shopping centre’s disabled parking bays.

I think it’s a fantastic idea and hope it will catch on! Needless to say, I’ve never seen anyone “illegally parked” in one of these bays.

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If “less is more”, the converse, “more is less” must also be true. In the case of the image above, it most certainly is. I can only think that this solid wall of completely unreadable text was inserted to somehow improve the site’s rankings in search engines, although I’ve heard that most modern search engines aren’t so easily fooled. Text should be easy to read, concise and to the point on most web pages. People visit a page to find out something, not to read page after page of boring text.

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I stumbled across a very cool site today. It’s run by American car manufacturer Acura, and I think it’s designed as a promotion for their future concept cars. Anyway the site allows you to compose a message consisting of predictions for the future and then have that message sent to someone or yourself up to nine years later!

I’ve scheduled to receive a message from myself in early 2017 and have included my predictions for the future. I’ve removed the personal stuff, but here’s a few things I think will be in place in 2017:

• Western governments will have used the ‘war on terror’ as an excuse to instigate a police state.
• Almost every bit of communication will be monitored.
• Receiving this email will make you nervous.
• People will be cloned.
• Brain and body ‘enhancements’ will be very prevalent.
• Designer babies will be all the rage, and a genetic lower and upper class will be developing.
• A cure for HIV will have been found.
• Africa will be developing much better.
• The US will no longer be the dominant global power - the EU will be instead.
• People will be very environmentally aware.
• Global warming will continue to cause massive problems
• There will no longer be a Northern ice cap.
• The Internet will be/have been used as a tool to control the global awareness of certain issues.

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I used to (and still do) love science fiction books about the future. The ideas and visions of the future that the authors espouse are usually very inspiring for me. One novel I remember reading when I was approaching my teens was “The Intergalactic Omniglot”, by Jenni Fleetwood. In this book, a young boy discovers an advanced alien device which the title of the book is named after. This ‘Omniglot’ allows him to understand any language spoken across the Universe. Of course this device is very valuable, and as is usual when discovering alien devices, he ends up playing an important part in a galaxy-wide saga (that’s about as much as I remember, I’m afraid). Anyway, I bring this up, because I think we humans have invented a crude version of said device, in the form of online translation services like Altavista’s babelfish. Not all languages translate well, but some work well enough to allow people across the world to communicate with each other.

Take a look at the picture above. It shows me, an English speaker, communicating with Donny, a Brazilian Portuguese speaker. I find it absolutely amazing that the Internet and an online translation service have enabled me to make a friend in a country 6687 km away.

When things go wrong

As I alluded to above, not all languages translate well. Here’s an absolutely hilarious translation of a piece of text from a Taiwanese friend’s Mandarin Chinese blog:

Will change the melon melon class thesis extremely painful altogether 24 tomorrow to have to deliver (entire one good is bothersome, some who will be allowed to help me to change?) Did obeisance four evening on first changes 5 to do obeisance for five earlies morning to change 2 originally to die in battle The melon class children are quite strange regardless of you said how any they all don’t have are listening For instance said back the comma must empty space, after the period, the question mark has free time two each Duan Yao to write subject sentence topic the sentence subject sentence to have to have controling back the idea each subject sentence at least to have to have 3-5 support sentence supporting sentences ending conclusion is begins introduction after the different sentence to say again a time of rough draft.

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I got an email through this site the other day from a Chinese student doing research on company blogs. I was asked a bunch of questions about my blog (which isn’t a company blog, by the way) including “what is the purpose of this blog?” (or something to that effect). It got me thinking. Why do I have a blog? Here are my 5 reasons for what some people might consider a waste of time…

1. I love sharing life with people. I met some interesting people via my previous blog (http://rogerintaiwan.blogspot.com) and I found having a blog motivated me to seek out new and interesting experiences.
2. Having an audience (or even just a perceived audience) makes one more critical of one’s writing and work. A personal, non-interactive diary would not push me to produce work of a high standard as a blog that potentially reaches across the globe does.
3. As a web developer, blogs are a technology I need to understand. Running and designing a template for my own blog gives me a deeper understanding than I would have from merely reading and studying other’s blogs.
4. I believe that everyone has things to learn and things to teach. I believe that a blog allows me to teach what I know, and gain a greater understanding of what I think I know. There is a true saying that goes ‘you’ve never really know something until you have to teach it.’
5. I believe participating in the ‘blogosphere’ makes one a better communicator and gives one a more open mind.

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Before I begin, please note that this post says nothing about the service, products or general quality of the (I’m sure very good) company mentioned below.

In a previous post I mentioned that spelling in South Africa often leaves much to be desired. The image below illustrates a teeny English misunderstanding that has gone terribly wrong. I could be wrong in thinking that the owners of the business actually wanted their shop to be called the equivalent of “that very strange and unusual bathroom shop that is frankly, just amusing” (thanks, Oxford English Dictionary), but I suspect that they actually had something like “The bathroom market” in mind when naming their company “Bathroom Bizarre”. Granted, “Bizarre” and “Bazaar” sound almost exactly the same, but if there was ever a time to check spelling, I’d say before permanently registering a major company would be it.

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There are many reasons I love my Apple iMac. One of the reasons is that it’s a sleek looking, fast and stable machine that’s remarkably compact and portable (I’m in a coffee shop using mine now). The other reason is the fantastic software that’s available for it. Years ago, the lack of quality software was what turned people off buying an Apple computer. I’ve used Windows for many years and Apple for about 2, and I can honestly say that the quality of software for Apple far surpasses most of the equivalent software for Windows - based machines. I’m not talking about the extra software that you buy, either. The standard of software that comes with your average Apple computer is so much better than what’s bundled with Windows (admittedly, I haven’t had a good look at Vista yet) that there’s really no comparison.

One of the little magical programs that comes with all Apple machines is an application called ‘expose’. This sanity saver allows you to see all your running windows, all at once by ‘zooming’ out. The best part of Expose is that you can activate it by simply moving your mouse to a screen corner (set up by you). For someone like me who regularly has 25 or more windows open at once, this keeps me from going crazy. Switching to that one tiny document in the one program you opened 4 hours ago is as simple as a swipe to the right corner and a click. That’s it. Swipe click. Swipe click. It takes all of 1 second to do.
Click the image for a larger view.

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On the way back from a photo shoot I did for Porsche I spotted this sign, advertising a new website for Kyalami Race Track. Granted, I’m not the most experienced and knowledgeable web guy out there, but I certainly wouldn’t have chosen http://www.kyalamigrandprixentertainment.co.za for my domain name. That’s 45 characters you have to type, just to get there. With South Africa’s poor literacy rate, and even worse computer literacy rates, the chances of someone noticing that mass of characters, being able to recognise the consitituent words (kyalami grand prix entertainment), being able to remember the address and then being able to spell it properly when they get in front of a computer are pretty slim.
What’s wrong with http://kyalamifun.co.za, and how about at least highlighting the individual words, so that people can make out what the 45 letter monster is all about?

Click the picture for a larger view.

Update. The link seems to be dead. Perhaps they realised their folly.

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Facebook, for those who are unaware, is the social networking phenomenon that is sweeping the globe like a virus, and has become extremely popular here in South Africa. It’s probably the best on-line tool for keeping in touch with people that I know of, and boasts an ever increasing set of features. However, in my opinion, it has recently started to get out of control. It has become impossible for a normal busy person to keep up with all the requests and notifications that it sends to you. Take a look at the preceding image to see what happens if you don’t log into Facebook for a week or so.

If you’re a Facebook user, how do you manage Facebook along with your normal work and email demands?
Do you simply ignore all the stuff that it throws at you, or do you diligently respond to all the requests for your time?

Click the image to see it full size.