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Interesting Sites

Web sites that I find particularly interesting.

Useful site: iTunes Artwork Finder finds more than artwork

Ever want to grab the cover art for some album? Or have you ever wanted the full-size icon from an iOS app? Or the cover image from a movie or TV show? A podcast's icon? Ben Dodson hosts an excellent web-based tool that lets you do all that and more: The iTunes Artwork Finder.

Usage is about as simple as it gets: Pick a category, enter your search term, set the geographical region, and click Get the artwork.

Note that this only works for things available from the iTunes Store in the specified region, so you can't use it to find cover art for that digitized copy of some obscure record you found at an underground music store in New York City back in 1973.

Also note that if you have your own web site, you can host your own artwork finder, as Ben has made the code available for all. I wouldn't recommend making it publicly available, though, unless you have bandwidth to spare—a single search for "Friends," for instance, returned about 25 high-resolution images.

Here's how I set it up on our family's web site; it's really easy to do, and it works great:

  1. Download the zipped archive from GitHub.
  2. Create a new folder on your server. I called mine getart.
  3. Upload the two files (php, js) from the archive into the folder.
  4. Add basic HTML tags (html, head, body) to the stub of HTML shown on the GitHub page, and save it as index.html in the same folder. If you like fancy and have time to spend, go ahead and pretty it up with CSS and layout. I just left it bare.

That's all there is to it; you can now look up artwork by loading http://yourdomain/getart (or whatever you called it) in your fave browser.



Useful site: iStockNow finds Apple products

During today's recording of our The Committed podcast, Ian mentioned a site he uses to check for sometimes hard-to-acquire Apple products. The site, iStockNow, is very nicely designed and makes it really simple to check availability not only at your local stores, but also globally.

Start by clicking the left-side filters section for the products you'd like to check on, then view the map on the right to see where they're in stock. For example, a search for the 15" MacBook Pro Touch Bar in Space Gray shows that it's available throughout North America, except in Mexico City:

But if you search for a 42mm Apple Watch in Stainless Steel in retail stores, you'll see that most of North America is a sea of red. Zoom in on the map, though, and there are some stores with stock:

When you find a store with inventory—the green pushpin—click on it to get the details of that store's inventory:

If you're looking for something particularly hard to find—cough AirPods cough—iStockNow may just help you secure your item. According to Ian, at least, that's exactly how he got his AirPods!



My post-CNN news sources

With the horrendous redesign of CNN, I quickly determined I had to find a new news source (or sources). After browsing the comments to my post, and doing some searching, here are the changes I've made in my news reading.

The first change is the biggest—I now use an RSS reader for the majority of my news reading. I've always used an RSS reader for most non-news sites, but preferred reading news directly on a web page (not sure why).

But as most sites seem to be heading in the image overload direction, I decided to find news sites with good RSS feeds, and read them using Vienna, my RSS reader of choice.

Why Vienna? I'll write about that in a future post, I think…but its excellent keyboard controls, and its ability to open articles in background tabs, are two of its key features for my reading habits.

The second change is obviously what sites/sources I use in Vienna. Here's my list of new sources, with both the web site and RSS URLs provided:

BBC - US and CanadawebRSS
UPI - Latest NewswebRSS
UPI - US NewswebRSS
Reuters - Top NewswebRSS
Reuters - US NewswebRSS

There's obviously some overlap between these sources, but that's OK; it's easy to mark/skip duplicates in Vienna. When I'm visiting a site on the web, all three (BBC, UPI, and Reuters) present a clean interface, without invasively large photos, and zero auto-playing videos or scrolling marquees. In short, all three are a joy to use on the web, unlike the "new and improved" CNN.

Sorry, CNN, but you've permanently lost at least one viewer; your new site makes it too hard to get what I want, which is news. The BBC, UPI, and Reuters understand that news is what viewers come to a news site to see. Perhaps there's a lesson there for CNN, if they can see it behind those enormous photos and CPU-sucking videos.



RIP Mac OS X Hints, Nov 4 2000 – Nov 4 2014

Note: The following is my unofficial eulogy for Mac OS X Hints; IDG has not announced any plans regarding the site, though I would hope they'll leave it online, even if no new hints appear in the future. The site is now officially in read-only mode; there will be no new hints. So it's officially comatose, at least.

Dearly beloved…

On this, the occasion of its 14th birthday, we're gathered here to mark the passing of Mac OS X Hints.

While it can be hard to tell exactly when a web site has died, the signs are fairly obvious. It's been over 45 days since the last new hint appeared on the site. There is no way for new users to sign up for an account. There's been one new comment posted in the last two days. A sidebar box proudly proclaims Latest Mountain Lion Hints. The site design, logo, and icons were last updated when I worked for Macworld, over four years ago. To paraphrase a Star Trek character, "it's dead, Jim."

To be fair, it's a bit more Monty Python "I'm not dead!" than officially dead, but really, the site is a dead man walking. Now that I'm done with movie analogies, let me explain why the passing of Mac OS X Hints isn't a bad thing. (Note that Mac OS X Hints' passing is in no way a reflection of its management by Macworld. In fact, the opposite is true: I believe the site would have ceased to exist years ago without their involvement.)

The simple truth is that the need for OS X hints has tapered off to near zero over the last 14 years. And that's a good thing.

[continue reading…]



Mac OS X Hints turns 14

Fourteen years ago today, I launched Mac OS X Hints, with this simple post. The Mac OS X 10.0 Public Beta was only a couple months old, and many Mac users (myself included) were feeling lost in the land of Unix and Terminal. (Despite anything Apple said at the time, Terminal was very much a required aspect of using Mac OS X in those early days!)

Related post: RIP Mac OS X Hints, Nov 4 2000 - Nov 4 2014

At the time of launch, I knew nothing about content management systems or PHP; I knew enough HTML to be dangerous, and very little about anything else—including design, as you can see from the image at right.

That image, courtesy of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, was taken one month after launch. Could it be any brighter and uglier? Probably not. While I did many things wrong during that launch, I did get a few things right…

  • The site was all about the community; it was my intent from day one that it would be a users helping users site, not a "me telling the world what to do" site.
  • The content management system I chose, Geeklog, has proven to be very long lived—fourteen years on, and it's still what powers the site. In all that time, we had (I believe) exactly one hacking incident. Not bad.
  • The site had a laser focus on hints; I'd do a pick of the week, but outside of that, it was all about the hints.

So despite my poor design and lack of PHP skills, the site flourished. So much so that Macworld purchased the site and hired me in June of 2005. I spent nearly five years with Macworld, before leaving in 2010 to join Many Tricks.

In looking back, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine the site would flourish to the point where it would actually change my career. But it did, and for that, I'm eternally thankful to everyone who helped make macosxhints.com what it was. So happy birthday, Mac OS X Hints!



Got tables? Use TablesGenerator.com

Whether writing here or on Macworld, I often find myself relying on tables to convey lots of data points in an easy-to-read manner. As examples, check out the tables in my Nintendo add-ons pricing rant, or in my analysis on the cost of LED lighting. (Or even in my mother-of-all-tables post on OS X release dates.)

Tables play a key role in all of those articles…but creating tables in HTML (or even Markdown) is, quite simply, a pain in the butt. The syntax is simple enough, but structuring complex tables with some entries spanning multiple rows and/or columns can be time consuming.

Often, too, my work starts in Excel, and it seems like a lot of redundant effort to take Excel's table-based layout and recreate it in an HTML-based table layout. (Excel has an export to HTML function, but the HTML it builds is heavily styled and needs a lot of editing.)

Enter TablesGenerator, an amazing tool for creating tables. Not just HTML tables, but pure text tables, LaTeX tables, and even MediaWiki tables (whatever those might be).

[continue reading…]



Why isn’t macosxhints.com a wiki?

A couple mornings back, while browsing my collection of feeds in NetNewsWire, I came across this entry about macosxhints.com in Chris Clark's excellent blog, decaffeinated. Chris writes:

MacOSXHints is a community-driven site operated by Mac Publishing LLC (of Macworld and Playlist renown) whose sole purpose is to collect and archive--wait for it--hints pertaining to Mac OS X...little tidbits you probably won’t find in the help files or product pages.

... ... ...

What we have is a thriving community site that houses a great number of hints, some percentage of them broken or redundant, most of which could be improved upon (and are, if you bother to read the comments) with the aid of a few dozen eyes.

This isn’t what blogs are for. This is what wikis are for.

So why isn’t MacOSXHints a wiki?

An interesting question to read, especially just after waking up. And it would have been interesting to reply in a comment on Chris' site, but...it seems there's no ability to do so. (Perhaps I should post a story about why decaffeinated should really be a blog that takes comments? :) ). So I'm posting my reply here, in case anyone's interested in the answer to the question.

The question about macosxhints.com is a valid one, and one that's potentially even more interesting when asked at a higher level...

Important note: The following thoughts are my opinions (and historical knowledge) only. They are in no way associated with any official MacPublishing, LLC company policies or plans. Anything I write about what I'd like to see on macosxhints.com is just that--what I'd personally like to see happen to the site going forward. They are not statements of official plans by MacPublishing for the macosxhints.com site (but we are discussing many of these same things internally).

[continue reading…]



For the long hint-less weekend…

Two extra days with no hints, and I doubt I'll write much on robservatory during that time ... so what to do, what to do!? To make up for the lack of hints and new writing from yours truly between now and Monday, here are some ways to amuse yourselves...

Have a great Thanksgiving, everyone!

-rob.