Chax is a great plugin for iChat which provides several options for customizing the iChat interface and behavior, including the latest big improvements – tabbed chat windows and auto-resizing of the contact lists. As the Norwegian localizer for this plugin it happens that I receive questions related to features and possible future improvements. Unfortunately, I’m not exactly the one whom to contact, but it do happen that I can provide some descent answers. This is an attempt of one 
One question which have popped up more than once is the availability of video support between MSN and iChat (via Jabber). As most Mac/iChat users know, iChat provides a great interface for video chat between iChat users (although it is not very tolerant when it comes to bandwidth issues, as far as I have seen). Although iChat has support for video, this support works only between iChat clients due to the way the video streams are sent.
There are some ongoing work in the Jabber community to come up with a way to send video streams between Jabber clients, but this does unfortunately not help that much (since both MSN and iChat uses their own approaches).
There are some other clients/networks which provides this functionality, but I haven’t tested them. The reason for this is that I do not want to have several clients running. Currently I have two, iChat and Skype, and I do not want more clients than this running.
My best bet when it comes to hassle free videoconference between Mac and Windows users is to wait for Skype to finally launch their 2.0 version of the Skype client. This is scheduled to happen in this quarter (April-May-June), and I hope they make this happen.
Posted in Uncategorized
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Tagged Apple
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Jump in joy everyone, the widget has been updated afterall! I have now released a beta of a new release with a new source for the weather data. The are still some clean up to do, but I want to get this release out now in case there still are some fixing to do.
Update: I have now merged all updates of the beta release to a single blog post.
Changelog:
v1.7b5:
- Altered the display/positioning of rain/snow in the forecasts
v1.7b4:
- Added: Display of amount of rain/snow in the forecasts for the next few days.
v1.7b3:
- Fixed: viewing forecasts late in the evening messed up the forecast for the next days
v1.7b2:
- Support for ambiguous placenames. Shows a list of places to select from.
- Checks placename on enter/return in search field
- Further code cleanup
v1.7b1:
- Changed site to collect data from. Was (Storm.no) – Is (http://www.aftenposten.no/vaer)
- Changed from textual display of weather forecast to icon based
- Cleaned up some code (more to do)
- Support for longer forecasts.
Download from the development page!
I came across this Flash-based game today while browsing the forums at mac1.no. I completed the 15 levels which are available. How long can you resist from shooting that god d**m puppy?
Link: rrrrthats5rs.com » Don’t Shoot the Puppy
Posted in Uncategorized
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Tagged Humor
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After some reconsideration and some nice feedback from forum users at Mac1.no, have I decided to continue the work on my weather widget, despite my earlier post.
I have spent quite some time with it today, and the progress are good. I’m done with the collection of data, but there are quite some graphical adjustments to do.
This bumped up on the front page of digg.com today:
Microsoft Admits Internet Explorer Mistakes:
Bill Gates admits that he made a mistake in waiting to build new innovations in its own browser technology, Internet Explorer. Now Microsoft is answering that challenge and is already looking ahead to the next two releases of IE…
What? Do they admit slow update on IE? To be honest – I still can’t believe that so many still uses that dinosaur browser called IE 6…
I’m currently trying out IE 7 on my Windows pc, but I haven’t peeked much into the features under the hood. Hopefully it is better when it comes to security, but so far the only thing I’m cheering about is the tabs (finally!).
There are a lot of people (read: Windows users ) around which have the assumption that there is a lack of software on the Mac OS X platform. That is plain wrong, and in addition to a lot of great shareware/commercial software, there are a lot of free software available.
FreeMacWare.com is a handy site which regularly presents a selection of great free software for Mac OS X, and which I quite often have learned about new and very cool software from. This site is definitely recommended for all Mac OS X users, and for those which are curious about the selection of free software for the Mac. So far, they have reviewed 337 great and absolutely free applications!
I present here a selection of five of these applications, all of them apps I miss when I’m using a computer without them:
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Growl (Direct link / via FreeMacWare)
Growl is a great notification system for Mac OS X. The visualization of the notifications are highly customizable and can be set up to not be that intrusive when they pop up. Some examples of notifications which I use: finished download from Safari, new song playing in iTunes and message received in iChat.
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Quicksilver (Direct link / via FreeMacWare)
Quicksilver is an application launcher on steroids. In addition to be used as a launcher, it can be used with certain actions. This makes it possible to as an example find a file on my harddrive and send it to a contact in my Address book without opening any of those applications. I haven’t used it much for the latter though, but it is indispendisble as a quick and hassle-free way to launch applications
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Chax (Direct link / via FreeMacWare)
Chax is a plugin for iChat which provides several additional features to iChat which other popular IM application has. I’m also the maintainer of the Norwegian localization of this app, so I have to recommend it
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Transmission (Direct link / via FreeMacWare)
Transmission is a very light weight bittorrent client, and the best one I have come across for Mac OS X.
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NetNewsWire Lite (Direct link / via FreeMacWare)
NetNewsWire Lite is a great free RSS reader which makes it very easy to keep track of whats going on on all the sites which I subscribe to. Currently I’m subscribing to about 60 feeds, spanning from news sites to personal blogs
I should also mention that they currently have a contest up to promote the collection of free applications on the Mac OS X platform, and if you’re a Mac user – Head over to them and check out the contest announcement!
Posted in Uncategorized
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Tagged Apple
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I have for quite a while now been using RapidWeaver to create and publish my site on the space I have available from my DSL provider. The use of RapidWeaver has been okey enough, and the ease of creating new content using this app are amazing. It has it’s limitations though, which are the reason behind my decision to move my site over to WordPress and the new domain http://www.lindsve.net. First of all, WordPress is free to use, which of course is great! Second, it supports a lot of great options which are great for blogging news I cross around the net. I’m not going to detail about that here, those of you which are interested in a platform for such a site can take a look over at WordPress.org and check it out.
I haven’t got around to have everything over to this site yet, and there are still some coding to do in the site templates to support some of the features in WordPress, but I guess I will be done with that tomorrow.
Update: I have now transferred all content (except blog attachments) from my old site.
Posted in Uncategorized
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Tagged Projects
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I have as of now discontinued my weather widget (Værmelding). It hasn’t been updated for a long time (but I was planning to), but I have now discovered that my home town have appeared in the Apple weather widget. Now that I don’t have any personal incentive to update my own widget, I have decided to discontinue it. It will still be downloadable from my website in case someone else want to give it a try.
I’m now assigned as a lecturer at the local university college for the next semester. I’m going to teach a class in databases, using Oracle 10g. Fortunately, I’m not the only lecturer in this class, but I will be responsible for most of the lectures. It’s not an advanced course, but it is my first experience as a lecturer and I bet it’s going to be an interesting experience.
I’ve also recently signed a contract with a local software development company. I’m going to work for them in addition to my other assignments, and I’ll join the company full-time after my studies are complete.
I have a gmail-account, which I also use to personalize many of the Google sites. I just went to Google Groups to search after some informations in the newsgroups, and since I haven’t set up any groups there Google suggests some for me. I was a little bit stunned after reading those suggestions though…The only Norwegian newsgroup suggested are no.alt.frustrasjoner (frustrasjoner – frustrations)! What the…..! I’m definitely not frustrated (at the moment), I’m actually quite relieved now that I’m done with the course curriculums for this semester!!!
