In six months with this MacBook Pro, I think I have acclimated pretty well to this other way of doing things. But there was one particular action or behavior that I hated. One reason that the package that is a MacBook wasn't as complete as the competition, specifically a Thinkpad. That one action was the method for clicking and dragging.

On the Thinkpad, there is the Track Stick, Pointing Stick, whatever its called. Most people don't spend the time required to get used to it, but once you do, it seems to be the most perfect pointing device. In fact, given the choice of an external mouse or the pointing stick, I will dump the mouse any day. It is so much more precise, quick, and useful that nothing else really could compare. The fact that I could have my index finger on the stick and my thumb on the mouse buttons allowed me to make intricate masks in Photoshop, drag and drop with ease, and select just the text I needed without any overlap.

Move over to the Mac, and that simple integration of man with machine was broken. Clicking and dragging became a chore. I had to either dumb myself down in Photoshop, or start carrying an external mouse. My knuckles were aching from pushing down that massive trackpad and dragging to grab a short piece of text. I was thinking I might have to get one of those external Thinkpad keyboards to get that efficiency back with the Mac.

But then a month or so ago, Apple changed the game. With a single feature that most people probably didn't think twice about. Three Finger Dragging makes my one big complaint about this hardware just disappear. And I didn't even pay attention to it until just a few minutes ago. I had been using it since the day the update was released and it came so natural. Its really incredible!!

Last night, I painted with a brush in Photoshop. With three fingers swirling around the Trackpad, I covered the area I needed just perfectly. Changing brush sizes with the keyboard shortcuts and back to dragging and I got exactly what I intended. Selecting text to copy into emails and documents works the first time with no sore knuckles. I was dragging files between folders in a Windows RDP session so effortlessly that I wasn't missing that track stick at all.

Of course, now I wish the TrackPad was a little bit bigger, but the fact that I can leave the three fingers on the pad, then use the index finger of the other hand to continue the behavior means that the trackpad really has an infinite width and height. It has turned a pretty good piece of technology into what could be the most perfect pointing device ever, all with a single, mostly ignored software update.

MacBook Pro, I think I love you.

Now Apple, if you could just add the three finger tap to give me a middle click without having to use add-ons, I will be over the moon.

I absolutely adore developers who realize that their platform isn't the only platform. Developers who know there is something else out there and are OK with it. A lot of devs think their platform is the best, and that if the customer doesn't feel that way, well they just don't get it. That's true on both the Windows side and the Mac side. But when the dev goes a bit further and enables the opposite platform to integrate, well that's just perfect.

SimpleNote is just one such application. I guess it started with the iPhone app. And if they ended it there, I would know nothing about it since I don't own an iPhone. But they also have a web app at https://simple-note.appspot.com/index.html (shown here). I am not a huge fan of working in the cloud: having the content up there is fine, as long as I can edit on the platform I care about. So if they ended it there, I would still probably not know anything about it. But the magic came when they opened up that web app for other developers to integrate in with.

What got me interested was Notational Velocity. And I am not really sure why I got interested. After all, the Notational Velocity website is terrible. After reading the page, I had no idea what it did. But for some reason I ran it on my Mac and I got it: a text-based non-relational database with a query interface so frickin easy that anyone can use it. Just start typing. If there is a note with that text, the title will show in the list. Keep typing to narrow the search. Arrow down to select your note, or just press enter to start a new one. Give it 30 seconds and it will totally click.

At that point I checked out the web client. It worked pretty much the same way and now I really saw the value of having it up there. This is probably the right time to check out the Extras page at SimpleNote. There are Windows-based apps that work with it as well. So I installed ResophNotes.

While it doesn't have quite the same level of ease of use as Notational Velocity, I was quickly able to get the sync going and see all my notes there as well. I edit on Windows, see the notes on Mac, make some changes on the web site, see them on Windows. It just works, and it works on most of the platforms I care about. If there was a Blackberry app as well, I would be in heaven.

Now you might look at this and wonder why I would get excited over a simple notepad app. After all, Evernote does all of this and more, right? While its true that Evernote is an amazing application, it never sucked me in quite as well as this. I personally feel that Evernote is trying to do too much, at least for me. SimpleNote and its derivations are just what I need when I want to make a quick note of something, and then find it easily where ever I am right now.

I have lots of excuses for not maintaining this blog with some regularity. One of those excuses was an easy to use offline editing platform. I guess solutions existed for a long time, but I was reluctant to plop down cash. Well, I gave in when writing up a recent post and decided to search out for a tool. The two that seemed to get the most recommendations were Ecto and MarsEdit.

If you look at the homepage for Ecto, its not exactly inspiring. Looks like a page that was created in 1995. So they turned me off before I even tried it. The MarsEdit page looks like it was from this century and as a bonus, the product had been updated in the last 3 months. I downloaded it and gave it a shot.

I added my two blogs (technovangelist and chromagenic) and it recognized Squarespace right away. The first post was a new entry on my Chromagenic.com photoblog. These blog entries are a short paragraph followed by a picture that is hosted on Flickr. Without thinking about it, I went to the Flickr page for the next photo and copied the link. Now I had to figure out how to insert it in the right way to get the formatting correct.

When you edit a post in MarsEdit, there is a little Media icon in the toolbar so I clicked that. I was amazed to see an option for Flickr right there. So after authorizing, I was able to see my images.

I clicked one of them and had it inserted. But when the post published, it looked wrong. Looking at the source for this post and the previous one, I saw that the Squarespace editor inserted a special set of tags, while MarsEdit added a different set of tags. When I selected the picture to insert, one of the options was a dropdown called style. The four items in the dropdown weren't all that useful for me, but I was very happy to see an edit option. Selecting that opened a small edit window where I could add my own set of image tags. Perfect!

I have only been playing with this tool for a few minutes and keep finding neat little features like that. I am quite impressed so far and I can't think of any reason not to buy the software.

From the time I first touched this MacBook Pro, there was one behavior that annoyed the hell out of me. It's something every Windows and X user takes for granted but is missing from the Mac. Its easy screen management. What I mean by that is that moving and resizing windows on Windows is just easy. Grab any side or corner and drag to resize that window. But that doesn't work on the Mac. I have no idea why this is the case.

Every now and then, I spend some time searching for solutions to this problem, but most mentions of it simply say its something you need to get used to. In fact, some forum posts that talk about the issue claim that it won't bother you after a while. As I have gotten more familiar with Objective C I started looking into how to control this myself. I just noticed how to do this programmatically but I haven't tested it out yet. Maybe I'll figure this out after a few more weeks, but it turns out I don't have to.

There is a developer out there who has already figured it all out. Someone who obviously had the same issue I had and figured out a solution. The application is called Zooom/2 and can be found at http://coderage-software.com/zooom/index_green/index.html. This tool is nothing short of amazing. By pressing a pair of shortcut keys, just moving the mouse resizes whatever window I am hovering over right now. A similar shortcut and a drag moves to window to another location on screen. Its absolutely fantastic.

Its got some other cool features as well. It will snap to a user-definable grid and/or to the edges of other windows or the screen. This is magic when trying to get a few different windows arranged on the desktop. I have heard suggestions that Spaces gives you a more powerful arrangement tool, but that is completely different. I want to see multiple windows on the desktop at the same time. Like when I am in Xcode while wanting to read some docs about whatever I am working on, and viewing the Stanford U Objective C course. Spaces is completely useless for that scenario.

So Zooom/2 from Coderage Software is an incredible tool that I will be buying very soon. Its 19.95 USD and has a 30 day eval, but it only took me about 3 minutes to know that I needed it.

One of my colleagues in the US Sales Engineering organization at Captaris built out a great set of templates for using UltraEdit to build out DataGrabber scripts. The problem with it is that I can’t really use it in my classes since I can’t really use UltraEdit without having paid for it for all 12 training laptops. So I wanted to find another similar editor I could use for my classes. I had a few basic requirements:

• Light & quick.
• Use of clips or templates that were easy to customize.
• The ability to plug in a compiler and to view the output without have to change the viewing context.
• Built-in Hex view for determining line and record delimiters
• Free or minimal cost.

After trying Notepad2, Notepad++, Programmers Editor, Context, and many others, I found PSPad to offer all that I needed. And figuring out how to make a clip file that could be used to create DataGrabber scripts easily took less than a single morning. So now you just create a new definition file, and press <ctrl><space> to add all of the common elements of a datagrabber script. Now I can create a script in less than 10 minutes. Pressing <ctrl><F9> to compile shows the log file at the bottom of the window. Now I can quickly tweak and re-compile until I get it just right.

For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, Datagrabber is a component of Alchemy, our archival and records management tool that has been available for more than 10 years. Many of our customers use Alchemy to store customer records in a searchable format, such as invoices and statements. So if they have a mainframe batch that runs every night that produces a single text file with 1000’s of customer statements, the problem is trying to store each as a separate record in the archive. Datagrabber parses the text file into a series of records. It also identifies customer numbers, invoice numbers, names, etc based on a definition file. This definition file is what I am using PSPad to create.

You can find my DataGrabber config for PSPad here along with instructions on how to install it.