Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

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As the Apple Turns
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Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
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Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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Thursday, September 5, 2002
18:35 - And then? No and then! And then? No and then!	(top)
Apple just released the .Mac Slides Publisher. I admit I hadn't thought much about .Mac since getting vaguely annoyed at Apple for converting my previously free mail/disk service into a for-pay thing, for which I grumbled a bit, paid my discounted fee, and went back about my business. Well, now I'm starting to see I should have been paying more attention. If you go to Screen Effects, there's a ".Mac" screen saver listed; in it, you can subscribe to slide shows published by other .Mac users. I'd seen this in passing, but never really given it more than a glance. Probably another of those things that a few camcorder-toting dads will use, after wrestling with some kind of clunky Web interface or a sluggish remote file browser, dragging files around or something. Nyope. I should have known better. The .Mac Slides Publisher is a little "droplet" style program, which you're supposed to keep in your Dock or your Finder toolbar; if you want to share some pictures as a slide show for your friends, you select a bunch of picture files (from the Finder or iPhoto) and drag them onto the Slides Publisher icon. It then optimizes them and transfers them to your iDisk, and then gives you the option to send off an announcement e-mail telling your friends you've just set up a new slide show. Then your friend types in your .Mac username into the Screen Effects panel, and your photos start streaming across his screen. (He can subscribe to as many of these as he wants, too, and select which ones to show and in which order.) I was thinking, "Okay, so now I'll bet I have to go to iDisk and manually move stuff around if I want to delete old images." And I go to look, and indeed within "Pictures" is a "Slide Shows" folder, inside which is "Public", which has the pictures and an XML config file. But I should have kept my grubby doubting fingers out of there. If you drag a new set of pictures onto the Publisher, it automatically replaces the image set and rewrites the config file. In other words, you never have to think about iDisk, and neither does your friend. To say nothing about never having to think about connection settings, file formats, folder names... bah humbug. Just drag the files to the icon, and everybody who's subscribed to you gets a new screen saver. That's it. I'm definitely going to have to play with this some more. This is far too cool. And then there's Backup, which rules: I honestly don't know how this compares to other backup software, but... well, just look at this interface and see if there's anything that is not entirely sensible and clear. Usage bar (current and potential). Prepackaged "QuickPick" sets of files and their sizes. A drawer pane with details on each item in the list. The ability to add new folders and files and select them for backup. And you have options for mirroring (deletion of locally deleted files), scheduling, backing up to CD/DVD, and buying more storage space. No way could they have provided something like this for free. And there's more like it coming, too. I hope I've never complained too loudly about .Mac, because it looks like I'm going to regret every decibel.