Where is Mozilla Ubiquity?

Link

“Though the main Ubiquity project is now on the back burner, Mozilla Firefox users might one day get a simplified version of a natural language command tool by way of something called Taskfox. At one point, Taskfox was intended for inclusion in Firefox 3.6, but that didn’t happen. Firefox 3.6 came out earlier this year, while Taskfox is still under development and currently there isn’t a specific timetable for when it will become part of the mainline Firefox browser release.”

Liquid Scale Winners Announced

Thanks everyone who entered the Liquid Scale giveaway. Also, we’d like to thank the Savoy Software developers for the codes they gave to MacStories.

Here are the winners:

Rossella

Scott Karlins

Shawn Williams

Subhash

Matto

CannonGod

Jaryre

Olive

Ellen

Griffin Lacek

You’ll receive the promo code in your inbox in a few hours.

Cheers!

Compress Your Mac with Squeeze

Everybody knows that Mac OS X doesn’t require a lot of manteinaince: actually, some people will even tell you that Mac OS doesn’t need mantenaince at all, if you ask. Still, there are some tasks and practices you should perform on a regular schedule in order to keep your Mac healthy and fast: CleanMyMac and Onyx are two excellent examples of apps that could come in handy when “cleaning” your Mac. Usually, the most importamt thing to consider is saving space by deleting old files, caches, unused logs and binary files. They can eat tons of GBs on your hard drive, and you won’t even notice it.

Squeeze, released tonight with the new MacHeist bundle, is a new application from Latenitesoft that promises to silently save space on your Mac in the background, by squeezing the last megabyte out of the folders you like to keep track of. And it works surprisingly well.

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On the iPad’s Self-Sufficiency

I read many posts about the iPad being a replacement for desktop computers, the device that’s aimed at changing your computing life. This is partially untrue.

There’s a big difference between replacing desktop computers and changing the computing scene forever. The iPad won’t replace desktop computers as it is now, and you know why? Because it just can’t. The iPad isn’t a self-sufficient device, it’s not independent of iTunes, it can’t manage itself on its own. As long as you can install every application and purchase every song from iTunes on your iPad (like you’d like to do so), you can’t - say - install software updates using just the device. And even in the best situation where you actually buy every single song to build your music library, I don’t think that situation is statistically accepted as “common”. Same applies for contacts, photos and, especially, movies. You need a computer to move that stuff into the iPad, period.

Now the question is, if the iPad can’t replace a desktop computer just because it needs one to fully work, how can Apple even think to revolutionize the computing world? Because it’s a start. I personally don’t think I’ll ever ditch my MacBook and replace it with an iPad, but I’m sure a lot of people will - and today is the start of this process. The iPad we currently know is the first iteration of a (hopefully) series of products that will slowly evolve over time, just as internet connections will grow in speed and reliability. The day you’ll be able to a) download an entire movie or software update from iTunes and b) have that download finished in an acceptable time, that’s when things will change. It’s not now, it won’t happen next year - nobody knows when that’s gonna happen.

You can’t think of the iPad as a full desktop replacement now, even for the less skilled user who just needs Safari and Mail to work, because that user needs the cable to make his device work.

The iPad is not a replacement for desktop computers, but it will be someday. And until that day, keep syncing.

Organizing Files: The Librarian Syndrome

But the more important conclusion is less obvious, which is that nearly everyone can benefit from the use of software that doesn’t require explicit file system management at all.

Instead of putting music files into a folder, all you had to do was put it into iTunes. Once you’ve added a song to iTunes you no longer need to worry about where it actually is in the file system

To argue that users should embrace manual file system management for every bit of data they wish to store is to argue against human nature.

This is not an argument that all software should abstract the file system by using the library paradigm, but just that more software should.

It wasn’t long time ago, though I can’t remember very well. I’m talking about the day I realized I needed a better solution to store all my documents, as the Finder simply couldn’t do that anymore. Maybe it was some months ago, back in September / October, when I made up my mind and decided to give Yojimbo a second, in-depth spin. I fell in love with it, much like I did with Things from CulturedCode the second time I tested it. Guess there’s a second time for everything, right?

Problem is, I couldn’t use a hierarchical folder system anymore. With hundreds of documents to manage (be them .pdf files, spreadsheets, reports, casual but still important notes) and new pieces of text each day, the situation became unmanageable and yeah, Finder was slow and cluttered. So I started using Yojimbo which allowed me to enter any kind of information both manually and in other ways like the Quick Panel or the Drop Dock. Be sure to read my previous post about if you missed it. I still have Yojimbo in my dock, if you ask.

A few weeks ago I discovered and wrote about a new app, iDocument, which wants to be the ultimate solution for storing and retrieving documents on Mac OS X. iDocument lets you import documents, tag them, organize them in folders and smart collections.

If you work with your Mac, you need a powerful centralized solution to sort and archive files. In this post I and Cody will take a look at 4 different systems (Finder, Yojimbo, iDocument, Leap) and discuss how they actually work, in which cases. We’ll surely miss a lot of apps, but we wanted to focus on those we know and use on a regular base.

Enjoy.

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