Omnigraffle

Although I've had my Mac for a few years now, every once in a while I stumble across a program that I had never known existed. Today I found Omnigraffle.



My version of Omnigraffle (v2.2) came bundled with Panther (I think) and somehow stuck around when I upgraded to Tiger - so for the moment its free and fully functional. As it turns out though, to upgrade to the latest version - v4, complete with bugfixes - I have to purchase a new license. I may actually end up doing that if it continues to prove to be as useful as it seems!

For those who haven't used or heard of Omnigraffle, let me give you a quick intro: its a standalone application that is part of the Omnigroup product range. This particular application is sold as a "Powerful diagramming & charting for Mac OS X". As far as I've used it, this seems to be a fairly accurate description.

At the moment I tend to use it to create system architecture flow charts and particle physics' Feynman Diagrams. Those annoying gammas can be squiggled out quickly and very accurately - creating quite a nice finish too.

One of the nice things about this program is its simplicity. To build a flow chart you simply drag the required shapes off of the "FlowChart" palette and place them onto your functional snap-to grid that forms the work area. Connection arrows and lines between objects is a simply three click process - Click on arrowed lines, click on start object, click on end object. Done.

As I've recently found out, it is also possible to get more palettes to increase the number of objects that you can place on the charts. These objects could be considered to be similar to Clip Art images that one might find in MS Office products... except that they are much crisper and less cheesy looking.

I would advise anyone wishing to create simple yet elegant technical diagrams to have a quick look at the trial version of the software. If after 20 minutes you aren't convinced that it will do what you want then move on and try another application.... but I don't think you'll find you have to!

Apple Sex Change

As a lot of people surely do, I have quite a few RSS feeds pouring into my Mac everyday. One of my top read feeds is the Apple Hot News feeds. Most of the time it gives news items that I really don't care about or don't affect me with my now outdated PowerPC-based Mac. Everynow and then however I like to follow the link and read a bit more on the news items - sometimes because I really am interested in their latest 'tip of the week', and other times because I'm bored.

Today I clicked on it because their use of language intrigued me. The news feed came in as:

Mac OS X Tip of the Week: One-Way Video Chat
Your iChat buddy doesn’t have a video camera connected to her Mac? You can still conduct a one-way video chat with her — you won’t be able to see her, but she’ll be able to see and hear you (and that’s the important thing, right?) [Jun 14, 2006]

The thing that got my attention was that they constantly referred to 'she' when talking about a generic iChat buddy. I clicked the link to read some more and was confronted with this:

If your buddy doesn’t have a camera connected, but you do, you can still have a one-way video chat. That way, your buddy gets to see and hear you on his end. The only downside — you don’t get to see him.

Notice they've moved over to 'he' now? Interesting....

Anyway - regardless of Apple not knowing which gender they want to talk about I would higly recommend adding the Hot News feed to your RSS reader. In fact - another good tip for Tiger users is to set up the screensaver that displays RSS feeds. Absolutely genius idea!

Non IE Windows Updates

Now although I'm a Mac-man through and through - I've also done my fair share of building and fixing Windows machines. In the past this has been work-related, but more recently it has dropped down to troubleshooting for family and friends only. As much as I try to convert them to the wisdom of Apple... they just refuse to take the plunge.

When recently helping someone reset their laptop so that they could sell it I came accross a rather annoying catch-22 situation. The laptop had all the recovery software on the hard disk and so a few clicks of the mouse reset it to the out-of-the-factory settings. Unfortunately, out of the factory was December 2004 and so Windows XP Home edition was missing a few service packs and a hell of a lot of security and bug fixes.

No problem - I updated all the AV software and the pre-installed Norton Firewall and then went online to Windows updates and started the long iterative process of applying the updates. After the second machine reboot however, MS Internet Explorer could find no connection to the internet, yet running command prompt and pinging Google by IP and name worked fine. Strange. So I used my computer to download Firefox and using a handy USB stick copied it across and installed it.

Firefox could browse the internet. Explorer couldn't. Assuming that a bug fix from Windows Update had gone wrong I thought to carry on with the update using Firefox... only to be kindly told by Microsoft that ONLY explorer could be used to retrieve updates!!!

Now I was well and truely stuck. The machine crashed when I tried to turn on automatic updates, and no Microsoft-related product could see the internet connection. The only thing that could, wasn't allowed to help. Bugger.

After many hours of googling I found this amazing site that appears to pre-download Microsoft updates and then lets you install them without IE. Genius! After running the update checker in Firefox from this site it found 10 or so critical updates and installed them. Whatever it installed obviously worked as the next time I rebooted the laptop everything was working fine and I was now able to carry on the Windows updating process using Explorer.

The only thing that I found was a problem with the site was that they couldn't install major service packs... but did provide links to direct download from within their FAQ pages.

Bringing it back into line

Woah there! Just glanced back at my initial 4 or so posts and realised that I was going completely off course of what I intended to use this blog for!

I initially wanted to use this to write down useful tidbits of programming code (Javascript, C++, PhP, MySQL, etc) and over tips and tricks for the Mac OS X. So thats what I'm gunna do.

In honour of this appraisal I have chosen a new template for my blog. In my mind that makes it more official. I was mulling over the idea of deleting the current posts... but I can't bring myself to do it! So for now they stay to remind me of where I was starting to go wrong.

Random thought

Quite randomly I noticed today that of my three blogs on blogspot.com, two of them have the blogger.com url bar logo but this blog has a generic internet/world logo given to it by Firefox. Strange.

iTrip ban

I don't know why this has been receiving much interest of late because it seems like everything that is being claimed to have been said by Ofcom has been in their FAQ's for a long time now!

A little late on the news here - but relevant to my previous post's concerns - is the update on the situation with iTrips (and similar devices) currently being banned in the UK. According to Trusted Reviews (and also confirmed by Ofcom's FAQ pages for iTrips and FM devices) there is current work underway to standardise some form of the iTrip so that everyone agrees that its not posing too much of a threat to a fellow Radio user sitting in the room or car next door.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like it will be happening for a while - so for now all you illegal users had better hope that the next cop car pulling up next to you isn't listening to white noise on an untuned radio!

Nike+iPod

Just seen the news about this latest innovation from Apple (oh and Nike as well). Apparently its some kind of pedometer/broadcasting unit that fits in the sole of your Nike shoe and sends information back to your iPod.

Sounds like a good idea I guess. I was initially worried that the "wireless" feature would be illegal in the UK... what with our bizarre broadcasting laws and all! But luckily its in the 2.4GHz range and so has no legal problems.

Its not been released yet, but I don't think it will be too long a wait. There's a couple of sites where you can glean some more info:

• Nike+ Site - which is nice and fancy but generally rather useless and contains next to no real information
• Apple's site - quite a bit more detail and tech info to be found here

One thing I would say is that Nike haven't really done themselves that many favours with me with their movie clip... the American computerised voice is already getting on my nerves... hmmm... I wonder if they'll put in the option to change the accent (or language for that matter) of the voice?