I happened to notice the above when I installed the newest version of TextExpander.

I’m sorry, did you say 5.39 HOURS?

Now, mind you this is over a pretty long course of time. It’s not like I’m saving 5 hours a day or week, but still, 5 hours is 5 hours.

Let me also say that I’m not a fast typer by any means. I can get by, but I’ll never make the secretarial pool. Given that, I think “at 400 characters per minute” should be “at 400 correct characters per minute” since I don’t have to worry about typos in those character blocks either.

Like many people (or at least a few loud ones), I was annoyed when the free Textpander became the $30 TextExpander, and not just because of the weird random capitalization thing in the middle of the word.

I was annoyed for the same reason I’m always annoyed when free software becomes pay-only software… and it has nothing to do with what our friend Fake Steve calls the “freetards” argument that “Information wants to be free!” which is actually (usually) just code for “I don’t want to pay for anything, ever! If I think it’s good, I’ll pay for it. Honest. Really. I will.”

No, what annoys me is this: If you want to make improvements on a piece of free software and charge for it, great. Have at it, carry on and good luck.

However, leave the free version alone.

If the free version is good enough for me, let me use it, and let me re-download it if I need to. Don’t make me keep a local copy of the DMG or installer for your free program just because I may need to reinstall someday and I’m afraid it will be gone. If you’re afraid the existence and availability of a free version is going to effect the sales of your commercial version, that’s probably a good sign that you aren’t really adding as much value to it as you think you are.

However, TextExpander has come a long way since then, especially with the use of .Mac syncing, which I ♥♥♥ and consider absolutely necessary if you use more than one Mac.

TextExpander is one of those things your fingers needs to be able to just do without thinking about it, and if I sit down at the iMac and try a shortcut I only have on my MacBook, that makes me think about it. .Mac syncing to the rescue!

So is $30 too much for TextExpander? I thought so when it first came out ($20 was my target price) but even at $30 / 5.39 hours = $5.56/hour. What’s your hourly rate? Mine’s more than $6/hour. Assuming I actually did anything productive with at least a couple of those hours, TextExpander has paid for itself… and will continue to do so to the point where I might even make money by having it.

We often hear talk about gadgets, software, etc making our lives easier, saving us time, etc. Here’s a case where it’s actually demonstrably true.

Last year I picked up an Airport Express at a really decent price and I use it often, so I was hopeful I’d get something else as equally useful.

Well, I could have been disappointed when Apple didn’t have anything all that interesting to me for sale…

…but I found something much more interesting. Getting the Video out of Your New iPod—for Cheap! which reveals that if you take a “camcorder A/V cable” and:

• Plug the red RCA plug into your TV’s yellow RCA jack.
• Plug the yellow RCA plug into your TV’s white RCA jack.
• Plug the white RCA plug into your TV’s red RCA jack.

you can get your iPod with Video (c’mon Steve, can we call it a “viPod” please?!) to work with a cable you may already have ’ I did. I tried it, and whiz-bang! It worked! However, I have, as many of you know, a terrible memory. So I did what seemed logical to me:

But as I was writing “Red” on the white plug, and “White” on the yellow plug, and “Yellow” on the red plug, I couldn’t help but think that Orwell would be pleased, not as pleased as he was with a certain ad campaign, but this certainly strikes me as Doublethink.

I’m happy to see that this news has made its way into the comments on the Apple iPod AV Cable page. It will be interesting to see if anyone spots a downside to using a non-Apple cable.

Meanwhile, I’ve discovered I can use an existing cable, my Dock from my 3G iPod, and I saved $50 :-)

I had a heck of a time trying to configure the Airport Express properly. I don’t know if it was a problem of knowing too much or too little, but nothing worked. Fortunately I was able to call Apple and they helped me get hooked up, but I wanted to make note of how this works in case I ever need to do it again.

These instructions assume that the Airport Extreme is already setup and that your Mac has joined that network.

1. Unplug the Airport Express
2. Hold down reset button and plug it back in
3. Wait for 4 flashes
4. run Airport Setup Assistant
5. Choose: Setup a new Airport
6. Join existing network
7. Extend range

Boom, 7 simple steps… simple, if you do them in the right order.

If you open a file, say a BMP (because that’s what MSWindows uses for its screenshots) but want to save it as a PNG (because it’s just much better that way), all you have to do is do “Save As” and name the file with a .PNG at the end, and GraphicConverter is smart enough to change the file type to PNG instead of BMP.

Very cool, very Mac-ish.

(Otherwise I would have had to click on the dropdown and find PNG out of a list of… well, I don’t know exactly how many, but a lot, of options.)

This morning I moved my old Dell laptop around, unplugged and replugged in the printer, and was reminded of yet another reason why OS X is better than XP.

I have a Dell laptop with 4 USB ports (via PC card) and a Powerbook with 2 USB ports.

XP: If I setup a printer (Brother 1240) while it is connected to one USB port, and then disconnect it and reconnect it, I have to make sure that it is put back into the same USB port. Otherwise, XP installs a new copy of the Printer “Brother 1240 (1)”.

How genius of them! That way if I setup the preferences that I want, or use Windows Sharing to share the printer on the network, I can do it four times! Then all I have to do setup the printer four times on the other machines on the network.

OS X, on the other hand, doesn’t care what USB port I use. It looks and says “Ok look, that’s the same printer that was over there before. I bet they want to print from it.”

And it just works.

In a year of using OS X, it’s not been just the big huge features that make OS X better than XP, it’s these little touches that you don’t realize until you use the two of them side by side.

CNet continues to say “Well, they are copying these features from each other” but what XP doesn’t have, and never will, is the thoughtful design that makes so many things easier.

Another example I may have shared before: One of XP’s “improvements” was a Network Wizard that made it “easier” (compared to other versions of Windows) to setup a network. It’s still a several step process where you have to answer several questions.

OS X’s networking: “Step 1) Plug in the Ethernet cable. Step 2) There is no step 2.”

Assuming you are on a DHCP network (which most are), everything “just works.”

Wireless networking? Microsoft claims XP has made improvements. Reality? My wireless card has (several times) prompted me “Network is insecure, join anyway?” and I click “Yes”… and then it asks me again (without connecting). OS X? Just works.

To fix:

1. Quit Stickies while off-screen
2. Resize the Display (use System Preferences, I recommend the smallest display size available)
3. Start Stickies (you may want to make some change, even just dragging a window to a new position
4. Quit stickies
5. Resize screen to normal resolution
6. Restart stickies

Stickies should be on-screen now.

Tested with 10.3.8 on a Powerbook.

The solution came via Matti Haveri who pointed me to http://www.sjoki.uta.fi/~shmhav/iMovie_HD_bugs.html#formatting on the MacDV list.

The short version is that the drive must be formatted in HFS+. I had chosen UFS because I needed case sensitivity.

I had no luck finding this information via Google and Toast technical support was no use either, so I’m noting it here in the hopes that someone else might benefit from my experience.

By the way, I was going to try a HFSX until I read The dangers of case-sensitive HFS+. So I guess I’ll skip it.

I believe all that “Apple + click” does it force mount the virtual ISO that contains the additions. It did nothing to launch the installation process.

If they still won’t install, try going to the virtual CD-ROM drive (usually D:) and manually run the setup.exe.

That worked for me.