Im Internet gibt’s mehrere Tutorials, die erklären, wie man Podcasts über Skype aufnimmt, allerdings sind einige dafür nur für Windows, andere wiederum setzen Audio Hijack Pro vorraus, das über $30 kostet. Es gibt allerdings auch eine Möglichkeit, Podcasts über Skype auf dem Mac aufzunehmen, ohne einen einzigen Cent auszugeben.

Die Software

• Skype: Ohne Skype kein Skype-Podcast.
• Soundflower: Dieses kleine Programm stellt eine virtuelle Soundkarte bereit, in der man alle möglichen Kanäle zusammenmischen kann.
• LineIn: Damit kann ein beliebiger Soundeingang umgeleitet werden.
• Audio Recorder: Ein kostenloser, kleiner und stabiler Audio-Recorder für Mac OS X.

Die Installation

Wie unter Mac OS üblich gestaltet sich die Installation recht einfach. Das Soundflower-Disk-Image öffnen, Soundflower.pkg installieren und Soundflowerbed (die Kontrollanwendung) in den Programme-Ordner ziehen. LineIn und Audio Recorder kommen ebenfalls dahin.

Some days ago, I bought a new keyboard/mouse combination, namely the Logitech S530 Mac Desktop. I was tempted to buy it because Cyberport had a promotion and sold it for just €49, compared €62,46 at Amazon.de. After several days of usage, I like the keyboard (which was my main concern before the purchase). Even though I really enjoy typing on my MacBook’s keyboard, which is entirely different from most other keyboards, I quickly accomodated to the new keyboard. The keyboard is rather stable and looks solid. The mouse is not that bad either, but the fact that I constantly scroll to the left (with the four-ways scroll wheel) when I try to perform a middle click, annoys me. The three buttons to control the volume don’t really make sense, adjusting the volume is not something I do twice a minute. And after all, there are three nice buttons on the right side of the keyboard as well.

The Logitech software allows to reconfigure most of the buttons. However, the software is terribly instable; it crashes nearly every time I try to change something. The current software version is 2.1.3 – I guess the developers have cast dice to determine the version number.

One last thing that’s really odd: The symbol on the NumBlock’s Enter button: The Mac platform has a symbol for this: ⌤ (you may not be able to view this on a Windows machine). In lack of this symbol (which is available on the Mac OS X character palette), Logitech’s engineers decided to use a K, clockwise rotated. It comes close, but it’s not quite the symbol. For a Mac specific keyboard, they should at least have used the right symbols…

In the quest for a decent color picker for Mac OS X, my search didn’t go very far. I discovered that Mac OS X ships with an application called DigitalColor Meter. It’s located in /Applications/Utilities and has the ability to display the color below your mouse cursor – system wide. Once you found your color, just press ⌘⌥C and you have the hex code in your clipboard.

The new beta version of Parallels Desktop features two awesome new features: Coherence mode and Boot Camp partition support.

In coherence mode, Parallels no longer has an application window. Instead, the Windows desktop is layed over the Mac OS X desktop, but without the actual Windows desktop. You see just the relevant parts: the taskbar and the windows. Windows’ background image and desktop icons aren’t shown. You can interact with the windows just like they were normal (Mac OS) windows. If you move the mouse from a Mac OS X part to a Windows part of the screen, the mouse cursor changes instantly. It really feels like Windows apps run natively inside Mac OS X.

Finally, Parallels supports booting from Boot Camp partitions. That means you no longer have to install two versions of Windows on your Mac. Personally, I installed Boot Camp for playing games once in a while. They tend to not perform very good in Parallels but run with acceptable speed in native Windows. Parallels Desktop is really useful for testing web pages with Internet Explorer.

A compliment to the Parallels developers. They are pretty much the market leader with Parallels Desktop but keep adding useful features and performace improvements. They could easily rest on their laurels. But they don’t.

Since I switched to Safari as my main browser, I notice these cute search input boxes from time to time. They don’t look like regular textfields but have rounded corners and take (among others) these additional parameters:

• placeholder="Text": Like the attribute says, a placeholder text can be defined. That means that a grey text appears when the field doesn’t have the focus and is otherwise empty.
• autosave="id": Saves a history of the search terms the user entered. The list is shared among all inputs with the same autosave id. It is advised to use a certain format for the id.
• incremental="uri": This allows Spotlight-like find-as-you-type behavior. Unfortunately, this is completely undocumented. It is not known what format the return value should have.

I always liked this input box and intended to use it with my new theme. However, the value search is non-standard which made me keep away from it. Instead, I wrote a Drupal module that adds a JavaScript file which in turn changes the type value of Drupal’s search boxes to search.

From time to time, you’ll need a ruler on your screen for measuring for example the actual width of some elements styled with CSS. I found PixelStick to be quite useful. It’s free, looks cool and does the job. You can make it snap to certain angles and lengths and move it around. It’s still a PowerPC binary, but that doesn’t matter at all - it runs fine on my Intel Mac.