Today, I received an invitation to Joost, a company who provides self-proclaimed “how-it-should-be TV”. I have to say that I am probably not among the target group since I’m not watching any regular TV either. Either way, I installed the Joost software (which by the way is built with XUL and run with XULRunner) and gave it a try. The setup is pretty straightforward: Just start the software, click on “Register”, enter a username, e-mail address and password and you’re registered and logged in right away. No e-mail confirmation is needed.

Once logged in, you see an introductary sequence showing snippets from the “best” Joost content. There are currently 83 channels of which some are restricted to or not available in certain countries, however, most of the channels are available worldwide. I think that the selection of channels is not really “how-it-should-be”; they don’t provide much interesting channels. There are quite some music channels and lots of niche or not-so-niche sports channels. The majority of them has a typical MTV program: They mainly show stuff you want to watch if you have too much time left.

Joost is not really TV how you’re used to it. It is merely on-demand TV: It looks like each channel has 5-20 TV shows or movies in the “playlist” (which probably change from time to time). There is no “live” stream. You could probably compare Joost with TiVo, just that you don’t have to record the shows in advance.

Besides the poor quality of available programs, the service itself is rather fast. It takes about 2-5 seconds to switch from one to another channel. Remember that the entire content is streamed over the internet. The software application itself is not that bad, although the navigation could be a lot more streamlined. Buttons are at lots of different places (they frequently change position from one “dialog” to the next) and the navigational structure is in my opinion not well thought out.

I noticed that Joost also offers a kind of “dashboard” where you can drag “widgets” onto (I’m asking myself where they got that idea from *cough*). These include socializing features (“channel chat room”, instant messaging, …). I somehow doubt that these are really necessary, but of course they are a requirement for being considered a web 2.0 service.

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.

Heute wurde im Rahmen des Adventskalenders der Webkrauts mein Artikel über Content-Management mit Drupal veröffentlicht. Der Artikel dabei im Besonderen auf den Webstandards-Aspekt ein, gibt aber auch einen allgemeinen Überblick über die Möglichkeiten und stellt einige in Drupal verwendete Konzepte vor.

Since there are quite some Drupal developers on the Macintosh platform using the awesome TextMate, Steven Wittens already created a TextMate Bundle (A collection of snippets, key commands etc. for TextMate) for Drupal development. However, his bundle “only” contains parameter hinting for Drupal functions.

While this is pretty useful, looking up functions is a less common task, at least for me. Therefore, I created a new bundle that contains tab triggers for almost all forms api stuff. Just type textfield, press tab and you have a complete definition of a textfield. It gets even better: The cursor is automatically position inside the #title’s t() function. Now enter an appropriate title and press tab again. Voilà, you’re at the next item you can change (the #description in this case).

But not only form api types but also single values as well as complete hooks are included in this shiny new bundle. (It’s not finished though.)

Note: There is now a Drupal bundle in the TextMate repository which contains this bundle and many more functions. It is also updated for Drupal 6. To obtain the bundle, check out http://macromates.com/svn/Bundles/trunk/Review/Bundles/PHP%20Drupal.tmbu... with Subversion.

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.

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.