It’s not really overkill. It’s just that what I want is very simple, wordpresses themeing setup sucks, and it doesnt do the stuff i would want.

I doubt i’ll code my own, but the idea is tempting (as usual)

and I only spend time in the real world when I have stuff to do… recently that has been a lot, but most of the time I’m still in Azeroth or Vana’diel or whatever mmo of the day has my interest. Though I think that’s going to stop shortly.

Either of you guys planning on being in town this summer?

I have nothing interesting to say about Tiger. I bought it as a loyal apple citizen. It’s no big thing. It’s got some cool stuff, but I use none of it. I’m waiting for the apps to take advantage of the new API stuff, and really impress me.

Plus, I’ve been board gaming a lot in real life.

I’m also thinking about getting the blog thing going again. Installed wordpress, but haven’t gotten around to configuring it. I think it may be overkill for what I want.

If i can get the gmail->flickr->moblog going from my treo650, I’ll probably get hooked.

Totally off topic: have you seen Ryan around? I’m surprised he’s been able to withstand geeking out over Mac OS X with us.

I used spotlight a lot the first weekend or so that I had it. But other than in Mail.app (where it is the default search tool) i haven’t used it at all. And honestly, spotlight has caused more problems for people with big mail boxes than it has solved. My mailbox is over Gig in size, and with all the default settings it takes 3 to 4 hours to check my mail because it indexes each time imap syncs (there are some settings you can change to fix this, but it left me and many other people without email for a weekend; Also, mail.app imap is still broken with the same bugs it has been broken with since 10.1 and despite how many people complain Apple doesn’t seem to care).

I spent years perfecting a system of folders to store all my files and can very quickly navigate my file system to find what I want. Most of what I do is in emacs, working with perl, python, xhtml, css, c and other source-code text files. When i’m working on a project i just open the finder to folder that i have all the source in, double click the file i want to work with, and it opens up in Emacs buffer. Any documenation i’ve written in Word files is in the same directory tree and easy to find.

But the biggest flaw with spotlight is that it doesn’t search network drives. At work 95% of everything i work with is in my home directory on the network and 100% of all the people not in the systems office is on the network. If spotlight would index those smb volumes it would really shine and save me a lot of time/work.

So, in short, yes spotlight is a decent feature. but its not the ground breaking, earth shattering feature that I was excited about and hoping for. I bought Tiger when it was announced because I was so excited about Spotlight, it was the one feature that I really wanted. But in practice it didn’t deliver and isn’t better than the system I was already using.

People go on and on about not needing to be orginized with folders anymore, etc … But I just don’t see that being the case at all.

If I have an “index.html” file. And its part of a project for work, how do i not put it in a folder of its own? If i drop it in the same folder as another index.html (of which, i have hundreds) it will overwrite the old one. I can come up with many, many examples (both in programming and ‘average user land’) that break the single folder model.

Until the OS takes over naming files for you and completely uses meta data to find what you are looking for, a folderless system isn’t going to work. And since it isn’t going to work, why not just put some thought into how to orginize everything to begin with?

At home I updated to 10.4.1, which i thought killed it but it is still doing it at work where i haven’t updated because of a new bug in mail.app in 10.4.1

I’m actually thinking about downgrading to Panther at work. Tiger doesn’t have anything i use that panther didn’t. Tiger, IMO is basically a failure. Panther was ground breaking for me. It is what made me switch from being on linux full time to MacOS X full time. Tiger, honestly, doesn’t really have anything worth upgrading for.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/sysstat.html

I totally agree with you that there’s a lot of redundancy between a lot of these widgets and my browser. Stuff like SysStat — that incorporates other bits of information that might not be together in one place — seems to be a lot more of what a “Dashboard” would be about.

I was really trying to force myself to get used to dashboard and use it a lot … but found that it was more of a hassle than just opening up another tab in my web browser and navigating to what i need.

Fedex tracking is nice, but i can just type it into the google search bar in my browser.

Wikipedia is nice, but i can just search it via my home page (well the version in development has a wikipedia serach box on it).

Stickies are nice, but the normal sticky app is better/has more features. Just use expose to keep them out of your way.

The RSS feeds for news sources are nice … except its not in my normal rss reader (mail.app via rss2email) …

Favorite Widgets:
Calculator: Its easier to get at than the normal app unless you keep the normal app open all the time.

Hula Dancer (mine is set to homer)

Magic 8 ball

Thats about all I use.

There isn’t any widget, other than calculator, that has all the features that the normal one has. And other than calulator i haven’t found one that is more convienant as a widget than a normal app. and honestly, if i just kept the normal calculator open and exposed to it, it would work just as well.