Computers & Mobile

Here’s how you change the Phone Book Widget on Apple’s new Mac OS X Tiger to use Google Maps instead- Hes Nikke on macoshints says…“Mapquest is an aging mapping system and doesn’t fit in with the new shinyness in Tiger. Thats why I made the phone book widget use Google Maps instead”. Link.

On Friday’s MAKE:Audio show we had a quick review of Mac OS X Tiger and now that’s we’ve been banging on it for a few more hours, here are some cheers and jeers. Spotlight search is creepy fast, it’s finding everything almost instantly. Dashboard and its Widgets are fun but take up a lot of memory, not sure if it matters though. The RSS screensaver is also fun, here’s a video of what it looks like. Only Macs that are 1Ghz G4 and above can do join in multi-video chats, but multi-audio seems to be fine on some sub 1Ghz machines here. Even if you bought QuickTime Pro 6+ you need to repurchase QuickTime 7. Overall a great release, it’s living up to all the stellar reviews. Some photos from the Seattle store (4th in line!).

Mac OS X Tiger is out today, so that means we’re going to see a ton of really neat widgets, if you want to get started building here’s an overview…Based on Web Kit technologies, Dashboard Widgets are created using a mix of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. This extends the ability to develop Widgets to a very wide audience. If you know how to create a web page, then you know how to create a capable Widget. Link. We’ll have some examples once we make a few too.

Here’s an article (in German) and pictures of the 4th German championship of “casemoding” (modification of PC cases). Here’s a translated page, some of the translations are kinda funny. Click on the three pictures in the middle of the article and you’ll see 16 entries to the championship. I think I like this one the best, it’s a cyborg looking PC with flip top head and bar code.