right-click -> New Document within a second you’re naming and working in a text, Word, Excel etc. file, and it’s in the location you want. Windows has the Mac beat in this. I tried to get an Applescript/right-click utility combination to approximate this behavior and failed. edit: John C sent me a note about NuFile, which solves this problem. NuFile I’m using, no question… its simplicity and customization are the cat’s pajamas. Thanks John!

maximize windows in Windows this just works. In Mac OS it’s a crapshoot. The window should maximize, not assume an alternate non-maximized form. It should respect the Dock location of course, and it should not span monitors, if you have more than one.

finder pathing ever want to go somewhere, and have the path on the clipboard? I use it all the time in Windows. It’s an easy way to get places, or to tell a dialog box where you want to save something. It means fewer clicks, which is what the Mac OS is supposed to be all about.

Overall I think the Mac OS is light years ahead of XP, and I’m very happy being a Macuser. But I think Steve Jobs’ and Apple’s design aloofness sometimes prevents them from adopting bits that would make the OS better, bit origins be damned.

(A note about the download: AddressBookToCSV looks at your Adress Book contacts and creates a comma-delimited file (.csv). This utility has been available since 2003 or so. If it was malicious, a) it would have infected my machine long ago and b) we would have heard about it and c) Apple would have made the author Ken Ferry remove it from his .Mac site.

1. Download AddressBookToCSV
   
2. Run it and save your .csv to desktop or somewhere you’ll remember.
3. Open your gmail account in a browser window.
4. Contacts –> Import Contacts, then select the .csv file you created.
5. Go mix a drink champ, you’re done.

*

Download widgets with Safari, and installs take one click. You still must clean up the .zip from your download directory (or not). Either way, it’s seamless.

Upon download you’re given a dialog like this:

Very Mac-like; couldn’t be simpler.

If anyone out there knows of a way to get Firefox / other browsers to install widgets this elegantly, let me know and I’ll add it to this blog entry.

I just rediscovered how to do this after knowing it then somehow forgetting it long ago.

If you listen to streaming radio with iTunes and can’t be bothered to do one of the various methods of finding the station in iTunes, this is the tip for you. You don’t have to use iTunes to start your stream; in fact iTunes need not be open.

Tested with iTunes 4 and iTunes 7; should work with 5 and 6 also.

1. grab a radio icon from iTunes
   
2. drag it to the Documents half of your Dock, it will take on the Web address Mac OS icon
   
3. click on it
   
4. that will open a web page in a browser and trigger a download of a file called something like listen.pls edit: name depends on the radio station
   
5. drag listen.pls to a nice location for long-term storage, then rename it and drag it onto your Documents half of your Dock edit: after renaming the downloaded file, Get Info -> Lock it

   

That’s it, all done. Enjoy.

A few things I’ve managed to dig up about Cover Flow, Apple’s cover art browsing component for iTunes:

• cover art is not portable between Macs and/or libraries
• iT 7 built-in artwork finder is often inaccurate, and never complete
• if it’s the wrong image, use Ctr-Click -> Clear Downloaded Artwork
• if your music is sorted by artist, movie soundtracks and other compilations will have [number of tracks on the album] positions in the jukebox, one for each track
• you can take the if you want it done right… approach

And then there’s artwork and album versioning. Different labels can and do release their own versions of albums, complete with different artwork (and many times different tracks, but that’s a result of the album’s production).

I think the only ones of us who can look forward to perfect Cover Flow artwork are the Britney-and-Janet buying crowd. But an imperfect technology can still be a joy to use, and seeing artwork for my music that I haven’t seen since I lost the CD jewel case is fun. And the visual analogy gives us a new method of choosing music.

It’s imperfect, but I like it.