What's it all about, Alfie?

I got a tweet today from the OmniGroup that the latest beta of OmniGraphSketcher, beta 5, was out with some really nice little features:

• Quick Look previews now work. (OGS files created before beta 5 need to be re-saved to get this feature.)
• Spotlight indexing now works, so you can find graph files whose text labels contain your search terms. (OGS files created before beta 4 need to be re-saved to get this feature.)
• Quick Look and Spotlight are also now enabled for ".graph" files created with Robin Stewart Software Graph Sketcher.
• Added a menu command called "Make Current Styles Default" which saves your current fonts and axis visibility settings as defaults for future graphs. We plan to replace this with full-featured graph templates in the future.
• Now the "Connect Points" button on the data inspector connects points in the order they appear in the list, rather than from left to right.
• Documents in progress now get autosaved and are reopened automatically after a crash.
• Smaller fixes and improvements.

It's looking better and better. I even saw a nice little web site about pricing and supply/demand using this for the graphs. Very impressive. I'm happy they are getting closer to release.

This evening I updated iTunes and QuickTime, and on the restart, I noticed that DataGraph had an update and was at v2.0.1. The release notes show that there were considerable changes in the graphs - specifically, the ability to color the area under the curve different colors for positive and negative values, and some very nice data point labels.

It's getting better and better, now if he'd only do the contour graphs and heat maps... then we'd really be talking. That would be sweet.

I noticed this morning that Bean 2.3.0 was released yesterday. Nice. It's a wonderful in-between app fitting nicely between Pages and TextEdit. It reads and writes Word docs, and that's what I use it more 90% of the time. I just need to open up a Word doc, make a few changes, and then save it again. I'm sure it'd do all the heavy-lifting I needed it to do, but for the most part, that's left to Pages where I can do all the page layout I could possibly ever need.

The release notes indicate that there are a ton of changes, which is nice, as I was using it on Friday and there were a few things I wish it had done, and it seems they are in 2.3.0. Nice.

I got a notice from LaunchBar 5 that RC 2 has been released. Most excellent. The release notes say that there have been a lot of changes - to the clipbard, to the tiny URL feature... all very nice.

I have to say that I really like the clipboard history feature. I use that a lot. It's getting closer to final release, but I've been using it every day for quite a while and haven't run into any problems. Excellent timesaver.

OK, I'm a TV nut. Well... I used to be. Now I'm an ex-TV nut, and still I like to watch the shows I want to see. Things like House, M.D.. This morning I heard about a new Hulu Desktop application (beta 0.9.1) for Mac OS X, and I have to say it's amazing.

This is exactly what I've wanted to see from one of these online video archive sites. Sure, it's got commercials, and from what I've seen, many are the exact same commercial over and over during the same show. But even this isn't bad. I can deal with that. It's the experience that matters.

Now I'm looking at the nicest desktop app for video I've seen in ages. It's clean, smooth, clear, and beats my Comcast DVR hands-down for viewing video. I'm almost ready to go get a Mac mini and hook it into my TV just so I can run this app and see the TV I want to see, when I want to see it.

DVR is still dicey. This is the best of FOX, ABC and Disney all online with a lot of older shows (Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, etc.) that I watched back in grad school and loved. It's simply incredible. Well worth the time and effort.

Also, I don't really like the web-browser-based viewers. I code, and I have my browsers set up for what I want them to look like. These sites all want you to reformat that to fit the TV show. No longer. I can fire up the Hulu Desktop app and it's stand-alone. Sure, it's probably just a web-browser underneath, but that's OK. It's standalone. That's nice.

If you like TV, get it.

I'm a huge fan of data visualization tools, and OmniGraphSketcher is a pretty nice looking tool. This morning I noticed that they had released 1.0 beta 4 with several nice improvements on the way to the final 1.0 release.

As soon as I get some time, I'm going to have to throw a few graphs together with this tool. It's demo screencasts are impressive and look to be capable of making publication-quality graphics. Nice.

I'm not a huge flickr user, but I've got a few photos up there and when I was first looking at it, I wanted a Mac desktop client to make it easier to upload a lot of photos (thinking this was going to be a big thing for me) and when I looked, one of the nicest desktop flickr clients was 1001. It's been quite a while, but they finally updated the app to 1.0.17.

Exactly what's new in this release I'm not sure, but it's been a while and I'm guessing it's a few little things that will make the experience a little nicer. I can still see all my photos/images on flickr, so it seems to work. If I see something really awesome as I play with it, I'll write it down, but it's enough to see an update for me.

I was reading the news feeds this morning and ran across this post about using WebDAV to bridge to Cloud Files - specifically for Skitch. I've always wanted HostMonster to support WebDAV so that I could point Skitch to my server there and not have to worry about Skitch going under. But they have repeatedly said that WebDAV poses security risks that they aren't yet willing to deal with. Gotta appreciate that, no doubt, and while I have WebDAV hosted at home, it's not the same because I'm never sure if Comcast is going to drop the ball at any moment and that link would be inaccessible.

While Cloud Files aren't exactly what I'm looking for, it does offer me an option if I wanted to go that way. After checking out at least one place, it's an interesting idea - Amazon S3, or Mosso... interesting.

I have to say that when I get a chance, I may look into this. It's something I've thought about for a long time - a place to store everything in the house off site. If I decide to go that way, then this is a really attractive alternative for hosting Skitch images.

I noticed this morning that Adium 1.3.4 is out with fixes for Facebook, Jabber, and a new libpurple. At the same time, I was surprised to see that Adium was using Mercurial for source control. It's one of the significant distributed source control systems, but I hadn't heard of it being used for Adium. Interesting.

Anyway, it's a nice update, and since I use it all day long, every day, it's something I need to keep up to date.

Well, if I lived in Egypt or Pakistan, I'd really appreciate the update to VelaClock to 2.1.13 as it fixed the Daylight Savings Time rules for those countries. Since I live in the US, it's just a fun update to have, and not really that necessary.

Got it for the fun value.