Comments on: Picks from MBW 52: Ten Cents A Dance

By: mayson

mayson — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 16:37:18 +0000

@wess – I think he’s gone to Google Calendar… check out episode 55.

By: wess

wess — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 15:54:51 +0000

i’m curious as to what merlin uses instead of ical?

By: tycho garren

tycho garren — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 17:00:56 +0000

finder of course, but I hold out for the new things in leopard.

iCal and TextEdit.

By: Robert Gottlieb

Robert Gottlieb — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 07:43:48 +0000

RE: David and two-way calendering:

There is something called GCalDaemon: http://gcaldaemon.sourceforge.net/ that basically sync’s iCal to your Google Calendar. I use it and it works quite well. Just follow the directions exactly as they are written – like it is a recipe.

By: piminnowcheez

piminnowcheez — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 18:40:39 +0000

Thanks for more good recommendations. What a swell crowd that hangs around here.

By: David Lanier

David Lanier — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 23:28:48 +0000

For a pretty easy, I’m just getting started, visual html editor, to stand in for iWeb, you could check out nVu. http://www.nvu.com/ Sure, it lacks Mac spiffiness, but it’s free and opensource.

By: Nick

Nick — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 22:40:11 +0000

“I have a copy of TextMate, which I have no idea how to use”

You can mark-up pretty quickly in TextMate by writing plaintext structured with Markdown syntax:

http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

TextMate has a bundle to automatically convert Markdown-formatted text to HTML. That’s a nice way to write HTML in TextMate — although not the only way, of course.

But you’d probably want to learn HTML first to have some idea of what you are short-cutting around. HTML isn’t hard to learn, although using what you learn imaginatively and well is another matter, of course. There are good basic books on it, and a few good online resources to step you through learning the tags and putting them together — here’s one:

http://www.htmldog.com/

If you want to use a WYSIWYG editor, then NVU is fine and costs nothing. It’s a kind-of Mozilla offshoot, building on the old Netscape Composer:

http://www.nvu.com/index.php

By: David

David — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 16:12:15 +0000

I like iCal. There are two things missing from it for my uses (which do not include group scheduling):

Customizable snooze (the intervals that are offered are not often what I want).
Two-way web calendar. Sometimes I’m out at an office site and want to enter an event on my iCal; I can’t do it from the web. Wish I could.

By: Geoff Evans

Geoff Evans — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 05:05:43 +0000

Microsoft Office would have to be the worst app pre installed
Also i would have to say that iCal and Digital Color meter would have to be great apps

By: piminnowcheez

piminnowcheez — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 03:48:42 +0000

Thanks for the recommendations. I was sensitive to Leo’s comments about iWeb exactly because I was looking for something that would let me start from zero web-development knowledge (where I am now), but transition over time to ALL-POWAHFUL!! (BWAH-HAHAHAHA!) as I learned along the way. So the trap Leo warned of was something I particularly wanted to avoid.

I have a copy of TextMate, which I have no idea how to use; I think I have access to DreamWeaver at work; and I had a look at Coda which looks good as far as I can tell, but is a tad spendy for where I’m at now. Maybe I’ll try starting with DreamWeaver and have another look at Coda in time.

Thanks again.

Oh, and: iCal isn’t great. It’s *almost* great, which is what makes it infuriating.