Fraser Speirs (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} fraserspeirs) wrote,@ 2004-11-17 00:07:00 |
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Fair use rights, note taking and a defence of NSDrawer
iTMS, iMovie and Final Cut Express
I was playing with Final Cut Express tonight. It doesn't appear to support import of iTunes Music Store files like iMovie does. It does support AIFF import, so if you can get your iTMS track into AIFF, you can use it. One way to do that is to burn it to a CD and import to FCE from the CD.
Another way is to send it through iMovie 4. Create a project in iMovie and add the track you want. Choose File -> Share, then select Expert Settings in the Quicktime tab. When asked for settings, choose "Sound to AIFF" and you'll get an AIFF file of your music track which you can import to FCE. There are other, possibly easier, possibly more legally dubious ways of doing this :-)
That mythical note-taking brain-organising application
I've been through so many applications, looking for that one place that I can stash all those stupid facts, notes and other random stuff. I tried OmniOutliner, but not everything is hierarchical. I tried VoodooPad, but I don't want to have to manage my categories manually. I tried DEVONThink, but it did a poor job of controlling the complexity. I tried MacJournal, but I needed more integration with Address Book and mail. I tried Circus Ponies Notebook, but it has a silly name and I hate applications that attempt real-world metaphors in their UI. I looked at Tinderbox, but I saw a price tag of $150 and a screenshot which had all the graphical pizzazz of, say, xfig. No, for $150, it has to at least look as good as OmniGraffle.
balatro put me onto Chronos StickyBrain. I'm not ready to say that this is The One App just yet, but it looks promising. However, I do have the odd misgiving about the fact that it installs and runs an OpenBase daemon on your machine without telling you.....
The one thing that no app seems to have cracked is the feature whereby I can drag an email from Mail.app and link that to a note as a "See Also" item.
In defence of NSDrawer
I read this blog post criticising NSDrawer, and I really don't agree with its conclusions, such as they are. I actually have come to quite like the Drawer element, when it's used correctly.
I don't have sufficient passion to write this out in full, but I reject the common argument that Drawers inherently waste screen space. If you have a table which is the full height of any window, you can argue that the unpopulated part of the table "wastes space". Whether it's inside the bounds of the main window or outside it is, to my mind, rather irrelevant.
I put together this one example of why I'm quite happy with Mail's use of a drawer rather than a table inside the window bounds. The reason is vertical space:
And where I say "you would regain this space", that's more of a "maybe" because it's not a given that moving the drawer under the toolbar would mean that those buttons would be removed.
There are some uses of a drawer which do waste screen space, but I think that Mail is one of the poorer examples to cite if you want to make that argument.
iTMS, iMovie and Final Cut Express
I was playing with Final Cut Express tonight. It doesn't appear to support import of iTunes Music Store files like iMovie does. It does support AIFF import, so if you can get your iTMS track into AIFF, you can use it. One way to do that is to burn it to a CD and import to FCE from the CD.
Another way is to send it through iMovie 4. Create a project in iMovie and add the track you want. Choose File -> Share, then select Expert Settings in the Quicktime tab. When asked for settings, choose "Sound to AIFF" and you'll get an AIFF file of your music track which you can import to FCE. There are other, possibly easier, possibly more legally dubious ways of doing this :-)
That mythical note-taking brain-organising application
I've been through so many applications, looking for that one place that I can stash all those stupid facts, notes and other random stuff. I tried OmniOutliner, but not everything is hierarchical. I tried VoodooPad, but I don't want to have to manage my categories manually. I tried DEVONThink, but it did a poor job of controlling the complexity. I tried MacJournal, but I needed more integration with Address Book and mail. I tried Circus Ponies Notebook, but it has a silly name and I hate applications that attempt real-world metaphors in their UI. I looked at Tinderbox, but I saw a price tag of $150 and a screenshot which had all the graphical pizzazz of, say, xfig. No, for $150, it has to at least look as good as OmniGraffle.
balatro put me onto Chronos StickyBrain. I'm not ready to say that this is The One App just yet, but it looks promising. However, I do have the odd misgiving about the fact that it installs and runs an OpenBase daemon on your machine without telling you.....The one thing that no app seems to have cracked is the feature whereby I can drag an email from Mail.app and link that to a note as a "See Also" item.
In defence of NSDrawer
I read this blog post criticising NSDrawer, and I really don't agree with its conclusions, such as they are. I actually have come to quite like the Drawer element, when it's used correctly.
I don't have sufficient passion to write this out in full, but I reject the common argument that Drawers inherently waste screen space. If you have a table which is the full height of any window, you can argue that the unpopulated part of the table "wastes space". Whether it's inside the bounds of the main window or outside it is, to my mind, rather irrelevant.
I put together this one example of why I'm quite happy with Mail's use of a drawer rather than a table inside the window bounds. The reason is vertical space:
And where I say "you would regain this space", that's more of a "maybe" because it's not a given that moving the drawer under the toolbar would mean that those buttons would be removed.
There are some uses of a drawer which do waste screen space, but I think that Mail is one of the poorer examples to cite if you want to make that argument.
