Kasperian Moving Parts

kinda like batman, but with a wife and 3 kids

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I’ve long-been wanting a nice WYSIWYG editor for my WordPress blog. And, let me just say… there’s not one that I could find for Linux, which both sucks and is honestly quite a surprise. And yeah, I know there’s a partial resource in kdepim 3.5, and I had it on my TODO list to look at helping to finish it/get it working, but that’s obviously not happened yet. Oooh! Maybe that can be the itch that I need to scratch! But anyway, I’m sure I missed this killer app in my searches and there is, in fact, one out there, but I sure as heck couldn’t find it.

So, it occurred to me that I now have one of those… how do you say… commercial operating systems (that being the lovely and talented OS X Tiger), and that there just might be some neato little blog editors for said lady. And indeed, there are. I’ve found Ecto and have decided to give it a spin.

It’s nice!

Although, I can’t imagine myself ever in the place in life where I’d joyfully fork over money for the pleasure of using it, it is a well-done little application, and it does indeed do WYSIWYG blog editing. I think that the length of time that I’ll use it is directly related to how long I can use it without having to pay money. Which brings me to the point of Open Source development on OS X. It doesn’t seem to have caught on nearly as well as I would have thought. I mean, the idea of developing software just because you love doing it and are fine with sharing your source code and applications with the world without feeling obligated to charge people for the privilege doesn’t seem to be nearly as prevalent on OS X as it is on BSD/Linux/etc. Bummer, that!

Also, there are a couple of pet peeves I have with iTunes.

1. First, it doesn’t do nearly as good a job as Amarok of watching the directories that it’s supposed to be. If I add songs to my directories outside of iTunes, it doesn’t know about them until I restart iTunes. And there’s no “rescan collection” that I can find, unlike the one that is readily available in Amarok.
2. Second, it doesn’t have a cover manager like Amarok does, from what I can find. This plainly sucks. It looks like Apple actually wants you to manually put in the cover art for each album?? No thanks. I can go get a pet rock if I want that boring of a hobby. Or maybe this is intentional–Apple wanting to make it as easy to get all this working if you use only the iTunes store, and as difficult to do it any other way?
3. This is a third bullet item, having nothing to do with iTunes at the moment. It may at some point, but it doesn’t right now. Actually, there’s something odd that Ecto does with ordered lists, like the WYSIWYG and code get out of sync or something. Ick.
4. Oh, I know–Lyrics. iTunes doesn’t do Lyrics?? Amarok does, and does it really smoothly.

Blah! So, I spent some time last week and got Amarok up and running through Fink in OS X. And it really, really, really works well!! Really really! I was expecting the same level of weirdness that one sees in Linux when trying to get Windows-ish things to work, but it all just worked flawlessly. Sound works fine, although it seems that amarok only wants to use esdsink for its engine, which seems odd, but multiple apps can still access the sound card, which is important (and problematic in Linux on most cheap sound cards) so there’s nothing wrong here. Maybe I’m just more comfortable with that which I’m used to, but I find Amarok a nicer interface to work with. So, seriously, two thumbs waaaay, way up, Amarok guys and gals!! =;)

And lastly, I’ve been jonesing for some Pink Floyd lately. Out here in Rhode Island, I’m without all of my CD’s, etc., so I went and found some songs from my favorite Floyd CD, Delicate Sound of Thunder. I am always amazed at how intricate, emotional, ahead-of-their-time, smooth, and experiential Pink Floyd songs are. I surely hope this isn’t one of those signs of me getting old, but I am still drawn to their songs, lyrics, arrangements, and musicality as much as I was 10 years ago+. My favorites from this CD are definitely:

1. Learning to Fly
2. The Dogs of War
3. On the Turning Away
4. One of These Days
5. Comfortably Numb
6. Run Like Hell

Awesome, awesome music. Makes me wish I could have seen them live myself. =:) Oooh–also, One Slip from A Momentary Lapse of Reason is awesome!! =:)

And with that, I bid you, fare reader, adieu.

One Response

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1. 

   christopherborne@yahoo.com

   One of these Days kicks ass. Currently listening to the PULSE DVD version.

   Tuesday March 13, 2007 at 5:36 pm