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April 17, 2009

Bringing CHF to Mac OS

Filed under: Software — Tags: — martinopia @ 2:54 pm

There is a very painful limitation in Mac OS X Leopard: the developers forgot to include a customize option for formatting numbers in Leopard. And to make things even worse: instead of the ISO compatible and widely used currency symbol “CHF” for “Swiss Francs” they included the very old fashioned “SFr.” as standard setting – and there is no official way to change it (I even called Apple support and they confirmed that this can’t be changed). And because applications like Billings rely on this setting (and do not offer an option to customize it onlz for the specific app) that’s really a BIG issue for swiss Mac users:

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Fortunately after spending some time in Google I found an article about how to change these settings with a terminal command.

So here it is: the magic command to bring CHF to the Mac OS X Leopard:

defaults write -g AppleICUNumberSymbols -dict 8 ‘CHF’

March 26, 2009

Google Docs gets drawing feature

Filed under: Netzwelt,Software — Tags: — martinopia @ 3:59 pm

Google Docs becomes more and more a powerful companion for everyday office software needs – and best of all: it runs completely in the cloud.

The latest feature which Google added to its Google Docs suite is a very nice drawing tool as one knows from OpenOffice:

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The drawing is inserted as SVG vector graphic which allows it to be scaled without loss in quality.

Obviously the software doesn’t improve the artist’s skills substantially – but the new drawing feature is a very handy tool for quick & dirty visualizations of ideas.

March 25, 2009

Macheist 3 breaks MySQL

Filed under: Software — Tags: , — martinopia @ 12:48 pm

After weeks with fantastic puzzles and a lot of free apps Macheist 3 is ready for prime time now and went online yesterday with an amazing bundle. I’m especially impressed by the inclusion of the brand new Espresso editor/IDE as well as BoinxTV. For 39USD this alone would be a steal.

Obviously I am not the only Mac enthusiast thinking so: Macheist’s MySQL server seems to need some holiday vacation after all that is over:

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But never mind – with some patience we all will get our Macheist 3 bundle – it’s definitivly worth it!

March 10, 2009

When customers become suckhole jerks…

Filed under: Software — Tags: , , — martinopia @ 2:48 am

Recently I bought “Delicious Library”, a nice Mac shareware tool from a company called Delicious Monster which helps cataloging books, movies, software, toys, tools, etc. – REALLY great stuff (it scans the barcode from a book/DVD and gets the corresponding data direclty from Amazon.com).

Well, sometimes nomen est omen, so I wasn’t too surprised when I got my license code, which started with my name follwed with some nice words:

martin-müller-suckhole-jerk- [r e m o v e d, just buy your own license, it’s really worth it!]

Hmm.. what nice attributes for new customers 😉 Well – after a short email to the support they sent me a very kind response:

Hello Martin,

I’m so sorry for that license code! The words are pulled automatically from a huge dictionary, and we eliminated the ones we thought were offensive, but it appears to be getting creative with insulting words! Apparently I’ll need to go through and further weed out some offensive words.

Here’s a new license code for you.

Delicious Library License Code: [r e m o v e d, just buy your own license, it’s really worth it!]

Again, I’m so sorry!

—
Terry Phillips
Delicious Support

So everything fine and I guess both of us had some fun 😉

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March 15, 2008

HP Smart Web Printing: Webpages drucken nach Mass

Filed under: Netzwelt,Software — martinopia @ 12:01 pm

Ein Ärgernis, das man leider viel zu oft im Netz antrifft – man möchte eigentlich nur einen kleinen Ausschnitt drucken.. oder eine Webpage oder ein Blog hat überhaupt keine Druckansicht und das Layout wird beim Drucken so auseinander gerissen, dass für den eigentlichen Text gerade mal noch 1/10 der Seitenbreite übrigbleibt.

Dafür stellt HP nun kostenlos ein druckerunabhängiges Tool für Firefox und Internet Explorer bereit: HP Smart Web Printing

Damit können Inhalte (auch Ausschnitte) von mehreren Websites zu einem Dokument kombiniert und dieses schliesslich gedruckt oder als PDF-Datei abgespeichert werden. Und das beste daran: das Layout der Website bleibt erhalten.

Danke HP für dieses wirklich hilfreiche Tool!

October 19, 2007

Easy blogging – Blog Desk

Filed under: Software — martinopia @ 10:33 pm

In his Blog Jürg Stucker linked to a very sophisticated Windows tool to make the life of a blogger much easier: BlogDesk

No matter which blogging software you use (WordPress, Movable Type, etc.) – Blog Desk just works and helps you to be much better organized in your blogging life.. just give it a try!

A small note for Windows Vista users: you have to install a DHTML Editing Control first, which can be downloaded from this Microsoft Server.

Btw: this is my first BlogDesk powered posting.. 😉

June 21, 2007

Microsoft: Support wie er sein sollte

Filed under: Software — martinopia @ 9:34 am

Ich bin nun wirklich kein grosser Fan von Microsoft-Produkten, dennoch überrascht mich diese Firma immer wieder aufs Neue mit ihrem wirklich herausragenden Support. Die Support-Teams sind nicht nur kompetent und freundlich, sonder haben auch ihre Prozesse im Griff. Versprochene Rückrufe erfolgen pünktlich und selbst nach Abschluss des Falls wird nochmals nachgefasst, ob die Lösung nun wirklich funktioniere.

Und dies alles ohne Extra Support-Vertrag, einfach nur im Standard-Support.

Es lohnt sich definitiv, bei Microsoft nicht die OEM-Versionen zu kaufen!

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