style posts

Apple is definitely one of the world's most admired companies, but their lofty ambitions, high visibility, and easy-to-identify style also makes them ripe for parody, as in this very funny video by the UK's E4. They're boasting about a madeup device called the ePad, which will wow you with its revolutionary and magical keyboard, screen, and standard attached computer and television. Like they say, if you want to see one of their shows, you can just literally reach out and touch ... well, we won't ruin the surprise.

But it is funny. And it shows that while yes, the iPad is a cool device, anything you talk about in a "revolutionary" and "magical" way can seem like it's exactly that -- even if it is just another heavy piece of junk.

Here's something I know affects plenty of users out there. Have you ever pasted text in a document or email message, only to have it formatted differently than all the text around it? Irritating, right?

There's an answer, thanks to the Keyboard & Mouse pane in System Preferences. If you click the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, you can assign "Paste Without Formatting" and/or "Paste and Match Style" to Command + V for all applications. Just click the button under the list, type in the name of the appropriate menu items, and press ⌘-V in the Keyboard Shortcut box.

One note: Panic designer Neven Mrgan found that using this tip means you won't be able to paste images into iChat using Command + V. Dragging and dropping (or choosing Paste from the Edit menu) still works, though. Update: If you explicitly add ⌘-V in as a shortcut for Paste that's specific to iChat, you can restore the image paste capability without breaking the global shortcut.

Apps that don't have either of those menu items will still default to regular old "Paste" for the same key command. Paste away!

[Via @robotspacer, @chockenberry, and thaweesak.com.]

These NetNewsWire styles just keep getting better, especially since this one is designed for both NetNewsWire and Vienna. Not long ago I found a couple of really slick NNW styles, one of them taking a crack at a Spotlight look + headline wrapping, and now Brent Simmons via the Ranchero blog has highlighted FeedLight, a style based heavily on Mac OS X's Spotlight searchbar. While it bears resemblance to other Tiger styles available (including NNW's own built-in style), I really enjoy FeedLight's approach of displaying all the important data like a properly wrapping headline, feed, date and author in a concise, static top bar that remains in place (only on NNW, not Vienna) even as you scroll through a long article. Of course, the fact that it comes in two sexy gradient-ific versions, one for Aqua and another for Graphite, doesn't hurt either.

All FeedLight styles and versions are available from Alex at BrokenLogic.

It's been a couple of months since I switched from NetNewsWire to Google Reader, but I am happy to announce that I saw the light and have returned to greener pastures. While Google Reader is still roughly 3000 times as functional as NewsGator Online, I simply could no longer resist the torture of no search (in a Google product, no less), and no support for authenticated feeds. Aside from those two setbacks, however, I still recommend gReader as the best web-based reader that is easily head and shoulders above the rest.

Since I'm back to NetNewsWire though, I have once again gone kookoo for styles and have come across two that impressed me quite a bit. First up is Reflex for NetNewsWire from Oliver Boermans (pictured above), which is the most functional and optimized style I have ever seen, and has quite possibly usurped my previous favorite: Tiger style by Jon Hicks (sorry Jon!).

First, Reflex offers a two column design by default (which can be slimmed to one if/when you prefer) that places metadata (author, blog, date, categories, etc.) in a non-scrolling column on the right of the post body. This is really handy if you don't want to keep scrolling up and down posts just to snag all the info you might need to, say, write about the post or the site you're referencing. Speaking of scrolling, Reflex will fade in a slick overlay headline at the top of the post if - and only if - you wind up having to scroll down so far as to knock the post's headline above the fold. Last but not least, Reflex offers two color styles (white/black) and layouts (single or double column) via a button at the top right of the reading pane.

This most excellent Reflex style can be had from Oliver's blog, and I'd like to tip my hat to the man himself for his fantastic work.

The second style hails from Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch, of Mac OS X development and C4 fame. Jon's Spotlight+wrap style is a modification of NetNewsWire 2.0's built-in Spotlight style in the name of functionality. First, and most noticeably, he added a wrap to the headline so long'uns will display in their entirety. The other big change is that he borrowed from Takaaki Kato's Samurai Style and eliminated the Feedburner footer that's catching on with so many bloggers these days (the ugly 'digg this, del.icio.us that' standard links appearing in many RSS feeds). Jon also mentions some stylistic battles he had to wage, but at the end of it all is a very functional improvement to a beloved default NNW style. You can grab Spotlight+wrap from Jon Rentzsch's blog.


[via Ranchero's blog]

New to iTunes comes the Style Network, home to shows about beauty, fashion, home and entertainment. I have never personally watched the Style network and, until it popped up on iTunes tonight, was never actually aware that it existed. The new shows include "Clean House", where the host inspires homeowners to--wait for it people, wait for it--clean their houses, "Split Ends", which covers the sheer shear madness (the wit!) of stylists who swap hair salons and "Whose Wedding is it Anyway?", which dives into the lives of wedding planners. Sadly, none of the new shows offer any free episodes to sample.

This is one of those widgets that makes me wonder why Apple hasn't already made one. Type Cast is pretty simple and straight-forward: it's a font preview widget from Code Line Communications, makers of Art Director's Toolkit (amongst other things). This widget isn't short on capabilities either; you can navigate font families, styles and sizes with merely your keyboard, and you can even be taken directly to the font file in the Finder.

The Type Cast widget is free and available from Code Line Communications here.

iChat Extender is a little app that lets you tweak various settings of iChat that unfortunately don't have a pref pane of their own. Features such as the format of the 'iTunes now playing' status message and the style of chat bubbles can easily be adjusted with this handy and free app.

For more fun with little apps, check out the developer's other utilities such as illis, an iTunes controller and Growl notifier, as well as Star, a menubar utility for rating your iTunes tracks and notifying you when a track is un-rated.

All of these utilities are free and Universal Binaries.

I'll have to agree with Dvorak that mail apps that don't allow HTML are lame lame lame. Apple's Mail will allow you to see HTML emails, but not compose them. I guess that's supposed to be a security/annoyance feature, but sometimes I would really like to make an HTML email... But at least we can have CSS for our signatures.

CSS, for those who don't know, is a way of styling web pages. It's more precise than plain ol' HTML, and quite frankly, more powerful and better looking. My personal site uses CSS exclusively (much to the chagrin of Netscape Navigator 4.7). Anyway, Melvin Rivera has a step-by-step tutorial on using CSS in your Mail.app signatures. You may want to learn a little CSS first, if you've never tried it before. Just like using a Mac, you may never go back.

I have never heard of Orbino until today, and I'm becoming perplexed as to why. They make what look like stellar hand stitched leather cases for all three of the current model iPods, offering a choice of styles, colors and unique clip and lanyard designs. Quickly browsing through their site, it looks like most of their cases run a respectable $39, which is a good price for a leather case (*ahem* Apple) that actually lets you use the iPod while it's wrapped up.

Check out Orbino's offering, and if any of y'all TUAW readers have already snagged one, feel free to post your thoughts.