Welcome to the adventure

MyWish - making wishes on facebook

Friday October 19, 2007

I love making whimsical wishes — “I wish I could drive a camel to work.” David Renie and I have just completed a new facebook app called MyWish that helps you do just that. With it you can make wishes like “I wish I could live in New Zealand for a year” or “I wish I had a pet giraffe.” Your wishes are customizable with millions of gorgeous photos from Flickr, and you can then stick them on your profile. They’re beautiful. Friends can comment on your wishes too.

My first wish of the day? “I wish I was at the beach *right now*”, with my friends back home in MD.

You can see it in action on my profile, or you can install it here.

Give it a try, and don’t hesitate to invite all your friends. You should. In fact if you don’t I will de-friend you.

Alright, I won’t do that… but you might get a malevolent wish directed your way!

How to answer your phone

Monday October 15, 2007

Couldn’t resist. This is a clever way to answer your phone — implement this strategy and telemarketers will rue the day they dialed your number.

Windows/Linux-like alt-tabbing for OS X

Thursday October 4, 2007

One of the biggest gripes I have with OS X is that when you hit cmd-tab (equivalent of alt-tab) to switch to another application, *all* of that application’s windows come forward and cover everything else that’s open. So if you’re using a text editor and Firefox to develop a website, when you cmd-tab from the editor to the browser, the editor can get hidden because all of your browser windows will come forward. Really annoying.

The solution is to use another window-switching app. Liteswitch (shareware, what I use) or Witch (free) can do the job — it can do alt-tab on a window-by-window basis. If there are other good ones, please let me know. One problem is that OS X greedily hogs the keyboard shortcut cmd-tab, so you can’t bind something like Witch to it.

But that’s not entirely true — you can use the cmd-tab shortcut with a little work. This application enhancer called Pulltab will wrest the cmd-tab keyboard combination from the OS, so now apps like Witch can use it.

This is just one step closer to keyboard nirvana.

Google analytics from way back

Wednesday October 3, 2007

I came across this early screenshot of Google Analytics, before it got the fancy flash graphs:

Google analytics