Google Widgets

Google has made their own widgets: Blogger, Gmail and Search History. In fact I'm using the Blogger widget now. It lets you choose which of your blogs to post to. It can save drafts or publish the post right away. It supports shortcuts like Cmd-N for bold and Cmd-I for italic. It's quite convenient I guess.

The Gmail widget checks new email. It checks every time you open Dashboard. But every thing you do in the widget – open a message, compose, search, and click on the Inbox button – the result is in a new window of your browser. That's not quite nice to me.

Search History displays your recent searches in Google. It has search too, but the results are in the widget itself. Clicking on the links bring them to your browser, naturally.

All three widgets are quite good-looking too. But Google, aren't you too slow for these widgets? Tiger is out for nearly a year.

My first AppleScript

I have been hoping to learn AppleScript for some time, because that seems cool. Today I read an article on MacWorld that teaches how to write AppleScript. So I started to learn.

I wrote a little script that deletes the selected files in Finder. It was not hard because I had the library open and just put words in. But this script is not exactly useful. It's in the sidebar now, but I much prefer pressing Cmd+delete to do the same thing.

Maybe I'll have some better scripts ideas later. Still an interesting learning experience.

Update of iPod Problem

One morning, after letting my friend's iPod to rest for a night or two, it woke up. I was really surprised. So I brought it back to its owner happily. Then she couldn't wake it. But when I tried, it woke! I said it was because of my "magic hand".

Then today she said the iPod has problem again. It's just a bit more then one year old. Maybe it needs restoring. Or I'll try my "magic hand"! lol. It always work. Maybe the iPod knows I'm an Apple person and we have a "connection".

iPod problem

I crashed my friend's iPod.

Or you can say the iPod crashed my iTunes. And then I came to the whole Mac. It ended up I had to force my Mac to shut down.

And I reconnected the iPod to the Mac, now it displays the unhappy iPod icon. Normally the solution is to restore the iPod, but the trouble is my friend doesn't have her music in her computer, so I can't restore the iPod.

Now our solution is to wait for some days for the iPod's battery to drain. That's going to be long because the iPod has charged a lot when I plugged it to my Mac. And we'll see if it'll be OK later.

1 GB iPod nano

It came out today. $1150. The prices of the two iPod shuffles were decreased (512MB $550, 1GB $780). Makes the shuffle more attractive, but they need to have an update of the shuffle or just discontinue it. Good, I'll see more and more nanos in the street, and I can't imagine how jealous I'll be.

Spring cleaning

I cleaned my Mac today, as it's really spring and I haven't cleaned it for a long time (really lazy person here). Now it's much cleaner.

When I cleaned the machine, I found a lot of dust in the holes under the machine. It was horrible. I picked the dust carefully with a toothpick. I smelt something like burnt things. I was afraid that something might be damaged inside. But that was impossible because I used the Mac yesterday and all things were fine. And I cleaned other parts. And the table. The state of the table was horrible.

After all this, I ran the Apple Hardware Test. Foolish of me, because nothing could be wrong. But I was worried all the same. And I'd never tried that before so I wanted to see what it was like. So it was a Classic GUI, and I've never used Classic. I ran the test and there was no problem. Very good.