martinopia.com » Software

Bringing CHF to Mac OS

martinopia — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:54:51 +0000

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:

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’

Google Docs gets drawing feature

martinopia — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 13:59:57 +0000

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:

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.

Macheist 3 breaks MySQL

martinopia — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:48:19 +0000

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:

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

When customers become suckhole jerks…

martinopia — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:48:48 +0000

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-mÃ¼ller-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

HP Smart Web Printing: Webpages drucken nach Mass

martinopia — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 11:01:12 +0000

Ein Ãârgernis, das man leider viel zu oft im Netz antrifft – man mÃÂ¶chte eigentlich nur einen kleinen Ausschnitt drucken.. oder eine Webpage oder ein Blog hat ÃÂ¼berhaupt keine Druckansicht und das Layout wird beim Drucken so auseinander gerissen, dass fÃÂ¼r den eigentlichen Text gerade mal noch 1/10 der Seitenbreite ÃÂ¼brigbleibt.

DafÃÂ¼r stellt HP nun kostenlos ein druckerunabhÃÂ¤ngiges Tool fÃÂ¼r Firefox und Internet Explorer bereit: HP Smart Web Printing

Damit kÃÂ¶nnen 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 fÃÂ¼r dieses wirklich hilfreiche Tool!

Easy blogging – Blog Desk

martinopia — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 21:33:37 +0000

In his Blog JÃÂ¼rg 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..

Microsoft: Support wie er sein sollte

martinopia — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 08:34:42 +0000

Ich bin nun wirklich kein grosser Fan von Microsoft-Produkten, dennoch ÃÂ¼berrascht 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 RÃÂ¼ckrufe erfolgen pÃÂ¼nktlich und selbst nach Abschluss des Falls wird nochmals nachgefasst, ob die LÃÂ¶sung 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!