Filed under: Software, World wide web Tools

A few days ago I mentioned that the Time Reader Beta would soon be open for Mac users, but I had no idea how soon it would actually appear.

This day the New York Times has released the Mac beta of their Times Reader. For those that don’t know, the Times Reader is a stand alone app that tries to marry to ideal aspects of reading the Times on the web with the high quality typography and readability one finds in the physical paper.

As many Mac users have bemoaned, the Times Reader is built upon Microsoft’s Silverlight technology allowing them to develop the app for both Windows and OS X.

While the Times Reader for Mac is in beta it is free, though once it leaves beta it will only be available via subscription. Check out the Frequently Asked Questions for more answers, and our gallery showing screenshots of the install process and of the app itself.

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Filed under: Software, World wide web Tools

A few days ago I mentioned that the Time Reader Beta would soon be open for Mac users, but I had no idea how soon it would actually appear.

This day the New York Times has released the Mac beta of their Times Reader. For those that don’t know, the Times Reader is a stand alone app that tries to marry to ideal aspects of reading the Times on the web with the high quality typography and readability one finds in the physical paper.

As many Mac users have bemoaned, the Times Reader is built upon Microsoft’s Silverlight technology allowing them to develop the app for both Windows and OS X.

While the Times Reader for Mac is in beta it is free, though once it leaves beta it will only be available via subscription. Check out the Frequently Asked Questions for more answers, and our gallery showing screenshots of the install process and of the app itself.

%Gallery-23524%

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Filed under: Software, World wide web Tools

I don’t know about y’all, but the beta service Dropbox has personally answered my prayers. It’s an astonishing piece of web software that integrates with the Finder, and allows you to seamlessly copy files up to the internet for sharing — and not use FTP.

Dropbox exists (through some kind of magic, I’m sure) in your home directory as a folder named “Dropbox.” There, you can copy files to and from it just as you would any other kind of folder. File replicating is pretty perky. A 1MB file took about 15 seconds over my broadband connection. As someone who still cringes at uploading files via the Finder (hi, early .Mac user here), this was a pleasant surprise.

One thing I wasn’t anticipating was that since the Dropbox folder appears to “live inside” your home directory, the default Finder behavior of moving files (and not duplicating them, as you might expect) applies. I was still of the FTP mindset that “I am copying files to the internet.” So hold down that option key.

Beta accounts of Dropbox include 2GB of storage. (If you need more, SugarSync, OmniDrive, or JungleDisk might be options for you.) You can also add multiple personal to the same account, and have access to a common Dropbox among all of them.

My favorite feature, though, is being able to upload files to a “Public” folder, and have a URL automatically assigned to them. I have a Transmit bookmarklet that already does this (though, it uploads it to my own website), but I’ve to type out the URL manually. Dropbox’s contextual-menu item saves me that trouble, and I can just paste the URL into my email.

Dropbox is still in public beta, so if you know a friend who got a beta signup code, then they got 10 invitations as well. So bring chocolates, flowers, cash, or whatever it takes to get an invitation. They will disappear swiftly.

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Filed under: Software, Internet Tools

The great SpamSieve was updated earlier this week to version 2.7. If you’re unfamiliar with SpamSieve, you’re probably inundated with unwanted email.

It’s a piece of software that works with your email client and excels at squashing spam long before you ever see it. Over time, it gets superior at identifying what you consider spam as well as those benign messages you want to see. Version 2.7 offers many great improvements, including:

• Several variety of accuracy improvements, focused on dealing
• Improved corpus speed and memory use
• Various improvements to the column widths and alignments
• in the rules and corpus windows, and added alternating row
• colors

There’s more, of course, and you can read the rest here. While you’re at it, read this tutorial for setting up a drone SpamSieve Mac. I’ve been running one for months and it works wonderfully.

SpamSieve 2.7 is a free update for registered users and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

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