Patrick Nielsen Hayden emailed; he'd spotted a link to Macadamia on the Locus site and then read all the way through from the beginning. He recommended BBEdit, but I'm tetchy about the $119 price (it's cheaper for academics), and I know that the free version would leave me itching for the upgrade. Also, I suddenly realised that between Radio and LiveJournal, I'm not actually doing any HTML editing at the moment. It's a weird feeling. Patrick also reminded me that Mozilla 1.0 is out, suggested I ought to be using TinkerTool, and mentioned the virtues of Silk. At least I'm on the side of the angels with the last of those three; one thing I forgot to mention in the massive Macadamia update was that I dashed off to get Silk the second I heard about it.
Patrick also added:
You say that "It doesn't tell you how to get a Mac share on the PC, and with good reason; you can't do it without spending substantial extra money for a third party package." Not quite true. Admittedly, you have to get Unix under your fingernails to do it, but:
http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/documentation/howto/html/osxsmb.html
--tells you exactly how to make your OS X Mac into a Samba server without spending a cent.
Right back at the very beginning, when I was despairing of ever talking to the PCs at all, I learnt of the existence of this stuff, but discounted it as being too hard for Bears of Very Little Brain. I am now inspired, and will have a go. Though not tonight.
On a different note, I don't know why the Apple Switch campaign needs to say any more than "And when you want to install new software, you drag it into your applications folder. You do not have to close down other programs, choose a place to install it to, confirm that the installation program is running in English, manually unzip the download folder to a temporary directory, have to guess which executable you need, or have to restart the machine. When you want to run the new program, you open your applications folder and click on the program."
Department of Unconsidered Trifles: I have now spent a whole thirty seconds with Mozilla, and provide a Pontificating Ignorant Review: "This browser is not as easy on the eye as Omniweb but it does appear to render web pages particularly well. It has a very wide range of features, none of which I understand yet. There are lots of little icons about the place, most of which seem fairly self-explanatory. Why is it that nearly all open source collaborative software is so terribly ugly to look at? Don't any designers get involved with the projects? All the window furniture in Mozilla is ugly as sin; it's hard to cope with after beautiful Omniweb. However, Mozilla is a lot better at, well, browsing the web, which is a bit of a core competency for a web browser."
Next up: TinkerTool.
12:40:45 AM 
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