Henry's blog

I recently re-discovered a gem of an app for Mac that I believe to have downloaded several months ago called Quinn.

For as much as people tend to rag on Mac OS for its small selection of games, Quinn is, surprisingly, a free, bang-up rendition of Tetris (or the “popular falling-blocks game which, according to the Tetris Company, must not be named here,” according to the site). I can honestly say that its being a game aside, Quinn’s interface ranks as one of the best I’ve encountered on Mac. With its multi-player functionality, and ability to host games, I know that I’ve spent countless hours trying to top others’ scores as well as my own.

If you’re not a serious gamer, but are interested in a largely mindless and simple, classic game to occupy those few spare moments you might have in your day — which may be far too little time once you become as obsessed with it as I! — I highly recommend Quinn.

With the version 2 release of the ever-popular Mint web analytics software two days ago, a part of me got to thinking, are stats I already get for free with a combination of a WordPress plugin called FireStats and Google Analytics really worth $30, just so that they may be delivered in a more attractive package?

Well, unless I’m terribly misinformed, and there’s some killer feature of Mint I’m unaware of, I really don’t think so. But, then again, another part of me got to thinking that there is that jaw-droppingly beautiful interface, and the UI is the most important thing next to, of course, functionality…

Still, 30 bucks, who am I kidding!?

Adium has now stolen my heart, with its highly customizable (and even more minimal-than-iChat) appearance, and exceptionally high tweak factor among other things. In addition to this, Adium is open source, with an extremely active development community. This means that tons of different styles, extras, and plugins are available; in fact there’s a dedicated web page for this because there’s such a large number of them. If you have a Mac, and use AIM (or nearly every other IM protocol), Adium is definitely worth checking out:

Website
Adium Extras

I’ll be perfectly honest with you. I really don’t like PCs. Yes, I’m a Mac guy. However, I didn’t used to be. Until a few months ago, my computer was a wheezing, 800 or so Mhz Dell laptop. It could do the basics ok–web browsing, email, word, things like that. But enough of my sob story. To cut to the chase, I had been wanting a far better computer for quite a while, and after having to put up with PCs and Windows for years the natural choice was to get a Mac. So, I got a lovely iMac named, um, Guido. Obviously, this new computer could and can do anything thrown at it (well, so long as it’s a universal app which is its Achilles heel, but that’s another blog post) but of course I still did not it for the basics, so for internet of course, I instantly downloaded Firefox, which was my favorite browser… for Windows. I instantly found it to be hardly as visually appealing as most other OS X apps, and it lacked some core OS X features (namely spell checking within textfields) as it doesn’t utilize Cocoa, an OS X API which lets applications have that visual aesthetic akin to OS X, you know–the flashing blue buttons and form items, things like that. Until now. Josh Aas, who seems to be a lead Firefox developer posted about this just-released Alpha in his blog. Note: This is experimental software, so use at your own risk.

That said, I downloaded it just a bit ago, and although for form elements it doesn’t render things as well, nor is at as sleek as Safari, but it makes Firefox that much more worth using on Macs. In any case, Safari’s my top pick for browsers on OS X, but hey, I’ll keep an open mind about Firefox and who knows, maybe Safari will soon be begging for my attention.