Operation Gadget

Category: Software

  • MLB’s Bid to Control Fantasy Baseball May Have Backfired on All Pro Sports Leagues

    Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe Wall Street Journal has an interesting article in its Tuesday edition about a U.S. Supreme Court decision that could have a profound impact on online fantasy sports. The article says that Major League Baseball and the Players Association have been fighting for three years to limit the number of companies…

  • Gadget Links: Post Memorial Day Weekend Edition

    Reading Time: < 1 minuteSixty-Six on Daring Fireball: “The idea that Apple now sells two-thirds of retail computers costing $1000 or more is simply stunning. I (along with many others) have long argued that a simplistic “overall PC market share” number has never been a good metric for gauging the Mac’s success because the “overall…

  • MacBreak Video Shows Finer Points of Quicksilver Utility for the Mac

    Reading Time: 2 minutesOne of the utilities programs that veteran Mac users swear by is Quicksilver which at first glance appears to be a keyboard-based application launcher. It turns out that QuickSilver can be used for a great deal more than application launching, but a lot of the productivity that you can gain from it…

  • Why I Updated to MacOS X 10.5.3 Right Away

    Reading Time: < 1 minuteApple released MacOS X Version 10.5.3 earlier today. I first learned about the release when I was checking out Summize for the first time and saw references to Mac OS X and Leopard on the home page as “trending topics”. MacWorld has a good summary of the important fixes and new…

  • Replacing the Polar Infrared Interface USB Because It Doesn’t Work with My Mac

    Reading Time: 2 minutesThe Polar Infrared Interface USB commonly used with PCs running Windows XP doesn’t work on a Mac [ Photo: Dave Aiello on Flickr ] The Polar Infrared Interface USB that many people got with their Polar S-Series heart rate monitors is a USB 1.1 device. I’ve been trying to use it without success on…

  • How Apple Saved Mother’s Day

    Reading Time: 2 minutesKathleen and Jimmy looking at the iPhoto book that we ordered for her mom. The second copy arrived today. [ Photo: Dave Aiello on Flickr. ] Kathleen and I took advantage of an iPhoto Custom Photo Book promotion that Apple ran for Mother’s Day. We ordered Kathleen’s mother a hard cover photo book. We…

  • Twitterific vs Spaz: The Twitter Client Face-off on My Desktop

    Reading Time: 4 minutesI’ve been using Twitter for several weeks, because there are things that friends of mine might be interested in hearing about that will never make it into an email or an Operation Gadget post. Twitterific vs Spaz: These two desktop Twitter clients that run on the Mac are competing for space on…

  • Is This a Music Video or an Ad for Leopard?

    Reading Time: < 1 minuteHere’s a music video that’s making the rounds of web sites I read: The movement away from Windows and toward the Mac is still in it’s early stages, so lots of people haven’t seen all of these Mac applications before. My question is, does it make more sense as a music…

  • Smart Playlists Suffer Because of Logical Limitations

    Reading Time: 2 minutesOne of the best techniques for using an iPhone with a large iTunes library is to use Smart Playlists to automatically select tracks from your library according to logical rules. I discussed this in Use Smart Playlists for Endless Combinations of Christmas Music. I wanted to provide an update because I see…