Quick software tip: MPEG Streamclip.

Every picture viewer these days can also rotate the image by 90 degrees, but the same feature is much less available for video, so that I had to do quite a Google dance to find a way to fix a clip I shot with my mobile phone turned sideways. iPhoto cannot do it, Preview (which is surprisingly competent for photo editing ) does not do video, VLC does not do it, and I do not know how to do anything in iMovie. Quicktime Pro can do it, but that is not free. MPEG Streamclip is free, runs on Macs and Windows, and has a great number of features to cut and convert videos (if you know where to find them in the rather clunky UI).

For the last few months, I have been using Mozilla Prism to read my (Google) mail. Prism turns web pages into standalone applications so that I do not have to log in to my Google account with my main web browser.

Today I switched to Fluid, which is a Mac-only (Leopard-only, in fact) application that does the same thing, but is more polished than Prism. For one thing, it is more tightly integrated with the Mac: The GMail application it creates is a real standalone native application (works better in the Dock than GMail Prism, which was only a document), it uses Growl notifications and software auto-update, there is a full screen mode, and it can also create MenuExtras (so that you could get the latest slashdot articles in a pulldown next to the battery life indicator). It is based on WebKit rather than Gecko, has a lot of preference panels, and you can write extensions using Greasemonkey-compatible JavaScript or Objective-C. I also had a weird performance issue with GTalk in GMail in Prism (typing into the chat window was painfully slow), that I expect to be gone now.

Update: One problem with using Fluid is that apparently all WebKit applications share the same browser cookie storage (and there seems to be no way to turn that off). This makes it currently impossible to keep login information separate from Safari, and between Fluid applications. Fortunately, I do not use Safari, and Camino and Firefox of course have their own cookie jars. On the other hand, a lot of applications embed WebKit these days, and I am not at all comfortable with the notion that they all potentially leak state and clobber themselves.

After a week of usage, Leopard is starting to break down.

• After waking up from sleep mode, the connection to my Yamaha USB speakers is lost. Have to manually unplug and re-plug the cable, and then open the Audio preference panel to activate it again.
• Parts of the keyboard do not work in Eclipse anymore sometimes. Such as Undo (Cmd-Z). Still works from the menu, and after having used to menu, the keyboard shortcut also works again for some time.
• Most annoyingly, window switching stopped working with Spaces at some point (it worked in the beginning, and I am confident that a restart will fix it): I can click on the application icon all I want, or use Cmd-Tab, and this will switch to the application as it should, but only as far as the menu bar is concerned. It does not take me to the Space where the application lives, so that there is no window. The only way to get to the app is through the Spaces dashboard.
• CamelBones, and by extension PerlPad, are broken again, of course, but that was to be expected.

One of the oldest (and potentially most useful) Mac features are text clippings (probably works with other types of content as well). Selecting some text in any application and dragging it to the desktop creates a text clip file there. You can then later drag this clip back into other applications, which will paste the text there. Double-clicking on the text clip will open it in the Finder, so that you can see the contents of the clip. Unfortunately, that is all you can do with it. It would be trivial to allow editing the contents of the clip, but you cannot. It would be even more trivial to allow selecting parts of the clip so that you can do selective pastes. I run into this problem every time I want to paste my postal code, or some password into a web form. Since I cannot directly paste only the postal code part of my address clipping, I have to either retype it (here it would be nice if the clipping window floated on top of everything else) or paste it into in intermediate text area and copy/paste from there again. Lame. And so easy to be fixed.

So my wish for the next OS upgrade would be this tiny improvement. But since it has not happened in the last ten years, and everyone will be working on Time Machine, or Expose, or iPhone integration, I do not have high hopes here. I'll probably install some freeware tool to help me out here.

Update: Oh my god, this is retarded. Apparently, from 10.3, you can select parts of the text clipping and Command-C them, but the text will never actually highlight. I am assuming that being able to covertly select from text areas that are declared noSelection is a bug, but I hope they do not fix this before they fix Text Clippings. You can also hack a Finder resource file to remove the noSelection property (which fixes the highlighting issue), and even remove the readOnly property to be able to edit the clipping (although the changes will not be saved).