Good Customer Service? Surely Some Mistake

I freely admit that this is a sweeping generalisation but customer service in the US is generally quite good whereas customer service in the UK is really quite crap; it doesn't seem to give any form of service to the customer - which we seem to accept in the UK. Even for US companies which open operations in the UK the whole customer service ethic seems to be somewhat less that that offered by their US parent.

So I was sitting at my dining room table last weekend with my, work issued, MacBook Pro surfing the CBeebies site for In The Night Garden. This is for the benefit of my two year old son I hasten to add. He's particularly fond of this site as it's able to access the built-in iSight web cam that MacBooks and MacBook Pros have so he can see himself in the game for one of his favourite TV shows.

Expose Challenge

Expose Screen Grab The Unofficial Apple Weblog ran an article today (https://tinyurl.com/2jxuhc) pointing to this Flickr image (https://tinyurl.com/2w9jnr) made by someone with with far too many windows open on his Mac.

So what the hell ... let's join in; for those remotely interested here's my MacBook Pro running ...

Mail.app (One main windows and 2 smart folders), Firefox, SSH Tunnel Manager, SSH Keychain, Growl, GMail Notifier, Adium, iSync, Terminal, OmniGraffle Pro, iCal.app, iTunes, Mac Word and smcFanControl

(Mostly) UNIX Quotes

Various quotes, mostly UNIX related, which I've accrued over the years from various sources.

Well my terminal's locked up and I ain't got any Mail And I can't recall the last time that my program didn't fail I've got stacks in my structs, I've got arrays in my queues I've got those: Segmentation violation -- Core dumped blues.

Running Shell Scripts With AppleScript

While I was playing with AppleScript earlier this week I wanted to run a shell script I'd written from within Finder rather than from a shell prompt in Terminal.app.

On Windows I tend to write scripts to run under Cygwin and then write a wrapper batch file to run the script under the control of Cygwin's bash executable.

Turns out the AppleScript solution is identical in principal and is as simple as

do shell script "/full/path/to/shell/script"

You may need to adjust the path to the script dependent upon whether the directory where your script resides is in your $PATH or not.

Mounting Network Volumes With AppleScript

One of my standard lunchtime reading web sites started me off on this; The Unofficial Apple Weblog got me reading an article on PC Magazine's site about Argh! moments. That sort of moment when you try to do something really simple on OS X but find it isn't. In this case, Robyn Peterson's struggle to mount a network volume on login struck a chord. I'd gone down a similar route and come up with an alias to a network volume in my login items, a solution which seems to be well documented after a quick Google search.

Visual Cues In OS X

After working on a Mac full time for almost a year, I've come to realise that OS X provides you with a lot of nice visual cues which greatly enhance the usability of the system. Here's a nice example I came across the other day; take a loook at this screen grab of a TextEdit.app window.

A TextEdit.app Window