Category: Applications

How and why to #quitFacebook

Posted on May 12, 2010 by ellen

After logging in to Facebook yesterday and seeing yet another notice about how Facebook is going to swap my data with just about any site they feel like, I realized I don’t want to have to check their extremely complicated privacy settings every week or two to make sure they haven’t changed something I care about.

Besides being an incredible waste of time, it’s futile: they have made a practice of making significantly bad changes you can’t do anything about. Some of these changes can have real consequences down the road, and I just don’t need that. Moreover, it is not clear what real effect the settings have, in practice. So, since I didn’t grow up with Facebook and I’m not going to go through social withdrawal, it’s out.

Add comments to Google Docs

Posted on May 6, 2010 by ellen

For some reason it took me a while to figure out how to add a comment into a Google doc. I’m not sure why: the comments function is right under the Insert menu where it

Set up Mail.app to handle ALL your email accounts, including Groupwise

Posted on May 5, 2010 by ellen

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A lot of people are unaware that it’s possible to set up multiple email accounts on Mail.app. You can even add your office GroupWise account! This is true for most mail clients, including Entourage and Outlook, but I’m just going to discuss Mail.app here, since everyone’s getting iPads these days, it seems…

How to shoot a screenshot on the iPad without accidentally shutting it down

Posted on May 4, 2010 by ellen

I must have a heavy touch: every time I tried to shoot a screenshot on the iPad, following all the directions I’ve read on other sites, I’d end up turning off the iPad instead. But

Firebug breaks on page errors whether set to break or not.

Posted on April 29, 2010 by ellen

Ever since Firebug got a recent big upgrade, I’ve had problems with it stopping a page from loading whenever there is any javascript error. Since the web is riddled with javascript errors, this has meant

Style Confluence with CSS using a back-door approach

Posted on April 28, 2010 by ellen

I recently had the task of creating a new theme for a Confluence-based corporate wiki in time for a big launch date.

There were a few restrictions on how I could do this, including:

There is no user access to the Space’s Page Layout features, which means that any changes needed there must be sent to an administrator to be added to the site.
There is no user access to the server, so editing stylesheets would have to be through the application or by giving them to the admin to upload. We could put assets on another server but sometimes this can cause security issues with browsers, coming from mixed security level domains. Similarly, every image to be used at the Space Page Layout level would have to be sent to an admin for upload.
The Documentation theme was not available to us yet.
ThemeBuilder was not available yet.
And – it goes without saying – the schedule was tight.

Our first challenge was to add a collapsible navigation tree on the left side of the page, similar to the Documentation theme does, but without using the Documentation theme, since we do not have that option yet.

Use SC Plugin for OS X to browse Subversion repositories in the Finder

Posted on April 21, 2010 by ellen

If you need to browse source code repositories to get the latest build of some application (e.g. the JW Player), one of the easiest ways is to use the SC Plugin for OS X by Tigris.org.
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The SCPlugin is a free system extension that allows you to use the Finder’s “Connect to Server” command to connect to the repository as if it were another drive.

Umbraco installation error: The virtual path ‘/install/steps/welcome.ascx’ maps to another application

Posted on April 21, 2010 by ellen

After installing “Umbraco,” you may get the following error:

The virtual path ‘/install/steps/welcome.ascx’ maps to another application, which is not allowed.

This is because you have installed Umbraco in a virtual directory (not at the web root of the “Default Web Site” in IIS terminology). It is a path problem, easily corrected by fixing the paths in the web.config file.

Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection for Mac

Posted on April 15, 2010 by ellen

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There is a Mac version of Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection available here: [Download here]

Among other things, this means you can log on and manage Windows servers from your Mac!

Remove mouse-click sounds in Adobe Captivate, Adobe Presenter and Articulate

Posted on April 13, 2010 by ellen

Adobe Captivate, Articulate and Adobe Presenter can all add annoying clicking sounds or “pops” between slides when there is narration. These clicks often are associated with either picking up the actual mouse-click used to switch slides, are added in by the application by design, or added in as an audio artifact. The solutions vary depending on the application and cause.

Adobe Captivate: the clicks can be mouse-click sounds added by Captivate. To silence these generated mouse-click sounds, you may want to try this suggestion from the Paul Dewhurst’s “RaisingAimee” site. Replace the standard mouse-click sound with a silent sound file from Paul’s site:
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