The control panel is noticeably faster in most environments, with much snappier rendering of filterable tables. And an expanded approach to ‘Remember me’ functionality that’s optimized for multiple sites and/or devices results in a nicer frontend user experience.

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File management continues to improve in this release, with a number of nice additions. The browser has been beefed up to allow sorting and filtering by keywords, greatly improving the ease with which you can find a particular file.

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Improvements designed to make updating and/or moving ExpressionEngine sites were also a focus of this release. File upload paths can now be overridden via a hidden configuration variable, making updates after a move or syncing a developer site and a production site easier.

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…the ability of the Channel Categories and Category Archive tags to accept multiple channels in the channel parameter

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Developers will also find a number of significant additions in this release. Two new constants, URL_THEMES_THIRD and PATH_THEMES_THIRD, have been added with the goal of allowing users to fully customize the location of third party folders.

This looks like an awesome update and I can’t wait to find time to start playing with it and making sure it doesn’t break any of my third party add-ons.

Except under extraordinarily rare circumstances — unless you’re Charles Dickens, for instance — you can’t use a comma to separate two independent clauses.

I’ve had this sitting in ReadNow for quite some time; mostly to remind myself about the principle every time I see it in my reading list.

I’m not a great writer, but I’m trying to become one. For instance, he says:

So you’ve mastered it’s vs. its — and you try not to use dashes too much. You’ve learned that the passive voice has its uses; you’ve learned how to build sentences and paragraphs with parallel construction; you’ve learned to use the Oxford comma.

You’re aces in my book.

I’ve at least got one of those things on the list down: it’s vs. its. I mastered that one some time ago. Also, too vs. to. I’m still working on parallel construction. I do have an opinion on the Oxford comma (which I plan to get to in a later posting). I’m not sure whether it’s right or wrong, and perhaps it’s subjective, but I have an opinion.

And finally,

Bad:

• Comma splices are bad, you shouldn’t use them.

Good:

• Comma splices are bad. You shouldn’t use them.

Also acceptable:

• Comma splices are bad; you shouldn’t use them.
• Comma splices are bad — you shouldn’t use them.
• Comma splices are bad and you shouldn’t use them.
• Comma splices are bad, my dear Mr. Chalmesworthy; hence it prevails upon us all to use Providence as our guide and eschew their use, as we heartily eschew all mortal sins.

I’m working on it. I agree in principle, but I find myself using comma splices where I shouldn’t. This is the rule. This is part of that readability/usability business I’ve been talking about. Not many people seem to care about mastering this and it’s a shame.

After I started using Time Machine in Leopard, I quickly found one major drawback. Every hour, regardless of what you are doing, Time Machine starts a backup. It slows the system down, if you back up to a Time Capsule as I do, it slows the network down, and it’s unnecessary. I really only want one incremental backup per day, but this isn’t possible by default. This is where TimeMachineScheduler comes into play.

My review of TimeMachineScheduler on Mac.Appstorm.

5by5 →

I have only recently discovered 5by5, but I definitely listen to podcasts a lot more now. Dan Benjamin has done something magical with 5by5 and I believe this is the future of broadcasting. I can listen to any show I want when I have time to do so.

I have a daily commute of 45 minutes each way and several of these wonderfully geeky podcasts help pass the drive much more quickly. In fact I was just commenting to my wife about how I wish I didn’t subscribe to quite so many 5by5 podcasts because now it’s hard to listen to audio books when I’d rather listen to the latest show.

The 5by5 model is interesting. You will often find that many sites and/or individual bloggers will have a podcast, but I have not seen a network of great podcasts under one roof until now. In fact, 5by5 may have made me a bit lazy because seldom do I try to find other podcasts now. But it’s not like I was really into many podcasts before. I tried a few times to find some podcasts I liked but never really got anywhere. Now, there’s 5by5.

If you are a geek, interested in geeks, web design, Apple, or anything along those lines I suggest you check out 5by5.

My favorite podcasts are:

• The Talk Show
• Hypercritical
• Build and Analyze
• The Ihnatko Almanac
• Geek Friday
• The Incomparable

In consideration of the reader, how we want the site to look, and due to the amount of time we can spend keeping an eye of this stuff, we will be removing comments from the next iteration of MacStories.

More and more people are realizing how broken commenting is these days.

1. Call a meeting of all top executives.
2. Pull my iPhone 4S out and rest it gently on the table in front of me.
3. Wait for dramatic effect.
4. Fire anyone not patient enough to wait for me to speak first.
5. Tell everyone left in the room that they have 3 months to bring me a working prototype that makes me want to use it over my iPhone. (While gesturing towards my iPhone already placed on the table.)
6. Fire anyone that asks “How?”
7. With everyone gone, hire a new executive team.

Right on.

Love this image from Marco. Love it!

Research In Motion will be getting a new chief operating officer shortly, replacing current co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis.

Is anyone actually surprised by this?

Sounds familiar to me.

After years of hearing how difficult it was going to be to bring the show into the HD future (and possibly impossible), I was concerned that this Blu-ray wasn’t going to cut it. However, shortly after “Encounter at Farpoint” started playing, all my concerns were put to rest.

If anything, the remastering of Next Gen into HD is even better looking than the original Star Trek. The colors are more vibrant, but not jarring. The details are astounding and make you want to keep on pausing to make sure you don’t miss anything. This goes for both the live action shots, as well as the remastered visual effects shots. Unlike the original series in HD, this time CBS have remastered the original filmed effects, and then used CGI much more sparingly (primarily replacing effects which were originally done on video). In the end the effects shots, especially of the Enterprise and other space scenes, are just astounding and really bring the show into the 21st century (or 24th century).

I can’t tell you how excited I am about this project!

(click the image to view at full HD quality)