[If this is your first time here, see my post about how I do reviews.]
If you are anything like me, you may feel a little depressed about the state of document writing on OS X.
Yes, there is Microsoft Office, but I have philosophical reasons to be opposed to everything Microsoft (I'll extrapolate this another time) and I'd rather use pen and paper than Office.
NeoOffice is pretty good, but when I want to write a quick document, I hate waiting 3 minutes (I know, this is a little exaggerated, but you get my frustration) for the darn thing to load up to the point I can start typing. I could fire up an old Mac SE/30 and be 3 sentences in by the time I see the icons in NeoOffice.
I love simplicity, but, for crying out loud, Apple's "TextEdit" is just ridiculous. You can't even resize the window without changing the margins. This is fine for doing plain text, but if you want to do a real document, this just doesn't cut it.
Fortunately, I have discovered Bean (http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html). Bean is a great document editor and you will love it if you are like me and fit into any one or more of the above mentioned categories of complaint.
First of all, you may notice I am referring to it as a document editor rather than a text editor. This may seem odd to many of you, but I am a programmer and my definition of a text editor is something that only does plain text and is generally only useful for coding or simple ReadMe files. By referring to it as a document editor, I am highlighting the fact that this program makes actual documents... formatted, multi-page pieces that generally include styling of some sort. This is what most people generically refer to as "Word documents". This annoys me to no end by the way, so please cease and desist said practice if you fit that category. A Word document is any document of the Word format, denoted by its filename extension of ".doc". Okay, now that my mini-rant is over, let's move on. ;)
As I hinted at above, Bean is simplicity. It does not have boatloads of features. It does, however, take advantage of all the built-in OS X goodness such as the Dictionary features, live spell-checking, Text-to-Speech feature, the excellent Font Chooser, the system-wide Color Picker, and drag-and-drop from Finder. These are what I consider the essential basic features for a document editor. These features also exist in Apple's TextEdit and were the only reasons I could tolerate it from time to time. Now, I can get these features in an app that works the way one expects a document editor to work.
There are several other features of Bean that come in really handy:
1. "Paste and Match Style" - If you've ever copied something from another document and pasted into the current working one, you have noticed that it kept the font settings of the other document (depending on what program you are using - but most do). Sometimes, this is good. Most of the time it is not, which means you now have to highlight the text and change it to match the surrounding text you just pasted into. In Bean, under the Edit menu, you will find Paste and Match Style, which will bring you happiness. :)
2. A live wordcount + character count + page count on the bottom of the window - Now you can keep an eye on how long winded you are at all times and save yourself the guesswork of having to go back and edit words out at random.
3. "Send to Mail" - Granted, it is easy enough to attach a document to a new email the old-fashioned way, but having a menu item to do the work for me makes the lazy person in me want to smile (dancing for joy wouldn't exactly promote the lazy ethos now would it?).
4. The ability to save as Word and other formats - For me, this is not a great feature because I prefer to just send someone an rtfd document and tell them they should be using something more universal and free than Word format, but I know this is a big deal to many of you, so I included it. Yes, there are easy ways to convert to Word format, but being able to choose it in the Save dialog is so much better.
5. Its default document format is rtfd - As I said, I prefer to promote file formats that are more open and not locked to a several hundred dollar piece of software created by an evil empire. RTFD is accessible to most document programs and allows for styling. Admittedly, the OpenDocument format is best in that regard, but it is less accessible until everyone gets a copy of OpenOffice or NeoOffice installed on their machines (they are free, by the way).
I have used Bean a few times now and am really happy I discovered it. It is still in Beta as of today's writing, but I have not had any issues with it and the only quirk I have noticed is that the document focus will sometimes shift up or down as you are typing near the top or bottom of a window. This doesn't cause a problem because the cursor continues doing what it is supposed to do, however, it can cause you to do a double-take the first time or two as you make sure you are still typing in the right place. After a few times, you know to trust it and keep typing and it is no longer a concern.
For really complex documents, you will still need something more robust, but if you are like me and want simplicity as much as possible, be sure to check it out:
http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html
Peace,
Todd
June 1, 2007
March 10, 2007
Review: Creative I-Trigue 3400 2.1 Speakers
[If this is your first time here, see my post about how I do reviews.]
If you are too impatient to read my philosphical setup for the actual review, scoll down to the image and start there. Otherwise, carry on....
Speakers are something we all take for granted. They're everywhere these days, for better or worse. Due to that fact, we have all been conditioned to unflinchingly accept sound waves coming at us through terrible tv speakers, cheap headphones, flat car speakers, and the worse-than-atrocious things they put in cell phones. I must admit that I fit the average here, which is rather strange since I am such a music lover. My taste in music spans almost every genre, with my deepest appreciation being reserved for music that is moving to the soul. Such music is often woven from numerous instruments and sound sources, or sung by people with amazing voices and equally amazing lyrics. I'll be doing a review soon of one of these, but on to my point.
Over the years, I have settled for any way possible to get sound to my ears. I have been willing to listen to music over the little speakers built into the Nintendo DS, over baby monitors, with FM static, and on free(for a reason) computer speakers. I have still enjoyed my music despite the flat mid-range that all the highs and lows of the songs have been smashed into. I'm easy like that. I had one such set of speakers in my entertainment center for a long while, a set of 2.1 Juster speakers that someone had given me after I fixed a computer for them. I thought they sounded okay, but eventually the "crackle" while adjusting the volume was grating on my nerves and I started looking around for a better, but still cheap, set of 2.1 speakers to replace them.
Roughly 9 months ago, I started the quest in earnest. I decided I wanted to stay in the $50 price range since we have a need to be frugal in all "amenities". I began watching sale ads for the local electronics dealers and doing a weekly browse through several of my geek shopping sites. Very often, I'd see a set of speakers in the price range and I would go check reviews of them on newegg.com, amazon.com, and circuitcity.com. Every time, the speakers got wildly mixed reviews, but it was obvious enough that they were not well built or sounded terrible. I would sigh in dejection as I continued my quest.
A few weeks ago, Circuit City was selling the Creative I-Trigue 3400 2.1 Speakers for $49.99 after Mail-In-Rebates. In the past, I have had a 100% track record with Circuit City Rebates, so I started looking for reviews. Oddly enough, there were not many out there, but the few I found were overwhelmingly positive sans one by a person whose review was so discrepant that he either had a damaged pair or had issues with his setup in Windows. I decided to bite the bullet and headed down to pick up a pair.
For more info on the Tech Specs, click the image above to see their page.
Setup took a while because our entertainment center is actually a 5ft. tall computer hutch with closing doors, occuppied by a Mac mini and a 17" Sony Trinitron as the "heart" of our entertainment needs. This is not ideal for movie watching, but we mostly listen to music anyway. The Bass Sub fits almost exactly into the cubby hole at the bottom of the hutch, and the speakers are standing in the back corners of the area for the monitor, with roughly 6" of separation from the walls of the hutch. These speakers come with a volume knob that is separate from the speakers which works perfectly for our setup because we have it tucked into one of the top cubby holes where little ones cannot reach it. The cables were all long enough for this scenario and I am extremely happy with the volume knob.
With everything in place, I decided to test them with the most worthy of tests: "Dark Island" from Mike Oldfield's album "Voyager". I was struck to silence. It was as if this was the first time I had ever listened to the song. Mike Oldfield has numerous layers in this song and I was hearing things I had never heard before. After fiddling with the Bass setting and volume for a moment, I backed up a few feet and stood in awe. I could literally feel the music. I could feel the Bass, and the 3 individual speakers in the satellite caused a spatial separation between the highs, mids, and lows that made me feel like I was listening to the music in a live studio, where the instruments would have been coming from different places, and at different strengths. I could not believe how amazing these speakers sounded.
Excited, I grabbed the mouse and started scrolling through the iTunes Library for some other songs that would be good tests. I wanted to hear some vocals, so I headed to Sarah McLaughlin's "Silent Night". I was now grinning from ear to ear as I felt the harmony voices coming at me from separate spatial locations, and could hear every emotional waver of her voice. Again, I had never heard music this way through speakers before and it gave a very live feel to the experience. I tried some Michelle Tumes, Leigh Nash and Dan Haseltine, Jars of Clay, and Marc Cohn. I was so excited at all the nuances I was discovering for the first time in songs I had listened to hundreds or thousands of times before, that I just wanted to go through and listen to every song in our collection all over again.
I went into the kitchen and told Mary Beth, "You have to hear this." She came in and we started going through some more of our favorites, both in awe and noticing things we'd never heard before. We ended up standing there almost an hour doing this. For the finale, I put on Marc Cohn's "Ellis Island", and we heard this amazing song in an even more amazing way than ever before. Over these speakers, we could feel the emotion in his voice more powerfully than we ever had before.
I now understand why audio snobs are audio snobs. After using these speakers, I do not think I will ever be able to buy another cheap set of speakers again. I only paid $50 for these, but now that I've heard them, I'd willingly pay $200 if I had to. Yes, they are that good.
If you read the synopsis on their page, they discuss the technical reasons for this sound quality, and I can tell you it is not just marketing. The titanium microdrivers make all the difference in the world. As I said, they do such a great job with the separation of highs, mids, and lows, that it creates a more live feel to the music and different instruments have different intensities at which the waves hit you, causing you to distinguish them clearly as separate instruments, and also to distinguish the different strengths of the instruments in the mix.
There are some great practical advantages to this speaker set as well. I really like the feel of the big volume knob on the control, and the Bass setting is a smaller knob on the side of the unit so that you are unlikely to accidentally change the Bass once you get it the way you want it. The other features of the control are the headphone jack, which I haven't used yet, and the Line In jack. This feature is fabulous if you have friends you like to trade recommendations with. Now, if a friend comes over with an iPod and wants to play a song for me, it is easy to just plug it into the jack on the front of the controller and play it through the speakers. The convenience of this is superb. Interestingly enough, when you plug something in, it does not override the audio from the main connection, but mixes the 2. So, if there is music playing on the mini, I have to at least pause it before playing the external device. This is not a problem, but it is not what one would normally expect. I tested the Audio In jack with my Nintendo DS and it sounded great.
So, in closing, if you have never listened to your music on a set of real speakers, you owe it to yourself to go out and buy a set of these and reserve a few hours to listen to your music collection for the first time all over again.
At the time of this writing, the cheapest place I could find a set was at Directron for $83. They are definitely worth that price. You can also buy them directly from Creative's site. If they are unavailable at the time of your reading this, I would recommend buying one of the other models that use the NeoTitanium Tri-Array[tm] Technology, as I believe that is what makes these speakers so incredibly good.
If you are too impatient to read my philosphical setup for the actual review, scoll down to the image and start there. Otherwise, carry on....
Speakers are something we all take for granted. They're everywhere these days, for better or worse. Due to that fact, we have all been conditioned to unflinchingly accept sound waves coming at us through terrible tv speakers, cheap headphones, flat car speakers, and the worse-than-atrocious things they put in cell phones. I must admit that I fit the average here, which is rather strange since I am such a music lover. My taste in music spans almost every genre, with my deepest appreciation being reserved for music that is moving to the soul. Such music is often woven from numerous instruments and sound sources, or sung by people with amazing voices and equally amazing lyrics. I'll be doing a review soon of one of these, but on to my point.
Over the years, I have settled for any way possible to get sound to my ears. I have been willing to listen to music over the little speakers built into the Nintendo DS, over baby monitors, with FM static, and on free(for a reason) computer speakers. I have still enjoyed my music despite the flat mid-range that all the highs and lows of the songs have been smashed into. I'm easy like that. I had one such set of speakers in my entertainment center for a long while, a set of 2.1 Juster speakers that someone had given me after I fixed a computer for them. I thought they sounded okay, but eventually the "crackle" while adjusting the volume was grating on my nerves and I started looking around for a better, but still cheap, set of 2.1 speakers to replace them.
Roughly 9 months ago, I started the quest in earnest. I decided I wanted to stay in the $50 price range since we have a need to be frugal in all "amenities". I began watching sale ads for the local electronics dealers and doing a weekly browse through several of my geek shopping sites. Very often, I'd see a set of speakers in the price range and I would go check reviews of them on newegg.com, amazon.com, and circuitcity.com. Every time, the speakers got wildly mixed reviews, but it was obvious enough that they were not well built or sounded terrible. I would sigh in dejection as I continued my quest.
A few weeks ago, Circuit City was selling the Creative I-Trigue 3400 2.1 Speakers for $49.99 after Mail-In-Rebates. In the past, I have had a 100% track record with Circuit City Rebates, so I started looking for reviews. Oddly enough, there were not many out there, but the few I found were overwhelmingly positive sans one by a person whose review was so discrepant that he either had a damaged pair or had issues with his setup in Windows. I decided to bite the bullet and headed down to pick up a pair.
For more info on the Tech Specs, click the image above to see their page.Setup took a while because our entertainment center is actually a 5ft. tall computer hutch with closing doors, occuppied by a Mac mini and a 17" Sony Trinitron as the "heart" of our entertainment needs. This is not ideal for movie watching, but we mostly listen to music anyway. The Bass Sub fits almost exactly into the cubby hole at the bottom of the hutch, and the speakers are standing in the back corners of the area for the monitor, with roughly 6" of separation from the walls of the hutch. These speakers come with a volume knob that is separate from the speakers which works perfectly for our setup because we have it tucked into one of the top cubby holes where little ones cannot reach it. The cables were all long enough for this scenario and I am extremely happy with the volume knob.
With everything in place, I decided to test them with the most worthy of tests: "Dark Island" from Mike Oldfield's album "Voyager". I was struck to silence. It was as if this was the first time I had ever listened to the song. Mike Oldfield has numerous layers in this song and I was hearing things I had never heard before. After fiddling with the Bass setting and volume for a moment, I backed up a few feet and stood in awe. I could literally feel the music. I could feel the Bass, and the 3 individual speakers in the satellite caused a spatial separation between the highs, mids, and lows that made me feel like I was listening to the music in a live studio, where the instruments would have been coming from different places, and at different strengths. I could not believe how amazing these speakers sounded.
Excited, I grabbed the mouse and started scrolling through the iTunes Library for some other songs that would be good tests. I wanted to hear some vocals, so I headed to Sarah McLaughlin's "Silent Night". I was now grinning from ear to ear as I felt the harmony voices coming at me from separate spatial locations, and could hear every emotional waver of her voice. Again, I had never heard music this way through speakers before and it gave a very live feel to the experience. I tried some Michelle Tumes, Leigh Nash and Dan Haseltine, Jars of Clay, and Marc Cohn. I was so excited at all the nuances I was discovering for the first time in songs I had listened to hundreds or thousands of times before, that I just wanted to go through and listen to every song in our collection all over again.
I went into the kitchen and told Mary Beth, "You have to hear this." She came in and we started going through some more of our favorites, both in awe and noticing things we'd never heard before. We ended up standing there almost an hour doing this. For the finale, I put on Marc Cohn's "Ellis Island", and we heard this amazing song in an even more amazing way than ever before. Over these speakers, we could feel the emotion in his voice more powerfully than we ever had before.
I now understand why audio snobs are audio snobs. After using these speakers, I do not think I will ever be able to buy another cheap set of speakers again. I only paid $50 for these, but now that I've heard them, I'd willingly pay $200 if I had to. Yes, they are that good.
If you read the synopsis on their page, they discuss the technical reasons for this sound quality, and I can tell you it is not just marketing. The titanium microdrivers make all the difference in the world. As I said, they do such a great job with the separation of highs, mids, and lows, that it creates a more live feel to the music and different instruments have different intensities at which the waves hit you, causing you to distinguish them clearly as separate instruments, and also to distinguish the different strengths of the instruments in the mix.
There are some great practical advantages to this speaker set as well. I really like the feel of the big volume knob on the control, and the Bass setting is a smaller knob on the side of the unit so that you are unlikely to accidentally change the Bass once you get it the way you want it. The other features of the control are the headphone jack, which I haven't used yet, and the Line In jack. This feature is fabulous if you have friends you like to trade recommendations with. Now, if a friend comes over with an iPod and wants to play a song for me, it is easy to just plug it into the jack on the front of the controller and play it through the speakers. The convenience of this is superb. Interestingly enough, when you plug something in, it does not override the audio from the main connection, but mixes the 2. So, if there is music playing on the mini, I have to at least pause it before playing the external device. This is not a problem, but it is not what one would normally expect. I tested the Audio In jack with my Nintendo DS and it sounded great.
So, in closing, if you have never listened to your music on a set of real speakers, you owe it to yourself to go out and buy a set of these and reserve a few hours to listen to your music collection for the first time all over again.
At the time of this writing, the cheapest place I could find a set was at Directron for $83. They are definitely worth that price. You can also buy them directly from Creative's site. If they are unavailable at the time of your reading this, I would recommend buying one of the other models that use the NeoTitanium Tri-Array[tm] Technology, as I believe that is what makes these speakers so incredibly good.
January 7, 2007
About My Reviews
I have a handful of reviews coming down the pipe, so I figure it is best to first give some disclaimers in regards to the way I will be handling reviews. There seems to be a fairly common practice in the Tech industry of giving favorable reviews in exchange for money or free review models. Hey, I'm not knocking the people that do this. We all need money to pay bills and gadgets to play with, right? That's not the way I will be operating here at the Coop, though.
I'm pretty hard-headed, some say to a fault, about sticking to my philosophical point-of-view when it comes to issues of fairness and justice. Part of this is that I simply refuse to be bought. One does not easily win my favor or approval (especially in regards to products), and attempts at winning me over through gifts or money only solidify my refusal to bestow either favor or approval.
So, rest assured that you will never read a review here that is anything other than my opinion. I take my opinions seriously, as they exhibit who I am to a great degree, and I will not hold back whatever praise or enmity I have for a product regardless of the circumstances that brought it into my possession. As I said, we can all use a little extra money to help pay off those credit cards. I can only assume that my sheer brilliance as a critic will become readily apparent after a few of my reviews, so if a company saw this and offered to pay me cash or goods to do a review of their product, I'd certainly entertain the notion. I would be upfront with them, though, that my review would clearly state that I'd been paid to do the review, and that I would not be shy about verbally assaulting said product, no matter how much I had been paid, if I find it to be lacking. Fair enough, right?
Another aspect to my reviews is that I really only intend, at this point, to cover things that I have first-hand knowledge and experience of that have not already been reviewed to death by others. If I do review something that has been reviewed a lot, there are only two circumstances under which I'd cover it anyway.
The first is if there is some aspect of the item in question that I feel has not been adequately commented upon by those others. Having a philosophical and theological way of analyzing things, I often observe things that others simply do not care about. For instance, there are mountains of reviews of Mac OS X, but how many of those observe the way Apple works from a "big picture" perspective in their design and expect the user to think rather than memorize when getting familiar with using the OS? This is the type of thing I may write about despite all the other reviews.
I definitely want to cover items I have that are slightly more obscure, though. It is hard to find reviews of some of the things you can purchase at geeks.com and places like that, so I plan to fill that void where applicable.
The second situation is if an item was a gift to me. I often receive gadgets or entertainment as gifts for Christmas. I plan to honor the people who gave them by taking the time to give back to the community through a review of the product. Again, I will not hold back in my criticism if the product is a failure, so people who give me gifts just have to know not to take my reviews personally, for better or worse.
One other important detail is that I will usually put up a link to the place I purchased the item from. In instances where I have an affiliate account, I will use the affiliate link. Please do not think from this that my reviews are just meant to be a way to fish for affiliate money. I only sign up for affiliate accounts at places that I actually buy from and like. So, I have an affiliate account at Meritline because I like their service. If I review something I buy from there, I will definitely use an affiliate link since I do not hesitate to recommend them to others. On the other hand, I wouldn't sign up for an affiliate account at TigerDirect if I was broke and eating scraps off park benches, so if you see a link to them, know that I begrudgingly bought from there because I could not find what I needed anywhere else. I certainly would not go sign up for an account just so I could try to make money off the fact that I am posting a link to their product. Again, only in cases where I like a place enough to recommend them will I be using affiliate links.
I think that sums up my approach to reviewing. I am a harsh critic of a product when it fails, but I will have undying loyalty to a company that makes good products and I will recommend them every chance I get. That's just who I am. I could sell anyone something that I myself am pleased with, but couldn't sell a bad product to someone even if it was the only job I could find. Then there is my famous blacklist, which you may have noticed a hint of in my mention of TigerDirect. Consistently do the consumer wrong, or do them wrong one really bad time, and there's almost no escaping the depths of my disdain.
Having bored you now with all my disclaimers, let me move on to some actual reviews.
Peace,
Todd
I'm pretty hard-headed, some say to a fault, about sticking to my philosophical point-of-view when it comes to issues of fairness and justice. Part of this is that I simply refuse to be bought. One does not easily win my favor or approval (especially in regards to products), and attempts at winning me over through gifts or money only solidify my refusal to bestow either favor or approval.
So, rest assured that you will never read a review here that is anything other than my opinion. I take my opinions seriously, as they exhibit who I am to a great degree, and I will not hold back whatever praise or enmity I have for a product regardless of the circumstances that brought it into my possession. As I said, we can all use a little extra money to help pay off those credit cards. I can only assume that my sheer brilliance as a critic will become readily apparent after a few of my reviews, so if a company saw this and offered to pay me cash or goods to do a review of their product, I'd certainly entertain the notion. I would be upfront with them, though, that my review would clearly state that I'd been paid to do the review, and that I would not be shy about verbally assaulting said product, no matter how much I had been paid, if I find it to be lacking. Fair enough, right?
Another aspect to my reviews is that I really only intend, at this point, to cover things that I have first-hand knowledge and experience of that have not already been reviewed to death by others. If I do review something that has been reviewed a lot, there are only two circumstances under which I'd cover it anyway.
The first is if there is some aspect of the item in question that I feel has not been adequately commented upon by those others. Having a philosophical and theological way of analyzing things, I often observe things that others simply do not care about. For instance, there are mountains of reviews of Mac OS X, but how many of those observe the way Apple works from a "big picture" perspective in their design and expect the user to think rather than memorize when getting familiar with using the OS? This is the type of thing I may write about despite all the other reviews.
I definitely want to cover items I have that are slightly more obscure, though. It is hard to find reviews of some of the things you can purchase at geeks.com and places like that, so I plan to fill that void where applicable.
The second situation is if an item was a gift to me. I often receive gadgets or entertainment as gifts for Christmas. I plan to honor the people who gave them by taking the time to give back to the community through a review of the product. Again, I will not hold back in my criticism if the product is a failure, so people who give me gifts just have to know not to take my reviews personally, for better or worse.
One other important detail is that I will usually put up a link to the place I purchased the item from. In instances where I have an affiliate account, I will use the affiliate link. Please do not think from this that my reviews are just meant to be a way to fish for affiliate money. I only sign up for affiliate accounts at places that I actually buy from and like. So, I have an affiliate account at Meritline because I like their service. If I review something I buy from there, I will definitely use an affiliate link since I do not hesitate to recommend them to others. On the other hand, I wouldn't sign up for an affiliate account at TigerDirect if I was broke and eating scraps off park benches, so if you see a link to them, know that I begrudgingly bought from there because I could not find what I needed anywhere else. I certainly would not go sign up for an account just so I could try to make money off the fact that I am posting a link to their product. Again, only in cases where I like a place enough to recommend them will I be using affiliate links.
I think that sums up my approach to reviewing. I am a harsh critic of a product when it fails, but I will have undying loyalty to a company that makes good products and I will recommend them every chance I get. That's just who I am. I could sell anyone something that I myself am pleased with, but couldn't sell a bad product to someone even if it was the only job I could find. Then there is my famous blacklist, which you may have noticed a hint of in my mention of TigerDirect. Consistently do the consumer wrong, or do them wrong one really bad time, and there's almost no escaping the depths of my disdain.
Having bored you now with all my disclaimers, let me move on to some actual reviews.
Peace,
Todd
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