James Andrews

It’s been one day since Steve Jobs announced the iPad to the world. Since then it seems like a world of haters has vomit their hatred of the iPad upon us. Complaining that it’s nothing more than an oversized iPod touch. What I am trying to figure out is this 1) why is that bad? and 2) Did you really expect something more? 3) Why did it have to be more?

In Steve’s keynote he talked about the computer and the smart phone and something in the middle. The iPad is not meant to replace the computer, and it’s not meant to replace the smart phone. It’s meant to compliment them. There are plenty of instances where you may want something portable like a phone, but not as clunky as a laptop, and that is where the iPad comes in. Something that doesn’t need a full computer operating system. Something that can become the device you need at the time.

Let’s say you are in the medical profession, do you really want to have to boot into a complex operating system like windows, linux or OS X that uses up battery life quickly? Or would you rather just turn on a device that allows you to open your application, view and enter patient data quickly and submit it to the servers in the hospital IT department? What if you are a photographer, or a real estate agent, or a business person in general who wants to track their appointments, calculate costs quickly. Applications designed specifically for you, so you don’t need to multi-task into other applications? That is what iPad is about.

Sure there are instances where multitasking may be nice, such as listening to Pandora Streams while doing something else in another application. It’s not a perfect device, but for people to condemn it for it’s faults and not look past them to the devices potential just seems real sad to me.

The iPad will be a great device once you get it in your hands, and see what it can do.

I was reading the macintosh livejournal community page looking to avoid what I was suppose to be doing. When I came across a post from a recent “switcher” Who was looking to change the way the context menu in Safari worked. He wanted to remove the “Search with google” menu item and put “Search with something else”, which I thought was silly, but whatever floats his boat. I read through the other community member comments, and one individual pointed him to an application called “On My Command” which allows you to add custom context menu items to the context item list. This was a great find. One of the things I have wanted to do is be able to “right click” on a folder and open it with TextMate. Which I can now do thanks to OMC.

I am not going to write a tutorial on how to use OMC, but rather refer you to one on Simple Help.

So far I have added 9 cool new commands.

Open with TextMate.
Copy Path to the Clipboard
Download with WGet
Strip HTML Tags
Track UPS packages
Track Fedex packages
svn add, commit, and update

The thing I would like to see done is modify svn commit to ask you for a commit comment, as right now it only blanks it out. I have the Tracking fedex and ups grouped under Package Tracking. It’s all very cool

One of the features I really enjoy about OMC is you can use more than one scripting language. php, bash, Applescript. It seems nothing is off limits. So if there’s something you’ve been looking to add to your context menus in OSX now you have a means to do it.

http://www.simplehelp.net/2007/06/12/how-to-add-commands-to-the-os-x-right-click-menu/