Twitter users near Greenville, Spartanburg, or Anderson, SC should subscribe to it.

And in case you want to subscribe some other way (RSS, email, etc.), or make your own customized version, you can visit the actual Yahoo! Pipe.

It seems to work quite nicely; we’re apparently having a Freeze Watch tonight. Who knew?

Inline CSS Editing

This is the biggest new feature of the Inspector. You can now edit CSS styles simply by double-clicking them in the Inspector’s Styles sidebar. This is really handy for tweaking the look of your site live in the browser.

It’s referred to again in the Safari 3.1 release notes, but I can’t get it to work in the final downloaded version, though it still works in the WebKit nightlies. Perhaps the feature was deemed yet too unpolished for official release — there are still a lot of bugs reported on it, and FireBug’s CSS editor is arguably better (and MacRabbit’s CSSEdit even more so!).

P.S.: The future of the Web Inspector looks even better.

Closed:

Open:

• iChat supports IRC-style status updates. You can type “/me is installing Leopard” into an IM window, and it will display it in a style similar to iTunes track notification messages, or away message changes, substituting your name for “/me”. (thanks, Andy)

• GOOD: iChat now has a profile editor, catching up with the official AIM client. From 1998. BAD: Lime green and/or white italic underlined text on hot pink backgrounds.

• Because iChat officially supports invisibility now, it no longer displays the ‘This person is not online.’ alert when you try to message an offline contact (since it has no way of knowing if they’re offline or just invisible). Instead, AOL seems to be queueing messages for the next time they log on. That’s cool, because now you can leave a message for someone, instead of setting up an alert to notify you when they do log on, in hopes that you’ll still remember whatever it was you wanted to say.

• GOOD: iChat can log into multiple AIM/Jabber accounts simultaneously. BAD: Five simultaneous accounts means five separate buddy lists. Still, slowly catching up to Adium.

• Spaces is awesome, especially on an untethered laptop (meaning: away from additional 20″ display). I never “got” virtual desktops before I used this implementation.

• Screen Sharing is nice to have in the OS, but I was very disappointed that it doesn’t go all full screen and swoopy when used outside of iChat. It also doesn’t work out-of-the-box with Ubuntu’s built-in VNC server (Gutsy Gibbon). (Update: It works using instructions found here.)

• Stacks are ugly. Which folder is that, anyway? Also, you have to mouse around with the contextual menu just to actually open the folder. No amount of clicking, double-clicking, or mashing modifier keys helps.

Some issues that it would be wonderful if plugin developers could address:

• Time Machine should issue a Growl notification when a backup finishes (because it gives me a fuzzy feeling to know that the last hour or two of work is now safe)

• Time Machine needs a Dashboard widget displaying its current status, which is currently only viewable in the system preferences pane.

• Quick Look needs to report on the contents of archives: .zip, .gz, .tar, .dmg, etc. A nice little list of the files’ names and sizes would be extremely helpful (I shall arrogantly assume Aladdin Allume SmithMicro is already working on one for .sit). Also, CSS files’ previews should render as text, like .txt and .php files do.

• iChat should employ some sort of Quick Look-like view for inline images. Once you’re used to Quick Look in the Finder, it’s frustrating to hit the space bar and have nothing happen, then remember you have to launch Preview to see that image at a comprehensible size.

And, as is tradition, I’ve already got my installation hacked up with a bunch of plugins, some Alpha-quality, some not:

• Chax 2.0 — Adds the features Apple forgot

• WidescreenMailPlugin — Makes your Mail window extremely narrow

• MiniMail — Like the mini iTunes window, but for Mail

• Saft for Leopard — Essentials like type-to-find, double-click-for-new-tab, and undo-tab-closing

• PlugSuit — Plugin enabler and manager prefpane. Lets you use many regular old InputManagers on Leopard.

So let’s do a price comparison of some music old and new:

I should point out that I’m motivated by three factors here: price, convenience, and audio quality. iTunes and Amazon MP3 are convenient, but a used CD still wins out in price and audio quality. Amazon’s 256KB/s encoding beats iTunes’ 128KB/s, and when iTunes does offer 256KB/s DRM-free downloads, they’re always more expensive than Amazon’s.

And I much prefer having physical media waiting in my closet in case I run over or otherwise destroy my iPod. That said, for any quick impulse purchases I do allow myself, I think I’ll go to Amazon before buying from iTunes.

So off we trekked to the closest Apple store. I once tried to make my whole setup as wireless as possible (including sound), but found it impractical with the technology of that time. I thought I might start heading that direction again, so I used the opportunity to pick up a wireless version of the Mighty Mouse.

Either I completely forgot my prior experience with MacMice’ The Mouse BT, or else I figured Apple’s quality would be better. The Mouse BT was (and presumably still is, since I still have it somewhere) a two-button alternative to Apple’s then-current Apple Wireless Pro Mouse, it suffered from a slight, annoying lag which I suspect affects all Bluetooth mice to some degree. Plus, it ate batteries.

Back to the present: I was initially impressed with Apple’s new wireless mouse. It looks and works just like the wired version (which is still my favorite mouse, second only to my MacAlly iOptiNet). Except for the lag. The stupid, unpredictable Bluetooth lag. Like, when I move the Bluetooth mouse in small, tight circles, I don’t even get a consistent circle from the cursor. In my opinion, a wired mouse just feels Snappier™.

So I’m selling it, of all places, on Craigslist. It’s sort of an experiment. If you live in Upstate SC, or if you want to pay for postage to where you are, feel free to send me $60 for it — which is a $10 savings over buying it new, I might add. Enjoy.

Oh, and if anyone wants my old The Mouse BT, you can have that for like $30 ($70 retail in 2004). Same deal with the postage.

Update: As Doug points out, it could be my hardware. This time, I’m using a Belkin Bluetooth adapter, since my internal Bluetooth module is fried. However, I was using the built-in Bluetooth with my The Mouse BT back in the day. Coincidence? Maybe. Either way, I can’t use the mouse now.

BRENT: Ever since I was a kid I pictured myself working at home. I thought it would be as a novelist rather than a programmer, but it’s about the same thing: I sit in a chair in front of a computer and make things up.

I like people and I like meeting people and hanging out. But I don’t like working face-to-face and day-to-day with people. I’m quite introverted that way. I just find it draining, and always have, going way back to elementary school.

I sometimes think of it this way: there are dog people and cat people. Pack animals, with their politics and pecking order, on one hand — and solitary hunters, camouflaged in the tall grass, on the other. I can be gregarious, and I’m certainly competitive, but I live further along the feline side of the spectrum than most folks. Which is not at all unusual for geeks.

I make exception for my wife, of course. We work well together. And it is indeed great that we’re both home all day.

I never thought of myself as a “cat person”, but perhaps I am, at least relationally. And, contrary to popular opinion, I have spent some time working in an office. I just prefer working by myself, at home. kthxbye.

#mydiv {
    background: url(wonderful.png);
    _background: url(wonderful.gif); /* IE rule overrides */
}

In IE7, however, Microsoft fixed that bug, and now the parser treats _named properties as unique, in accordance with CSS 2.1. The result being that you can still use the underscore hack to target IE6 only with a rule, which is useful for when you’re working around some other bug that was fixed in IE7.

But what if you need to hack your CSS in IE7? You can use a period (.) instead of an underscore to prefix your property names. This method can be used to target both IE7 and IE6, or just IE7 with some creative jiggling:

/* targeting IE7 only */
#mydiv {
    margin-top: 10px;
    .margin-top: 20px; /* affects both IE6 & IE7 */
    _margin-top: 10px; /* reapply first rule to IE6 */
}

The period doesn’t validate, unfortunately. But neither does the underscore, for that matter, even though it’s allowed under the W3C spec. And your best bet for future-proofing is still conditional comments. But for the moment — which means until some future version of IE changes it — this seems like a relatively clean way to work around the layout issues still present in IE7.

MiniMail made me want to have something like that for iCal, too. Here’s an idea of what it could look like, incorporating the layout of the iPhone’s calendar list view:

Ideally, it would show To Do items in another pane, perhaps a pane above the appointments list. I didn’t mock that up yet.

If I were further along the path to Mac development proficiency, I’d do it myself. One thing I thought of, though, was that iCal might not support plugins like Mail.app does, and any plugins it did support might break in Leopard. InputManagers would for sure. Maybe, then, this should be an APE haxie.

I’ll let the LazyWeb sort it out for now.