$HOME, Library, Preferences etc

It might be a bit of an exaggeration to say that Edward Tufte is solely responsible for making people think harder about how they present information, but it's clear his influence is spreading. I'm just reading the new-to-me What Color Is Your Parachute? and its use of color , diagrams, ironic Victorian engravings and tables to break up the text is attractive and effective. Well done.

Many Mac users subscribe to Apple’s .Mac service which provides email, Web hosting and a shared files service. .Mac has had a lot of stick over the last few years, most of it deserved; it’s not cheap (about $100 a year), the mail had a whole week of being unreliable last year, and the performance of its iDisk file storage and sharing service is capable of being painfully slow, so slow it’s sometimes unusable. You use iDisk through the Finder, which, in the background initiates a WebDAV connection to Apple’s servers. When the .Mac weather’s bad, this connection can be too slow or lossy, leading to spinning beach-balls and a halting, stuttering Finder. The way I cope with this is to use Transmit which can us WebDAV as well as FTP to connect to remote file systems. Transmit is blindingly fast at everything it does and slices through the bad weather in a way that the Finder doesn’t seem to be able to manage. You can do various useful things with the ...