Find your downloads quickly in one dedicated stack. Downloads from Safari, iChat, and Mail are automatically saved to the Downloads stack. Say goodbye to desktop clutter.

... says Apple's "new feature" description for Mac OS X Leopard. What it doesn't mention is that you can make (almost) any software you like use the "Download Stack".

Fact is, the "Download Stack" just displays the contents of a folder named "Download" in your home directory (which Leopard automatically creates). So, making Firefox use it is fairly simple -- here is how:

Go to the preferences window, into the "Main" tab:

Under "save files to", go to your user folder, then choose the folder named "Downloads".

Save the settings -- and next time you download something off the net, you'll see that it is easily (and instantly) accessible through the neat little "Download Stack" in your dock (in this case my local bus schedule. What a meaningful file name.).

"Goodbye, desktop clutter", indeed!

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Oh, how long have I waited for this! Almost three years ago, I blogged about the then newly-introduced POP access for GMail (German) and, to summarize it for you, my conclusion was that POP does not sufficiently support GMail's specialities, in particular the big storage capacity (downloading tons of mail is no fun) and tagging (which could easily be replicated in IMAP folders).

Now, three years later, GMail implements IMAP and with that, in my opinion, GMail has become a global player in email that now actually deserves the name.

IMAP features are mapped to GMail features reasonably, for example tags to folders as I suggested, or IMAP flags to GMail "stars".

To test, I connected to my account with Thunderbird, and as far as I can tell now, it works nice and quickly. Good job, Google!

According to Jean Pierre, IMAP is not enabled for all users yet, but I assume everybody will get the feature soon. Once you do, make sure to check it out!

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A while ago, I asked my German readership if they would mind me merging my German and English blog together. For time reasons, my blog output wasn't as high as would be reasonable to fill two blogs with, and furthermore, I often had trouble deciding if I wanted to blog something in my English or rather my German blog.

Fact is, most of my German readers can read English (and don't mind doing so either), while the opposite does not apply.

The German readers (and the English-speaking ones who also understand German) said they wouldn't mind, and encouraged me to do so.

Yet, until now, I didn't find the time to actually do it. Today, I finally merged my two blogs into one, (of course not entirely without problems, I'll blog that in a little while too), and to cut a long story short: Here are the changes that count for you, dear readers:

1. fredericiana.de is now part of fredericiana.com -- all requests to .de get automatically redirected to the appropriate .com site.
2. If you have subscribed to the German feed, please update your feed reader (even if the redirect works fine for now, I can't guarantee that fredericiana.de will always stay a straight redirect to the .com site).
3. If you have subscribed to a specific category only, please adjust your feed URL also.
4. If you cannot or do not want to read one of the two languages, I suggest you filter by the German or English category on the right hand side, respectively (especially when using a feed reader!). Then you should not see the stories anymore in the language you don't want.

I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. If you have any comments, or if you notice any unexpected behavior, or whatever else you may have for me, please do not hesitate to leave a comment. Thanks!

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Yesterday, I registered with LinkedIn and sent out a few invitations to people I know who also have an account.

Sadly enough, LinkedIn didn't like my name, Frédéric, quite as much as I do, so the invitation emails ended up being signed like this:

I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. -Frédéric

I reported the bug and hope they fix it soon. For now, I replaced my "é"s by regular "e"s but of course they are only half as nice :)

Sorry for the inconvenience to everyone who though "who the heck is that?" when receiving my email.

(Thanks to Brandon and morgamic who told me about the problem.)

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What do Firefoxes snack on? Cookies, of course. So somebody went ahead and baked these Firefox cookies:

Yummy!

But, even though Firefox is clearly a web browser from outer space, let's still not assume these were space cookies ;).

(Thanks for the link, Jean Pierre!)

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From the HTTP response headers that the del.icio.us API sends:

HTTP/1.x 200 OK Date: Mon, 08 Oct 2007 15:10:01 GMT X-Delicious-Debug: Hi there (...)

Uh, hi, Yahoo! ;)

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Today I had to upgrade Apple's XCode to the current version 2.4.1, because the old XCode 2.2 that came with my OSX install CDs resulted in errors with some apps (ffmpeg, in my case). The XCode installation package weighs in at 924 Megabytes, just a little short of one Gigabyte. Slim is not one of the words I would use for that...

And all that just to install Macports, my favorite tool to bring the most powerful Unix tools to OSX.

At least their download servers are pretty darn fast -- that eases the pain:

I am just wondering: What do people do with a slow internet connection or a small harddrive?

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I just noticed that youtube is an excellent resource for all things Care bear:

Good to know! ;)

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Almost half a billion Euros, which is about 600 million US Dollars, is the fine against which Microsoft fought with an appeal at the European Court of First Instance. Today, they lost: The court ruled that the decision of the European Commission to impose the fine on Microsoft was appropriate.

For almost a decade now, the European Commission has been struggling with Microsoft (to little avail) against their alleged abuse of their significant market power. In the center of the controversy is the hardly uninstallable Microsoft Media Player, which was considered an abuse of the OS monopoly to create another monopoly in the media player market. However, when it comes to monopolists abusing their monopolies, the European Union tends to have little sense of humor (a fact that Microsoft could have known in the first place). And thus, they fined Microsoft in 2004 with 497 million Euros and demanded them opening their APIs so competitors could give the consumer a realistic choice of softwares. Microsoft complained against that at the European Court, and now, only ;) 3 years later, the 248-page ruling was published.

Well, you can almost imagine how it went on in the meantime: After Microsoft still didn't completely comply with the demands after two years, they were fined with another 281 million Euros in 2006. In early 2007, the European Commission complained that Microsoft charged too much money for the API documentation and threatened to fine another 3 million Euros per day (dated back from the 1st of August 2006) if they kept up that practice.

Microsoft's main lawyer said today that they will "analyze" the whole ruling and then decide if they keep going on -- but I have a feeling that this is the amount of money that Microsoft is not happy losing: I assume the judges at the European Court of Justice (the next and last instance) are already waiting for the appeal in the mail.

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Check out this cool animation:

The author writes:

An animator faces his own animation in deadly combat. The battlefield? The Flash interface itself. A stick figure is created by an animator with the intent to torture. The stick figure drawn by the animator will be using everything he can find - the brush tool, the eraser tool - to get back at his tormentor. It's resourcefulness versus power. Who will win? You can find out yourself.

This is just awesome. But sometimes I am glad I'm not in the animation business. :)

Oh, and if you can't get enough, there's a sequel, too! (And it features Firefox :))

(Thanks for the link, Jenny!)

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