So what is *your* OS like?

Everyone and his mother has already mentioned this but I’m a “me too” kind of guy sometimes and this is just too funny (and strikes too close to home) to ignore.

So what am I talking about? Charles Miller has a couple of articles in his weblog where he explains (and very convincingly so) why Microsoft is a cheap whore, Apple is a lover and Linux a psychotic ex.

The creepy thing about this is that on some higher level he is right on the money. Funny old world, heh?

Ecto

As I’ve mentioned earlier, I’ve always used Movable Type’s web interface to manage all aspects of my weblog, including all of the editing and posting of entries and drafts.

Pedro, however, being a newcomer to the world of weblogging is in love with Ecto and so has been harassing me to try it out. ;-)

Well, I’ve had problems with version 1.1.5 because of character encoding issues (which, by the way, are not really Ecto’s fault, it is Movable Type who is in the wrong here but Ecto had to adapt, of course) but now they are completely solved and so I’m giving Ecto a spin.

So far I’m very well impressed with it, it gives the user a very powerful and very easy to use interface to his/her weblog and that’s no easy feat (powerful and easy are almost always at opposite ends of the application characteristics spectrum).

Also it’s integration with MAC OS X’s applications (so far iTunes and iPhoto) do come in handy.
The iTunes integration is more of a toy and the default output (creating a link to an Amazon.com search on the author) is more of a curiosity than a really useful feature. Yes, I know it can be changed but this is a Mac for crying out loud, give me sensible defaults! Kidding, OK? :-)
Now the iPhoto integration is a real interesting thing. It allows the user to upload pictures straight from his/hers iPhoto collection without ever opening iPhoto and then you can even scale the original, create a thumbnail, customise it’s positioning, border, margin, even convert the picture format! This is something I’ll surely appreciate having (at least until such time as my incredibly useful and sexy photography collection manager is in place).

And that’s it for now, but for the finishing touch, the piece de resistence if you will, here’s one of Ecto’s defaults HTML snippets:

[Posted with ecto]

Now ain’t that a nice thing?