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Next-gen: does size matter?
Will the tiny Wii muscle aside the 360 and the PS3? Who would win in a steel cage match? And does size really matter when considering a new console?Far-reaching philosophical questions about size aside, we stumbled across a chart comparing the heft of the three next generation consoles -- and the original NES is thrown in for good measure. In fact, Nintendo owns the smaller end of this spectrum -- even the old faithful NES is smaller than the 360 or PS3.We'd like to see some other comparison charts, like heat or noise emissions, amount of damage inflicted by a thrown controller, functionality of each console after the family pet knocks over the entire entertainment system, etc. ... but we guess that we'll have to wait until after release date for some of those. Check the chart out after the jump.
Seagate hoping to get 120GB drives into the iPod?
If you're as burned out about iPhone rumors as we are, maybe rumors of new storage capacities (finally) coming to the iPod can grab your attention. Engadget found some comments in Business Week from Seagate CEO William Watkins on the state of small-format storage, including whether the Flash memory craze has fazed the company and what's coming down the pipeline in 1.8 inch hard drives. Apparently, the company will have a 120GB 1.8 inch hard drive ready for the December quarter, which would be ripe for the iPod - as it's been stuck at 60GB since Fall 2004.This is obviously no indication of whether these drives will actually make it into the iPod, but it's great to know they're available, which means there's a chance. Hold your breath at your own risk.
HD-DVD external drive the next big thing
This pic of the Xbox 360 HD-DVD external drive gives you a little (or should I say alot) more perspective on the size of the beast. El Jefe, aka the big black power converter, is pleased.[Thanks Zack]
View a graphical chart of file and folder sizes with Disk Inventory X
Disk Inventory X takes a unique approach to helping you analyze your disk space usage by visualizing it as a graphical chart. You can see a breakdown of which types of files are hogging the most space, and clicking on a graphical portion will display the file's location in your Mac's system. Let's hear it for the use of color, shapes and sizes in helping Mac users clean up their hard drives; those Britney Spears MP3 duplicates and abandoned BitTorrent downloads aren't going to trash themselves.Disk Inventory X is donationware and available from derlien.com.
Nintendo Wii mockup next to stuff ... lots of stuff
Never again can we be accused of obsessing over the relative size of things. We admit, we're guilty of a chart here or there, and we've been known to calculate cubic volume like a mofo, but a poster at the GameFAQ's forums has just shown us how it's done. DocCRP has crafted a pair of meticulous Wii mockups, complete with Wiimote, and proceeded to take pictures of the diminutive box next to ... well, just about everything. NES? Yup. Atari 2600? Sure. Ketchup bottle? Yeah. Dreamcatcher? Errr, yeah, that's here. John Philip Sousa award? Now it's just getting weird.If you're really curious how the Wii sizes up compared to a 1998 US Mint Proof Set, I've handily hyperlinked the entire forum thread's worth of images after the break.[Via DigitalBattle]
Widget Watch: Type Cast font preview and info
This is one of those widgets that makes me wonder why Apple hasn't already made one. Type Cast is pretty simple and straight-forward: it's a font preview widget from Code Line Communications, makers of Art Director's Toolkit (amongst other things). This widget isn't short on capabilities either; you can navigate font families, styles and sizes with merely your keyboard, and you can even be taken directly to the font file in the Finder.The Type Cast widget is free and available from Code Line Communications here.
On resolution independence
There is a lot of buzz and speculation floating around as to what we'll see in the Mac OS X 10.5 update that will be previewed (and I suspect released) at this August's World Wide Developer's Conference. One exciting 'fundamental feature' John Gruber hinted at last November has been mentioned again by a developer named Dustin MacDonald: resolution independence.Gruber broke this concept down in a November '05 post titled Full Metal Jacket (under the Display heading), but to summarize: most of the dimensions of elements in Mac OS X (and other OSes to my knowledge) are defined in pixels - the menu bar is 22 px high, for example. This explains why things 'seem to look a little smaller' when you move from the 1024 x 768 dimensions of a 12" display to the 1440 x 900 resolution of the latest 15" PowerBook G4 or MacBook Pro displays. Conversely, if you decrease the resolution on the machine you're working on now, things will look a bit bigger; you have smaller resolution and fewer ppi (or dpi) on screen, so some elements change size. This can become a problem in the context of notebook displays and their resolutions - if you take the 15" MacBook Pro's resolution higher than 1440 x 900, things could become smaller than what many might consider usable (these same rules apply to Windows and I believe Linux as well). Further, you can't just keep increasing notebook display sizes like you can with desktop displays; I've heard of the 19" notebooks Engadget has come across, and I personally don't consider a 16 lb computer worthy of the 'portable' adjective.
Mail slowing you down? Rebuild its database
Apple's flagship email client had me banging my head against a wall again when I finally dug up this tip on rebuilding Mail.app's 'Envelope Index' SQLite database at Hawk Wings (If you're wondering what that file is all about, check out Hawk Wing's "What's in your Mail folder?" post). Forcing Mail.app to rebuild this file is as simple as quitting the app, browsing to your ~/Library/Mail/ folder and dragging out the file called 'Envelope Index' to your desktop (I'd recommend making a backup of your Mail support folder before attempting this. Don't say we didn't warn you). Start Mail.app back up and it will give you a message about re-importing or re-indexing all of your messages (sorry, I forgot to screencap the message), and depending on how many you have it could take a couple minutes. I have over 13,000 emails and it didn't take my G4 PowerBook long at all. My Envelope Index was over 300 MB before I started this, and after it was all said and done that file weighed in at less than 4 MB. Putting Mail.app on this kind of a weight loss program can seriously speed it up and generally improve its performance; no more clicking on a new message 10 minutes after Mail.app notified me about it only to be greeted by "this message has not been downloaded yet..." silliness.It is also worth mentioning that this tip is probably more of a troubleshooting technique than something you should work into your regular maintenance tasks. A commenter on this tip at Hawk Wings pointed out that this rebuilding operation nullifies a couple of mailbox settings. If you have set any specific IMAP mailboxes to be used for trash or junk, Mail.app will forget those settings after this rebuild. Still, I think the performance gain and all-around less-schizophrenic behavior of Mail.app was worth having to reset a couple of preferences.[UPDATE: Some commenters have pointed out that Mail also has a Rebuild option under the Mailbox menu (at least in Tiger). I tinkered with this on one of my 4 IMAP accounts and it seems to do the same trick with far less fuss. Thanks for the tip!]
