By the way

This isn't going to be a sparkling piece of analysis; it's a rant.

Let me say this at the outset: I love NetNewsWire Lite, the excellent free newsreader from the folks at Newsgator. It handles secure news feeds, it lets me group the hundreds of feeds I subscribe to, it's fast, it's free and it syncs with the Newsgator online reader so that I can read my feeds from both my MacBook or my iPhone.

Some rant, huh? Well here it comes. You see, NNW lets me sort the messages in my feeds in several ways. I can set them to be ordered by title, source or arrival order. I don't see why anyone would want them sorted by anything but arrival order, but, to each his own.

Now, it's super convenient to change the sort order. Just like any other Mac application, all I have to do is click on the column heading to sort by that column. But... there's no column to display arrival time!!! In other words, if I want my news to display in arrival order (with the newest on top) I need to set that in a menu. But, in order to set it to sort by any other value, all I have to do is click on the screen. Which I do. Often. By mistake. A lot. Grrrrr.

It's super-easy to set the sort to the wrong preference and super-difficult to set it to the right one. WHY?!

This is a fantastic discussion of screenshot options in Tiger.

If you missed it, here is a recording of Steve Jobs's latest appearance on Saturday Night Live.

This is a fantastic write-up of the advantage Apple has over WinPC systems when it comes to security. Everyone needs to read it. By John Gruber, of course.

Here is a useful list of system-wide keyboard shortcuts in Mac OS X. It's worth bookmarking. And, while you're at it, this is a list of otherwise-undocumented shortcuts in Safari. This file is on your own computer, but you need to know about it to find it.