File sharing in Leopard

This Macworld article on File sharing in Leopard is very helpful in explaining the new possibilities with OS X 10.5 Leopard regarding having a folder on your mac that you'd like colleagues to have access to. Apple has dramatically improved the tools you use to share all kinds of resources from your Mac across local networks and the Internet. And some of the biggest—and handiest—of these improvements are in the ways Leopard lets you share files, folders, and volumes.

Apple Data Detectors Are So Useful

When hearing about the new features that Leopard OS X 10.5 were bringing, I was thrilled to see Apple Data Detectors on the list. Back in the OS 8.5 days, these were system-wide and you could customize your own data detection schemes. I wrote a set of ADD's that recognized scripture citations that would then look them up in Accordance. I can only hope that the possibility to add custom data detectors will be forthcoming. To date, you can only use Apple Data Detectors for calendar and contact information and they only work in Mail.app and iChat. Hopefully, that, too, will change soon.

Let me demonstrate to you how smart and how useful this technology is. I get lots of emails from my university and from church manifestations announcing info for meetings and events. Consider this email from my church regional office regarding a Men's retreat: If I hover of the date information with the pointer, it is highlighted with an outline to show that the technology is detecting an event description. If I click on the little drop down menu, I see an option for adding this event to iCal: After selecting it, the event is added to iCal, and look how smartly it deciphered the data. It even picked up on the fact that the following church name and address was the location for the event and added it as well: How quick was that? Notice the event event includes a link back to the original email for later reference. Wow. Thank you. Amen.

Update: If you won't ever be using ADD as they are and find the auto text highlighting annoying, you can disable the Data Detectors. In Terminal, us the command:
defaults write com.apple.mail DisableDataDetectors YES

Tauber's Graded Greek Reader Ideas

This just shows one example of why I've appreciated James' mind for some time now. He has put together a presentation on his thoughts regarding a new kind of Graded Reader that have interested me for some time--one created programmatically based upon the students current vocabulary/grammar progress.

I am no longer teaching Greek, but have long thought that whenever I'm at it again, I will start with inductive reading from the start, but still move through paradigms from the beginning as well. The major shift though, will be that the inductive work through a graded reader is primary, and the paradigm work is secondary. I might vary from James' proposition in that I would not encourage waiting until very long before a critical mass of forms are encountered before abstracting that paradigm, though they can be introduced strategically.

It is very hard for me to still not desire to combine this clause approach with a simplified pseudo-scripture corpus at the beginning--allowing for greater control of when students encounter certain forms/vocabulary.

Don't miss James Tauber's further explanation in the comments section. And if you are ever interested in teaching Greek and still haven't watched the video presentation, remedy that now.