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The Parallels Desktop for Mac virtualization software is in Release Candidate 2 stage.and includes the Compressor utility to reduce guest OS virtual disk space use. The list price went up from $49.95 to $79.95 but the pre-order price remained at $39.95. So, I pre-ordered my copy this morning. I’m downloading the RC2 version this evening (still a free test drive) to test it out on a MacBook.
Since Google expanded internationally and got to face language barriers as well as legal discrepancies, they have an established policy of auto-detecting the country from which a user originates and present him with the “right” language. It’s nice, too nice actually. In fact, it’s as nice as a Microsoft Office Assistant: a little can be great fun but too much just makes you want to slam the computer through the window.
Why is video chat between Windows and OS X so hard? Jason Levine is asking a very reasonable question.
Desmond Elliott is coding for Camino this summer, and he wants your thoughts on how to improve its tabs. Let your imagination run riot - what tab features would you like to see most? (Personally, I’m pretty happy with Camino’s tabs so I hope Desmond doesn’t change too much. Automatic tab saving between sessions would be welcome though.) There’s a related thread on the Camino mailing list you can keep an eye on.
Meanwhile, Andy Matuschak thinks many Mac OS X apps could do a better job of updating themselves, and his Sparkle module is attempt to do something about it: “Sparkle is a module that developers can stick in their Cocoa applications (five-step install!) to get instant self-update functionality. By that, I mean that your app will be able to update itself, not just check for new versions: it’ll read the update information from an appcast on your server, download, extract, install, restart, and even offer to show the users release notes before they decide if they want to update.”
Matt Neuburg on DEVONagent 2.0. He says it’s a mixed bag: “Here, you are not shown just what plugins this Search Set uses; instead, there’s a list of all 130-plus plugins, and you must hunt for which ones are checked - not easy, because the plugins are arranged hierarchically, so you have to keep opening disclosure triangles, manually. But you still don’t know what each plugin actually does, because DEVONagent provides no interface for displaying this information. Instead, you must open the DEVONagent application bundle and read an embedded XML “plist” file. These files are the heart of DEVONagent’s functionality; yet the program gives you no interface for viewing and understanding them!”
QuickTime is a wonderful authoring tool, enabling webmasters to blend in video, flash, dynamically loaded content and to wrap it all in a cross-platform, configuration-detecting snippet of code. In fact, thanks to the (relatively) new QuickTime to JavaScript bridge, there is little that cannot be done within QuickTime when it comes to providing a rich interactive experience.
What if Tuesday never came? That’s what it looks like right now. We’re still stuck solidly in the middle of last week in the US iTMS store as well as the several other-country stores I checked. Maybe Memorial Day messed things up…
Hey Derrick!
Here’s another, sometimes easier, way. Open the Doc file in TextEdit and then choose File -> Save As and choose HTML from the File Format pop-up.
That having been said, take note that TextEdit reads many but not all Word Docs and that details often get lost in the mix. On the up side though, I feel a lot safer opening Word attachments in TextEdit than I do in Word.
jpkang writes: I think Derrick’s point was that the HTML that Google produces is much cleaner/readable than the standards-compliant HTML that most text editors produce nowadays (with tons of CSS tags).
TextEdit rocks at this. Open TextEdit -> Preferences. Choose “Open and Save”. Set the Document Type and Styling. (I prefer to pick No CSS from the styling pop-up, XHTML 1.0 Strict from the Document Type popup, and Western (Mac OS Roman) from the Encoding pop-up.) Close the Preferences pane.
If you have a MS Word doc that you want to convert to HTML, the last thing you’d ever use is the “Save as Web Page…” command in Word. Talk about terrible code! Instead, you can send the attachment to your Gmail account and use the “View as HTML” link. Once the page is displayed in your browser, go to “View Source” and copy the code. Most of it is very clean and quite useable. I’m surprised however, that Google doesn’t use the XHTML version of the break tag…
Last week, we talked a little bit about the business decisions that prompt Ambrosia Software’s commitment to old platforms and code. This week, Ambrosia’s own bitwise operator, Matt Slot, tells us a little more about what this commitment means to the average coder in the trenches. Is supporting a single product through numerous generations of platforms and OSes an untenable mandate handed down by our short-sighted management overlords? Matt doesn’t think so.
And he should know. He’s Ambrosia’s point-man on porting and maintaining Apeiron X, a game that, with its recent update to v1.0.2, now runs on all Macs — from 68k to Intel, from OS 9 to Tiger. How does one pack all that multi-platform goodness into a single binary?
iDont.com at first appears to be just another anti-iPod site created by a talented graphics designer with too much time on her hands. However, it actually is a heavily disguised ad for SanDISK’s new Sansa e200 portable music player. Just like Real’s ill-fated “Freedom of Music Choice” campaign from 2004, it claims to be about freedom of choice, of thinking for yourself instead of mindlessly following the majority crowd. Which, in itself, is a feasible marketing message, if it wasn’t for the fact that the site’s underlying leitmotiv is to insult iPod users downright. Have a look at their “Materials” section and you’ll know what I mean.
If you have to resort to this kind of marketing tactics, more often than not it’s because your product is not desirable enough in its own right, or is not different enough to lure customers over to it from the market leader. If you do have a great product, just showing off the product’s features (including non-technical aspects like styling and prestige) alone should suffice to make that product successful. The iPod is a good example for how this can work.
But there’s more to it: attacking your competitor’s customers instead of your competitor’s products is not only lame; it is downright dangerous. Regardless of whether this strategy succeeds in getting new customers to buy your product, it will ensure that those whom you attack may never consider buying from you again, even when they’re looking for a replacement of whatever they are using at the time.
In the case of the SanDISK campaign, any time I’ll be seeing one of their products, I’ll be reminded that they once compared me to sheep, chimps, or donkeys just for being a satisfied iPod user. And I don’t really think that someone who views me that way is worthy of my business.
Here’s the problem. Perl? Great. Love the Perl. CPAN modules? Not so great. Well, yes, they are *great* in a they-kick-ass-in-all-the-functionality-they-provide, but they’re not installed on the default Mac OS X user’s machine. So not so great. Sure, Apple includes the command line cpan utility (man 1 cpan), but don’t you want utilities that just, you know, work? Without any further laborious installation of packages?
Subject: Tarsiers ate my post Erica Sadun wrote:
My “Copying YouTube Videos Part II” post seems to have been abducted by wayward tarsiers. Any idea where they may have taken it?
More after the jump…
As part of its iPod+iTunes expansion scheme, Apple recently made some important changes. Strangely enough however, these were almost obliterated by the more popular Nike co-branding and the arrival of the first MacBook units. Yet, we may have witnessed and ignored the one thing that is going to propel iTunes into its next level of success.
A few years ago, the Durex Condom Company started co-branding with various “good” companies. Among them was a car manufacturer, who touted their cars were “as safe as Durex condoms”. Needless to say, the whole contraption flopped miserably, despite a rather warm reception from the ad crowd — a group to which I am sometimes told I belong. Now, the Apple+Nike campaign sounds like a good idea in many aspects but, for some reason, I can’t help equating it with the defunct Durex+ efforts. (Note the effective use of a mathematical operator underlining the close relationship existing between both corporate DNAs in a symbiotic, market-empowering, consumer-centered fashion.)
The trick for copying YouTube videos I mentioned in a previous post seems to have broken. No worries though. Here’s a workaround.
Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only and may not be used, copied, reproduced, distributed, transmitted, broadcast, displayed, sold, licensed, or otherwise exploited for any other purposes whatsoever without the prior written consent of the respective owners…If you download or print a copy of the Content for personal use, you must retain all copyright and other proprietary notices contained therein. You agree not to circumvent, disable or otherwise interfere with security related features of the YouTube Website or features that prevent or restrict use or copying of any Content or enforce limitations on use of the YouTube Website or the Content therein.
% cd /tmp % ls -lt total 20528 -rw------- 1 ericasad wheel 10478103 May 25 08:46 WebKitPlugInStreamRGr3qd -rw------- 1 ericasad wheel 526 May 25 08:43 WebKitPlugInStream3iFMhq -rw------- 1 ericasad wheel 13145 May 25 08:42 WebKitPlugInStreamk9BljY -rw------- 1 ericasad wheel 60 May 25 08:31 objc_sharing_ppc_501 -rw------- 1 security wheel 24 May 25 08:31 objc_sharing_ppc_92 drwxrwxrwx 3 root wheel 102 May 25 08:31 printers/ %
% cp WebKitPlugInStreamRGr3qd ~/Desktop/copiedvideo.flv %
I know it is silly to get excited over the arrival of a notebook computer. But, I was pretty darn excited when my MacBook arrived on Tuesday (after a wild journey that went from China, Alaska, Indiana, California, and finally to my state). After the intial excitement, I started looking at the various questions I had about the MacBook garnered from web while waiting. Here’s what I’ve found so far…
There’s a new bleeding edge version of TextMate out as of yesterday; Paul Bissex has some thoughts about it.
GROSX lets you subscribe to syndication feeds in Google Reader.
A snippet from Gary Krakow’s review of Windows Vista Beta 2: “Beta 2 is a good looking operating system with a number of new features, which will be familiar to you if you’ve played with recent versions of Apple’s OS X.”
AppleScript for Beginners. I’ve been looking for a series like this for a while now…
Hot Mac? See the Intel Mac Temperature Database.
Some MacBook benchmarks that suggest it is a very powerful machine, given that it is aimed at the consumer market. “Contrary to bizarre rumor, the MacBook can indeed run Final Cut Pro, and it can run it quite well.”
David Chess on his new MacBook: “And mostly I’ve got a new toy to play with. Pretty much it’s just a standard Computer, but there are various odd and fun things (the peculiar noncontiguous keys, the glossy screen, the built-in camera that when you first power it on and start setting up it turns on so you can take an Account Portrait of yourself, which is really good User Experience and very Appley). It’s small and light and fast and shiny.”
Interesting to note Samsung’s planned release of notebooks with solid-state storage instead of a hard disk - The Reg has details. Is a similar computer on any drawing boards at Apple? Would you want one?
Apple and Nike teamed up to offer a sensor for Nike’s Air Zoom Moire shoes that connects wireless to an iPod nano (presumably not a Shuffle or standard iPod). The NikePlus.com website says that the products will be available on July 13.
Convert a Raw file to Tiff or Photoshop formats in seconds? Yes! Lighten the picture, add sharpening, and increase saturation? No problem. Maybe you want to take your Raw file, save it to PDF, then encrypt it so it’s protected from prying eyes. You bet.
Do you need a high-end image editor, such as Camera Raw to perform this magic? Hardly. Tiger users have a powerful tool right there in the Applications folder that can execute these tasks in less time than it takes to launch Photoshop. The magic software is the often-overlooked Preview app.
You can discover all of Preview’s image editing power in the post titled The Simplest of All RAW Converters. Preview does a lot more than open PDFs…
Can I still rotate video clips in QT7? Sure you can. In QuickTime Pro, type Command-J, select the video track, click Visual Settings and then use the left or right rotate buttons.
Apologies in advance. Going over phone lines to the iTMS is pretty hellish.
My esteemed colleague Jochen Wolters wrote a piece about the next “Insanely Great” Apple product. Like most, well, insanely great pieces, it got me thinking: does something along these lines have a place in Apple’s lineup today?
As part of Apple’s well-executed transition from PowerPC to Intel CPUs, the new MacBooks follow the same pattern as the previously released MacIntels: just like the Intel-based Mac mini, iMac, and MacBook Pro product lines, the MacBooks sport a completely revised motherboard and a few welcome new features — e.g., the built-in iSight camera — in an almost unchanged outer shell. It would not surprise me if the PowerMac G5, the last product line yet to be moved over to Intel chips, would also feature new innards in an only mildly modified case.
So, while Apple’s current model line-up features state-of-the-art machines that combine elegant looks with rock-solid performance, there’s been a distinct lack in the “insanely great” department lately. Let me point out two of my dream Apple products that I would consider worthy of the “insanely great” label.
Assuming that the new MacBook also serves as a replacement for the 12″ PowerBook, there is room for a smaller-sized portable computer in Apple’s line-up. Although it is anything but a new idea, I would like to see a MacTablet machine. A good friend of mine has been using a Windows-based tablet PC for a long time now, and he’s really impressed with it. Except for using a stylus to get data into the machine, however, it behaves exactly like any other Windows PC. Which made me wonder what Apple could come up with if they used the same approach as they did with the iPod and “just” re-thought the whole tablet PC category: Take the best ideas from the Newton, the Palm, the PocketPC (if there are any “best ideas” in that platform…), the Ultra-Mobile PC, and better smart-phones like the Sony P-9xx line, and see what this “MacFilofax” could look like…
Somewhat bigger in size than current PocketPCs, with a UI featuring OS X’s Aqua look-and-feel and the ease-of-use of iTunes/iPod, optional phone support, and a scroll of electronic paper that you can unroll from the side of the machine to extend the screen, Apple could go wild with ideas on this one, and I’d say they should.
Even if you use your Mac for processor-intensive tasks like video or audio editing, and you want all the processing power you can get, you may not necessarily require the expandability of a PowerMac-level machine. For example, if you’re into digital audio, there are now numerous I/O solutions based on external devices hooked up to the computer via Firewire, so you don’t have to rely on the classical PCI-card approach anymore. Wouldn’t it be cool, then, if you could have the power of the next-generation Intel-based PowerMacs inside a small box just slightly bigger than a Mac mini?
So, here’s my dream workhorse Macintosh: a quad-core processor; support for at least 8G of RAM; a SuperDrive and room for two hard drives; three Firewire 800 ports, optical audio I/O, and state-of-the-art driver support for mLAN. And all of this packaged in a slim, shiny case, which takes some design cues from the current PowerMacs and has the exact same footprint as the MacBook. Take it with you on the road, place your MacBook on top of it, hook both machines up with a LAN patch cable, and run your creative software of choice in distributed mode — a truly portable solution with the processing power of a high-end workstation. Insanely great indeed!
What would your personal insanely great über-Mac dream machine look like?
Until very recently, this sort of thing was just a daydream:
But now, thanks to Parallels and Virtue, it’s possible to turn your Intel Mac into a multi-OS environment within which you can flit from OS X to Windows to Linux or pretty much anything else that takes your fancy, with a simple keystroke.
Don’t be fooled by appearances. In this video clip, it looks as though the user is leaving OS X completely when using Ubuntu Dapper and Windows XP. In reality, both of them are running inside Parallels, which is running on OS X. The visual effects that make each new OS swoosh in from one side are simply that - visual effects. Apple’s own Boot Camp solution is different; it lets you boot into different operating systems. Under Parallels, the “guest” systems are running inside their own virtual machines alongside the “host” OS, Mac OS X.
In the video above, we’re shown each OS doing some basics, running a browser and perhaps one other app; it would be interesting to see just how far you can push the CPU before it falls over.
But that doesn’t make this demonstration any less impressive. For people working in one OS and wishing to test something in another, or simply use a single Windows app in an otherwise Mac-oriented workflow (hello, Lotus Notes users!), a setup like this looks pretty compelling.
Note also that Parallels is still a Release Candidate, so you should be prepared for unexpected behavior, crashes and so on. Be backed up, people.
This month, Ambrosia Software announced an update to their highly-addictive and award-wining game, Apeiron X. This update didn’t steal many headlines. It was only a point-release, after all. And it didn’t add a bunch of new levels or secret weapons. When you’ve got a track record like Apeiron has, you don’t mess with success.
So what’s the big deal about version 1.0.2? Apeiron is now a Universal binary. And what’s so special about a universal version of everyone’s favorite mushroom shooter, you may ask? Easy. Now that Apeiron has added Macintels to its list of compatible machines, it officially runs on every generation of Macintosh.
The Google Web Toolkit looks cool, but at the moment, Mac users might think they are locked out: on the download page, you can choose Windows or Linux. And if you download either one, you might be discouraged to find shared libraries in the form of .dll or .so files.
The Linux version does work on the Mac, but you won’t be able to run it in hosted mode since that mode depends on SWT (that’s what those shared libraries are there for, apparently). Hosted mode gives you more debugging power, so you are giving that up on the Mac.
To use web mode, run the autogenerated MyApplication-compile script to compile it all to JavaScript, then open MyApplication.html in a browser.
Here are the steps to unpack it and create your first app. I haven’t gone beyond these basics, but it should be enough to get you started:
$ tar xfz gwt-linux-1.0.20.tar.gz $ cd gwt-linux-1.0.20/ $ ./applicationCreator com.mycompany.client.MyApplication Created directory /Users/bjepson/src/gwt-linux-1.0.20/src [etc., etc.] $ ./MyApplication-compile Output will be written into ./www/com.mycompany.MyApplication Copying all files found on public path Compilation succeeded $ cd www/com.mycompany.MyApplication/ $ open MyApplication.html
Once you’ve done that, you should see something like the following:
The free Mac version of Google Sketchup is not quite ready yet, but in the meantime the Sketchup team announced availability of the Sketchup Google plug in for Mac OS X, which provides owners of a a Sketchup license with direct integration with Google Earth.
The free version of the software is licensed only for personal use; professionals are still required to shell out about $400 for the Pro version. The additional pro features include better export options (especially 3D export formats, animations and walkthroughs) and email tech support.
I never fail to be amazed by the kind of work Sketchup allows people to produce.
Parallels renamed their virtualization software for Intel-based Macs (formerly Parallels Workstation) and went from a beta-release to a release candidate:
Now, I have something to look forward to while I obsessively check the progress of my MacBook as it travels from Suzhou, China to the U.S. :-) I’m also wondering how Photoshop Elements 4 runs in Rosetta on the MacBook.
In the world of DSLRs, black means business. Apple must have observed what’s going on in other areas of consumer electronics. The white iBook has always been a great machine, but its cute exterior may have deterred macho users. Now with Intel inside, the new MacBook comes in both black and white… but going macho will cost you an extra $200. Is it worth it?
I did a quick poll among our Mac DevCenter bloggers. I’ve heard everything from, “I Just want the Darth Vader MacBook” to “I really like the look of the black one, but I don’t think I’ll be spending money just for that,” to the more practical, “I am inclined to buy the black one as well… I want to check out the keyboard, the surface (does it scratch easily?) and the screen (can I bear the reflection?) first.”
It’s not uncommon to charge a bit more for the “pro” look. It’s been happening for years in the camera world. It’s not the money that tops my concern list, rather, will the black surface be covered with oily finger prints…
Ever had to take a Hard Drive out of any of the PowerBooks that have been introduced since they moved into shiny alumnium or titanium shells?
Remember the amount of swearing that caused the paint to literally peel from your walls? I sure do. While getting a Hard Drive out of a Pismo or a Lombard was certainly non-trivial, getting one of an aluminum powerbook required spelunking gear and rappell lines. Don’t even get me started on the iBooks, we could be here all day.
Not so, the new MacBook. Check out the video from Macworld.com:
With levers to make sure RAM comes out properly, and an easy-to-remove S-ATA drive, I’m going to come right out and say that the MacBook is a piece of engineering that has been sorely lacking from the Mac world for quite some time.
Thanks, Apple, for giving us real choices this time around.
iWeb officially supports multiple web sites now, but it must be said that the implementation of this feature is messy and less than intuitive to most people. Why can’t iWeb simply do “New”, “Open” and “Save” like all the other apps?
How to run Classic apps on Intel Macs. Cos you need Hypercard on your MacBook, doncha?
Oh look, Stream Recorder records streams as MP3s.
Daniel Eran spells out five architectural flaws in Windows; Mac OS X avoids all of them. (Which is not to say that OS X is free from flaws, of course…)
Tom Yager made some thought-provoking comments about Apple’s closing down of the OS X kernel on Intel machines: ” Even if I don’t need to hack the kernel, knowing that I can affords me a level of self-sufficiency and insulation from vendors’ whims that fixed system software, such as Windows, does not.”
Derek Powazek on black MacBooks: “Until then, I’ll happily keep pecking on my second favorite laptop ever, my aluminum Powerbook with a keyboard that’s designed for grownups, and the matte finish is where it belongs - on the screen.”
Could Apple do more for early Aperture adopters? Some of them feel hard done by because there’s little sign of a sensible upgrade path for their computers.
Update
Oops, forgot to add a bunch of other interesting stuff that was lurking in a hidden Camino window :)
Final Cut Express HD 3.5 is out now; upgrade price is $99.
What would you like to see in future Mail updates? Hawkwings is asking.
While we’re talking email clients, EWeek has some good tips for looking after Thunderbird
And Dennis Sellars starts the wishlisting for 10.5 Leopard - what would you like to see in it? I’m still missing tabbed folders from the OS 9 days, and in my opinion neither the Dock nor the Finder toolbar are suitable replacements…
Oddness was happening.
Over the last couple of weeks, I noticed odd things kept happening on my PowerBook. Shiira would launch but wouldn’t function. Preview did weird things when I tried to quit it. Photoshop Elements 4 wouldn’t launch at all, which was pretty annoying at a time when I was trying to write an article about it.
After this last problem appeared, I tried a simple experiment; created a completely fresh user account on the same machine, and installed PE4 there. It worked just fine, so I made my diagnosis: something was broken inside my user space, and whatever it was I wanted to fix it.
True, all the apps I needed to use every day were still working without any problems, but I felt uneasy about using the machine without taking preemptive action. I found myself worrying that it might suddenly die on me just when I needed it not to.
And rather than re-install and simply drag my apps and documents back in from backups, I took the route that required more work: re-install everything manually, from scratch, to make sure everything was as pristine as I could get it.
So that meant downloading fresh copies of all my essential apps, re-entering license codes where necessary, and going through each one to import data, change preferences, and add passwords. It took some hours. Downloading all the updates from raw 10.4 and straight-from-disk iLife 06 took quite a while too.
But now I’ve almost reached the end of the process and things feel so much better. The computer feels a little more snappy than it was before, and all the symptoms of oddness have disappeared. The step-by-step reset was time-consuming, but worth doing. I can recommend this approach to anyone whose Mac is misbehaving.
Now we have a complete family of Intel Apple notebooks to compare with one another, what is it about the MacBook Pro that makes it a “pro” machine? And in what respects are the MacBooks a better machine than their iBook predecessors?
The MacBook sports many very attractive new features, such as a magnetic latch, easy access to RAM slots, and - this is really impressive, this - user-replaceable hard disks. It also supports extended desktops, a feature previously denied iBook users. Apple claims it has a six hour battery life.
But here are the features that make a MacBook Pro a “pro” machine:
And that’s it. That’s not a long list of differentiating features; and several of these are only really different on the top-of-the-range 17inch MacBook Pro. So what is Apple suggesting is the difference between a “pro” user and a non-”pro” user?
This morning, I was working on my MacBook Pro, tapping happily away at a manual for a Zimbra installation, when I noticed I had 10% of battery left. I fished out my power adapter and walked over to plug myself in, when the screen went dark.
Crap!
Imagine my surprise when I tried to wake it from sleep. It wasn’t sleeping, it was off. That’s right, instead of sleeping at the end of the battery, it randomly and completely, with no warning, shut itself off.
Uh oh. That’s no good. I spent some time on the phone today with Apple, explained the constant heat issues, the whine, and now the straw that broke the camel’s back: the random power failures. Today’s shutdown wasn’t the first time, I lost a few pages of a paper I wrote on weblogging and pamphleteering, when I was editing it for republication. Then I lost part of a presentation on Zimbra. The third time was the charm and I called Apple.
Aww, don’t they look lovely together?
Most of it is what most of us expected. The display, in particular, will appeal to many with more pixels and the new glossy sheen. But the RAM and hard disk defaults seem a little stingy to me. And is it true that there’s no built-in microphone any more (as pointed out on 2lmc’s spool)? There’s no mention of one on the tech specs page, but it seems very weird to have an iSight without a mic…
Your thoughts and comments are, as always, encouraged…
The Intel-based MacBook (replacing the iBook model series) was announced and became available for purchase today. Couple of surprises (not all good) regarding features, color, components, and pricing. Nonetheless, my Core Duo model is on order. With luck, it’ll be here in a couple of weeks. Here’s my list of MacBook hits and misses (in no particular order) based on my ordering experience…
We live in an age of instant fulfillment. I can order a bunch of vitamins from Mother Nature and with free shipping they end up on my doorstep less than a week later. So why does it take twelve to sixteen weeks for a simple bimonthly magazine subscription to begin?
I don’t buy the whole “Here’s Why” explanation Amazon offers. Two weeks for the subscription to get to the publisher? Do they have a team bicycling across the country to deliver the subscriptions by hand? Seems to me that for a bimonthly you should have to wait a max of two months. And it would be a welcome courtesy to send out the current issue if their shipping system allows it.
OK, I’ll guess nearly everyone downloaded the iLife ‘06 update by now (including the 88.8MB iWeb update to 1.1). I wasn’t exactly sure what the updates included and went looking for more information. Here’s what I found…
Today’s inert “iPod Killer” article (complete with cheesy graphic) is brought to you by the San Francisco Chronicle, which talks up the MTV/Microsoft “Urge” music service as if it weren’t an obvious demitasse of suck.
Today, Skype announced free calls to all landlines and mobile phones in the US and Canada. The SkypeOut service lets you place phone calls your computer. Great freebie, very kind of them to offer this, but it’s not working for a large number of Skype subscribers. Is it working for you?
This is a different approach from competitor Jajah.com. With Jajah, you place the call at the website and then wait for Jajah to call you at home. It then acts as an operator and connects you to the number you requested. You don’t talk over the computer, you talk over your normal landline handset, which I find very handy. Also, unlike Skype, you can also place free short calls to Europe. For longer calls (world wide), you need to set up and fund an account.
There’s been a lot of talk about the US National Security Agency and call privacy, but somehow I feel more private calling over my land line than my computer, let alone over my cell phone. Am I off base here?
Finally, if you have nothing better to do with your life and you have the emotional maturity of, say, a donut, Jajah makes it very easy to place prank calls. You could connect your friend’s phone to, for example, the local restaurant take-out line, any number of porn shops, or even Dial-the-Truth ministries. You may need to clean the Jajah cookies (Safari -> Preferences, Security, Show Cookies), wash your hands, and visit your local cleric to seek absolution between calls.
Report back here.
They didn’t put the Mac in Emacs for nothing. (Dear Usual Pedants: I am aware that Emacs predates the Mac. This is an attempt at wit. A bad one, I’ll give you.) Did you know that you could use Emacs navigation keys in TextEdit? And Terminal? And many other Cocoa apps? They all work the way you’d expect. Well, at least mostly. In TextEdit, ^N and ^P go to the beginning and end of word-wrapped paragraphs, not just lines.
(There’s also ^L to center your selection, but I haven’t seen it used in many Cocoa apps.)
Your keybindings are defined in /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Resources/StandardKeyBinding.dict. This Apple document shows how to expand the emacs key-bindings further.
In Terminal, use the Emacs key-bindings to scroll back and forth through your command history (^P, ^N) and to edit the contents of the current command line (^B, ^F, ^H, ^D, ^A, ^E, ^T, etc). Add ^U to the mix to clear the command-line completely.
Don’t overlook the elegant double-escape completion feature that works so well with the other editing commands. For example, type % cd ~/De and then type ESC-ESC to automatically complete “Desktop”.
While I’m speaking about Terminal, don’t forget that you can always drop a file icon onto the command line to see its path. That includes the little icon found in the title bar of most documents, such as the ones in TextEdit. Save your text file and then move the cursor over the little icon in the title bar. Press the (left) mouse button, Wait for the icon to turn dark and then drag it out of the title bar and drop it onto the command line or into any other program for that matter. (Again, this won’t work unless the document has been saved. The “saved” title bar icon is dark. The “modified” icon is slightly lighter in hue.)
Finally, for extra Terminal-fu, you may want to bone up on the “bang” commands that work in nearly all the shells provided in OS X (/bin/*sh*). !! means repeat the previous command. !-2 means repeat the command just before the previous one (aka “go back 2 items in the history list”), and !5 means do command 5 in the history list. A bang followed by a few letters searches for the previous command that started with those letters, e.g. !cc reruns the last cc command issued.
I think I’ll stop now.
Khoi Vinh’s idea for a software typewriter is intruiguing, but I can’t see myself wanting to use such an app for writing.
As someone who learned the basics of journalism on a typewriter bought from a market stall for £10, the idea of emulating one in software does not appeal to me. Working on my typewriter was slow and frustrating.
Just because a typewriter doesn’t allow you to go back and edit, and lacks commands like cut, copy and paste, that doesn’t make it a more productive writing environment. I can’t see myself wanting to go through any text I’d written this way, because it would be crammed full of struck-out errors which I’d then have to manually remove before doing anything else with the text.
The other aspect of Khoi’s Blockwriter idea is that it blocks out all other distractions while using the computer, but again I find this bemusing. I’m inclined to agree with the comment by Narayan, who says:
Obviously working practices are a personal thing, but it amazes me that people cripple their working tools when for me, a good work environment and some self-discipline seem to be all that’s necessary to get work done well and efficiently.
Right. If you want to avoid distractions on your computer, the best way to do it is to be disciplined and switch them off. Personally, I’m a fan of the zoom feature built into the OS, which you can switch on at any time, from within any app, just by hitting Option+Command+8. With it you can create a near-as-dammit fullscreen editing experience, effectively “hiding” all those distracting browsers and email clients. But as Narayan said, the best way to deal with them is simply to Quit them, and use a little willpower to get your work completed before starting them up again.
The MacBook Pro 17″ ships with 1GB 667 DDR2 - 1 SO-DIMM Ram in a single chip, which I very much appreciate. The laptop only has two Ram slots, and you certainly don’t want to mess around with 512MB DIMMs… you might as well put potato chips in those slots.
But don’t stop at 1GB, leaving that second slot open. As you calculate your budget for this machine, figure on 2GBs Ram. I ordered my additional Ram separately ($200 from 3rd party vs $300 from the Apple Store for a 1GB DIMM). The upshot is that I went 3 days working with the MacBook Pro on 1GB Ram. That was 3 days too long. Don’t let this happen to you…
I’ve been an avid Emacs user since college. I used it (along with LaTeX) to write, edit, and publish all my essays and theses. It was my FTP client, my mail reader, and, on occasion, my browser. I’ve used it to write web pages, screen plays, comic books, and every non-cocoa program I’ve ever compiled. Seeing Emacs on the command line was what convinced me OS X was a good idea. Finding a carbon port of it was a prerequisite of my moving to a Mac.
After all these years together, why am I now unceremoniously dumping Emacs without so much as a small redeeming twinge of guilt? It’s all because of this spunky little editor called TextMate. With all the love I have for Emacs, making the move to TextMate is still a no-brainer. Why? Two simple facts:
It is often said that even Steve Jobs may have failed at saving Apple after returning to the company if it hadn’t been for Microsoft’s promise to keep offering a Macintosh version of its flagship Office package. Most of us need to sometimes write letters, run presentations, calculate spreadsheets, etc., so Apple does indeed need to make sure that an “industrial strength” office package is available for the Mac, especially if they want to lure business users over to the platform.
In a recent column, Robert S. Cringely has suggested that Apple should adopt an open-source office package in order to be less dependent on Microsoft, and that OpenOffice.org would be a good choice to build upon. While I do think that Apple’s adoption of open source software generally is a good move, I sincerely hope that they won’t “port” OpenOffice.org outright, but continue to expand iWork, instead. Here’s why.
On my Windows machine at work, I use OpenOffice.org 2 almost daily. It’s a capable and feature-rich piece of software, and you definitely can’t beat it in the bang-for-your-buck arena. But its roots go back to the mid-nineties and it does show its age in some of its UI concepts. Let me point out just two differences between OOo and iWork to show you what I mean.
If you insert a table from the insert menu into your Pages document, it will behave like a real drawing object, i.e., you can select the table, you can drag-n-drop it around, you can select more than one table to make changes to both table’s properties in one go, etc. In OOo Writer, a table behaves more like fancy text formatting: a table cannot be selected per se, it cannot be re-positioned by dragging-n-dropping the whole table, you cannot select multiple tables, and, if you want to delete a table, you will run into one of the most un-intuitive features yet: instead of simply clicking on the table and hitting the delete key, you must place the text cursor inside one of the table’s cells and select a menu command specifically for deleting tables. That’s because the usual cut/copy/paste/delete commands only work on the table’s contents, and not on the table itself.
Just in case you’re like me and occasionally get on a CLI bender…
Install mpg123 (via Fink or Darwinports).
Let’s say you have an existing iTunes-organized music folder at its usual location. Start by getting a list of all of the .mp3 files in that directory and its subdirectories, and saving the list to a file on your Desktop:
find ~/Music/iTunes -name "*.mp3" > ~/Desktop/allmp3s.txt
Next, we feed mpg123 the full list of mp3s as a playlist to randomize:
cat ~/Desktop/allmp3s.txt | mpg123 --shuffle --list -
And that’s that. If you’d like a playback time indicator, add a --verbose flag to the mpg123 command. Rock on!
Inside Lightroom is a new O’Reilly site loaded with tips and techniques for mastering Adobe’s breakthrough photo workflow application. Start by listening to an audio interview with published author Julianne Kost as she discusses Lightroom’s impact for digital photographers.
Then go the the Adobe Labs page and download the latest version of the public beta. To help you get comfortable quickly, also download our free 22-page “getting started” PDF by O’Reilly author, Ken Milburn, titled From Darkroom to Lightroom.
We’re firing up the blog posts too. For example, do you know how to add music to a Lightroom slideshow? Check out this slideshow tip to get the scoop.
Lots more to come… stay tuned.
My iPod nano starts to reset when I press Select on the Music menu item (and no other item) every few months. The first time it started happening, I sent the nano to Apple for repair. However, it was sent back with a note saying that no problem was found with the unit. So, here’s a couple of theories…
Rich Siegel wrote N Reasons Why You Should Send Me Scotch, and most of them make some sense. An oldie, but a goodie.
But wait, what’s this? Google Trends? What does it say about, let’s see now, BBEdit and TextMate?
Two low-cost drawing apps, compared: iDraw and WouldjaDraw. They both have a lot going for them.
Dragging text to a Dock icon works in BBEdit, too.
Would you trust anyone selling a “PowerPC G6 Macintosh”. No, neither would I, and neither would The Inquirer.
From the .Mac blog: your iDisk Public folder is now much easier to use: “Simply entering the URL idisk.mac.com/membername-Public now produces a page that automatically includes download links for whatever’s currently in membername’s Public folder.”
In an attempt to cross promote my latest MacDevCenter article, I offer you a bunch of short iTMS songs. Because each song is under 30 seconds in length, you can download them in their entirety to your Mac or iPod. The article provides you the how-to, this post lists some of my favorite tracks.
Own a MacBook Pro? Tired of the incessant whining, heat problems, or that faint lone cow mooing somewhere inside your MBP?
Well, the good folks over at the OSx86 Project have designated Saturday, May 20th The Day The Whining Ends, and I have to say, I’m totally onboard with this.
The plan, as you can imagine (if you haven’t clicked one of the above links) is for everyone with a problematic MacBook Pro to call Apple’s technical support specialists and inundate them with requests to fix the problems we’re all finding in the MBP line.
However, I’d like to suggest taking this another step further. Rather than just calling Apple Care to complain and have them do nothing, get in their face. How, you ask? Well, if you have an Apple Store near you, take some time and drag your MBP down to the Genius Bar for a little fun. Rush the bar, sort of like last call on St. Patrick’s Day, except instead of wanting the final pint of Guinness, tell the Apple Store Geniuses that you want your MBP fixed of whatever ails it. Personally, I’m a little tired of hearing MBP moo at me while editing. I’m also tired of the whining noises that occasionally come from it. And, if it wasn’t for the fact that I had a vasectomy a few years ago (okay, I know, I’m over-sharing a bit there), I would also worry that certain parts of my body might bake, burn, and fall off.
So go on, set an iCal event for May 20th and tromp down to your local Apple Store to complain about whatever ails your MacBook Pro. I’m sure the one thing that Apple doesn’t want is a long line of customers in the store complaining about their latest product line. Our request is simple: Fix our machines and we’ll quietly go back to working (and hopefully we won’t take part in a class action lawsuit, either).
So, NetNewsWire 2.1 is out and, as many folks have pointed out, it boasts plenty of interesting new features, most notably automatic synchronizing with NewsGator’s online feed reading service.
What you may not have realised is that signing up for a NewsGator account is a requirement of your continued use of NetNewsWire.
You’ll probably remember that Ranchero, the company responsible for NetNewsWire, was purchased by NewsGator last year.
If you dismiss the NewsGator signup window that appears when you first run 2.1, you will be able to continue using NetNewsWire just fine for 30 days, at which point it will appear again and ask you to sign up.
The official upgrade instructions to say that need to complete the sign-up, even if you have a old NetNewsWire license.
NewsGator explains that this is because Ranchero used Kagi for online payments, while NewsGator has its own payment system, and they need to tie the two together.
For years, I was in love with Mail.app. I even praised its glory in a previous entry about Mail and Mailsmith. Today, I can now officially announce our (putative) break-up. It is a break-up full of hope but also of anxiety. Here is why.
I thought/hoped I would have a shiny new Intel-based iBook/MacBook on order by this evening. But, it looks like the latest rumor (along with the April 1 Apple 30th anniversary non-event) fizzled. So, here’s my list of other dumb things to wait for while I continue to wait for a MacBook (or whatever it will be called)…
Imagine for a second that the Google index is a big sheet of glass. Now, imagine GoogleBot is a big, fat, black marker. How do you go removing traces of ink? In other words, how do you get GoogleBot to de-index .Mac pages?
iTunes and Indian Music. I stumbled across a fascinating post at the “One Where” blog which describes why Indian Music can be a poor match to iTunes. Problems include improper artist categorization and spelling, a lack of Bollywood know-how, and over-inflated prices. Well worth a look.
Cool Apple URLs. This post at MyMac.com offers a list of oddball Apple URLs you may never have known about, from NSA Panther docs to senior Apple Exec bios. Submit a comment and encourage the author to find more.
Overclocked Core Duo. Macenstein reports that the good geeks over at Cooling-Masters have overclocked a Core Duo to 3.8 GHz.
iTunes Media Store…? Ars Technica has a nifty article discussing whether Apple iPod/video/iPhone convergence is right around the corner.
The webserver in VoodooPad. Gus, that is simply a fantastic idea.
Was the last StickyBrain release “Yojimboed”? There’s a lively arguement in the comments.
M-Tron: a Mellotron emulator! Cool!
Instant Gallery makes instant galleries. Nicely done, too.
Marilyn Carolyn came up with a list of five reasons why the iPod shuffle is the ultimate MP3 player, and I agree with most of what she says (although I wouldn’t have used the word ‘ultimate’ myself). The shuffle’s lack of screen is a bonus, in my opinion; the extra battery life gained by not having one more than outweighs the benefit of reading artist and title info while listening to songs. It’s my music collection, anyway; I know which song is which, I don’t need to look at a screen to check.
Rob Manuel, who many years ago built me a web site CMS in exchange for a four-pack of beers and a packet of ciggies, has just gone and got himself a Mac. And rather to his own astonishment, he loves it: “But I’ll tell you something about this ’switch’ business. Ex-smokers are always the most irritating type of non-smoker. Are ex-PC users the most boring type of Mac user? Er.. I suspect they are, so if you see me knocking about, remind me to shut up about Macs.”
I have achieved nirvana:
Yes, after I’ve-lost-count-how-many years of using email and two or three years of vague leanings in the direction of Getting Things Done, this week I finally managed to do something I wish (now, with hindsight) I’d done a long time ago: I emptied my inbox.
I used to treat it as not just as an inbox, but also as a things-that-are-waiting-for-something box, and as a result messages would disappear from view, and therefore from memory. Weeks would go by and I’d suddenly remember something important, and end up scrolling through my inbox hunting down the email that would tell me about it.
So this week I declared an end to this unhelpful practice. I created a new “Pending” mailbox, into which I could throw things-waiting-for-something, then spent about an hour (that’s all it took) going through the contents of my inbox and dealing with it; deleted, replying, and archiving as necessary.
And this is what I’m left with. An empty inbox, waiting to be filled. I have a new rule for my working day: this box always gets emptied, no matter what.
It’s only been a day, but already I can see the benefits.
News Flash: Buffy & Firefly episodes for sale at the iTMS.
Sci Fi Pulse debuted today. It’s got a lot of great features–but it’s no ABC. When you visit the ABC interactive TV site, you’re guaranteed to find the day-after latest episodes of some of their top shows. Sci Fi Pulse also offers full-length episodes, but in no coherent on-demand or day-after presentation. Instead, you get the standard behind-the-scenes filler (it’s pretty cool as filler goes) and a sample “taste this” episode, in this case Battlestar Galactica’s “Scar”.
Scar is an action-packed season 2 thrill-ride which struggled to play back over my DSL connection. ABC had the same problem, but courteously informed me that the video playback would be jerky given my connection speed. Pulse also seems to lack the integration with advertising snippets that ABC is pulling off so well during its two-month trial (set to end on June 30th).
Local stations are hardest hit when networks go digital. Fortunately ABC and it seems Fox as well are bringing their broadcast affiliate stations into digital revenue sharing deals.
Top 10 tips for Mac users getting started with Windows - Microsoft makes things plain for people wondering what to do with their new copy of XP running in Virtual PC. Might come in useful for Boot Camp users, too.
SyncupX is a tool for backing up external disks, USB drives and so on. “A note on security: You probably don´t care so much about the security of your OS, but we do. When backing up system files or the like it is necessary to run the backup task as root. This is for some reason and not just anyone on a system should be allowed to do so. For now SyncupX does only allow you to do that if you ARE root or use the headless mode with proper authentication prior to each backup.”
Oh nice: The Quiz Press is a simple to create quizzes for print or web. Here’s what the app looks like in use:
When you preview a quiz as a web page, it actually creates it as a .swf Flash file, a nice approach. Also, the word “thwart” appears in the preferences, a feature in itself in my opinion.
Otto’s Garage is a weblog about Automator stuff; delve into the archives, there’s some good tips to be found.
ATPM has an excellent review of that excellent backup application, SuperDuper.
So, are we going to see some new iBooks/MacBooks tomorrow? Wait and see!
Apple Computer has won its court fight with Apple Corps, the Beatles’ record label. The two companies began legal proceedings because Apple Corps accused Apple Computer of overturning a 1991 agreement that it would not enter the music business.
Apple Corps argued that by using the Apple Computer logo on the iTunes Music Store, Apple Computer was breaking the agreement.
This morning at the High Court in London, Judge Edward Mann in London that Apple Computer was using the logo to identify its online store but not the music the store sells; therefore the 1991 agreement was not in breach, and Apple Computer could continue to operate the iTMS as before.
Apple Corps will have to pay costs for both sides, and the judge granted permission for it to appeal the ruling.
Opinion
Most of this case rested on the use of the Apple Computer logo, and that people might perhaps get confused about which logo represented which company:
Confusing? No, I don’t think so either. Personally, I don’t see what the fuss was all about.
Update:
Apple Corps said it would go ahead with an appeal.
Core Data (along with Tiger) has been out in the wild for over a year, now. As a result, most of the whys? and hows? of CD have been answered at great length in mailing lists and updated documentation. A question that still gets asked on a fairly regular basis, though, is when? When should I use Core Data in my application?
The flip answer is, “Whenever you can!” Core Data is an incredibly powerful technology that crosses “Model” off the MVC list of Things Programmers Worry About. Unfortunately, not every program is a good fit with CD, and sometimes trying to wedge an inappropriate app into the CD mold can cause more complexity than it banishes. So how do you know if your app is a good candidate for CD use? Your answers to the following three questions will let you know.
USAToday reports CBS will offer free, original entertainment on their new “innertube” service. By “free original entertainment”, they seem to mean behind the scenes snippets of the sort that were always available on CBS.com, now packaged into a new and really irritating interface. You’ll find the same Amazing Race insider videos and Daytime Emmy Awards red carpet chatlets and so forth. However, the new interface offers the uplifting option of actually blurring the text as you select it, providing the added bonus of instant migraine headaches.
You won’t find day-after on-line streaming, the way you will with ABC’s far superior site. Next down the line? Sci Fi will debut its new Sci Fi Pulse channel tomorrow. They promise to offer complete, uncut episodes, movies, as well as deleted scenes and behind-the-scenes featurettes.
The fine people at VideoLan.org have released version 0.8.5. Notable improvements include: Firewire DV-in support for Linux, more satellite DVB decryption modules, better real audio support, Macteltosh support, and lots of OS X UI enhancements. Until now, I’ve been using VLC 0.8.1, mostly so I could countinue to play FLV files. Not only did my FLV files play nicely in 0.8.5, the improved window design makes it unnecessary to keep both the playback and controller windows open at the same time. Very nice update.
iDisk uses DAV for remote disk mounting, and iCal lets me publish my calendars to a personal DAV server. Presumably, iPhoto photocasts to the iDisk DAV system, and iSync does the same. So why can’t I use my own DAV server to store all of my iSync data? Why can’t I photocast to my own DAV server?
Naturally there’s a market-related reason: Apple wants to sell .Mac accounts. Fair enough. But if that’s the case, why do they allow iCal to play outside the sandbox? It feels inconsistent. Or are there technical reasons for the difference I’m not seeing here?
I understand Apple wanting to sell “advanced” features to power users, but I also think that increased openness / interoperability would make OS X more attractive to many power users. They’d still sell plenty of .Mac accounts to the general public. Openness expands the reach of systems and makes people feel warm-n-fuzzy. Artificial limits leave a sour taste in people’s mouths.
Apple, here’s one of my Leopard wishlist items (if it’s not too late): Start assuming that WebDAV is a feature to which many customers of external hosting systems have access - not some kind of magic pixie dust available only to .Mac users.
One may or may not like round corners. That, after all, is a matter of taste. But I somehow fail to see what’s wrong with using JavaScript to artificially round corners on some divs. Could you enlighten me?
I’ve been pretty busy lately, what with a move back to Boston and catching up on various work projects (i.e., books), but thought I’d take some time to spew out some random Mac-related bits and bobs…
Well, that’s enough bits for today. It’s time to head back to the trench and edit some books.
Ciao for now!
As I think about the tremendous success of Google, I don’t think about the details of what they’ve done (although the quality is certainly there) so much as I think about the bare fundamentals of why they’ve been so successful. It’s simple really: they’ve identified their target audience (Joe User) and tailored their webapps accordingly (keep Joe User happy about 80% of the time, exceed expectations more than not, etc.)
That sounds pretty obvious, right? Well, I think that taking that basic idea a bit further can give us a good indication of what exciting things may lie ahead — but first let’s briefly recall what Joe User likes to do. Let’s see: check e-mail, send instant messages, keep a calendar, crunch some numbers in a spreadsheet, and do some word processing. Oh yea, and then there’s that whole “search (and buy stuff) on the internet thing.’
I don’t have as much time to play video games as I’d like (who does?) so when I do play, I tend to gravitate towards engaging games that call upon the skills that I honed during my youth. (Some might call this evidence of a misspent youth, but I disagree.)
Um, in other words, I’m a sucker for any game that is vaguely “retro” in its approach, game play, or style.
Big Fish’s new Mystic Inn caught my eye because it seemed like it was reminiscent of the arcade game Tapper. That was one of my favorites, and I also really enjoyed the ColecoVision version, too.
I was pleased to find that I was right about Mystic Inn. It has much of the same qualities as Tapper, but it is updated in many fun and clever ways. In addition to serving drinks you have to seat customers, deal with “to go” orders, and handle an ever increasing menu. Unlike Tapper, you don’t have to pick up the empties, but there is still a critical time element involved; your customers won’t wait forever.
One thing I had to get used to is that all the customers are doll-like wizards (inexplicable, really) and boy are they thirsty. Seriously, these witches go through a tray of sparkly purple potions like Vegas bachelorettes shooting JägerBombs.
The trial period is plenty long to decide if the game has staying power for you, so give it a whirl. If you have the time, of course. Oops, I gotta go. Table 3 needs another round…
Here’s a neat trick for turning newly-imported photos into a fresh album in iPhoto. And did you know about “New playlist from selection” in iTunes?
GTD nuts: anyone tried Hot Plan?
The Powersquid surge protector looks like, um, a squid. Apple Matters says: “The protection it provides to your equipment is superior and well worth the cost of this product … And with it’s unique design, you won’t feel compelled to shove it under the desk like you currently do for your powerstrips. The cephalopod design takes a garbled mess of electrical cords and turns it into a work of art.”
Make Thunderbird look like Mail. Well, if you must.
India’s MoneyControl blog is now reporting the Leopard+BitTorrent rumor from yesterday as “fact”… you might want to wait for the official release before saying that, guys.
Terminal alternatives. Altermintives?
Camino 1.0.1. Hooray!
TextMate tricks, including an awesome-sounding hack for using TextMate as Mail’s external editor. Cor.
What do you do when your QuickTime movie has ugly artifacts around the borders? Use QuickTime Pro’s unlikely Mask feature to slice ’em off. Here’s how.
For the recent O’Reilly Digital Media feature on composing music for mobile games, author Peter Drescher sent several movies of expert gamer Lucas Finklestein playing on a T-Mobile Sidekick. Due to the camera position, though, the movies had enormous black borders. Not only did that look strange, the borders bloated the file size. (See Figure 1.)
Fig. 1: The original movie had big, ugly black borders, but QuickTime Pro’s Crop command snips out time, not area. What to do?
I can’t add too much to the chorus of people who like Super Duper as a Mac OS X backup utility, mainly because I don’t use it that way. (For backups I faithfully use psyncx.)
However, I am a very happy Super Duper customer. I use it because most of the time my primary computer is a desktop iMac. But when I have a presentation to give, or I’m otherwise going to be out of the office, I use Super Duper to copy my /Users directory to a PowerBook. This ensures I have all of my files (and the different user accounts that I use) with me when I need them. When I get home another Super Duper session back to the iMac and I’m once again current and have all the changes I made while on the road. Because I have to do this somewhat regularly, I use the “changed files only” option to reduce the time it takes; but overall it’s definitely fast enough and very, very convenient.
I know that I’m missing out by using Super Duper as a one trick pony, but it’s a good trick that is essential for my current working style, so I’m happy. If you’re faced with a similar need, I suggest you give it a try.
The Get a Mac ad campaign. Now, I know it only makes a positive verbal mention of Microsoft (”We both run Microsoft Office”), but if I were on the Windows development team I’d feel a little uneasy about this. It just seems a little … aggressive. Is that the right word? And another thing: by making the PC guy look like a dork, isn’t Apple being a bit insulting (just a bit, mind you) to a lot of potential customers?
Rob at MacOSXhints.com asks: Does anyone even use Sherlock and Watson anymore? The comments to the post make the answer clear: no.
Ever wondered how to add the iPhoto image browser to your application? Involking the iPhoto browser, (or the iTunes browser, for that matter) is as simple as running a one-step Automator action. VoodooPad creator Gus Mueller points out that when combined with a method for programmatically running Automator Workflows, this becomes a quick solution to the problem.
John Gruber: Good journalism: “If Goodin wanted to be reasonable or accurate, he could have written a story titled “Some Guy Double-Clicked a Trojan Horse Virus for Mac OS X but It Didn’t Actually Spread to Anyone Else”, but what kind of story would that be? OK, it’d be a true story, but it wouldn’t be a good story.”
Fiendish Master Plan: “So basically, you can create and add to an arbitrary number of running lists (the names and nature of which are up to you) from within a single text file.” I should so be trying this out.
Finally, an intriguing rumor: what if (warning: popups, sheesh) Apple built BitTorrent into Leopard, and offered users iTunes credits in exchange for helping out with the huge bandwidth implications of future online video/movie retail? Now there’s an idea.
Like a lot of folks, I have multiple email accounts in Mail.app, checked automatically on a fairly rapid schedule (5- or 15-minute intervals usually). While the program’s Bayesian spam filtering is quite spiffy most of the time, there are occasional “false negatives” that get through. In addition, when I’m busy working it gets to be annoying to be bothered checking email when often it’s not that important.
A couple of years ago, I decided to leverage the power of the say command (man say for more info), which converts text to speech, and use its -o option to create .aiff files.
On Sunday I took out my Canon S410, turned it on, and received the dreaded E18 error. After googling frantically, I was able to pinpoint the problem as a misadjusted lens housing. I adjusted the lens casing by hand until it clicked into place and the error went away. For now.
So I’m about to go and start taking pictures when I notice that there’s already pics on the memory card. Quite a few pictures, in fact. All of them taken from the strangest point of view–just a couple of feet off the ground.
Thus, I offer to you a Toddlers-Eye view of my house through the magic of iPhoto and iTunes. And yes, I did have to clean itty bitty finger prints off the lens and LCD screen.
There’s a lot that’s wrong with iWeb, but one of the most insanely annoying things is the way it allows you to create supposedly separate web sites, but insists on uploading the content of all your sites to any server you might try to connect to.
Enter iWebSites. This neat little chunk of donationware messes (in a nice way) with the data stored in ~/Application Support/iWeb/Domains.sites. This is where iWeb stores all its stuff; site settings, pages you’ve created within the app, but not HTML you’ve exported.
Consequently it helps you manage a series of separate sites in iWeb. You can choose one as the default - the one that will open if you simply launch iWeb - and can choose which site you wish to open by just selecting it in the list and clicking “Open now in iWeb”. To use it, you have to learn to launch iWebSites first, before launching iWeb itself, but that’s a pretty shallow learning curve.
MSNBC reports that Apple has finally renewed those contracts with those four largest record companies and the iTunes prices will remain at $0.99 per track.
In Smart Home Hacks, Michael Ferguson (creator of the Mac home automation application XTension) contributed “Hack 54 - Monitor Your Driveway” which describes his techniques for knowing when a vehicle has entered his property and when it has arrived at the house. It uses some simple, but useful, scripting along with motion detectors and a photo-electric beam.
Neil Cherry, on his Linux home automation resource list, pointed me towards an interesting alternative approach by Fred Stelter, as published in Linux Journal. Fred’s techniques uses a serial I/O box, a magnetic sensor, and some clever Python scripting.
When it comes to home automation, knowing multiple approaches allows you to choose (or more likely, combine) what works for you.
After the Boot Camp beta came out, I got a lot more excited about a MacBook Pro, so I ordered a refurbished unit from the Apple Store (with plans to sell my PowerBook and my PC laptop before the finance charges catch up with me). I usually place my computer on a CoolPad, so I didn’t notice that the bottom of my case was warped. But I went on the road shortly after the MacBook arrived, and I was using it on a hotel desk when I realized it was scraping the desk surface every time I moved it.
I slid a business card underneath it and dragged it across the front, and was upset to find out that it got stuck about halfway across.
Since I was close to San Francisco, I took it into the Apple Store, and I explained my problem to the employee who greeted me (Jeffrey), who naturally sent me to the Genius Bar. I got in the queue, and was helped by Justin, who took it into the back, probably did something that I was better off not seeing :-), and returned with the MacBook and slid a business card underneath, which moved the whole way unimpeded.
This was my first Genius Bar experience, and I’m impressed. I wish I could get that kind of instant service for all my gadget woes!
Not long after I posted about how OS X users might employ Automator to manage separate location-based workspaces, Mac Devcenter reader Mark Hunte got in touch with a more refined and elegant solution to the problem.
Here’s how Mark suggests doing things, again in Automator but with a twist of Applescript:
From the “Finder actions”
1. Get Specified Finder Items. (Select the “work” folder)
and then:
(Select the “road” folder)
Pay attention to the order, its important later. (Work first, Road second)
From the “Automator actions”
2. Run Applescript
on run {input, parameters} display dialog "Where are You Today?" buttons {"Work", "Road", "Cancel"} default button 3 (*The order is the same as above - Work first Road second *) set the button_pressed to the button returned of the result if the button_pressed is "Work" then set input to item 1 of input else if the button_pressed is "Road" then (*again The order is the same as above - Work first Road second *) set input to item 2 of input else end if return input end runFrom the “Finder actions”
3. Open Finder Items (open with: Default Applications.) Save as application. and put in Login items.
Watch the latest eps of Lost, Desperate Housewives, Alias and Commander in Chief here. You need Flash 8.
On the main page, click “Launch”. A new brower window opens Ignore the egregious UI-design, and click on any show to rotate it to the front. Click on the show again to launch Play mode. Click the Play button.
If your connection speed is less that 500kbps, you’ll get a “Your View Experience May Suck Because You’ve Got A Crap Internet Connection” message. (aka “Your viewing experience may be less than optimal because your bandwidth appears to be below 500Kbps. Click on the close button to remove this message.) Click on the X to close the message and proceed with playback.
With luck, you’ll start to watch. Without luck, you may have to keep clicking around until playback starts. And you’ll probably run into a few commercials along the way.
Update: Outside the US? Look here for info about watching from abroad.
Over time, some programming habits become so ingrained that they extend a language’s syntax into a personal dialect. For example, one gets so used to certain variable names that you know at a glance exactly what they mean, whenever they’re deployed. For example, I overuse rizlen to mean the length of a string or array returned from a function call. Results length, rizlen. I’ve been doing it so long, it’s become brainless habit.
What programming idioms have you incorporated into your style? Which ones do you regret? Are they a force for good? Do they hamper communications with other programmers? Let me know in the comments. I’m curious to find out how other people have (or have not) developed their own idiom.
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