iCalamus.net - sometimes they come back ... (hey, what's the panic, they only want to eat your brain!)
mac-os-x - 12.1.2006 - 5.10.2006
Vmware how to - OSx86 - a guide on how to run Mac OS X under VMWare on a regular PC.
Merlin XU870 3G HSDPA 7.2 ExpressCard - Direct UMTS in the MacBook Pro?
Update accelerates Parallels Desktop for Mac OS X - hopefully the support for non-US keyboards will finally be worth something. That is currently the most severe drawback of Parallels.
MacWeb3D - everything about virtual worlds on the Macintosh
Apple - Support - Download TechTool Deluxe - quite useful for Apple Care users: the latest TechTool version, which, for a change, shouldn't shred the disk structure ...
beaTunes ~ build better playlists - automatically analyze and classify iTunes libraries.
Suitable Systems / SeisMac - Record vibrations with the Sudden Motion Sensor of the MacBook Pro.
Textureshop - generates tileable textures based on parameters for random generators. Interesting idea, can definitely deliver nice results with some tinkering.
Tinderbox: Tinderbox 3.5 - many features sound interesting, but somehow this will be the Emacs of the outliner ...
Exploring Cocoa with F-Script - interesting article about the object system of OS X
StepTalk(GNU Scripting Framework) - now available in a version for Mac OS X!
Medallia Blog: SmackBook Pro - use the motion sensor of the new MacBook Pro to switch between virtual desktops. Just give the MacBook Pro a slap ...
Safari Tidy plugin - tidy as a Safari plugin. Nice. Safari is slowly growing up.
MyTunesRSS - nice little tool, starts a web server and generates dynamic podcast feeds (as well as a simple web interface) from the iTunes library.
Rogue Amoeba - Nicecast for Mac OS X - Stream iTunes to a ShoutCast server (or locally on the LAN).
New MacBooks - sorry, but a notebook with chipset graphics instead of mobile ATI and then still 5 cm wider and 1 cm deeper - something like that is no replacement for a 12" PowerBook. I hope Apple comes to their senses ...
Critical security vulnerabilities in Mac OS X - yuck. Please people at Apple - get your act together and use current and fixed versions of the various libraries. Otherwise, I might as well install Windows in the long run ...
Apple Converts Xserves from PowerPC to AMD
Wow, I didn't realize that Apple is transitioning the XServe to AMD processors. I wonder if Intel agrees with their assessment of server performance?
The Mac OS MUD Zone: Clients - lots of MUD clients for OS X.
MudWalker - A MUD Client for Mac OS X - can be used for LambdaMOO (hey, I don't want to just sit around stupidly in the hotel tonight!)
Mac OS X Security Challenge
The Mac OS X Security Challenge by the University of Wisconsin is a much more realistic variant of the rather dubious "30-minute hack" that is currently haunting the press and blogs. Because on the box hacked in 30 minutes, the attackers had a user account - it was therefore a simple privilege escalation, not a remote hack. The latter is quite different to set up, as you first have to get access to the machine.
Nevertheless, Apple should of course also take privilege escalations seriously - because, for example, on publicly accessible computers there are already some attack scenarios that are quite problematic - especially with alleged security features. For example, the encrypted home directory becomes a farce if multiple users can be logged in at the same time on the computer - the home directory is opened and mounted when the first user logs in, the second user can then simply look in. Apple should already improve at such points, of course also at the points where an unprivileged user can get root rights - because these are attack vectors for viruses and Trojans.
Hey, I don't feel like having similar nonsense like under Windows in the long run, so make sure you close the holes at Apple!
SharedAppVNC - interesting VNC variant that only replicates application windows, not the entire desktop. Also with special OS X support.
MacMini with Core-Duo
Sir Steve announces the MacMini Intel Core Duo - and I think I want one. After all, it's definitely nice to have two processors on your work computer. Especially if the chipset also steps up a bit - the one in the MacMini PPC is not exactly the fastest.
However, my dream setup (Core Duo, 2 GB Ram, 120 GB hard drive, Apple Care) would easily cost me 1500 euros. Ouch.
Disk Inventory X - also provides overviews of where disk space is lost, but with a very clever graphical display.
ID-Design, Inc. | WhatSize - provides a good overview of where disk space is consumed.
Monolingual - removes language versions of OS X that you never use. Brings back a lot of disk space.
Textpander - a very nice tool that automatically converts abbreviations into long texts. It works in all programs via the UI Scripting interface (so activate Assistive Devices in OS X Accessibility Preferences).
Hetima:SafariStand - yet another monster plugin for Safari that includes everything possible, filtering, colored source, thumbnail previews on tabs, page modification ...
Pimp My Safari - Plugins and tools around Safari.
SurfRabbit - and another Greasemonkey-like tool for Safari (I don't know if the Rabbits are written in JavaScript, but the effects are similar).
Google Macintosh Dashboard Widgets - what you see is what you get. Google Dashboard Widgets for Google.
Growl! - everyone knows it by now, visually appealing info windows, can also be used from scripts.
iWeb and its Output
I recently tested two different editors for easy website creation: Sandvox and Rapidweaver. Now I've also created a site with iWeb. Sandvox was out of the question due to its gigantic memory requirements, Rapidweaver already showed some nice and interesting features and was especially fast. But the styles were not as professional as those from Sandvox. How does iWeb perform?
Well, take a look at the site. Right away, I noticed a whole series of problem points:
- The style in iWeb looks much "slicker" than in the rendered output. Font rendering is not really good on websites with every browser.
- The idiotic redirection and rather unusual folder names. Sure, I can name my site differently - but why the hell should I rename my site just because iWeb makes a folder name out of it directly?
- The URLs are anything but beautiful - and I generally find redirection on the start URL stupid, you can really proceed more intelligently and use the default document meaningfully. And take a look at the blog pages, see what URLs they get. Disgusting.
- With Lynx, you can't use the whole thing at all. The redirects are wrong and the links are no longer displayed.
- Even if the HTML code is validated, it is still not really semantic. Headings are not set as Hx, but simply made larger by styles.
- Layouts are not made with tables, but DIVs are misused as tables through inline styles. Sorry, but just changing the tag does not make a layout beautiful.
- The source code is completely unreadable and shit.
- The basic pages constantly contain JavaScript for various purposes. And no, iWeb has definitely not informed about this in the editor. How can you expect Mac users to then also think about the problems of JavaScript-based elements later?
- Why a company that programs its own text-to-speech software, builds its own spell-check solutions and otherwise handles text relatively well, makes the shortening of blog post texts in such a way that it is cut off in the middle of a word, only Apple knows.
- Accessibility? We don't need no stinking Accessibility.
I hope Apple will improve this significantly. I mean, semantic layout and source code that complies with accessibility guidelines is really nothing new. Why Apple produces such lousy HTML code is a real mystery to me.
Tomato Torrent - a nice BitTorrent client for OS X.
8-p.info - Creammonkey - something similar to Greasemonkey, but for Safari.
Browsers are not program starters
Apple Safari automatically executes shell scripts - more precisely, a whole range of techniques come into play. The trigger, however, is the stupid habit of Safari to automatically start the appropriate viewer for certain file types - and sometimes incorrectly assign file types. In general, it is simply a bad idea when a browser tries to classify downloads as safe or unsafe and then passes them on to an external program - because this external program is usually in no way prepared to receive unsafe content. As soon as the browser misjudges, the trojan is functional.
So people: turn off the "execution of safe file types" in Safari. And Apple could take this as an opportunity to finally remove this function from Safari. The few extra clicks won't kill the user ...
Update: and here's the reason why I get a bit pissed off about such bugs - sorry, but this is Microsoft-World, not Unix-World. Please pull yourself together and don't do such nonsense
Google Maps Plugin for Address Book - Brian Toth - a plugin for the Apple Address Book that allows you to jump directly to Google Maps from an address.
Eiffel For OS X - what you see is what you get. Only this terrible background graphic on the site ...
Overweight
Are the iLife and iWork application bundles from Apple: iLife 06 takes up 7.2 GB in the full installation and iWork 06 takes up 3 GB in the full installation. If you install both, you have a clean 10 GB less disk space. Ouch. That's a lot.
Unofficial documentation of iPhoto 6.0 photocasting feeds - Mark Pilgrim tears apart Apple's iPhoto RSS support. It's bad. It's really bad.
Ok, Sandvox doesn't just suck up hamsters
Found at Bill Bumgarner:
As it turns out, Sandvox silently installs Smart Crash Report in ~/Library/Input Managers/ when it is launched. As an input manager, SCR is thusly loaded into every Cocoa app launched and subsequently uses various non-supported mechanisms to modify the behavior of said application.
Sandvox installs a hack in the Input Manager - these are libraries that plug into the interface to modify application behavior. They usually overload system functions with their own code. Not a rootkit - they don't hide. But they may destabilize the system. And above all: they affect not just this one program, but all programs that use this mechanism.
Sandvox is off my disk, sorry, but I don't want something like this installed without a big warning sign and without asking. We're not under Windows ...
Ross Barkman's Home Page - Modem scripts for Mac OS and Mac OS X and various mobile phones.
RapidWeaver - the next website tool
RapidWeaver has been around for a while, but I hadn't seen it until now. Quite a funny idea: essentially a GUI editor for websites, not just individual pages. There are pre-made templates for various purposes (blogs, photo albums, etc.) and integrated, specialized editors for these elements. With a plugin API to program your own page types. But absolutely not WYSIWYG, just an integrated preview.
The HTML source - this is now my second great homepage tonight - looks somewhat okay. At least more than just DIV tags are used. However, the strange HEAD with all the LINK tags does irritate me a bit. But the result is already usable.
The templates themselves are not as slick as those from Sandvox - they seem a bit homespun and somewhat clunky (e.g., the font selection in the body text on my example page looks a bit ugly - I can't quite pinpoint what bothers me, but the Sandvox page just looks better).
What I don't like: only FTP and .Mac for publishing. SFTP is really not entirely new; this should be supported. Otherwise, it is most comparable to my good old PyDS for me - specialized editors for each content type with automatic rendering to HTML and automatic uploading to the server.
Oh, and the program handles 39 images in a photo album without any disasters, doesn't consume the computer's memory and small children to achieve the result.
First Test with Sandvox
Sandvox - the new GUI editor for websites, which was just introduced as a beta by Karelia - is really nice in concept. It offers an overall view of the website - and that is on the components of the website. Nicely structured, so that you can easily make changes to pages. The whole thing is also really easy to use - with nice wizards and good integration with iLife. Publishing is not only to .Mac, like with iWeb, but for example via SFTP to a normal server.
And Sandvox sucks hamsters through straws.
Sorry, but you can't put it any nicer. The thing is a complete and total catastrophe in the present second beta. I didn't give it many tasks - I didn't get that far. I created a homepage, a page with a single image, and a photo album. None of that is particularly difficult. The photo album was given 39 images - directly taken from iPhoto. That's not complicated, one would think.
But the software just sucks up 1.5 GB of memory because of these images and reduces a Mac Mini to a crawling snail. With every click in the navigation in the software, you wait for 10 or 15 minutes until the selected page appears. The created file with the site is by the way only 280 KB in size - why it then occupies so much memory, I don't even want to know ...
Additionally, it does offer nice publishing to servers - with a comfortable wizard for setup and checking. But this stupid wizard provides no meaningful information during the check and already gets a timeout with a simple SFTP connection - and that is on a server where I am already logged in via SSH in a terminal window in parallel.
I saved myself the trouble of realizing publishing in any other way (e.g. in a local directory and then subsequent copying to the server) in view of the horrendous memory and CPU load. That's why there are also no statements about the generated HTML.
Sorry, I understand that Karelia wanted to get the beta out quickly - especially in view of the iWeb announcement. But then maybe you should write that the software is completely unusable on a Mac Mini. Not even Aperture is such a resource hog ...
Sandvox Test Part 2
Well, of course, I couldn't leave it alone, so I struggled with the extremely slow part and replaced the 39-image album with a 6-image album. Still slow, but at least tolerable enough that I managed to publish locally and then manually transfer the files.
What stands out: the HTML code is actually quite usable. Without a stylesheet, the necessary skips over the navigation and the sidebar are included, and more tags than just DIVs are actually used. However, it also becomes apparent that there are extremely many DIVs with many classes inside - in principle, almost everything is divided. There aren't many P-tags and other logical structures (okay, I haven't written much text, but still, I would at least expect individual paragraphs). It looks better than the HTML from iWeb.
A number of bugs have also been noticed - but it is a beta after all, I don't see that as critically as the exorbitant memory usage. By the way, I deliberately only took one of the predefined stylesheets and didn't change much. I also created a movie page, but somehow the most important thing seems to be missing - the embedding of the movie. In any case, it offered my movie from iMovie but did not adopt it. Well, at least you are spared my silly babbling.
Fiddling with iWeb
If a software generates such HTML code, then it is definitely crap. And I don't particularly care if it comes from Apple. This is an absolute low blow to everyone who deals with semantic markup and everyone who deals with accessibility. Similar to the PhotoCasting debacle, Apple once again shows that they unfortunately tend to be "outside nice, inside crap" every now and then.
And quite honestly - not only is the code a catastrophe, but also the generated URLs - has anyone at Apple ever heard of human-friendly URLs? Oh, what am I asking, they don't even know RSS Enclosures ...
More about iWeb's HTML can be read at Todd Dominey.
Products - Flip4Mac WMV - maybe not quite as buggy as the toy player from MS. On the other hand - I hardly ever need a WMV player.
Apples Photocast Format
Apple now supports PhotoCasting - and Dave Winer comments on the format. In this case, I absolutely agree with him: the format is complete crap. On the one hand, they've invented something new instead of simply using Enclosures (which in RSS are exactly there for such purposes), on the other hand, the feed is also completely broken from beginning to end. What is this nonsense?