In the WebObjects 5.3 Release Notes I saw and immediately checked: WebObjects is now part of the XCode 2.1 (available for ADC members) distribution. I downloaded the over 700 MB and checked: yes, there is a WebObjects.mpkg in it. Quite strange, because so far WebObjects was not a cheap package - is now the whole deployment free, or do you still need some kind of runtime for the generated applications that then costs money again?
Muahahahaha, it's true. I can't believe it. They are really phasing out PPC in the long run and switching to that Intel junk. What a mess. Of course, Intel or AMD doesn't automatically mean bad computers - SUN has built some nice boxes and SGI had a few fine ones as well. And if Apple continues to be as stringent with the rest of the hardware, there won't be any major problems with stability and the system. And the fact that this will again open up the chance for clones is certainly not bad either. But who wants to see an Intel Inside sticker on their Apple? Disgusting.
The crucial thing remains, of course, the operating system - and OS X on Intel is still not Windows, just because the heart beats the wrong way and the processor wasn't co-designed by Motorola.
Oh, and of course, we will eventually be forced to use Intel's crappy DRM stuff...
Otherwise: there will be an emulator that will run PPC programs on Intel Macs if the application bundle doesn't already contain an Intel binary. Therefore, the transition will probably be relatively smooth for users - although PPC applications will then of course only run at a reduced speed. And it will probably become annoying for users that at some point various programmers will no longer generate PPC binaries - simply due to lack of hardware - and thus new versions and new programs will no longer run on the old Macs. Unless someone knits an X86 emulator for the PPC Mac in a similarly transparent manner (and with similar performance issues).
Update: whoa, the switch even made it into the Heute Journal
Mail.app under 10.4 always requires confirmation when first opening a connection to a server with a self-signed certificate - even though I have the certificate in my x509Ancestors KeyChain and have set it to always trust there, it just won't accept it directly. Does anyone have an idea how to get Mail.app to stop this nonsense? It's only when starting Mail.app, later when disconnecting and reconnecting it doesn't happen, but it's still annoying... The message always says "This certificate has no root certificate" - which makes sense, as it only signs itself. Somehow this is quite stupid - instead of simply believing "Always Trust" Apple thinks it knows better. I hate know-it-all software.
Anacron for Mac OS v10.4 (Tiger) - System/Disk Utilities is a port of Anacron to OS X with support for Tiger's new launchd. Anacron ensures that regular cleanup jobs are also triggered on computers that are not constantly running - otherwise, the log files will eventually overflow.
Don't ask me why Apple hasn't been delivering and installing this as a system component for a long time, as Apple users' desktop computers are rarely running nonstop - and there's nothing more unpleasant than systems whose log files explode. Whether they become larger than 2 GB or the disk is full or the backup takes unnecessarily long because of the large log files.
From the discussion Shirt Pocket Discussions - SuperDuper! and FileVault (a somewhat clearer explanation is in this discussion) it can be gathered that there are a few problems with SuperDuper! backups when using FileVault to encrypt your home directory: if the logged-in user is a FileVault user, their sparse image (the file where the actual home directory is located) is not backed up correctly and cannot be mounted correctly when booting from the backup.
The manufacturer suggests in the discussion to set up a second user who does not use FileVault and log out of the FileVault accounts to start a backup under this user.
Alternatively, you can of course create a separate backup for your home directory - the FileVault image is mounted normally when you are logged in. However, this means that the encryption is lost. This can of course be solved again with an encrypted SparseImage on a backup medium.
All in all, this is not the ultra-simple Mac user-compatible operation you would wish for. Precisely the home directory is the one that contains all the important things and whose contents you should back up regularly - but precisely this becomes cumbersome to back up as soon as FileVault is involved.
Of course, you can also do without FileVault - but somehow I don't want to entrust my private data on the notebook to an OpenFirmware startup password as the only security measure ...
As a follow-up to the previous entry about the problems with backing up FileVaults from an active FileVault account, I took a closer look at what Apple actually does for FileVault. I'm not particularly enthusiastic about the approach.
First of all, a FileVault is nothing more than a so-called Sparse Image - a disk image in which only the actually used blocks are stored. So if it is empty, it doesn't matter how large it was dimensioned - it only takes up a little disk space. With the stored data, this image grows and you can have it cleaned up - in the process, the data blocks that have become free (e.g. through deletions) are also released again in the Sparse Image, so the image then shrinks. Additionally, encryption is enabled for the FileVault images. The shrinking happens semi-automatically when logging out: the system asks the user if it may. If the user agrees, it is cleaned up. But this is only the mechanism of how the files are stored - namely as an HFS+ volume in a special file. But how is it automatically opened at login and how is it ensured that programs find the data in the right places where they look for it? For this, the FileVault image must be mounted. In principle, the process is the same as when double-clicking on an image file - the file is mounted as a drive and is available in the list of drives in the Finder and on the desktop. However, for FileVault images, the desktop icon is suppressed. Instead of the desktop icon and mounting to /Volumes/ as is usually the case, mounting a FileVault image is somewhat modified. And that is, a FileVault image is usually located in the user directory of a user as a single file. So for a logged-out user hugo, there is a hugo.sparseimage in /Users/hugo/. As soon as the user hugo logs in, a number of things happen. First, the Sparse Image is moved from /Users/hugo/ to /Users/.hugo/. And is no longer called hugo.sparseimage but .hugo.sparseimage. Then it is mounted directly to /Users/hugo/ (which is now empty), which is why it must also be pushed out of the user directory, as it would otherwise not be accessible if another file system were mounted over it.
Now the volume is accessible as the user's home directory. Additionally, all programs see the data in the usual place, as it is mounted directly to /Users/hugo and thus, for example, /Users/hugo/Preferences/ is a valid directory in the image. When logging out, the whole thing is reversed: unmounting the image and then moving it back and removing the /Users/.hugo/ directory. Additionally - optionally - compressing the image.
Now it also becomes clear what problem backup programs have: when the backup runs, the home directory is empty and the image is moved to the dot directory. Booting into such a created backup would not find the user's home directory and would present the user with an empty home - it would appear as if all files had been lost. This is also one of the major problems of FileVault: if the computer crashes while you are logged in, the directories and files are moved and renamed. So if you use FileVault and can't access your files after a crash: maybe it helps to log in with another FileVault-free user (which you should also have for backups!) and repair the home directory. I don't know if Apple's disk repair program would do that - so far, none of my FileVault installations have crashed. But for the emergency, you might want to remember this. Overall, the whole thing gives me a rather hacked impression - I would prefer if the whole system could do without renaming and moving. For example, the FileVault could simply lie peacefully next to /Users/hugo as /Users/.hugo.sparseimage and only be mounted - then backups would have no problems, as the structure between logged in and logged out would be identical. I don't know why Apple took this rather complicated form, probably because of the rights to the Sparse Image and the resulting storage location in the user's home directory.
Photon is a very nice iPhoto plugin that allows you to easily post pictures from iPhoto to a MetaWeblogAPI-compatible blog (e.g. WordPress). The pictures that were just uploaded come from it. Photon uses the image data in iPhoto, so you finally have something to give your pictures titles (with Snail ... I did it wrong - that's why the link is so cryptic). I like the plugin ... What doesn't work quite right again is using it with my own photo blog on hugoesk.de - there I use my own WordPress plugin that manages all the metadata. Let's see if I can hack something together that automatically adds the missing metadata (e.g. EXIF data and photo assignment) from MetaWeblogAPI posts via Photon, or if I will continue to work classically with file export from iPhoto and subsequent upload. By the way, the two uploaded photos were previously RAW images - iPhoto handles the RAWs of the 10D very well. And the new editing window in iPhoto is also quite usable. However, iPhoto has a stupid bug: it only writes reduced EXIF data to the JPG when exporting to disk. The aperture, time, and focal length are included - but the original date is missing. Quite annoying when the target software generates an entry date from it (as hugoesk does). In addition, iPhoto only imports the .CRW files, not the .THM files (which store additional setting data). On the one hand, these data are missing in iPhoto, and on the other hand, memory cards gradually fill up because the .THM files remain and take up space. At least when you use the delete originals option in iPhoto. I definitely have too many photo management systems in use.
At Schockwellenreiter seen: QTAmateur, a simple QuickTime player that can also export - could actually end the constant QTPro buying, because I actually only need very few of the export functions of QT.
Who doesn't feel like paying Microsoft for Virtual PC and isn't exactly thrilled by the other well-known alternatives, might want to check out a less known one: iEmulator PC Emulator for MAC OS X is an emulator for the Mac based on QEmu. The special feature: not only the normal 32-bit Intel chips can be emulated, but also the 64-bit ones, as well as Sparc, ARM, and PPC. Pretty cool, that thing. And for those who find even the 25 dollars for iEmulator too much (or are hardcore OSS users), there's QEmuX - a free graphical interface for QEmu on the Mac.
To take it for a test drive, you can get suitable pre-prepared images from FreeOSZoo.
In initial tests, I had the usual problem: the keyboard layout just doesn't fit. You can only get something similar to a German keyboard layout, it doesn't fit exactly - the umlauts are off, some special characters are wrong, the whole thing is quite rough in that regard. Not that Virtual PC is any better: I could never properly enter the angle brackets and the pipe symbol under Virtual PC (which is pretty stupid for programmers).
... to install Desktop Manager, set it to Transition Cube, and then constantly switch back and forth between two desktops just for the fun of the visual effect
PithHelmet is an ad blocker for Safari. Very similar in function to the AdBlocker for Firefox. Very practical, making Safari a quite interesting browser again. In addition, PithHelmet for Safari provides selective JavaScript suppression and similar mechanisms - just like OmniWeb does. However, one or two rules (especially the BadSense rule caught my attention) are a bit aggressive, but you can configure that well.
Safari WebDevAdditions is a developer toolbar for Safari - so display of block-level elements, links, etc. It makes a quite practical impression on me.
Saft is a kitchen-sink extension for Safari. Packed with features. However, it's shareware, and I haven't tried it yet.
Well, a story that naturally hits me now is the change by Apple to the processor fan's response threshold - something was changed with 10.3.3 and since then, the fan is basically always on in a 12" PowerBook (at least in the older ones - mine is still one with 867MHz). Annoying, that. Before, it was a nice quiet device, now it's noisy - especially when operating on the power grid. And this even when there is absolutely no activity on the box (MenuMeters shows absolutely low-level activity).
There used to be a software called Silent Night, which replaced two kernel extensions (AppleADM103x.kext and AppleADT746x.kext) with older versions and thus reset this control to old values (which, after all, did work). There is also a description of this available. But somehow, you can't find anything there anymore - the links are dead. Does anyone have a useful idea of what could be done? The 12" PowerBook unfortunately doesn't have the processor setting "automatic" (for some reason), but only "maximum" and "minimum" - and a castrated processor wouldn't be any better than a noisy fan. If it were automatically regulated, it would be okay, but as it is ...
Somehow, I find it pathetic that Apple doesn't offer a usable solution. Simply imposing fan noise on the user is quite harsh - especially since I couldn't find any documentation about it at Apple. Normally, you would at least expect a knowledge base article on this ...
... because you no longer change the standard web browser in the system settings, but in the settings of Safari, I find that quite wild.
Delicious Library - yep, it works! Awesome.
... is what Epson writes for the scanners under OS X. When you start the software, at some point - after the software has been successfully loaded - a message appears that it cannot be started. Of course, it works perfectly. And if you leave the software running and do nothing, the CPU load is enormous - always around 80% of the CPU is consumed by the waiting software. But if you then initiate a scan, i.e., the software actually does something, the load drops to 10%.
What kind of idiots does Epson actually employ in programming?
My Photoshop 7 no longer opens the file open dialog - it would rather crash. The file browser works, directly opening files also works, but File Open does not - crash. Strange - has anyone else been able to observe this? I have already reinstalled Photoshop, but it didn't help.
I need to urgently deal with the indexing issue, whether you can also include remote indexes or an indexer that indexes a database over the Internet. I would like to have my collected postings from my WordPress blog in my Spotlight index. That would be much more practical than opening a browser extra and searching here. And since I use this as a link dump and note blog anyway, I would finally be able to find the things I wanted to remember.
I was asked yesterday if I notice any difference in performance: yes and no. Yes, because all the display stuff is noticeably faster - especially browsers get their content displayed much quicker. There is a significant improvement here.
No, because the nice - yet useful - features like Spotlight and FileVault (which weren't available in Jaguar) also consume some of the system performance. Especially more intensive memory operations in my home directory are affected. On the other hand, the features are really useful, so I'm happy to pay the performance price.
So overall, the display is faster and the rest is not slower. Considering that I'm two major releases ahead on the same hardware as before (867 Mhz 12" PowerBook with 640 MB memory), this is a good result. The leap over two Windows versions certainly requires more frequent hardware upgrades to remain enjoyable.
Shoebox looks quite nice - a quite clever photo management with similar organization options through categorization as iView offers. I liked the quite high speed while playing around. However, I have already bought much more photo management tools than I can use, so I am practicing self-restraint here.
Just found in the VoodooPad bug database: version 2.1 will support Spotlight. Very good - I'm stuffing quite a bit of junk into my VoodooPad. And then I might actually be able to find it again.
I've now reinstalled my computer - I wanted to start fresh with the installation so that everything really works smoothly and no remnants from the Jaguar (I skipped Panther) cause any trouble. So I made backups and reformatted and set up the box. Everything went well. Dragged music via drag-and-drop into the iTunes folder, that worked too. Played the first purchased piece - I have to authenticate my computer. Hello? What? I'm using it on exactly the same computer I bought it on, but I have to authenticate myself?
DRM is simply an insult to adult customers.
Here, the Tiger is currently being installed. At the moment, most things still work, but I haven't installed everything that should be working yet. At least, the network is already working.
The Safari of OS X has a stupid bug: you can usually click on a defined label to toggle a checkbox. Only not with Safari. Annoying, that.
First Trojan for Mac OS X spotted - if there aren't any, do you write your own? Just a guess - the information at Sophos about the alleged Trojan is very thin. No information about the spread and no specific information about the removal of the Trojan, no detailed information about detecting the Trojan (port or similar) and no information about the installed files. Sorry, but this all doesn't sound very credible ...
AquaMacs is an Emacs build for OS X (unfortunately only from 10.3 onwards) that aligns more closely with the Mac OS X Human Interface Guidelines. Those who appreciate the high configurability of Emacs but not the rather sick interface and key binding for Mac users might want to check this out.
SPE-OSX comes from the same stable as AquaMacs and is a compilation of Stanis Python Editor - a very comprehensive IDE for Python. Also only available from 10.3.
Seashore is an image editor that builds on GIMP things and uses the same format - but for OS X. You should keep an eye on it, could be quite nice for some simple purposes.
BBEdit 8.1 brings Subversion support - maybe I should upgrade now, Subversion integration is quite practical.
Nette Butterbrotdose
Now comes the annoying setup and loading of all the data again. But I've already done the most important part. A few perversions are still outstanding (connecting my old Ergo-PS2-keyboard to the Mac via adapter and plugging in the ancient Logitech Trackman) and of course installing all those many little helpers that I have gotten used to in the last time (but I will probably use the opportunity again to take an axe to the selection).
Unfortunately, I couldn't afford an Apple display and now have a very bright BenQ that also shamelessly ignores the brightness control.
TidBITS: What You Get Is What You CSS, With Style Master 4.0 - sounds very interesting, a program with which you can edit CSS files and display them directly in connection with various websites. I must take a look at it, because manually tweaking CSS files and experimenting with them can sometimes be quite annoying. Being able to prepare something offline would be quite nice. Update: sorry, but after a first test, the thing has been kicked off the plate. Good idea, slow and unintuitive implementation.
In the Firefox Help: Tips & Tricks I found the tip on how to block advertising images and videos with a user CSS. Certainly old news for most, but new to me. Nice, because for example Camino doesn't have a proper ad blocker like Firefox (yes, I'm back to Camino again ...).
cyrusharmon.org: More GCC-XML (new and improved -- now with pr0n!) - crazy title, but a brilliant thing: SBCL gets native bindings to the Carbon API. And thus becomes the second Open Source Lisp system with integration into the OS X world (although Cocoa bindings would of course be cooler - but so far in the Open Source area only OpenMCL offers that).
Found on Schockwellenreiter, looked at and immediately dismissed as nonsense: Substance Softwares Phew. Reason:
NOTE: Phew currently doesn't backup the resource portion of files. In short you may find incomplete files on your backups (text clippings for example). This probably won't effect 99% of most peoples data but please check critical files after a backup to make sure.
This doesn't just affect rare files. All applications that use the Carbon API and don't come in bundles or need to store in bundles require the Resource Fork. With this backup software, you can't even back up a whole range of Carbon applications, as their Resource Fork is lost - and that's where the entire program code is stored.
Sorry, folks, but until this problem is fixed, it doesn't make sense to use it. I'll stick with psync and psyncX, which may have a rather primitive interface, but at least a backup to an external drive is not only complete, but even fully bootable. And they're not only free, but also open source.
Eine Reihe kleiner netter Freewaretools für OS X. Besonders gefallen mir die WordServices und den CalcService ) ein einfacher Formelevaluator als Service)
fjf's (Cocoa) AbiWord for Mac (MacOSX) - komisch, scheine ich bisher noch nicht gelinkt zu haben. Dabei ist Abiword wirklich eine nette Textverarbeitung. Sicherlich für Gelegenheitsschreiber durchaus eine Alternative zu grösseren Paketen.
Using the .Mac SDK - Objective C (und über PyObjC dann wohl auch Python) Schnittstelle zu .Mac.
Brian Mastbrook beschreibt sehr schön wie Quicksilver das beste aus den Welten der tastaturgesteuerten Interfaces und der grafischen Interfaces verbindet. Leider läuft QuickSilver erst ab 10.3, weshalb ich immer noch mit LaunchPad festhänge - das allerdings in den neuesten Versionen (bis auf den wirklich extrem lahmen Start) schon ganz gut mithalten kann.
Allgemein finde ich diese sich langsam entwickelnde Idee der Kombination von grafischen und tastaturgesteuerten Interfaces sehr angenehm. Grafische Oberflächen sind zwar gut in der Präsentation von komplexeren Strukturen (eine Verzeichnisstruktur erschliesst sich mir grafisch schneller als von der Shell), aber oftmals doch recht umständlich zu bedienen. Tools wie QuickSilver und LaunchPad helfen da ungemein. Vermutlich würde auch Apples Universal Key Access mir helfen - hätte ich 10.3 ...
Working with Automator beschreibt wie das neue Automationswerkzeug von Mac OS X 10.4 arbeitet. Macht neugierig ... (Gefunden beim Schockwellenreiter)
Entwicklung der Aqua-Variante von OpenOffice für Macintosh eingestellt - schade. Ok, NeoOffice/J ist eine brauchbare Alternative aber trotzdem, eine voll native OpenOffice Version hätte was gehabt.
Longhand ist ein netter kleiner Formelevaluator. Man könnte es auch Taschenrechner nennen, aber es ist ja ein Programm für den Desktoprechner. Sowas wie eine grafische Variante von bc - unterstützt auch beliebig grosse Zahlen. Nett und simpel für die kleine Berechnung zwischendurch.
Wenn ich mir den Featurevergleich vom jetzt kostenlos verfügbaren TextWrangler und BBEdit ansehe, dann gibt es eigentlich nur ein Feature, das mir fehlen würde: Shell Sheets. Diese Shell Sheets sind absolut genial - jedenfalls wenn man wie ich auf alten Macs mit MPW gearbeitet hat und sich an die Arbeitsweise gewöhnt hat. Im Prinzip wie ein Shell-Fenster im Emacs, nur das der Editor drumherum bedienbar ist
Ansonsten ist allenfalls noch die Einschränkung keine TextFactories mit TextWrangler bauen zu können (ausführen kann man sie aber) zu nennen, all den anderen Kram halte ich persönlich für absolut verzichtbar - besonders diese ganzen HTML Werkzeuge habe ich eigentlich nie benutzt.
Schön das BareBones endlich wieder eine nennenswerte freie Version ihres Editors zur Verfügung stellen.
Renaissance - GNUStep GUI Beschreibungssprache und Bibliothek auch für OS X Cocoa
Infinity-to-the-Power-of-Infinity - Kleine Anwendung zur Erstellung von Icons aus anderen Icons
Crystal VST Instrument - Softwaresynthesizer für OS X und Windows
MidiKeys - Software-Keyboard für OS X
Holocore / Mac OS X Software / OnDeck - Upload-Plugin für iView Media zum Bildupload in kommerzielle Bilderdienste
iDrum - The Drum Machine for Mac OS X - Drumkit für Garageband (und auch standalone)
iDive 1.1 - Videoschnipselverwaltung ähnlich wie iView Media Pro, aber speziell für Video
iMovie FAQ - Home - FAQ zu iMovie - nicht viel, aber wenigstens etwas