Scribus/Aqua - manual installation (why don't they package the libs in the application bundle?), but maybe still worth a look.
software - 17.1.2006 - 6.10.2006
iCalamus.net - sometimes they come back ... (hey, what's the panic, they only want to eat your brain!)
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.
BS Exporter for Blender - export interactive VRML from Blender (static VRML is already supported by default)
Wings 3d - 3D modeler. Open source.
beaTunes ~ build better playlists - automatically analyze and classify iTunes libraries.
Enigma Homepage - an Oxyd-lookalike for various platforms.
Oxyd Extra - a continuation of Oxyd, the old marble game.
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 ...
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).
The Mac OS MUD Zone: Clients - lots of MUD clients for OS X.
Google buys SketchUp
Google has acquired SketchUp - a manufacturer of 3D software. This makes you think, especially if you've just been dealing with virtual 3D worlds. Could something like Second Life from Google be on the horizon in the long run? If you look at what multi-user 3D virtual environments need: render farms, disk space, network bandwidth, distributed architecture, delivery of massive amounts of data, user management, chat architecture, accounting system, payment processing - Google already has all of that. And the subscription model could be interesting for Google, as it is similar to the advertising stories.
Horizon - a sketchbook for the Nokia Tablet.
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!)
UFRaw - a free raw converter based on DCRaw and LittleCMS. Sounds quite interesting.
NASA World Wind - Software like Google Earth, but with NASA satellite images. Unfortunately only for Windows.
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).
Democracy Player - an RSS aggregator that expects BitTorrent files in enclosures and automatically downloads them. Many features, essentially implements TV-on-Demand.
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.
ZNC - RottenBoy - interesting IRC bouncer (proxy) for multiple users. Significantly more powerful than the Muh I have used so far.
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.
MUlliNER.ORG : Nokia770 - a whole range of tools for the Nokia pad, such as the Wireless Tools or dsniff. Interesting for analysis in case of WLAN problems
SlimserverAndNokia770 - how to use the Nokia Pad with the SlimServer as a music player.
HolisTech Limited Free Software, pwsafe - Password-Safe for the Nokia Tablet.
Password Safe - by Bruce Schneier. The Java version 0.5 is compatible with the Maemo version.
pwsafe password database - Command line tool for Password Safe databases.
Internet Tablet Talk - Gnumeric 1.6.2 Released - Spreadsheet for the Nokia 770 Tablet. Wow.
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.
ApplicationCatalog - Maemo Wiki - Applications for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet
Opera Mini: Free HTML browser for mobile phones launches worldwide - Golem.de - definitely better than the primitive built-in browsers. However, of course - due to Java - not necessarily the fastest.
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 ...
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.