One of the great things about playing with pre-release software is you come across these little things that make you giggle and you know will make others you know giggle if they could see it with the proper context, and of course one of the annoying things is you're not allowed to tell...
posted on May 03, 2006 at 05:49 PM1...
From: Pepe Barbe
Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2006 21:53:51 -0600
Subject: Quicksilver/Blacktree website is downHey DB,
Recently I noticed that the Quicksilver/Blacktree sites are down. I've been looking around for some info about this, and since you are the only Macelebrity ;-) that is reachable (sort of) I was wondering if you knew anything about this.
Thanks!
Pepe
2...
From: Dean Mayers
Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2006 17:17:04 +0000
Subject: Quicksilver's Gone!The Blacktree website is down and Quicksilver is reporting an error when trying to update. It seems to have disappeared.
I was wondering since your tight with the dev, you could let us know what's happening.
Cheers.
When it hit three, and he'd been offline for awhile and it was going into its second day, I picked up the phone...
Some days while I'm digging around through documentation, let alone having to sit through a presentation, I feel physically sad for platforms without access to OmniGraffle. Perhaps a type of volunteer effort is in order, pairing the have-nots on underprivileged platforms with the haves who'd be willing to help projects make their documentation diagrams not look like ass. Presentation should always be the icing, but at some point cutting corners really does harm the message.
Things you need to know for the following to make sense:
- Constellation is a highly beta experimental plugin for Quicksilver trying to do some UI stuff via radial wheels. If highly-beta-and-experimental interests you, Garoo has the best tutorial for getting it up and running that I've come across.
- I always get asked a lot about MacWorld and WWDC and all those things, and whenever I get badgered enough I usually try to spin it towards the absurd and rub it shiny-weird. Since I wasn't going to be going, there was talk of a scavenger hunt involving The Cow and various developer booths with prizes for the top finishers.
The dev of QS wouldn't be having a booth, was amusingly down with being the "mobile Cow" and walking around MW with a Cow on his back just to introduce some randomness. I realized it'd take a lot more effort than I wanted to give to take it past the lame stage into the absurd, and promptly forgot about the whole thing.
Anywho...
I don't normally post about software updates regarding various apps, because:
- There are better places to keep track of that type of thing, even if some of the options are arguably retarded (in a sling-blade way, not the cuddly way).
- You start doing it for one, then you have to start doing it for everyone.
It's worth mentioning Growl v.7.3 though, because:
- I said I would (like
xdays late, but still). - It primarily just fixes one bug -- but I gave Chris a lot of hell over this bug in person (not on the site), so good to note that it's fixed.
I've actually got a bit in my head regarding Growl, and other things, that's built up to the point where I want to dump it out...
Gus's "How to become an independent programmer in just 1068 days" is now up there with Panic's "The True Story of Audion" in my stable of links to pass on to any and everyone interested in software on any platform -- not just budding indie developers. It's basically a post-mortem of his start as an indie Mac developer, and the lessons he's learned along the way...
When I get a ping that starts with something akin to "You still like pointless but neat stuff, right?", I don't usually get my hopes up. Unless it comes from Jesper (the guy who spent a bunch of time slapping together a perl script to convert text interviews to audio), which brings us to OGMT, short for "OmniGraffle Musical Taste"...
Paul @ Rogue Amoeba, on realizing the supplier for MacWorld (GES) has a website that doesn't work in Safari and completely chokes FireFox:
Fantastic, no? It finally worked in IE (*shudder*), and even after I registered, I was unable to sign in using Safari. You'd think perhaps the company running a large portion of the biggest Macintosh show in the world would have a website that worked in Safari. You'd think.
The first screenshot had me in absolute stitches, only partially from having met him and being able to picture his expression when he saw it...
I ran into some guys from Meetro at Evening at Adler, and over the last while have been playing with the alpha version for the Mac. The idea behind Meetro is fairly simple -- input your location, such as your address or GPS coordinates, and see who the hell else is around you...
Location-awareness is interesting, if a little odd just thrown into an app by its lonesome, however on the whole it's always nice to see someone throwing together a Mac app instead of only allowing them access through a web service or something (which is a part of it)...
I hate to go to sleep, and I hate even more to wake up. I'm totally that guy setting multiple alarms, and then getting up 4 times hitting snooze on all of them. They're not exactly sexy, but half of life is just showing up...
The other day, the CEO of BareBones offered an amusing "clarification" of the alert I mentioned in Unintended Interactions. The simple gist is that my unstated bias is leading me to misinterpret the dialogue I referenced in , which is a simple troubleshooting step because they've seen a lot of problems with haxies and their products. We'll take this piece by piece...
Over at Inessential, Brent of Ranchero noted last night that they're going to be contracting out to Gus for the development of MarsEdit for the next version:
We thought about different people, but one name kept coming up as totally ideal: Gus Mueller of Flying Meat.(Now, before anyone worries that Gus has given up his indie status, he hasn’t: he’s working on MarsEdit as a contractor. He’s still Gus of Flying Meat.)
(And, by the way, Gus does live near me. We just had a meeting at my office, in fact, and now he has the source code and is getting started.)
Brent mentioned at Evening at Adler that development would continue, but wouldn't say who or what company might be taking over development, but just the fact that it wasn't dead alleviated some minds (cough -- I use it) but there's always the worry you're going to end up with something weird.
If you're a MarsEdit user and spend a few minutes with Gus's VoodooPad or his other works, you'll probably notice it'd be difficult to think of another independent dev better suited to taking over dev of MarsEdit from a look and feel POV -- there's an obvious alignment there between Brent and Gus's sensibilities. If I'd have had a say, he's who I'd have wanted but probably wouldn't have followed up with because I'd have assumed he wasn't a realistic option.
Of course sensibilities and actually getting up to speed to make headway on the next release are two different things, but Gus also mentioned last night that he's used to working with other people's code (should have followed up, but I needed to get back on the video) and was finding and fixing some reported issues within a few hours of getting the code. Cool, and good thing I didn't have a say.
Before we really get into this post on NeoOffice and OpenOffice.org, I need to give a little background, because:
- The following email exchange won't make any sense without it.
- There's been rumblings about what's been going on in bits of pieces around, but it's more confusing than clarifying for many.
This is something I've been sitting on, primarily because I wanted to see what was going to happen with it over the last week, and I've been trying to get something else out the door, but then I saw enough weird commentary floating around that it's worth getting out there.
I'm going to be working in reverse, which means we'll start out with the heavy stuff for those who are up to speed on what's going on, then break it down -- to the best of my knowledge -- for those who have just seen bits and pieces...
So, today was interesting, although I'll have to backtrack a bit to explain why. As you may have heard, NewsGator will be buying the assets of Ranchero, not the least of which is Brent Simmons, but also happens to include NetNewsWire and MarsEdit.
You weren't supposed to hear about it until 9PM EST, with the official announcement occurring at the Web 2.0 conference tomorrow, but Om Malik once again proved he's a scooping bastard (This is a compliment). Apparently someone leaked, Malik sucked, they had to put out the PR release early, and I lost any immediacy I felt about the situation. Kudos to Malik -- there's a certain charm to someone poking a hole in the best laid plans of PR schedules, even if it causes them headaches.
It's hard not to be amused, even when you're on the other end for once, although I'm sure there was some swearing going on at the NewsGator end. Since the immediacy was gone, and you can get the details and specifics elsewhere, I'll flesh out what I've seen going on behind the scenes in a more personal way...
Don't know if you've seen this already, but you have a search item in Quicksilver's Web Search module all to yourself. You're in the Other category since you defy categorization.Because, you know, you don't get enough mail already... :)
Enjoy,
- jeff
This was so amusing I had to ping the developer of Quicksilver about it, who also had no real clue how it got in there. All that's known is it's been there since version one, and it's referencing the old drunkenbatman.com site URL, which still works but is forever in danger of going away.
Quicksilver dubs itself "An evolving framework for accessing and manipulating many forms of personal data," and it's really hard to describe QS to someone who hasn't experienced it. However, if you were going try, the words "interesting" and "innovative" would probably come up, even by those who don't take to it or just get confused by it.
It's worth noting that the author, Nicholas Jitkoff, redeemed a Golden Ticket yesterday from Pittsburgh and will be on the panel for Evening at Adler, and the original roster was updated a few minutes ago to reflect it.
So your request on your blog for an OS X Portable Firefox. Here you go.Sam Krupa
This is one of those messages that makes me feel slightly ill. I start talking about how much I'd like something, someone takes the initiative and creates it -- and then tells me about it -- and for all intents and purposes it looks to him as though it's been dropped into a black hole...
I'm sorry if this is listed on your site somewhere, but in your recent post you have an image of your IM client. What client do you use? It looks much cleaner than Adium, which I use currently. Thanks. (Assuming you reply. If not picture me scowling at you.)
It's not a big deal, if I only had a nickel for when I get asked something like this and it's another reason why I really, really need a FAQ or something. I remember meaning to do one, and then getting sidetracked by other things, and until I do Paul @ Rogue Amoeba is going to be asking why on earth he's seeing me answering reader mail before getting back to him...
I talked this up in a big way before, and won't rehash it here, and I don't really do the xyz has a new version out deally.
However, I do think it's worth noting this one, as Smart Crash Reports could end up being a big deal for developers and having the platform improve in general.
Its out of beta and available for download, complete with a spiffy new icon which some people say looks like a beetle trying to have sex with a paper airplane which may or may not be a bad thing depending on your views regarding beetle-on-paper action.
Go get it, and hope you see an app you like on the supported list soon. It's also worth checking over some of the Q&A on their site to bone up on some of what it's doing a bit. There's a real chicken and-the-egg problem with something like this, where developers need users to have it, so if you can, help lay the damn egg.
In my continuing quest to cut a swath through my inbox this evening instead of doing what I said I'd do to others, I'm noticing people keep asking why they can't post a blogspot or google url in the comments, and I really need something I can just link to instead of having to reply, as due to time they're getting shorter and shorter, and it'll eventually be mistaken for being terse. It basically comes down to two things...
As it turns out, my embargo is generally worthless, because no one is paying it any heed. Earlier today, Rosyna passed on their new treat called Smart Crash Reports has reached Beta 5, along with some screenshots. "I'm embargo'd." I said, and then realized I was forwarding it onto twenty people I thought should know about it...
(Note: The download link on the front of the site isn't working, and most normal people -- Including the Unsanity Folks, are asleep. However, this direct link will work until non-vampires awake)
Hi, I'm a Mail.app user, but the widescreen-pane aspect of Gyaz looks really neat,However I noticed scrolling through my messages is rather laggy. Is this something you've noticed as well?
Nicholas P.
I've gotten a ton of mail over the last while about GyazMail, and I've kind of avoided it because I wasn't really sure how to handle it. I use it on OS X, however I rarely recommend it anymore.
I'll get to that in a moment, but to get to your question, yeah, it's always been a little laggy when browsing large amounts of messages, but amusingly enough it still used to be faster than Mail.app...
One of the things I've been asked in a roundabout way this week is "Why, in the name of all that's holy" would I spend so much time writing up a little shareware game instead of using the time for something 'bigger' and giving it a plug as a footnote. There are a few reasons:
- If you go back through the archives, you'll see I often try to single out some little guy that's toiling in the corner doing cool things, especially when they're going so over the top. Hopefully it made the authors day, and is an encouragement to keep plugging.
- Others might see it and be encouraged to keep plugging, or to plug things that need plugging. While that writeup was about Lux, there was a lot of other stuff mixed into it also. You might pick up that while I'm talking about Lux in general, it was also a convenient means to an end. There are other people out there toiling to make good games for the Mac, and hopefully they're encouraged to see so much time spent on a little guy.
When you're a small developer trying to give it a go, often times the hardest thing to deal with -- paycheck issues aside -- is the idea that no one is paying attention and the momentum to get them to pay attention can seem insurmountable. Basically, startups and small bands have everything in common but the pussy, everything else can be mapped to a commonality.
And it's not like games on the Mac are doing that well in general, with Aspyr all but confirming their cash flow issues earlier today. Anywho, at the end of the day, I go over the top like that because I've seen how completely awry a little software project can go, which is why we're going to be talking about Tiger's Eye Pub today.
It is quite possibly the worst game every created for the Mac, perhaps one of the worst apps in general, but it's hands-down the worst casino game I've ever seen.
A reader named Dan pointed me towards an app called URLwell, which well, acts as a well in your menu bars for URLs.
Using it couldn't be simpler: Launch the app (or add it to your login items), and you get a little icon in the menu bar. Drag a URL from the address bar in your browser of choice to it, and it adds them to a list. Once they're added, you can click on the URLwell icon and see them, and selecting one loads it in your default browser.
Now, Dan left a link to this in the comments for a reason...
Earlier today wootest turned me onto an image editing app for Mac OS X I'd never seen before: Seashore.
The idea seems to be to wrap the open source GIMP image editor within a Cocoa front end, and I have to say it's pretty damn cool. I love the GIMP, but there's no denying it has some issues when it comes to user interface in general, and that using it on the Mac is a rougher experience than on other platforms.I use it all the time on Linux and tolerate it on Windows, but rarely launch it on the Mac, even the version where the guy moved a bunch of menus around to make it more like Photoshop.
Still, the tech is all there, and it's very good tech, so the idea of wrapping it up in a Cocoa interface is fantastic. It's been talked about since the beginning of Mac OS X, but I didn't think anyone would take it on in my lifetime because of how large the project would be. Mark Pazolli apparently decided to take it on, and hence we have Seashore...
Today we're going to be going through a strategy game for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux called Lux, for a few reasons:
- I like games, and Lux has an interesting history and I had some chats with the author that others might find interesting.
- There's a certain shiny absurdity to Lux in general that has thoroughly charmed me. The fact that someone went out and recreated the old board game RISK for Mac OS X, and then ported to it to Windows, would be amusing by itself, but the author went way beyond that.
- It's on my system, yet it's not really installed -- only its preferences are. I keep it within its archive, because its too dangerous to have hanging about in the 'Recent Applications' part of the Apple Menu where it could be easily launched while I'm supposed to be doing other things.
This isn't a real software 'review', more just jotting down my thoughts on it, as otherwise I'd have to go breaking it out "5 out of 5 white russians" or "4 out of 5 cows" or something, and then I'd have to make up a pretty badge in different sizes... Still, you should be able to grok the soul of Lux via this, and why The Cow and myself dig it muchly, later caveats notwithstanding.
The word on the street is that illumineX is going to acquire Freshly Squeezed Software, makers of PulpFiction (an RSS reader for the Mac) and some other things. I'm kinda scratching my head at this one, but it seems like it's probably going to end up being legit, or why else would people be posting things like this.
Still, I feel like I'm missing something:
- Obviously, making 'falling marble games' for Mac OS X is much more lucrative than my napkin calculations would imply if they're snapping up other companies.
- Freshly Squeezed makes more than an RSS reader, but they're primarily little utilities that would seem to have zero connection with what illumineX does, unless I'm missing something in their product portfolio.
Like I said, I'm scratching my head on this buzz, but now that I've had it pointed out to me it would certainly explain part of a bizarre conversation I had with Eric this morning.
Those are almost always a little different, but my accidently tripping into "Uh, why shouldn't I be asking you, you haven't sold the company have you?" would go a long way towards explaining why this one turned so decidedly odd so quickly.
D'oh, I so need to catch up on my feeds.
Awhile back I posted on the upcoming Cube CD for Macs (think Quake/Doom/Unreal Tournament), and went into a bunch of info on the history of the game, why I dig it and why I think the CD will be a cool thing for Mac users to have in general.
If you're lost, I'd start there first, but one of the main things I mentioned was that there were some real problems with the 'official' OS X build of the game.
My new main-man, Troy from ZettaServe, chimed in on what was going on and then sent me a build with everything fixed. He was also good enough to file some bugs, so hopefully this kind of thing shouldn't be necessary in the future...
I could have just posted the build and given you some instructions on getting the rest of the files and where things need to go, but it seemed just as easy to wrap it all up and post it as an archive so you can unzip and double click:
- Download Here (23.4 Megs)
While that's downloading, it's worth giving a quick primer so you aren't completely lost after you clicky-clicky... With the caveat that if it works it works, but if it doesn't...
I'm not going to be spending any time on it, but it should be enough to get you up and running. It was tested on Mac OS 10.3.8, and just a few machines.
I've been playing with Airfoil from Rogue Amoeba, which lets you stream any audio source through your Airport Express.
I have to say I'm pretty impressed that they got this out -- it's working really well, and this is very cool.
The below is from a post on secondfoundation.org, which kinda wigged me out.
I’ve just spent about an hour and a half going through the archives on DrunkenBlog and making PDFs of the posts that interest me. Even though it’s just going to dilute my iTunes library, I’m filling it up with various articles and lengthy pages from the web that would otherwise just sit forgotten on my “Bookmarks” menu.
I'm pleased to see Growl has a changelog for 0.6 and 0.6.1 up now, and it's also included with the .dmg. You can also keep track of what's going in via their ticket system, but hopefully the whole situation will improve -- on VT they at least actually said what was fixed in 0.6.1.
FYI, Growl 0.6 is out in the wild today. If you're curious as to what on earth it is, please see an older interview we did on it. I haven't had a chance to really put it through its paces, but luckily they leave 0.5 available just in case you have a major problem.
Take a few minutes to go watch the Delicious Guys (I need a new term, that one makes me feel dirty) get profiled on their local news about working in the coffee shop, and their Delicious Library software. It's nice to see people having a good time, and being excited, by doing what they love to do.
Someone not too long ago woke up and said, "I wonder just how many people I can piss off in one day, in how many ways." In other words, they did some benchmarks of various web browsers on multiple platforms, including Mac OS X, Linux and Windows.
Even under the most stringent and clean conditions this is just asking for trouble, as caveats and clauses get up in arbitrary ways, but you have to give the guy props for trying to do it in such a thorough way. Someone gave up some serious time.
That image landed in my inbox awhile ago, and you've probably seen it on sites like slashdot and such by now, but it's a good excuse to talk about the upcoming CD specifically geared for Mac hardware. If you weren't aware, Cube is an open source game (FPS, ala Doom/Quake/Unreal) that's cross platform.
A few days ago a very strange, very trippy, and very cool Visual Thesaurus was released that costs $19.95/year or $2.95/month and works via your browser or installed on your hard drive for $30. And it's Mac compatible (Java). You'll have to check out the free trial to believe all it does.
It reminds me muchly of the uber-cool Visual Google, which doesn't really show any Mac browsers a lot of love, but even on the Mac the glimpse you get makes the crashy crashy worth it. It's that cool. The Visual Thesaurus seems to be much better behaved, or perhaps just less intensive.
Who hasn't linked this great piece of web yet? I had it hit my desk early yesterday, saw how long it was and saved it in the hopes of getting around to it when I got back later in the evening. I'm glad I did, it's cute. It also gives me an excuse to link to their USA vs. Japan page, which I always meant to.
I got an amazing email from Frédérique et Hervé Sainct earlier today, who I'm just going to have to call Herv, because after his email, we're tight like that:
I got some mail asking why I was giving Apple Remote Desktop a hard time in a previous post, and I suppose I should quantify my comment: while I do just find dealing with ARD loathsome, it's primarily from using Windows, and it's only because I want what ARD can't offer.
...that, well, can't print. And doesn't have a Preferences window. I've been playing with this code/web editor for awhile since being turned onto it (v1.0.1), like just about every blogger has, so as usual I'm about the last to weigh in.
I'm about to head out the door to watch the election coverage with friends, but Zach was kind enough to send me the latest beta of his first Mac OS X app that normal users can use, ThumbScrew.
I've been a little busy over the last few days, but for those who aren't running the beta (as, well, the beta tells you there's a new version) it's worth noting that AdiumX is out of beta and 0.7 is out for your enjoyment after beta after beta and release candidate after release candidate. When I was snagging it last night, not all the mirrors had it yet, so you might have to clicky clicky a bit.
I could poke a little at how many I was downloading and installing, but really it was all going towards making this release as solid as possible. My prior notes on some of the changes are here. It's a pretty fun release.
Not everyone gets to say they know someone who has actually broken their back, let alone it being a family member. That's going to affect the blog schedule, and already has as far as this last weekend is concerned, but long term the person should be fine. They were tossed from a horse and now 20% of a vertebrae is crushed, which hopefully means after a period of severe annoyance it'll heal. Giving them shots of tequila when it was thought it was just a muscle spasm might not have been the best course of action, but hey.
Well, at least beta5 does. So there's some major badness in the new AdiumX 0.7 beta5 that was released last night if you're a Yahoo user. And by badness I mean crash fest. You may not have noticed any issues if you aren't a Yahoo user, as it fixes a ton of buggage everywhere else.
But if you happen to be having problems, it's already fixed but rather than wait for beta6 (since I did turn some of you onto it I feel a little responsible) here's a special build that will take care of it (10.3 users only) given to me by Evan that takes care of it, along with a few other minor things.
One of the more common things I get asked regarding the AdiumX chat I did awhile ago is "What about Fire and Proteus?", and well, ok. It's worth noting that when I pick something for one of my 'chats', by choosing it I'm not dissing the others somehow.
The AdiumX guys have been working hard, giving me more reasons to keep pushing their product down mac-users throats wherever I can get a chance. Their efforts have been going into v0.7, which just hit beta 4 and has been a long time in coming compared to their other releases, but there's just a ton of stuff in it.
I got asked by a few people to post my views on MailSmith... checking their site, they're up to version 2.1 now. Below is part of an email exchange from August 11, 2003 where a guy was getting on me hardcore to check out MailSmith 2.0, as while the original OSX port was... problematic, he swore this one had reaffirmed his faith.
The first time I got asked by someone over the internet why I had been gravitating away towards BBEdit, it was because I was touting Hydra... Now I've been asked the same, but it was within the context of me gravitating away from Hydra SubEthaEdit. Ironic, that.
At any rate, I had an email from the first time I was asked where I actually had it in my saved message folder, which means it's pretty old (so it might not all be relevant, but it was then), but it should get the point across. There's an even longer one about my disappointment with MailSmith, but that's long enough that I wouldn't bother to convert it into HTML unless someone actually asked. Pretty sure you could actually find it at the x4u list if you looked...
Either way, here you go:
...especially when it's software I actually really, really like.
I've been checking out the new version 2.0 of SubEthaEdit for the last several days (I know, I'm kind of behind right now), and I have to say I'm both very happy with whats new and a little wigged out and disappointed in other areas...
If you're not familiar, SubEthaEdit started out as an app named Hydra, and is essentially a collaborative text editor that allows you to share documents over your local subnet via rendezvous.
For some reason Hydra SubEthaEdit is just not playing nice. Machine goes to sleep, SubEthaEdit is gonna be crashed when I get back. And now I'm uploading files, and they're not running correctly because of ?????'s being thrown in the files. I just spent 20 minutes double checking encodings and crap, and no, somehow they got introduced into the files instead of tabs in some places. Wtf. These files have never been touched outside of this editor, except for pico -w, and that doesn't count. :)
I'm using 1.1.4, and it's at 1.1.5... and one of the fixes is supposed to involve the crashing... but when its 6am and I'm trying to wind up a deadline before I crash the last thing I want to do is be installing new software. Egh. On the bright side, I saw they have an rss feed for their news & update page (yay!), so all is forgiven.
And yes, I'm back from Toronto. I've just been perpetually annoyed since. What was done to the bathroom and (possibly worse) my coffee supply in my absence is nearly unthinkable.
Someone pointed me to this mysql package for OSX, which includes 4.0.15 (reasonably up to date, and doesn't have the bug that apple is shipping in theirs). It comes with a decent installer (you'll still have some manual typing) and neatest of all, a preference pane for starting/stopping mysql.
For "normal" users, getting mysql up and running can be a bit of a drag (least i've seen a lot of people hose their users & permissions trying), so this has a lot of promise.
It's got some rough edges, while I was messing with it I wasn't able to get it to not start mysql when the machine boots through the pref pane. Oh, it'd say it did it, but I'd get an error message and upon rebooting sure enough mysql would be running and the check box to start upon boot would be rechecked.
It's still a nice job so far, and I'm keeping my eye on it, and its worth a look if you're after a simpler way to get mysql on an OSX machine.
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Update
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If you are coming here from macsurfer, please read this post.
Mozilla Firebird Firefox 0.8 is out, and they've changed the name again. You can download here.
The name change thing is annoying, but understandable since they didn't want to step on anyone's toes. I just wish I knew how they were picking these names. I was never a big fan of firebird, and thought that the browser (firebird) and the mail client (thunderbird) should have switched names. Firefox just sounds like a video game or something.
The annoying aspect is that I've really tried to get a lot of people to check out firebird firefox, as it's a fantastic little browser (great on OSX, even better on other platforms) but having to explain the name change things every time is getting a little grating.
On OSX, especially with the latest release that has the newer default theme, it's become my go-to browser whenever Safari is acting stupid or I have to deal with SSL sites. I'm still amazed by how mac-like they've gotten it when they're using their own interface engine.
Speed is about the same, although I'm pretty sure my SSL sites have gotten even faster. There are some nice little touches though: previously, when you had no windows open and clicked on the dock icon nothing happened, you'd have to create a new browser window. Now, a new browser window is created for you, following Apple's UI guidelines.
Normally, if I came across a piece of software as interesting as Inquisitor for OSX, I'd be telling everyone about it. The interesting thing is the speed, and the live updates while searching really do help.
But it's really pretty lame, there are free downloads (betas!) which are fine, but the damn things time out after a week or so, at which the old one refuses to work and you have to stop everything to go catch the new one.
The first annoying part for me was that I'd saved it, and hasn't installed it yet as I hadn't gotten the time to play with it... so my first greeting upon opening it is a message saying it's expired that day and I have to go download the new version.
The biggest annoyance was that it just hangs out with a download button, and won't let you quit. You can't quit from the dock, you can't even quit from the menu item. So my first experience with this soon-to-be-shareware product is that upon first launch I have to force quit it because I don't want to download something.
I have to imagine he is just trying to get people hooked and it's going to be released as shareware, but really, developers, this kind of thing is sooooooooo stupid.
If you've never tried Adium, and iChat or the OSX port of AIM really annoys you, its seriously worth a look. It was my client of choice for a long, long time. Done by Adam Iser I believe, it had tabs, clean UI, and solid, resource-conscious code. Looking at its code versus another project like Fire is a bit sad. It was really best of breed.
I lost track of it for various reasons, mostly because the original author stopped development and i was trying to make do with a bunch of the multi-protocol clients out there, which all suck.
A random passed on a link to a new project called AdiumX. Cool. They're taking the old code and moving to backend based on Gaim. It's rough in a lot of areas, and isn't quite what the old Adium used to be. But it's interesting and has a lot of promise, and it supports the Address Book. It's really worth a look.
I also got pointed to this plugin, which logs your Adium chats to a PostgreSQL database. Slick. As. Hell.
Also of note on that site is this MP3 on their music page which I swear for a second had me wondering if I was listening to an old undiscovered Pixies track. But I could just have pixies on the brain due to the rumors of a reunion that are springing up everywhere.
They also have this nifty picture, which makes me laugh. Hard. I'm not sure why.
I'm preparing to head off to canada again on friday, and wanted to import my new Kill Bill soundtrack (it's yummy) so I could have it with me.
At some point in the near future, I want to rerip my rather large music collection from standard 192k mp3 to one of the newer formats. I basically just have plenty of storage now, and I can really tell the difference with some of my music. IE, Lords of Acid really shows some artifacts at 192k mp3, but not at 240+. I know I could re-encode everything with much better quality for the same amount of space.
It's just becoming a bit of a hassle. There's:
- Ogg Vorbis
- MP3
- AAC
- FLAC
- AIFF
WMAWAV
WMA and WAV are out right off the bat. WMA isn't a bad codec, it'd just be way too much of a hassle for me to access my stash. WAV is just a crappy encoder. The only thing I find interesting about these are WM9's lossless encoding option, which would be handy. If I used windows most of the time I might look into it... but it wouldn't play on an iPod or some of the less mainstream players.
MP3, with the LAME encoder, actually sounds excellent. LAME is just slow as hell on Macs when encoding, although I know they're working on an altivec-enhanced version. It's also CLI based, which is fine, but it'd be nice to have something a little simpler. It's attractive only because MP3 is so universal. Things like LameBrain make the whole thing so much easier... but again, Lame is just so very slow on PPC.
Ogg-vorbis is extremely attractive from a quality standpoint, but it limits you greatly in the players & peripherals you can use right now. It's also not the fastest to encode, and uses some decent CPU while decoding. If there was more player support (especially quicktime!) and peripheral support I'd prolly be jumping towards this one.
FLAC is probably the most interesting, if you have mondo space to spare. Lossless compression, so you basically rip everything to FLAC, then as different formats come along... no big deal, just re-encode the original FLAC files to whatever you want. One of the big chores of this endeavor is going to be sitting there feeding in hundreds of CDs and ripping. Whipping up a quick shell script or pointing an app to an HD of FLACs and telling it I want MP4s or MP5s one day would be cool. There's at least one CLI wrapper for ripping, but egh, without CDDB support and the like it's a drag. Entering tags by hand is 199* territory.
AIFF isn't very appealing. If you're going to use AIFF, you might as well just make disk images of the actual CDs or something.
AAC is pretty fast to encode, and has good quality, but again you limit your player support. It is, for the moment, pretty much a mac thing. That'll prolly change if the iPod and the iTunes Music Store keep going as they are. Right now only the iPod supports AAC I believe. It's just a real hassle to say "Here, listen to this track, these guys are great" if they aren't on the mac. Yeah, you can convert it to an MP3, but lossy + lossy = eww. And even though in the grand scheme of things AAC is very much a mac thing, a lot of the cooler tools for things like HE AAC aren't available. Suckage.
I'm really interested in Ogg & FLAC, but doubt I'll go that route right now. I'm not looking for iTunes support completely, as iTunes constantly pisses me off with its CPU usage, but a lot of the lower-CPU players just don't have great features or aren't really stable or have other problems, like Whamb. I really miss the winamp experience in OSX sometimes.
So I prolly won't do a damn thing about re-enconding for awhile until things shake out, or there is some other catalyst to spur me on, like a new digital audio player. Who knows, maybe AAC will take the world by storm, or Ogg will. I'm prolly still reeling from trying to rip radiohead's "hail to the thief" album... it's DRM protection really screwed up my Macs drive for a bit.
There's a new 1.5gig Ogg-friendly mp3 out, the Korean D-Cube. Actually looks kinda nice. I've been looking for a decent FLAC player (rio karma comes to mind), it'd be nice if iTunes supported it. The rio is supposed to play Ogg files too.
I'm a big fan of the iPod, but I'm really sorta leaning towards the Rio Karma or Nitrus since they support the formats I'm interested in. I can handle USB 2.0, but dont' want it to be a big hassle getting my music to and fro. Ethernet support is another plus. And it's getting good reviews.
I've been keeping a list for awhile of things I'd like to see in GyazMail while I use it, and check them off as they get added, or get annoyed as they don't. :)
Figured I might as well put it online:
- A delete thread command. This really speeds up going through larger lists, especially with the preview pane. Just make it command+option+delete or something.
- Don't update status icon with a delete icon whenever you remove a file. I guess if your machine is super slow it might be nice, but really, when you're deleting 100 messages having to wait for it to refresh is a drag. Apple did this with their finder recently for a nice speed boost.
- An empty all trashes command would be nice, as having to select all your mailboxes before you run the command is a drag.
- Allow the damn "end" & "home" keys to work in a message. For some reason, they dont seem to.
- Double clicking a seperator bar should collapse the side/bottom view, while remembering the current sizes when you expand again.
- Why show the horizontal scroll bar at all if nothing needs to scroll? Gyaz does this, both in the mailbox view and the folder view, for wasted space.
- A "hide/show preview pane" button for the toolbar would be nice.
- An undo command for more actions. IE, when you delete an item accidently, being able to hit "undo" and have it moved back would be a lot nicer than having to go to the trash, fish it out, and then moving it back.
- It'd be nice if the preview pane was smarter, and remembered its size depending on the folder. IE, in some mailboxes i don't get that many messages, so I'd want the preview pane to be larger. In others, I'd want it smaller to better keep track of threads.
- Ability to select "search within all folders" (or more customizable options) would be awesome without having to select all the folders.
- Please show quoting and formatting information while you're composing an email. If it is going to wrap, show where it will wrap! Showing colors for quoting makes things so much easier to follow and respond to while composing a message. I've requested this from the author, but never heard back.
- I don't understand why "new message" and is under the "Message" menu item instead of the "File" icon. Not a big deal, but I always have to look twice for it as it's not where I'd expect.
- Wide screen support!
- Alternating colored rows for threads. Very helpful for scannability. I suppose you could also give alternating rows as an option for individual messages too, ala iTunes.
- I'd wish the grid would just seperate out the messages themselves, not also the subjects and attachments... IE, horizontal lines, but not vertical lines.
- Add a global "take all offline" menu item, or key combo. Because really with how Gyaz is setup, if I don't want a bunch of error messages when I can't connect coming up I have to take it offline, which means selecting all the mailboxes. No reason why there can't be a global command.
- Option not to show messages in the trash as read, as it reduces scannability when looking for folders with unread mailboxes.
- Option to only check for new mail when you have an active internet connection, so I am not bombarded with can't connect messages.
- Consider throwing the can't connect messages into a single window, download-manager style. Having to hunt for them (I have a lot of mailboxes) is a drag.
- A global search option from within search mode. Having to select individual mailboxes is a chore when I don't know what folder or mailbox the message was in...
- If the mailbox with unread messages is not collapsed, don't highlight the mailbox itself as unread, it reduces scannability when looking for folders with unread messages.
- Add a "collapse all" and "expand all" option for the folder view.
- Better integration with the Address Book: especially in a wide screen mode, there's more space to pretty things up and perhaps snatch picture info, etc.
Continuing my quest for a decent wide-screen mail reader in OSX... I pretty much gave up. Since I had some time last night waiting on the testing peeps, I figured since we're just talking panes, modifying their nibs shouldn't be too hard, right? So I grabbed and made copies of the GyazMail, Mail, and GNUmail bundles.
I tried Apple's Mail first, which didn't go well. Everything seemed to go well, but it seems to do something strange with its custom view in its mail view, so I kept getting the content cut off.
GyazMail was easy, really. GyazMail basically has 2-pane and 3-pane modes:
2-pane
Pretty basic view... mailbox + individual message. You can keep good track of all the messages, and open each individual message in a new window. On a tech list this is a big deal, as the messages are longer and will often have bits of code.
This one isn't so bad, as I have key combos set up so that I don't really ever need to leave the keyboard. Hit "N" and it shows the next message, etc. It still gets a bit wearing, though. Especially when I'm flipping between different boxes & messages.
3-pane
This is the one a lot of people are familiar with. Standard mac way to view mail since eMailer (R.I.P.).
This view allows you to quickly get the fist of a message, and read further if you want. But since iBooks & Powerbooks, you are constantly scrolling through messages, even if you can hit the space bar it's still annoying. It also makes it more difficult to get a mental snapshot of the message, especially if there are bits of code.
So more than anything, I'm having to switch between 2-pane and 3-pane throughout the day.
Wide-screen version
I actually got a little annoyed while messing with GyazMail while doing this, which isn't it's fault, as it was just too damned easy compared to Apple's Mail. If you have the developer tools installed, it'll take you all of 5 minutes.
Here's a shot of it (click for larger):
This actually works really well, considering, especially on my powerbook which is wide-screen. I'm using it as I type this out. The only real problem is that the mailbox viewer isn't really setup for this kind of viewing, especially with how the threading is done.
But even still I'm using it, as it gives me the benefits of 3-pane and 2-pane, I can just use the arrow keys to go down through threads. Saves me a lot of scrolling & clicks.
Unfortunately there's no real way for me to change how the mailbox view is handled without the source, which means I'd have to start looking at something like GNUmail instead, which is open source.
Optimal wide-screen version
But here's a quick mock-up I did of what I'd ideally like to see, since modifying GyazMail went so fast. And no, it's not perfect, but I spent all of 15 minutes on it.
- Included a "sort by" menu item above the mailbox view, as it wouldn't be that efficient to keep the same column-clickable views unless you were on a monster screen. You'd want to remove "address" and call it "ascending" or "descending", and when its clicked it changes how the items are sorted. The rest would be touch up stuff, which I don't really have the time for at the moment.
- Moved the subject under the author, and moved threading to just indent once under the main thread. I moved the date into the middle of the row, just to help break up the space, but you'd probably want to have the size of the message or something under it.
- You wouldn't really need the scroll bars at the bottom anyways if there'd be nothing to scroll... I don't know why GyazMail insists on leaving them in anyways.
- I alternated threads with a color, basically a 5% shade of black. I've kind of wanted to see this in the real version anyways, along with a "delete thread" command, as it just looks nice and improves scannability.
I've installed the v5 Intellimouse drivers for OSX to be productive with my favorite mouse... it's not going well in punter panther.
Most everything is fine, but it seems to have really weird problems registering single clicks in apps. I'll often have to click twice to get a hyperlink to register, etc. Starting to look at the logitech MX500, a pal passed on good things about it, and it has the buttons I'd want.
The weird thing about these is that awhile ago, a manager at the MBU (microsoft's mac business unit) passed onto me that they, and another mouse manufacturer for the mac, simply license and use usb overdrive.
Considering the large gaps in their driver versions for their mice, I'd doubt they're keeping that up to date. So I'm going to wait awhile and see if it magically clears itself up, as things have a habit of doing in OSX, and if not, will give USB overdrive a shot.
Going kind of nutty here, been spending part of a day helping a friend get their Xserve up and running on panther. Most things went fine, but mysql was throwing hissies. Code that worked fine on other boxes/platforms was borking big time after installing 10.3.x server. It looks to be confined to inserts & ordering by datetime.
That at least gave us a clue, as there is a well-known bug in the earlier 4.x series of MySQL that got caught very fast and was fixed, involving just the above. Turns out yeah, Apple is shipping the borked version with 10.3.x, specifically 4.0.14. Ew. Downloaded and installed 4.0.16 and everything is back to normal.
This is just so fricking lame, we wasted a huge amount of time tracking this down, which is partially our fault as we just dismissed them shipping that broken of an install. It'd be caught in any real testing whatsoever, and gives a feeling of "download, slap together, $$$profit!!!" to OSX Server, and still hasn't been fixed.
There are prolly lots of people out there hitting the same thing and having no clue as to what's going on.
I've really been pining for a sideways mail reader in OSX. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out the screen shot to the right, although in Outlook I believe it's called a "reader pane" or something.
At any rate, most email clients stick to a two/three pane interface, as you can see by checking out Apple's Mail or my personal fav, GyazMail. Long and short, these are fine for the most part. Especially if you have more vertical space than you do horizontal, but most of my machines have the opposite... they're wide screened. By going to something like the clickable shot above, it ends up being much more efficient.
Especially for technical lists, which might have bits of code, or longer messages in general. Basically I either end up scrolling way more than I need to, or having to open more messages than I need to.
I looked around awhile ago, but no luck. Then I saw my favorite RSS reader Netnewsire has added a widescreen mode to their newsreader, and it is so much more efficient it has me itching again.
So far, no luck. Only the lowly Thunderbird seems to offer it. And no, I'm not Thunderbird, the problem is that it is very windows oriented, and as such, all of its performance goals go windows first and other platforms second. I also just don't really enjoy using it.
This sort of thing should take all of 5 minutes to add to a cocoa program, but since there aren't very many of them (Apple's Mail & Gyazmail & GNUMail), I guess there just isn't any real push.
*Sigh*
I hate waiting for disks to spin up, but at the same time I don't want them to be running constantly when I'm not at the computer, especially with someone like a laptop... has a penchant for kicking the fan on. Having "spin down hard drive when possible" checked can save you some heat.
So you'll be sitting there working away, and go to save something. *wwwRRRRR* For some reason, the OS decides it needs to awaken every single drive connected to the computer, and in my normal setup I have a whole bunch of firewire drives connected. That'd be annoying, but not a big deal, as a HD doesn't take that long to spin up... except it does it sequentially.
IE, first drive wirs up, then it sees the second and wakes that up, and eventually you're hanging out for 5 seconds waiting to be able to save your document. It's not really long enough to multitask to something else, but long enough to really crimp your style. Carbon apps seem especially prone to it...
I found some .plist setting you can modify, but it wasn't something I really wanted to mess with. But if you have the developer tools installed on 10.3, under:
/Developer/Applications/Performance\ Tools/CHUD/Hardware\ Tools/
...you'll see a nifty little app called SpindownHD. It's not really well documented at all, really, not even through googling. But it seems close to what I'd want. You can modify the default sleep time, as well as change the polling frequency, but I can't really seem to get that to stick. It also doesn't show all the drives connected for some reason. Weird.
Ooooooo. Omniweb has a neat little preview up about their new browser shipping in a bit, which looks kinda interesting. You can check it out here. In looking it over, these things come to mind:
- Using Webcore
Good! I'd been playing with the betas a bit, but just in a cursory fashion as they were mightily unstable. It's a little disconcerting that, from what I've been hearing, they're going to be a bit behind on the current versions. Webcore is still a little immature to not be staying on top of it- stuff is getting fixed all the time. I know there are some caching, speed, resource usage & rendering things coming down the pipe.
I'm also a bit sad to see another engine die- it was obvious omnigroup's engine couldn't keep up with the others, but diversity can be a good thing. Right now, due to the other browsers sucking royally, it seems to be down to webcore vs mozilla based browsers. - Tabbed Browsing
Also good! Up till now, the betas were practically Safari in drag. Differentiation is good. I'm a little concerned about the whole thumbnail in a drawer thing... this was discussed a lot back on theChimeraCamino list. The consensus, from a UI standpoint, was that while it was a nice idea it'd pretty much fall flat in general use. IE, 10 thumbnails of slashdot pages are all going to look the same (you see this with Apple's Expose, too), meaning you're still going to have the label, so lots of scrolling is going to ensue. Still, I'm interested in checking it out and seeing how it'll work in real use, maybe I'll be surprised. I have a hunch it will be nice, but people with lower-rez monitors are going to be pining for normal-style tabs across the window.
What is very cool is that you can drag and drop "tabs" to different windows, something no other mac browser does right now. Back in the early Chimera days I know they were looking at it, but it would have meant custom widgets as Apple's tab frameworks didn't support it, so they were trying to avoid it. - Workspaces
Slick. I know Opera has had this for awhile, and I've always liked it and wished it would make its way into other browsers. This could be a real time saver, and is one of the only thing Opera has over the competition on this side of the fence. They seem to have taken a step further, which could be very cool. - New Bookmarks
With the exception of some RSS feed capabilities (which I don't get- if you're in a web browser, why not just go look at them? But I could see why things like netnewswire would have them edgy as hell) it seems to be a straight Safari clone. I like the search field built into the interface, ala the address book, as Safari is pretty confusing the first time around. - Search Shortcuts / Page Marking
Egh. Search shortcuts has the potential to be really sweet, and save you a few clicks. Nothing big, but a nice refinement of what others have. Page marking just seems to be Apple's snapback with a little more ooomph, so it's hard to get excited about it until I use it. - Icons
Just an aside, but Omniweb's toolbar icons have always bugged the hell out of me and these don't look any better. The color schemes aren't consistent (detracting from the content), they use different degrees of drop shadows and even different angles for them. Egh.
Of course all of the above is null & void until the beta is released in February, but still, it's exciting, as Omniweb has a lot of potential and there are a lot of areas in which Safari is lacking.
What I'm really worried about is the idea of a lagging webcore- I can understand it from a development point of view, but there are lots and lots of areas that could use improvement, and enhancing webcore is another area they could differentiate themselves.
Been spending more time with cocoa, specifically trying to get a good handle on NSTask and pipes to other programs for a long-term app I'm working on. Out of 10 projects or so I have in various states of learning, drunkenDig actually works. Simple wrapper for the unix dig command. No icon or frills, but it should work.
I may improve it some in the future, I want to clean up the output some and be able to spawn multiple threads (currently the UI blocks, which on a slow network could be annoying) and allow for more options, like mx lookups.
Download here, and lemme know if it works for ya.
Screenshot:
I'm actually starting to feel really guilty about this stupid website, and since I had to write out a quick blurb about the different types of OSX apps that I'm aware of I figured it's as good a way as any to fill up some space.
There are at least 6 very different types of applications running on OSX. IE, OSX is Mach + BSD userspace as a kernel, with varying technologies running "on top of it". Some run within the BSD environment (such as apache) while others barely know BSD is there. Below is some cliffnotes.
(1) BSD-*unix style GUI-less, usually c or c++ applications that run straight within the BSD environment. These are usually fairly trivial to port from linux/freebsd/openbsd/netbsd to OSX, barring having to replace certain functionality such as /random (although I think that was put back in).
(2) Java/Java Cocoa/Swing Apple's gotten really into integrating Java. This means you have .jar's running with a swing interface (cross platform, such as limewire), down to gui-less java apps and even "cocoa" applications written in java instead of objective-c.
(3) Classic Old > OSX applications, which run in the classic compatibility layer, which is basically an instance of OS9 running as a separate process within OSX.
(4) Cocoa Old next/openstep API's, retooled for OSX, although a lot of intermingling has gone on with carbon, to the point where it's hard to make certain types of apps without using Carbon calls, and even then some cocoa calls might actually just be wrappers for carbon calls.
(5) Carbon Old > OSX API's ported to OSX, ripping out 10-20% off the really scary old API's. All of adobe's apps that I'm aware of are Carbon applications, which means they took their old codebase and had to replace sections where appropriate as the API's changed, retool their event model, etc. So for these to "run" within linux you'd have to either port the Carbon API's to linux, or just access them, such as through "mac on linux" which i believe only runs on PPC linux machines.
(6) X11 Apps Older windowing interface for linux applications. Pretty creaky, yet also very very cool in things like it's client server model. A lot of GUI linux apps out there use this, and Apple has even done some really nifty stuff whereby X11 ties into Quartz with an OSX look and feel. Things such as open office and others use this.
Heh, there are even potentially more that are coming (and other subclasses i didnt mention) with the advent of some of the KDE tools coming out.
I've been using Hydra a lot lately, which is an uber-cool editor with emacs-style sharing via rendezvous. Today for some reason the 1.1 build is really going wonky... which is annoying me to no end, as 1.1 has some things in it (syntax coloring for more than C) that I really need to use.
IE, the tool bars and syntax options have gone away entirely. I've cleared my caches, rebooted, repaired permissions... but no Hydra love. It looks something like this:
You know, I don't really read Mac news sites by and large. They're often run by people who love Apple products, but for the most part don't really know anything... hence the sites & forums of those sites often turn into narcisistic, apologetic and uninformed circle-jerks. There are much better places to get good, reliable info.
So, I miss a lot of the really stupid articles... but I've had this one forwarded onto me from two people and it's annoying the hell out of me. I rarely would refer to anyone as a reason-challenged hack, but Mr. Steinberg gets the honor. The only saving grace seems to be that not many people really know who he is or read his site... hence, he seems to post really nonsensical stuff with misleading headlines hoping to get linked to from other mac news sites, and hence push up his ad impressions.
This "article" is a very good example, the title is barely applicable to the article, just a bit sensationalistic over, well, nothing. Bygones, actual news sites usually do that sort of thing too... but the "article" itself is barely coherent in that it contradicts itself several times which you can see by just giving it a quick overview.
However, these two paragraphs struck me particularly vile:
The demise of C&G doesn't auger well for small software companies. It's hard enough for any small business to survive in an uncertain economic climate. And finding a niche that won't be usurped by a larger company, even Apple itself, is doubly difficult.
The point being in that somehow Apple is pushing out smaller software companies by including new "features" in their OS, such as font management, reminiscent of what some people think happened with Watson (a whole other story, which I think Watson's creator milked a lil too much considering his entire app was based on calls Apple put into the system saying "this is what you can do").
Anyone who does print work using a mac uses some sort of font management tool. Macs have an extremely high marketshare in the print market... hence, it's a feature many people need/want. It just makes sense, and should have been in 10.1. There isn't a whole lot in OSX that really makes a print designer go "oOoooOo that would help me", but this feature is one of them. Good for adoption, good for users, good all around.
Being a small software developer (or small anything) is about identifying and exploiting niche markets. If the one you're currently exploiting is going the way of the do-do, you either have to identify a new niche. If that isn't possible, or you can't compete, you close up shop.
For example, you could claim that by including Apache in a stock OSX config that Apple has completely stolen the mac web serving market from the likes of webstar. Or that by including mySQL they'd be doing the same to filemaker (which is an Apple subsidiary), or by including a spell checker at the OS level they've doomed the market for 3rd party spell checkers, or by including anti-aliasing of text they'd killed that market off...
...or that by including an integrated TCP/IP stack they've killed the market for 3rd party TCP/IP stacks. Sounds kinda stupid, doesn't it?
But how has Mac OS X hurt Casady & Greene? Well, let's face it, the need for Conflict Catcher, probably one of the showpieces in the company's line, has all but been eliminated. Yes, it still runs in the Classic environment, but as more and more Mac users move full time to Mac OS X, even that becomes irrelevant.
This one is just so blatently stupid... the market for their product simply went away because it was tied to a product that also went away. It happened to be their main livelihood, so their company went away. The gist goes something like this:
OS9 and below used '