Notes

In case you ever need to create a new user in Leopard using the command line, the required steps are documented in the Porting UNIX/Linux Applications to Mac OS X document.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 05:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I've tried at least twice now to move from ecto to MarsEdit, but I was having some problems moving my ecto setup from 10.4.x to 10.5.4, so I decided to give it another try.

This time it seems to be working much better. Local Markdown works, and I could define my usual shortcuts easily with the markup editor.

I've still haven't found a way to import all my posts (I want to have the full history locally), so I'll have the check the manual for that one.

In the features-I-would-love-to-see-departement, I haven't found a decent pre-post analysis tool. If I repeatedly link Markdown to http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/, my blog tool should suggest the same link in future posts.

A nice tweak to the editor would be smart quoting: if I have a selection active and I type \``,",',*, or_`, it should wrap the selection with that characters.

So for now, I've switched. Let's see how it goes.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I'm looking for a desktop Mac.

I'm pretty unhappy with the current Apple offering. We have the high-end Mac Pro, starting at 2.499€ (but you can configure a single CPU version for 2.049€, and at the low end, the Mac mini, starting at 499€. In the middle we have the iMac's but those have a built-in screen, and I already have dual 20" Wide displays that I would like to reuse.

I wonder if Apple will ever fill the void between the two head-less versions they have now. I want multiple internal disk-drives (or at least an eSATA connector) because for my main workstation I like to have RAID1, but the only way to get those is a Mac Pro, way to expensive.

There are alternatives, but I would like to avoid the hassle.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I haven't seen the Keynote yet (holiday in Portugal, spending the time with the kids out in the sun), but I did a quick drive-by-browsing across the Mobile Me Guided tour.

I found the shorter video, about the Web version of the applications (at the bottom of the Mobile Me features page), much more interesting.

The following details got my attention:

• the video demos are done not only with Safari on the Mac but also Firefox and IE7 on Windows;
• the URLs shown jump from http to https and back: it seems that secure access will be available, at least to the application, no mention of secure iDisk access;
• no support for IE6: the web applications will not support IE6. Is this the start of a trend? I know that a lot of web developers would love to drop IE6;
• support for Apple TV: you should see an Apple TV upgrade with support for Mobile Me soon. Its mentioned in the video.

I've dropped my .Mac membership some time ago, but I will sign up for a year of Mobile Me just to see how it works.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I've completed the reservation process for my iPhone 3G this morning. I've asked for a 16Gb model. They don't have a box to select the white or black version, so I'll have to double check on that soon. My current mobile phone, a Sony Ericsson 608i will be two years old at the time I upgrade so my "upgrade phone every two years"-rule seems to hold up.

Reading over the material online, it has most of what I wanted: 3G, and built-in GPS. The only thing I did not get was a upgrade to 32Gb.

With the €199 price point (for the 8Gb model), the biggest complaint that people I've talked to had, also goes away. The price is very competitive when compared with other phones I see around here. I don't see the iPod Touch keeping the current price though, so I expect that to drop real soon now.

Regarding the "background apps" stuff, the solution Apple came out with should be enough for the XMPP crowd. Sending a badge with the number of pending messages covers most of the XMPP clients needs. It remains to be seen if we can convert those pushed messages to a sound so that the user knows that it has something that requires attention. Another thing: how well will this work? Does it keep the radio on all the time? or does it uses a SMS message to send its notifications? More questions than answers actually.

There are a lot of pending questions also about the 3G capability: can I use the iPhone as a Modem for my Mac? Via bluetooth? Will it provide a bluetooth PAN? That would be the best case scenario, given that Mac OS X supports Bluetooth PAN's since 10.4.9.

And the GPS, will I have a Bluetooth serial port to access the NMEA stream? If we get that, and a decent dock for cars, a lot of Tom Tom's could go Bye Bye, with just a decent software upgrade.

The last thing that caught my eye was that you can download applications to your iPhone without going through the App store. Enterprises will be able to push applications to devices directly, and there is an "ad-hoc" mode to send applications directly to the device. I could not find details on these two options, though. Something to keep an eye out for.

All in all, with the iTunes App Store also opening up and having access to applications outside Apple control, I think it will be a good phone for me in the next two years.

Update: one last thing - the fact that we still got the same shitty camera doesn't bother me as much as the lack of video capture. All my phones so far had under two mega-pixels and they worked just fine for me needs. I can only hope that this is not a hardware but a software limitation.

Update: and the bad news keep on coming - from the iPhone 3G spec page, the Audible formats supported no longer include version 4. Sucks really bad, because that was the recommended for iPods so all my books are in format 4.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

It's now 10.5.3 time and I'm still running 10.4.11. That alone should tell you something about how I feel about Leopard.

The Snow Leopard approach, a OS-cycle dedicated to "just" stabilization and performance, is a welcome investment on the part of Apple.

It's interesting though. It seems that Apple is saying: we can invest an year just to digest and make what we have better, because there is no competition for the next 2 years at least. And they are probably right - Microsoft operating system department is so messed up right now (XP doesn't want to die, so now you can buy Vista and upgrade legally to XP).

From the desktop Snow Leopard page, the only thing that I'm interested on is OpenCL. I don't know how "open" it will be but the idea of giving an API to the GPU is a welcome addition to the set of APIs. Other operating systems already have them, so its nice to see it reach our OS.

Personally, I think that OpenCL is the only API I will really use to its full potential on my desktops or laptops. This of course, if someone ports the H.264 encoder that Handbrake uses to OpenCL. Using the GPU to speed up my DVD-to-Apple TV sessions would be a most welcome improvement.

On the server side of the equation, Slow Leopard brings an interesting feature: read/write support for ZFS volumes. Nothing is mentioned about booting Mac OS X from a ZFS volume, so I don't think you'll get that, but your big disks should be able to use a modern file system next year.

One thing I find strange: you'll have to wait for 10.6 to experience a Safari with SquirrelFish? Thats bizarre. I understand why Apple would like to upgrade the Safari browser with major releases only (back-porting to the previous release like it happen with Safari 3.1 and 10.4.11), but the Webkit development is (or seems to be) very very fast, so I would like to see a more aggressive schedule for Safari releases.

So, next year, Apple will digest the 10.4 and 10.5 new features, to prepare a massive 10.7 upgrade in 2010/11. Just in time for Windows 7.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

This is great news: Todd Ditchendorf just released a nightly build (link removed) of Fluid.app that includes Google Gears.

I'm a big fan of Google Gears, and Fluid is getting a lot of love regarding integration with the desktop.

BTW, this is a good reason for me to upgrade to Leopard.

update: Todd giveth, Todd taketh away.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 02:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

For the first time since 10.1.x, I didn't upgrade to the latest Mac OS X with the .1 release. Usually I wait for a .1 and "nuke and pave" my Mac, but this time, after almost 8 months after the 10.5.0 release, I'm still running 10.4, and reasonably happy with it.

Sure, there is software out there that I would like to try but requires 10.5, only its nothing that I totally depend on, so 10.4 is still perfectly usable for me.

But 10.5.3 should be here soon, and with almost 220 fixes, it might be the stable release that the more conservative of us were waiting for.

As usual, I'll wait a week or two after 10.5.3 to make the jump, but I think I will finally unwrap the Leopard DVD sitting on my desk.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Inside the "Keyboard & Mouse" preference pane of Mac OS X, you'll find a tab named "Keyboard Shortcuts". This is one of my first stops after any nuke and pave setup of my Macs.

I don't have many shortcuts:

The Take Rich Note and Append Rich Note integrate all applications with DevonThink. I select what I want to keep, and hit the proper sequence to save it in my default database.

The Quit Safari shortcut prevents me from closing Safari by accident. Its specially useful if you have a lot of tabs open. Recently Safari gained options, like the Reopen All Windows From Last Session, that make this less useful but I still use this.

The Select Next Tab and Select Previous Tab work around the fact that the default shortcuts in Safari for those options just don't work with some international keyboards (like my own, PT-layout).

The final shortcut is something new, that I'm trying out. It gives you a global shortcut to Zoom any window. Not sure if it's a keeper.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Yesterday, Rui pointed me to two applications/services that immediately found a place in my Applications folder.

The first is Yuuguu. Its a screen sharing application that just works. You install the client (Windows, Mac. You can also use the web server), create a free account and add your friends (by email address). That's it. You can now share you entire desktop with any of your friends. Essential for those support calls you get from your family members.

The second one is PortMap, a free application from the CodingMonkeys (of SubEthaEdit fame). It allows you to open services running on your desktop when you are sitting behind a NAT gateway. It will use NAT-PMP or UPNP to map a public port to your private address.

PortMap is the end user application. They also made available the Framework they created around the code that does this magic. I should point out that Leopard has this functionality built-in (point from João Pavão, the Cocoa guru at hand).

Posted by Pedro Melo at 03:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

The limitations slide that Jobs presented yesterday is of course incomplete. You would not expect it to have the full set of limitations.

In the next weeks, people will go over the documentation and find some more. I'll try and keep a list of the ones that are relevant to me, in order of importance:

• third-party applications cannot run in the background (link via Gruber): this is most unfortunate to those of us who are thinking "XMPP client, XMPP client". I hope this is only a temporary restriction, or that a specific certification program is setup up to gain the right of running in the background;
• a temporary limitation, but a big one. The last line of the iPhone SDK readme: "Interface Builder is not yet included in this beta of the iPhone SDK";
• "Applications may only use Published APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any unpublished or private APIs": not a restriction by itself, but is interesting to have this in the License Agreement. I think this will mostly be used as "If you mess up, know that we can go out and get you, legally" (article, via gruber).

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I suppose that one of the words we can use to describe the iPhone SDK is sexy.

I played a bit with Cocoa a couple of years back so I haven't followed to improvements of XCode. I hear João Pavão complaining about all the bugs but thats about it.

So while watching yesterdays event stream, and while I was looking at the game that the Apple dude wrote in (cof, cof) "two weeks", and all the nice tools, my though was: do the other mobile environments have such a sexy SDK, with such good tools?

The SDK seems better than expected, even for developers who just want to give away your apps. The integration with maps, the photo and pictures, it all seems to fit well. And it all works with both the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

The games we saw yesterday, and the fact that you have all that accelerometer stuff built-in makes the iPhone a potential mobile Wii, and I think we will see amazing games for this. I think Nintendo is considering adding a accelerometer to the DS as soon as possible after seeing this. We know (looking at sales of the Wii) that the new controller is the best thing out there (I own a Wii, and my four-years old is starting to be able to control it with precision, scary), so games on the iPhone, its going to he huge.

All this seems like another leap forward for Apple. I mean, competitors like Microsoft, RIM, Nokia, really, do they have the entire package that Apple is offering for download today (err, strike that, maybe tomorrow, the developer site is slashdotted)? And something that you can run on your iPhone and iPod touch today with the beta release of the firmware? My magic ball says: definitively not.

As for the limitations, the two that caught my attention where porn and VoIP over EDGE. The last one was predictable, as a protection to their revenue stream from the carrier deals. But porn, I was surprised. Sure, they don't want to piss off prude consumers, but mobile porn? In a gorgeous screen like that? Dude, iPod XXX series for sure!

The deal to distribute apps ($99 setup, as a "don't waste our time"-fee, and 30% of the price we set for the app) is something I cannot judge. I've never developed for the mobile platform so I don't know how much it cost developers to distributed applications for say, RIM, or Nokia. But on the other hand, no other mobile device producer has the reach of iTunes and the new App Store. Sure, as Rui says often, Apple and the iPhone are a spec in the windshield of Nokia globally, but the ecosystem that Apple is creating is something out of level 18 of Spore.

And jailbreak? sure, the next version will allow you to install applications without the App Store. Thats the logical step for them, to build an alternative distribution channel (I was going to say competitor, but really, it doesn't stand a chance as competitor, but as an alternative, it could be very good). But even so, it will not be worth it for most users, I think.

And me, I have one application I want to write that affects my standard of living. It ties with a e-learning site I operate. The thing is, I'm still running 10.4 on my Macbook and I don't want to change right now, and the SDK is 10.5.2-only. So what is a person to do?

(those iMacs really look cool, and my birthday is coming... hmms... the lower end model is "just" $1100...)

Posted by Pedro Melo at 08:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Nothing more to add, just linking to Fake Steve. Sure, its the extreme position on the Apple fan boy club, but then, there is also a grain of truth in there.

Oh, and yes, it runs on the iPod Touch also. Everything presented yesterday also works with the iPod Touch except stuff that depends on the particular characteristics of the iPhone hardware, as any reasonable person would expect.

And yes, you have to pay for it again. Why? The official response as far as I can tell boils down to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, but I would like to hear a definitive explanation about this. We all get updates to the iPod, the Apple TV, the Airport Extreme, and other devices by Apple for free, so why not for the iPod Touch?

Posted by Pedro Melo at 08:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

While searching the the link for the SDK post of Fake Steve, I read the previous posts just for kicks. The one about Sarah Lacy just got me laughing out loud. Choice quote:

See, there's just these two things you notice about Sarah right away when you meet her. They're right there in front of you, just staring at you, and you can't look away from them and you find yourself watching them roll from side to side and getting hypnotized by them and just agreeing with anything she says.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 08:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I did a quick read over the article from The Wall Street Journal about the Apple shareholder meeting. I was mostly interested in any iPhone SDK tidbits.

But the following paragraph about Flash support caught my attention:

As Jobs put it Tuesday during the company's annual shareholder meeting, Apple's iPhone, with all its cutting-edge mobile Internet trickery, needs something much better than the current Flash player that Adobe makes for cellphones. The Flash Player option that fits the bill is made for devices like laptops that are larger than the iPhone; as a consequence, it performs too slowly on the iPhone, he said.

Emphasis mine.

I don't know if those are Jobs exact words. If they are, there is a lot of meaning and future directions we can extract from the choice of words. Is Apple preparing a Silverlight-style maneuver, with a Flash-like language? Or are they writing their own Flash player?

In the end, I think its just a curious choice of words, without any second meanings. But the mind did wander a bit for a while.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

A quick tip that I just read, and I didn't see this mentioned anywhere else: the Apple TV, with the latest software update, is now a AirTunes destination.

This is very cool. I can send the music from my iTunes to the big speakers easily now.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 07:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I'm updating two Macs via Software Update in the same network and they share four downloads between them.

Why do they need to download the new versions from Apple? I mean, they could just find each other and swap.

This isn't rocket science, at least not in a system that has Bonjour built in.

And its not as this would be terrible security-wyse: all the updates are signed by Apple and Software Update will refuse to install them if the signature doesn't check.

Oh well, maybe in the next cat.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

The new Macbook Air is really small and light. The pictures are very impressive.

Anyway, not my kind of laptop. I could live with the soldered-to-the-logic board memory, but the non-replacable battery is not a good trade-off.

The Apple TV upgrades are much more important to me, mainly because they are all available on the current hardware. But until we get proper content in Europe, it's still sort of a half-product. And if you look through the specs and check that Apple does not provide, or easily allow the installation of the Perian codecs with it, at a time that all the consoles are supporting DivX, well, it just gets sadder. All this means that I will not upgrade my Apple TV until its properly hacked.

For those who want to watch the Keynote on your Apple TV, and don't want to wait for the update to the "official" Macworld Keynote Podcast on iTMS, you can download the mp4 file.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Yesterday, Amit Singh announced a new version of MacFUSE at the Google Mac blog.

The major new feature is the MacFUSE.framework, and today, I already found a strange filesystem built with it: the Objective-C runtime FS.

Objective-C has a very cool runtime, that allows you to dynamically discover available classes, methods and other information. So now you can cd NSString if thats your kind of thing.

I wonder how long is going to take to implement execution of specific methods directly from the shell...

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Wow... The latest version of NetNewsWire, 3.1, is out. And its now a free download.

I'm was a paying customer and I can only say, congratulations to Brent and Newsgator for this bold move.

I expect that they plan on charging you for the Newsgator Online service, which I don't use, but its a cool move. Update: It turns out that the online version and the sync services are also free. Excellent value. (via comments).

BTW, this applies to all NewsGator client software.

Related posts:

• Brent Simmons;
• Greg Reinacker;
• Nick Bradbury;
• The official FAQ.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 07:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

The best Apple TV plugin, Sapphire, is now open source.

Very cool.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

While my Macbook is in the shop, I "borrowed" my sisters Mac Mini G4.

Oh, G4, how much I loathe you... Let me count the ways:

cd ~/src/some_software && time make

Update: for future reference - starting a Catalyst app I'm working on, it takes 17 seconds. Previous Macbook Pro: 2.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

So I need to decide what to do with my broken 17" laptop.

I'll try and see how much would it cost to fix this, but replacing a LCD is always the most expensive operation.

If I have to buy something new, I'll probably won't buy a Macbook Pro again. I spend a lot of time in the office now a days, so I can work on the road with a smaller laptop.

A combo of a low-end iMac plus a low-end Macbook is cheaper than my Macbook Pro 17", anyway.

I'll wait for Macworld 2008 (less than a month away) to decide. Time to put my APPL gains to some good use, I think.

Not in a good mood, however...

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

If I had to choose one, it would be the support for message: URIs in Mail.app.

It allows you to:

• send a link to a message to a friend: if he also got that message but "lost" it somehow, he can just click and let Mail.app find it;
• you can store URIs to important messages on any other Mac application, and in a Cocoa app, just right-click to jump to it;
• it allows interesting integration between web applications and your local mail client: it should be pretty simple for someone to write a "Open in Mail.app"-scriptlet that works inside GMail or others webmails.

I used to have MailTags installed just for this, but now, it just works out of the box.

I noticed this feature before but Gruber wrote a nice article about it that triggered my memory.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 08:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I'm researching video cameras to buy one for Christmas. One of the requirements is support for iLife, and in particular, iMovie.

So I googled to see if I could find a compatibility list, and sure enough, we have technical article 306171.

The next step was filtering the table for HDD-based cameras. I copied the HTML table, fire up Numbers, and pasted it, and... WTF?? A single column of data? I fired up Excel and sure enough, pasting a HTML table produces a decent Excel worksheet, one that I can then AutoFilter and work with.

So unless I'm missing something obvious (not unheard of), Numbers just ignores the largest source of tabular data available, the Web.

Really smart...

Anybody has a quick AppleScript to import HTML tables?

Update: well, not a AppleScript, but Firefox. If you copy the table in Firefox and paste inside Numbers it will just work! Many many thanks to Jon Prettyman (via comments).

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

So, at last, the Apple Online Store opens in Portugal.

One quick tip:

It's Olá, not Olà...

(Kudos to Miguel)

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

So there is this batch of Seagate disk drives that has a high (or more accurate above normal) rate of defects:

The faulty drives are all Seagate 2.5" drives that are manufactured in China, with a Firmware revision of 7.01. They are also all SATA interface. No other drives seem (at this stage) to be affected.

Guess what my Macbook Pro 17" 1st generation has:

I have good backups, but still... Time to find out if there is a Apple program to replace the drives.

(via João Pedro, and the local Mac mailing list)

Update: the counter-punch.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

The number I took away from the Apple Fourth Quarter Results is 400k.

The Q3 ending in July had been the best quarter ever with 1.7M Macs sold. This quarter, even with a new version of Mac OS X pre-announced for October, Apple was able to sell 400.000 units more to 2.1M Macs. And most of those will now give an extra $100 to upgrade to Leopard.

That's the amazing part. The extra $17 per share in the last 24 hours (10%), ant the fact that in the penis-size-contest (read market capitalization) Apple just streamed past Intel and IBM, those are just road-side shows.

Last but not the least, traditionally Apple has been very conservative in his guidances for the next quarter. Not so this time: Apple told analyst to expect $9.2B in revenue (for comparison, this quarter it was $6.2B). That's a 47% increase, so they expect a really big Christmas.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

My .Mac renewal date is approaching, but after 4 or 5 years as a paying customer, I don't think there is enough value to keep it.

I think I'm going to look at the direct competition, it seems to be heating up.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 06:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

As expected, Apple unveiled the iPhone in the UK. It will be using O2 network, and EDGE for connectivity, not 3G.

I understand that EDGE is less power-hungry than 3G, and I can see it too. My Macbook battery goes from 5 hours to less than 2 when I plug my USB 3G card.

But the problem for me is that as far as I know EDGE coverage in Europe is very poor compared to 3G, and there is no way I'm going back to GPRS.

I guess I'm keeping my current phone for quite some time.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Pedro took the time to write about latest Apple news. Worth a read.

I share most of his points of view:

• ring tones: it's a big business based on idiotic consumers, move on. I personally hate ring tones;
• iPod Touch activation: the iTMS account is required to purchase stuff, not to activate the iPod as far as I could read, but I'll wait until I see some Linux geek reporting his life with the iPod Touch.
• lock down of iPod database: this is something that happens on a regular basis as far as I remember. Anyway, it's a non-issue, because the hash-based protection is very week and already broken. It is a pity that Apple is losing time writing this stuff though;
• video-out cables: this sucks, of course. I was wondering why would Apple would do such a thing, and selling more cables doesn't sound right.

Regarding the last point, about locking AV cables: my bet is HDCP. Apple is getting ready to have HD content and one part of the equation to please greedy content owners is probably having HDCP support all the way.

So they need some sort of hardware lock to make sure only approved cables can carry the digital signal from your iPod to a HD TV set.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Beta6 of SynergyKM is working ok for me. I recommend the upgrade to anybody using Synergy on a Mac.

Things that can bite you:

• if your clients can't see the server, disable Bonjour discovery: it fails miserably with me;
• don't use screen names with spaces in it: it will fail with some strange error about failing to read /tmp and friends. If you look at the log file, you'll see that it barfs with spaces.

Apart from that, smooth sailing.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

There was a lost opportunity yesterday when the new iPod Touch didn't use Samantha Fox hit "Touch me". Lots of '80 teenagers (ok, me!) where saddened by this lack of vision on Apple.

Back to the goodies, the best value still is the lower end of the iPod Classic. The iPod Touch is cool, but I believe the iPhone 3G will be the one that makes me buy something with a multi-touch interface from them. The lack of capabilities of Bluetooth in the iPhone line-up still baffles me.

The $200 drop in price of the iPhone is very very nice. It makes a nice comparison to the same-day $50 price drop of Zune. I'm sure the Zune team is having a hell of a day today...

So, me, I'll keep waiting for news about the 3G iPhone to see if I switch phones or not. Nothing like waiting 9 months to see something beautiful being born.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Is it just me or isn't it a bit stupid that I cannot see Apple Keynotes in a Apple TV.

I can sit through gigabytes and gigabytes of YouTube trash, but looking at Apple Keynotes, noooo....

sighs

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Busy day, so not much time to write. Highlights from yesterday Apple announcements:

• F$%#$%Q&#$%! Airport Extreme got GigabitEthernet now. I bought mine 4 weeks ago! Anybody wants one, good old Airport Extreme base station? Tested? The reason I would like to have gigabit: shared disks, which this base station supports;
• The new keyboard is beautiful, but I will have to wait until I can try it out. I don't know if I will like the feel. I'm very glad that they upgraded the wired version to USB2, so that I can use the ports to sync iPods;
• if the new iMovie has direct YouTube upload (maybe a feature of Quicktime itself?), why doesn't iPhoto allows me to upload to Flickr? Guess I have some place to spend my $30 (see below);
• Numbers: I'll download the demo and see what the fuss is all about. It wont replace die hard Excel fans like Rui (and I understand why), but it might be enough for simple people like me. But, I'm willing to bet that the analysis features of DabbleDB (my favourite Hype2.0 site) will leave both Numbers and Excel in the dust;
• the iPhoto Web Galleries: shiny. Pity about the size;
• the new Macs (iMac and Mini): if I wanted a desktop Mac, I would probably buy a Mac Pro. The difference between a desktop and a laptop is expandability, and the new models are both limited in that regard (I can't see why the iMac does not offer the option of a second hard-drive. Can't they find the space behind those huge displays?). The Mini would be on my wish-list if they made a version with a basic Mac OS X Server edition. That I would buy. They could add a couple of inches and make it dual-drive RAID1 by default: nirvana. (Update: having said all that, the new iMac ads make me want to rush out the door and buy five of them).

Some other odds and ends, and rants:

I don't understand people who like bluetooth or RF keyboards:

• I would hate to be out-of-batery in the keyboard;
• I don't want the bother of changing or recharging batteries in a keyboard;
• the fact that a wireless mouse is extremely useful (because mice where made to be moved around and the cable gets in the way) does not translate to the keyboard, something that you hope that does not move around (rubber feet, essential feature of a keyboard).
• given Macs poor USB port count, even the two extra ports in the keyboard are extremely useful, even more by the fact that they are very accessible;
• the $30 difference is the price of several great looking, extremely useful apps by independent developers out there, which will probably make a bigger difference on your productivity than one less cable.

Still on the USB port count, the iMac specs page is funny:

Total of five USB 2.0 ports: three ports on computer, two ports on keyboard.

Err... Pity that the Keyboard that has 2 USB ports is the wired keyboard, and that one takes one of the other 3 ports, so let's just say:

three USB ports. If you use the included keyboard, you get two more! If you decide you wanna look cool using our bluethoot keyboard, you just get those three ok?

There. Much better.

On the department of things I would like to see in a future opportunity:

• the ability to buy iLife and iWork as a package or as standalone apps via iTunes, to keep on abusing the 'M' in iTMS. I couldn't care less if they called anything else, but the infrastructure is there, just use it. I don't need the entire package, but I would update some of the apps;
• there is this technology inside every mac called Bonjour, don't know if you hear of it. Apparently Apple has not. Why cant I do a slideshow over local lan, that other users can watch in real time? Or why can't I share a Pages/Keynote/Numbers session? Like Subethaedit? Room to grow.

That is all.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog:

So what does this mean? Well, once you've got ssh installed on your iPhone and active, you can access your iPhone from a shell on your Mac. You can send and retrieve files using scp or sftp. And you can use the compilation toolchain to build other Unix utils or even your own software. It's just a short matter of time until perl and other command-line utilities are iPhone-ready.

Emphasis mine. At least they got their priorities straight.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 09:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

If you use TextMate and Skitch, you might have found that the excelent ''Comment selection'' command from the Source bundle will no longer work with the ⌘/ shortcut.

The problem is that one of the hot-keys of Skitch is exactly that key combination and for something that I don't use that much (Capture Frame).

So go into Skitch Preferences and change it.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 05:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Between me and my brother, we had three iPod Shuffle that iTunes wouldn't see, nor the previous iPod reset utility. They where pretty much dead.

Apple released a new version of the iPod Reset Utility, and this latest version (1.0.2) was able to recover all of our iPod's.

So if your Shuffle is not recognized by your iTunes, check out this latest version. It worked for us.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I bought my TV 1 or two months ago, but I've only been using it in the last 3 weeks or so. I was expecting to connect it to my standard definition TV but I made a big confusion between component video and video by components. Somehow I was expecting to plug the box into a standard s-video...

Anyway, now that I got it connected to an HDMI TV (a Samsung LE32R32B if you must know) and stuffed it with video content, I can tell you a bit about my experience.

I love it.

You can buy or build a much feature-complete PVR with MythTV and others and comparing with a TV, the latter lacks a lot of features. But I've seen my mother and my mother-in-law sitting in front of the TV with the remote in their hands navigating successfully over all my iPhoto albums searching and looking at photos of the kids. Without my help. That in itself is already a big win for me. I probably could have the same thing with MythTV, but not without more effort from me than what I had with this.

I haven't hacked the box yet, I waiting a little bit more to see if a legal patch stick appears so that I don't have to open it. I only want to put the Perian Quicktime components and some sort of plugin that allows me to use network disk drives for storage of video files (I'll probably find something in the plugin category of the AwkwardTV or in the plugins directory).

And that brings us to my only gripe with it: the disk inside is very small.

And that is with only the kids videos inside, no content from me and my wife...

So I need to expand the storage and there are two ways: swap the disk inside, or use a NAS.

I've decided to use the second one. And to that end, I also got a Airport Extreme Base Station. You can plug several USB devices into it (printers and USB drives supported) and share them over the network. I had a 500Gb Western Digital Book external drive, I plugged it in to the base station, and I can now see the drive from my Mac and from the wife PC laptop.

The second part is to get the TV to see that device and the video files inside. Let see how the patch stick goes. It if takes more than a couple of weeks, I'll open up the box, enable SSHd, and install some plugins.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I'm not a indie Mac developer but I buy a lot of their wares and it has been a major factor making my Mac experience more pleasant than any other previously had.

And as some of them, I was disappointed about them not getting the iPhone SDK they all wanted. It would spur a flurry of applications for sure.

But bottom line: the iPhone is a very restricted platform. Low memory, battery operated, and very different user interaction than your keyboard/mouse combo. Those set of restrictions raise the trust level we must put on applications and their developers before pushing some software out of Apple Downloads site into my phone, a device I like to have always available.

I think that the smart developer will rapidly work around the low memory and the new user interaction. But the battery usage problems are harder. Your applications must be written with low power consumption in mind, in a very big way. I would naively say that minimizing network traffic and CPU intensive work is just the beginning, the are bound to be subtle issues.

So expecting your smart but used to multi-megabte RAM devices, with big disks and lot of power to develop power-saving-oriented applications without help is a bit to much.

On the other hand, this is the place I can see Apple giving them something very cool in a future. I could tell you how good and fun XRay is, but then I would have to kill you. I will say that it is an amazing piece of GUI on top of DTrace stuff, much much better than I was expecting.

The tool I see that the iPhone SDK must have to be a real SDK is just that: a XRay for power consumption. Developers need, more than frameworks and guidelines about UI design, tools to check power consumption of their apps. And I would expect that sort of tool to take some time to develop.

Bottom line, I really would like to see a iPhone SDK, but I don't mind waiting a bit to make sure that it comes with the tools that help developers not break my phone.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 03:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

There. I did a iPhone post. I'm cool.

Not.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 03:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Great read to start the day.

Don't you just love hyped-up releases?

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

As with all Steve jobs keynotes, everything is great, all Apple apps are the best of the world.

The part about Safari 3 was no exception, and he mentioned that Safari is now the speed champion.

As always, speed is subjective and some times difficult to test, but I remembered the ExtJs library speed tests for DOM matching.

The cool part of these tests is that they do about 28 tests with several different JS libraries. Its mostly a test to show off ExtJs DomQuery speed, but it might helps us to test the speed assertion. And best of all, anybody can do it.

So, open up the three browsers (I used Safari 3 beta, Firefox 2.0.0.4, and Opera 9.21, all Universal binaries running on my Macbook pro laptop) and on each one open up the test page. I switched to 10 seconds timeout on all three browsers just in case.

Then start the test, one browser at a time, and compare the results. I used the DomQuery column only, too many numbers.

The result? Safari was the fastest but results where not uniformly faster. Some tests he was 3 or 4 times faster. Most of the times it was only slightly and in one test (and one test only) Opera was the faster browser. On all tests, Safari was faster than Firefox.

So it looks good. But don't take my word for it. Do it yourself.

One last thing: I'm happy with Safari for the vast majority of my browsing needs. Its fast and all the pages I visit on a regular basis work with it. For web development, you can't beat the Firefox+Firebug combination.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

To me the most unexpected news out of WWDC 07 was Safari available on Windows.

At first, all I could think was: WTF?? Why waste precious engineering resources on this??

But after the announcement of the "iPhone SDK", it all makes sense: they need a Webkit-capable browser available on all platforms to make it easier to test future "iPhone Apps".

That small detail aside, Safari3 is working ok for me with the latest Mac OS X 10.4.9. Its very fast, and for now stable.

It has some goodies like SVG support that are nice (you can play Tetris, or see several other demos) and the Safari debug palette is now built-in (right-click, and select "Inspect element..."). Its not something new, everybody who uses Firebug knows about this, but its nice to see it built-in into Safari.

For now, it will be my preferred browser, but I keep the uninstaller handy. We never know.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Houston, we have a problem. This is happening to me to. After the 10.4.9 upgrade, when I'm using battery, the Macbook just shuts down without any warning whatsoever.

Crap.

Update: Today I got this behavior with a TiBook G4 at work, very weird. This could point to a problem with the 10.4.9 upgrade.

Articles I'm following about this:

• http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=892757&tstart=285;
• http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=867275&tstart=240 (this is a good one, might have find my problem);
• http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=863919.

I think I have a swollen battery. I'll drive by the Apple tech support tomorrow.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Recently, Merlin Mann did a show about Quicksilver Proxy Objects.

If you have problems getting that to work, follow the excellent mini-tutorial about enabling Quicksilver proxies and application menus by Robert Daeley.

In fact, you should read the short tutorial before watching the show.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Recently, Merlin Mann did a show about Quicksilver Proxy Objects.

If you have problems getting that to work, follow the excellent mini-tutorial about enabling Quicksilver proxies and application menus by Robert Daeley.

In fact, you should read the short tutorial before watching the show.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

In my workspace I use two laptops to increase the number of screens available (low quality picture of the setup I use).

I have everything the way I want it right now: the mouse, keyboard and clipboard are in sync using Synergy, and all my backup apps are installed on the Tibook (SuperDuper! and Retrospect, the best backup application for your small network), including the big external disks. They are connected with Gigabit ethernet so transferring files is a breeze, even gigabyte sized files.

I have only one last problem to solve: audio. I need to redirect all the audio of the TiBook to the Macbook, so that I can open sound apps in the TiBook and keep listening to them with the headphones I have on the Macbook.

Does anybody knows of an app that does this?

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

One of my favorite projects in the last years is finally public. The first public version of SAPO Messenger for Mac, a Jabber client tied to the SAPO Messenger community.

The client has both English and Portuguese and given that most Portuguese Mac users have English as their default language, we choose to ignore the settings of the International preferences pane for now and force the Portuguese locale. To switch back to English, do this:

1. in the Finder, select the SAPO Messenger icon, from the Applications folder;
2. Use the Get Info menu option (Cmd-I shortcut);
3. From the Languages section, enable English.

You have to do this after every upgrade, but we will probably change this in a future version.

You can register an account at the SAPO Messenger registration page, its free. Its Portuguese only for now, but it should be self evident. I'll try and do a a small screencast about that part.

The cool features that I think make this an excellent Jabber client for the Mac:

• native Cocoa interface;
• a rock solid Psi core (kudos the Psi team, Justin Karneges, Kevin Smith and Remko Torçon in particular);
• a multi-contact implementation: just drag all the contacts of the same person on top of each other;
• a search-as-you-type roster: amazingly useful with big rosters;
• Growl notifications;
• SOCKS5 File Transfer;
• SMS text messaging to Portuguese networks;
• and lots of other small things.

All in all, it was a great year fine tuning the first set of features. I'm particularly in love with the search-as-you-type roster (and the internal versions are already a lot better :) ).

There are some features that are not present because we haven't decided how to do them right. Two examples are tabbed chat and address book integration. We don't know if they will appear in a future version or not.

Other features are not present because we are still building them:

• multi-user chat support;
• better handling of offline and pending messages.

So download and give it a whirl. If you need to add a local user, feel free to add pedro.melo@sapo.pt.

One last thing: during the last year, we have had the privilege to have an amazing Cocoa programmer in the team. He single handed took the project into his hands, used the core framework and C++-to-Coocoa bridge developed by the Psi team, and built all the Cocoa goodies that you will see. kudos to João Pavão of Critical Software. This was a team effort of course, but some elements just stand out.

Last but not the least: expect a GPL source code release soon :).

Happy! Happy! Joy! Joy!

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Here is how Jobs says shove it! to the Nordic, French and German consumer groups that where complaining about Fairplay.

No comment from me, just providing the link. I'll watch this one from the sidelines. I couldn't care less about DRM. It's broken, it will always be and it does not prevent me from doing anything that I want to do.

BTW, at last count, I have 1311 tracks purchased from iTMS and I never ever bough a CD again since iTMS Portugal open up. I despise the waste of a CD Jewel case and leaflets more than I despise DRM. This could even be a slogan: DRM doesn't kill trees.

update: commented about a good call that MP3 doesn't kill tree either.

update 2: I was eagerly expecting Gruber view point. Good as always. Pay the man, he is worth it.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Awesome news:

Today Google is releasing MacFUSE, an open-source Mac port of the FUSE mechanism for Linux. Like FUSE, it enables developers to implement a fully functional file system in a user-space program. And since it aims to be API-compliant with the original FUSE (Filesystem in USErspace) for Linux, it makes many existing FUSE file systems readily usable on Mac OS X. The core of MacFUSE consists of a dynamically loadable kernel extension.

Get MacFUSE.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

With the 100 minute Apple keynote where the iPhone was introduce, Apple market capitalization raise $6B. Thats sixty-million dollars per minute right there.

This and much more info on this post.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 03:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

When I first saw the presentation of this last year, I was not terrible impressed.

But I've been looking for a device that would connect to the TV and allow me to play XVid and DivX files. I would upload the files via ethernet or wifi and I would have a small interface on the TV to play them.

Right now, the Apple TV does most of what I want. I don't expect support for DivX or XVid anytime soon, so we will need to do some transcoding, but as long as we can do it, I think I found my box.

We'll see. Should be available next month in the US, must check availability in Europe. Not a lot of market in Europe without the TV series in iTunes EU... ;)

Update: Wills commented about the DP-558 of Kiss Technology. Excellent feature set, it really has. But it's €499, so I'll wait a bit before commiting. The TV as a target price of $299, with less features, but better integration with my current hardware. We'll see.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

It's here, everybody has an opinion:

I like:

• the weight is the same as an iPod 5G. It's a tiny bit shorter, and a tiny bit thicker;
• 160 dpi screen.

I don't like, but I hope they change it in time:

• the lack of support for third party applications;
• the lack of 3G: I don't believe they will launch in Europe without this.

Overall, very very good. I want one.

Update: there is a good iPhone video demo online at YouTube. Check the second video, hilarious: "The Zune zucks!".

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I've just finished watching the Quicktime stream of the Apple Showtime presentation. My first impression is positive, but there are some issues.

The iPod revamps are nothing spectacular in my opinion, with the exception of the iPod Shuffle which I find truly amazing. The extended batteries are cool for some of you, but I already get enough juice from my iPod Video. The new search features feel strange to me. I'll have to experiment a bit to see if they match with my brain.

The cool stuff really started flowing with iTunes 7. I think it really a great upgrade. I love the new iPod ground control, and the new source list is much easier to navigate, although I never had problems finding anything with the search field. I do wonder where do I go now to search everywhere. Until now, I would click on Library and whatever I did, I knew that if it where inside iTunes, it would pop up.

The upgrade to TV shows to 640x480 (and in the new Movie option) is a decent one, and long overdue, but until I can buy them in Portugal, I couldn't care less. Also, I still find the lack of a re-download option for these kind of media, even if we had to pay a few cents, disturbing. I don't want to keep every item I download from iTMS on my laptop hard-drive. At first I was thinking that a direct-to-S3 option of storage would be great, but we have a new feature that also solves my problem.

It's probably my favorite feature of them all, the ability to sync your iPod with multiple computers, bi-directional. So you can have a desktop computer with a big disk at home with all your music purchases on it, and sync to your laptop using the iPod as a glorious sneaker-net device. That is a killer feature for me. Unfortunately, it only works with music you bought from iTMS, so this is not a universal sync. Yet.

Apart from that, we also got games, and I've already played my fetish game on my iPod, Mini-Golf. It will be an excellent wast of time. If my wife had a supported iPod, I'm sure that Bejeweled and Cubis would also be in my credit card statement by now. Now that I'm thinking about it, it's probably safer not to tell her that they are available, or I might not only spend the money on them, but also loose my iPod to her. Heh :).

There are other features in there that are cool or useful, Coverflow and the new download manager, for example, but I don't expect to make much use of them.

Lastly, and for me and Rui, most surprising, a preview of a upcoming product: code-named iTV, its a media-center to plug into your TV and Stereo, that will be available sometime in Q1 2007 for $299. The box looks good, and the interface seems mother-in-law-proof, so it might make it to my home soon.

There are some questions though: does it play other open codec's, like XViD or Divx, or do I have to transcode it to H.264 MOVs? Can I have several of these boxes pulling from a single Mac? What about DVDs? Can I stream a DVD from another computer?

Will see. For now, my opinion is that this will be an excellent opportunity to sell more desktop computers to become the household server. Mini X-Serve's anyone? :)

All in all, a cool event, but nothing spectacular. For my friends waiting for laptop updates with Intel Meron's, don't despair, I'm sure you'll have something for Christmas. I was hoping something at Apple Paris Expo, but I noticed that it started today, and Jobs will not be present, so no updates for now.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)