nutMac

My homeboys, Realmac Software in Brighton got some big props from ars technica today for an upcoming 4.0 release to their popular web design application, RapidWeaver. If you are itching to have a sneak peek at all that’s new with RapidWeaver 4.0 then go give the article a read.

A few points that have me excited are the hinting of a more robust api that could possible allow plugin developers greater access to the OS and other apps. This is, of course, just me reading between the lines. Greater plugin freedom ovens up a whole lot of possibilities for RapidWeaver.

Something else that has me excited is the news ticker which should make it a lot easier to keep users updated with theme patches and updates.

Path Finder (my all time favorite OS file system) has had a long awaited point release, bringing the version to 4.8.4. This update brings some needed bug fixes for both Tiger and Leopard versions that are apparently rooted deep within the Mac OS itself (due to be fixed in OS X 10.5.3 I suspect). For a complete list of updates and bug fixes see the Path Finder Changelog.

How much happier could a geek like me get? Well for the first time since I started putting down my Mac thought patterns down on digital paper (this blog) I can say that I am proud of the keywords used to find nutMac. My top 25 keyword are predominantly TextMate, QuickSilver, MAMP, HTML, CSS, SQL, websearch and various combinations therein. If that is not THE most geekified set of words, I don’t know what is. The only word missing from the list is Unix!

So what does this mean? I guess I could use it as some sort of metric that what I write is important particular demographic. I mean, these keywords are an exact reflection of what I write about. These are things I have searched for myself wishing to find an article that answered my needs. Maybe my articles are answering the needs of geeks like me. That would be pretty cool if you ask me.

So if you read this blog, you must be a geek. But not any geek; you are a Mac geek and probably one that knows a little more than the average geek about OS’s, hardware, software or some form of programming. You are hardcore (if not just work with me here). So if you like what goes on here, but crave something more of an audio nature, please check out the podcast from MacBreak Tech. I have raved about them in the past and I am going to do it again now. This show is for geeks. Real geeks. Crack the case open, pull on the wires, hack it with a bash command kind of geeks.

The first time I wrote about the show, there would be only 5 or 6 comments per episode. Now they get 15 to 25 per show, and the geekier the show, the more comments! Take, for instance, the show where they turned an old G4 Power Mac into a NAS drive (a long standing request of mine). How geeky is that? It got 25 comments! You have to be a hardcore geek to understand WHY anyone would want to do this (the correct answer is “because you can”, by the way).

The number of outlets for this kind of geekery are few and far between (outside of flame bait, forum arenas where the main topics are Kirk vs. Picard ) so when a show as well put together as this one comes along, one that doesn’t cater to the ADHD, Digg skimming, tech trend surfer, it is a refreshing and very welcome change.

Thank you John, Kenji, Ben and Craig for making MacBreak Tech.

So it’s been a bit. Many mac stories have come and gone and had I not been overwhelmed with work at those moments I would most certainty add my two cents to the stream of consciousness. The same can be said right now too but I just had to free my brain from the coding and scripting matrix that has become my life. So today I bring you a quick and dirty little tip, another one of those little known or long forgotten OS tricks that will save you a ton of misery.

I would like to believe that this one is long forgotten versus little known since the latter would imply that Apple is not the best at getting word of it’s most basic features out there (FYI: Apple is doing a bang up job of teaching you little tips at http://www.apple.com/business/theater/). Everyone like the drag-n-dropiness of Mac OS X right? It’s great for moving things right? Well it’s also great for copying things too! You can copy items from one place to another by simply holding the option key while you move your item. This will leave a copy in it’s original place while making a new copy to add to the location you finally decide on.

This isn’t just for moving items from folder to folder, the same is true when working within documents. Highlight a word or phrase, click and hold on it then press and hold the option key to make a copy of that word or phrase, ready to be positioned wherever your heart desires.

This one is too cool for words. I think this one came to me from Dan Counsell of Realmac Software. Anyhow, as are most of my articles about apps, this app is the perfect tool for any web designers toolkit (well what did you expect from a web designer). I find there are a lot of times where I just need a little (or a lot) more space on my screen to see what’s below the fold on my web designs. Well there is a great little app called Paparazzi! that takes care of all that for you and will take a screen shot of any URL you throw at it. But it won’t just snap what your browser can see, it takes a picture of the whole thing, from header to footer.

It’s free for the time being and I don’t know if there are plans to make it a paid-for app but it would be certainly worth it to me. To get an idea of how insanely col this app is, take a look at this image of an extraordinarily long wed page that I posted on Flickr.

I’ve been pretty quite about ExpanDrive despite my HEAVY usage of it over the last week. I kept quiet simply because I really wanted to drill this one to death before getting behind something with this kind of power.

For those looking for a way to best describe ExpanDrive, it’s like iDisk without a .Mac account, it’s like Jungle Disk without the transfer rate$, it’s WebDAV without jenky WebDAV protocol (can’t pass many programming commands since WebDAV uses those same commands) or it’s like an external Firewire or USB drive that you access anywhere with physically carrying an hard drive around… ExpanDrive brings mounted disk functionality to remote storage locations.

Like I said, I have been driving this thing to wall since I got it last week, and yes it gets a little shaggy at times (which could be to blame on the server or the ISP as much as the app itself) but overall, this is a must have app. I have been beating the snot out this doing web development from the Finder (or Path Finder, truth be told) once I need to move beyond local development yet not ready to go live. I have installed and run apps directly from ExpanDrive drives. I have used it for storage, a file server… the reality is, anything you use any mounted volume for you can use ExpanDrive.

It’s brilliant.

Be warned: I have found that when using it as a web development platform the odd edit I make to a remote file will suddenly render that file useless leaving me no option but to replace that file with a local copy (this happens most often with style sheets). I have yet to watch my console to really see what’s going on but when I find out, I’ll let you know.

Here is a quick little tip that surprisingly few mac people know about, switchers and veterans alike. I’m sure Windows users and most Mac users will be familiar with the alt-tab(windows)/cmd-tab(mac) method of app switching, if not, just try it. You’ll see a heads up display of your running apps which you can tab to or mouse to in order to select a running app to bring to the front.

But what many people aren’t aware of is the fact that you can use this method as a quick way to quit a bunch of apps. On a Mac, simply cmd-tab to the app you want to quit and while still holding the cmd key, press the “q” key and that app will quit right then and there. Keep depressing the cmd key to quit other apps as you go. It’s that simple.

I want to preface this by saying that I might be totally ass backwards in doing this but I had a need and I answered it. So before you try what I am about to tell you, be warned, if this totally obliterates your computer, project, or anything at all… it’s not my fault!

Ok, here is my needs, part 1; I run MAMP on my system to develop web projects locally. I use MAMP because it has more up to date versions of Apache, PHP and MySQL and I can update any of those on the fly at any time. It’s great that OS X has all of this pre installed (save for the MySQL), but it just isn’t very fast and I’ve always felt that by banging on the these system services I can potentially harm my system as a whole. With MAMP, I can bang on the innards of it’s services all I want and only worry about breaking that which resides in the MAMP folder.

My needs, part 2; I am a heavy, heavy TextMate user and as it happens, TextMate is a brilliant SQL editor which allows for complex queries to be written in a comfortable editor (as opposed to the very linear Terminal.app) and executed in a sexy little browser. The problem with is that TextMate presumes you will compile your MySQL server in the standard location and configuration (/usr/local/mysql/), where as MAMP puts it all in it’s own folder located in the Applications folder (/Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/).

What I have found is that TextMate want’s to access the socket (mysql.sock) in the /tmp/ folder (buried in the /private/ folder on the hard drive), but I know the MAMP socket is located at /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/. So I thought I would try making an alias of this socket in the /tmp/ folder for TextMate to find. And it worked.

WARNING: IF THE TERMINAL SCARES YOU THEN LOOK NO FURTHER

First, open terminal, then type in the following line to create the link (this is based on the assumption that you already have a /tmp/ folder which you should):

sudo ln -s /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock /tmp/mysql.sock

Next, you want to change the owner:

sudo chown _mysql /tmp/mysql.sock

And lastly the permissions:

sudo chmod 777 /tmp/mysql.sock

Now from the SQL bundle preferences in TextMate, add your server and database info (assuming you have already created a database). Remember that by default, MAMP MySQL administration is set to user: root, password: root (yikes, you might want to change that). It would look something like this:

That’s it! Now you can freely execute SQL queries from TextMate using your MAMP MySQL engine.

Technorati Tags: TextMate, MAMP, MySQL, SQL, PHP, Apache

Hurray!

I hope this solves all the issues I had with 10.5.1. By this list, it looks promising.

Originally posted on http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=307109

What’s included?

This update delivers several improvements for both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs (as well as improvements provided in the Mac OS X 10.5.1 [update][31].)

Active Directory

• Addresses issues which could hinder or prevent binding Mac OS X 10.5.x clients to Active Directory domains.

AirPort

• Improves connection reliability and stability
• Includes 802.1X improvements.
• Resolves certain kernel panics.

Back to my Mac

• Adds support for more third-party routers, as detailed in [this article][32].

Dashboard

• Improves performance of certain Apple Dashboard widgets (such as Dictionary).
• Addresses an issue in which Dashboard widgets may no longer be accessible after switching to or from an account that has Parental Controls enabled.

Dock

• Updates Stacks with a List view option, a Folder view option, and an updated background for Grid view.

Desktop

• Addresses legibility issues with the menu bar with an option to turn off transparency in Desktop & Screen Saver preferences.
• Adjusts menus to be slightly-less translucent overall.

iCal

• Improves iCal so that it accurately reflects responses to recurring meetings.
• Addresses an issue in which a meeting may remain on the calendar after being cancelled.
• Addresses stability issues related to .Mac syncing of iCal calendars.
• Resolves an intermittent issue in which editing an event with attendees would cause the event to shrink and not register that the event was updated.

iChat

• Addresses an issue with simultaneously-logged in accounts in which iChat sounds generated from one account might be heard in another account.
• Fixes an issue in which iChat idle time is affected by Time Machine backups.
• Improves connectivity when running iChat behind a router that doesn’t preserve ports.
• Enables logged chats from previous versions of iChat to open faster and more reliably.
• Addresses an issue with text chats in which users may be unable to receive messages from the sender.
• Addresses an issue that may prevent rejoining an AIM chat room without reopening iChat.
• Addresses video chat compatibility issues with AIM 6 and third-party routers.
• Fixes an issue with case-sensitivity of AIM handles.

iSync

• Adds support for Samsung D600E and D900i phones.

Finder

• Addresses an issue in which Finder could unexpectedly quit when displaying folder contents in Column view.
• Addresses an issue in which Finder could unexpectedly quit when accessing Users and Groups in a Get Info pane.
• Resolves an issue that prevented setting permissions on a folder alias.
• Resolves an issue in which the Eject command could write to a disc in the optical drive.
• Fixes an issue in which the scroll bar might disappear when deleting a file within a folder that includes files that are out of view.
• Fixes an issue in the Sharing & Permissions section of Get Info windows, in which the gear icon appears to be gray/disabled after authentication.
• Addresses an issue in which the Show Icon Preview preference might not be not saved when turning it off.
• Fixes an issue that could occur when trying to print an image from the Finder.

Mail

• Addresses an issue with Message menu’s Mark > As Read choice.
• Fixes an issue in which duplicate On My Mac folders may appear in the sidebar after upgrading to Leopard.
• Improves the accuracy of the Data Detectors feature.
• Resolves an issue with scrolling through a Note that is displayed using the split view in the message window.
• Fixes an issue with deleting messages located in the Drafts folder.
• Fixes an issue in which dragging the icon in the Safari URL field into a Mail message creates an attachment instead of a link.
• Addresses an issue found when opening a item in the Notes folder that is not a Note.
• Fixes an issue that may prevent RSS feeds from being delivered in Mail.
• Resolves an issue in which a selected message could “flash” from blue to gray when in Organize by Thread mode.
• Fixes an issue with scrolling between multiple To Dos in an email message.
• Fixes an issue in which the body of email messages with certain MIME structures may not be displayed.
• Improves performance with America Online (AOL) account-based messages in Mail.
• Addresses issues with some ISPs during automatic set-up in Mail.
• Addresses an issue in which Mail might not send mail on some networks to some SMTP servers.
• Mail now automatically disables the (unsupported) third-party plugin GrowlMail version 1.1.2 or earlier to avoid issues.
• Adds an option to view large icons in the Mailbox list.

Networking

• Addresses a hanging issue that may occur when connecting to an AFP network volume.

Parental Controls

• Improves stability when opening the Parental Controls System Preferences pane.
• Fixes an issue that may prevent changes to the email address for permission requests.
• Addresses an issue with printer administration for a guest account enabled with Parental Controls.
• Addresses an issue with setting printer administration privileges from another Mac on the local network.
• Fixes an issue that could prevent certain applications from being allowed.
• Addresses accuracy issues with the web content filter.

Preview

• Improves stability when scrolling through a PDF document.
• Fixes an issue that prevents tabbing within a PDF document after clicking on the PDF.
• Improves the Mail Document feature so that email attachments are more reliably created from Print Preview.

Printing

• Addresses an issue in which remote printers may be deleted when the computer is put to sleep.
• Improves printing performance when using some Microsoft Office applications.
• Resolves an issue with some printing options, such as landscape orientation, number of copies, two-sided printing, and so forth that may not have functioned with some printers shared by Microsoft Windows.
• Adds support for certain printers connected to the USB port of an AirPort Extreme or AirPort Express base station.
• Resolves a stalling issue that could occur when installing certain Canon printing software from a disc.

RAW Image

• Adds RAW image support for several cameras, as detailed in [this article][33].

Safari

• Addresses issues with Safari reliably resolving certain domains.

Login and Setup Assistant

• Addresses an issue in which Setup Assistant could unexpectedly appear each time Mac OS X 10.5 starts up.
• Improves stability and performance during log in.

System

• Improves the accuracy of the grammar checker.
• The computer will now shut down if an automatic disk repair does not succeed during startup.

Time Machine

• Adds a menu bar option for accessing Time Machine features (the menu extra can be enabled in Time Machine preferences).
• Improves backup reliability when computer name contains slash or non-ASCII characters.
• Fixes an issue in which the backup disk displayed in the Finder may be out of sync with the disk chosen for Time Machine.
• Addresses issues in which some external drives are not recognized by Time Machine.
• The status menu now appears by default.

Other

• Improves general stability when running third-party applications.
• Addresses an issue in which the incorrect search results may be displayed for certain Automator Find/Filter actions.
• Addresses an issue with the Latvian and Russian keyboard layouts.
• Addresses an issue in which the backlight could turn off before Energy Saver’s backlight setting.

Apple really missed the mark with the Leopard version of Finder. I don’t need more places and things in my sidebar to get confused with. What I need are tabs. Who really looks at there system and folder structure in such a linear fashion? And with multiple Finder windows virtually indistinguishable from one another, who really wants to drag files from one window to the next?

Tabs are todays solution to many peoples daily folder grind. To move effortlessly from one location to another, to drag files tab to tab with the certainty the Finder won’t slip and slide into other folders as you hover over them with file-in-hand, to not fill your entire desktop real estate with little, grey, nondescript windows.

Finder is arguably the backbone of the OS. Sure it’s not sexy to hone something as dismal as a file browser and then blow your horn about it, but by perfecting the Finder with each new OS X Apple stands to have something to really talk about. Not everybody is going to do backups a la Time Machine, not everybody is going to get Spotlight, and most people only have one computer at home and will certainly never need to share that on the LAN or otherwise. But there is one indisputable fact of all Mac OS X users, new or old; they will all need to browse files on there computer and so much of their experience doing so is what will determine, for them, whether Mac OS X is a good operating system or not.

I make a plea to you Apple, don’t treat Finder like your 9 to 5 underwear. Make Finder your sexy lingerie that you are just dying to show off. Finder hasn’t had any significant advances since OS X came to be. It’s time she got a facelift, tummy tuck and some new lipstick.

Technorati Tags: Mac OS X, Apple, Finder