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.
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.
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
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].)
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.
I’m always on the hunt for quick way to go from here to there. One thing I especially dislike is redundancy, repetition, extraneous steps, movements and keystrokes. That’s why I love Quicksilver. Every day I am able to tap the wonder app for more and more time saving tricks.
One aspect of my job in web design and theme design is having to look up web sites and online resources constantly. So here are a three tricks I’ve dug up, which was not easy since Quicksilver documentation is few and far between.
I hope this little how-to was useful to you. Bookmark it, Digg it or do whatever it takes to keep track of this permalink because you never know when you’ll need it.
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