Results tagged “MacOS X” from Bill's Words

Am I the only one who sees it? No, I’m sure I’m not, because it’s as plain as day. What the hell is Adobe thinking?

They already have a captive audience in people who own and use their Creative Suite. All they have to do is make it the best damned HTML5 development tool there is and they’re in like Flynn. What if it could just pump out HTML5 instead of Flash with a checkbox? Same tool, same lock-in, same developer community familiar with their tools. And, oh-by-the-way, nobody said that making Flash-like things with HTML5 is easy, au contraire. So if they do it and do it right, they will gain those customers who refuse to use Flash but find developing in HTML5 to be hard.

They should shut up, quit whining about the death of Flash (whether it is dead or not) and move on to creating the first pro-quality HTML5 tool to market instead of an also-ran. And they’d be right back in the game.

Yeah, it costs money to do that. But… hear me out.

All of the browsers in the world now support or will support HTML5 and all the goodies therein—not just the desktop browsers, not just the mobile browsers. All of the browsers.

Some of the browsers in the world will not support Flash, and never will. Never. Never. Never. Period.

So, funny thing: if asked whether I would develop a creative tool which has as its potential audience all browsers or just some browsers, which do you think I’d put my time and money into?

Flash is dead, but long live Fl.

As a footnote, I tried to find out what the name, or names, of the Adobe Flash-generating products are called. After five minutes, I gave up. Too many SPODs, too much crap, not enough information. The Adobe website is a clear example of the technology’s getting in the way of the content.

(inspired by Daring Fireball Linked List: Jeff Croft on Adobe’s Android Flash Demo at FlashCamp Seattle.)

In record time: eight days. Article here.

I predict Apple will do one of two things: two WWDC’s per year, one for Mac OS and one for iPhone OS, or (more likely), one WWDC per year with alternating Mac OS and iPhone OS content. There will be some items in each for both platforms, but really, Apple has set itself up nicely for a major delivery per platform every two years.

Until Apple jumps into another market, or until there’s a major shift in the content/capabilities of either OS, I don’t think we’ll see the rapid pace of development that requires annual developer conferences as we have in the past.

I’ve been having wicked-bad performance problems with VMWare Fusion 3.0—the frustrating, I-want-to-hurl-it-through-the-Windows kind of performance problems. Turns out it’s a combination of v3.0 of Fusion and AVG Free 9.0

Since we changed antivirus protection types from a site license to a pay-per-copy license, I had to change to a free antivirus checker, and chose AVG Free 9.0. After that, performance went downhill. Windows would crawl along (refreshes were slow, sometimes not occurring at all), usually after resuming a VM, one core would jump to 100% usage, and Windows thought life was hunky dory because it shows 0% CPU usage. I.e., Fusion was working very hard, even though Windows was not. Weird.

Turns out, it’s a known problem with v3.0 of Fusion and AVG Free 9.0, and if I’d bothered to read the release notes, I’d have never chosen AVG Free. After uninstalling AVG Free and installing avast! antivirus, which got good reviews from reputable sources, the problem has gone away.

Hope that helps someone…

Amazing. Courtesy of Gruber at DaringFireball.net, I just signed up for the beta of HTML5 video playback on YouTube. You can, too. Just click here. Don’t be afraid, “beta” is not as bad as it sounds. It’s just a Google codeword for… for… well, nobody’s really sure.

Is it worth clicking through to sign up for this beta? If you use Safari or Chrome on a Mac, the answer is not just Yes, but rather Heck, yeah! I just watched a short video with this new playback method and my laptop barely broke a sweat. Watching a YouTube video with Adobe Flash causes my laptop to break out in tears begging for mercy, for me to put an end to it before it self-imolates under the strain of the bloated framework that is Flash.

If there were any better proof that Apple was wise in its decision not to allow Frickin’-Flash on its iPhone platform, I have yet to see it.

(I also use ClickToFlash as a preventative measure. It makes web surfing so much more palatable, and my laptop loves me for it.)

Well, this is good news.

Is the option to keep the most recent version of a file new in the MobileMe preferences (shown below)? Or have I not noticed it before?

Snow Leopard (MacOS X 10.6) really doesn’t offer a whole lot of new features. But some of the refinements, such as the AirPort “searching” ping! are just plain nice.

Before 10.6, clicking the eject button next to a mounted volume in the Finder’s Sidebar yielded no action until the volume was actually ejected. And if something was using a file on that disk, it would warn you about that fact and then do nothing. You just wasted two clicks.

Now, if you click the eject button, the volume is immediately grayed out. And it stays that way until it’s not busy anymore, at which point it gets ejected. Or “put away,” if you remember that terminology.

Updated: Aw, crud. Turns out I was wrong about that busy thing. Finder still insists on telling you that you just wasted a click. Poop.

And when a server gets disconnected, as often happens when I go from LAN to VPN mode, you can tell MacOS to ignore the fact that it lost the connections to those volumes, as shown below.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard: Now with 20% less pestering!

The other day, I noticed that the magnifying glass indicated when spotlight is busy indexing files.

But that’s old news since it applied to Leopard. Today, I noticed that, though it seems to take a lot longer to connect to my AirPort network, Snow Leopard animates the process of searching for a wireless connection. The AirPort symbol “emits” a ping that goes out and comes back in as it searches. I tried to record it with QuickTime’s screen recorder, but it doesn’t record the menu bar.

Or maybe that’s old with Leopard, too, and I’m just noticing it because Snow Leopard takes longer to find a network. Anybody got a clue?

Well, fixing this gripe alone is worth the $29 that Apple is charging for MacOS X Snow Leopard. I use that dialog box constantly and the changes in it address all of my previous concerns.

In my previous post on the subject, I complained that the dialog box pops into existance with two active-looking controls. (Problem 1.) No more. Only the text field is highlighted, and tab takes you to the list box where…

…no item is highlighted, but pressing the down arrow selects the first item in the list and then down from there. Pressing the up arrow selects the last item in the list and then up from there. That solves Problem 2, and it’s more intuitive than my original suggestion of using a grayed-out item (which may or may not have matched the item in the text field, so Apple’s one up on me there).

Problem 3 is solved, too, as resizing the dialog box no longer deselects anything that shouldn’t be deselected.

Alas, Snow Leopard doesn’t fix Problem 4. I won’t hold my breath, but I think that fix is just around the corner.

Updated: Looks like at least Problems 2 and 3 were fixed prior to 10.6, sometime in one of the later 10.5.x releases. But I’ll still pretend they were fixed in Snow Leopard to make me like the little kitty all that much the more. Besides, Problem 1 is a big one, and I’m glad it got fixed in 10.6.

I have been using Safari 4 Beta for all of five minutes now and I’m about to explode because my brain simply can’t wrap itself around the speed and usability improvements that I’m seeing.

First, the speed: I use Google Reader a lot and it is noticeably snappier. A web app that I’m designing is also considerably more responsive as the JavaScript engine (“Nitro…” I liked SquirrelFish better…) is far faster than the last version.

Second, the usability: I don’t know if it’s because Apple buggered up the JavaScript engine to handle the “javascript:NewWindow” function or not, but the Canon USA website I found incredibly frustrating to use last night is now usable. Wow.

Also, that I can tell, Safari now handles self-signed certificates (and remembering to allow them) correctly. What a blessing that one is, especially as I am developing my web app on my own server with my self-signed certificate. Whew!

And the integration of lightning-fast (and I do mean lightning fast) Google suggestions into the search bar is absolutely outstanding.

Now, a gripe or two:

The blue progress bar that filled in across the URL bar as the page loaded was very nice, and I miss it.

The grid display of most popular sites is really cool, as is the Coverflow view. But why no keyboard navigation? And why is there no way to access these views in the… View menu, or with a keyboard shortcut? The only way I can find to get at them is with a click in the Bookmark Bar on the grid icon. That strikes me as oddly exclusive of keyboard users.

More later as I discover things…

Article here.

Apple changed the lightbulb of the Energy Saver preferences panel to a CFL bulb.

As I continue to say, it’s the details that Apple pays attention to and which they mostly get right.

Never on a Dell would you find this level of care, but mostly because Microsoft doesn’t give a crap.

The latest Security Update (dated October 9, 2008) appears to be PHP neutral.

Through not-so-rigorous testing (i.e., comparing the results of “php -i” before and after the upgrade), I have determined that the latest Security Update appears to change nothing in my PHP installation. Your mileage may vary.

Article here.

The subject and title of the page is a bit misleading in that the problem really seems to have nothing to do with Parallels, but the solution is right on:

If you are experiencing really slow typing performance (“slower than frozen snot”) in Excel 2008 for Macintosh and you have files in File>Open Recent Items… which are from a Windows network volume, then go to Excel>Preferences>General and disable Show this number of recent documents.

Performance should become snappy again.

When it’s a “><”, of course!

Here’s the text of the original function in a standard html file. It’s properly enclosed in tags, and other parts of the script work, so don’t get your panties in a wad.

      function getArgs() {

      var args = new Object();
      var query = location.search.substring(1);
      var pairs = query.split("&");
      for(var i = 0; i < pairs.length; i++)
      {
      var pos = pairs[i].indexOf('=');
      if(pos == -1) continue;
      var argname = pairs[i].substring(0,pos)
      var value = pairs[i].substring(pos+1)
      args[argname] = unescape(value)
      }

      return args;
      }

This code is part of a custom app that my company uses, so I won’t publish the whole thing. (It’s available upon request—let me know and they’ll send it to you.) But suffice it to say that this code can be pretty easily found on the web, too. Just Google “getargs() javascript” and you can find numerous sources for it.

As best I can tell, Safari refuses to execute this code, instead returning a null value or something to the caller. When I look into the Web Inspector window to see what’s going on (because I’m curious like that), this is what I see:

Look at line 121 carefully. That’s an odd comparator, isn’t it?

I saved the original source of that page and put it onto my machine, which has only the proper “<” comparator in it, and verified that the Web Inspector window does indeed show me the odd “><” comparator, highlighted appropriately as if it were comparing i to < pairs.length.

I sent off a bug report to Apple using Safari’s feedback. But I’m not holding my breath.

I love MacOS X.

Except when I don’t.

Like when I’m looking at the disks on my MacOS X Server 10.5.4 machine and see this:

Though it’s nice to know how big the drive is, the more important question is How much space is left? And most of that info has been obliterated in favor of ellipses.

I’ve seen it done before, though I don’t know where, where two lines are used to show enough information about an item.

But now, when I went to look at the desktop, this is what I saw:

Did I do something?! What happened here?

Argh.

Oh, wait, I see it now. Previously the second number, the free space, was five digits (and a radix). Now it’s only four, so it fits.

Rounding. Truncating. Something-ing. Anyway, Finder should not display the most useless part of the number (the digits after the radix) in favor of ellipses when rounding a bit would make it fit.

So you haven’t bought an Intel Mac yet? (Don’t worry. You don’t have to.) And you’re still using VirtualPC? (Yes, that’s OK, too. I was until a couple of months ago.) And you have the error “NTLDR: Fatal Error 2592 reading BOOT.INI” on boot?

Uh oh.

Don’t worry! I’ve been there! And this is how I solved it.

First, you’ll need to create a brand new PC with Windows XP. I think that means you’ll have to start with the VirtualPC installation CD and make a new installation, but I’m not sure as I didn’t have to do this step. (I already had a second PC handy.)

Second, in the broken PC’s settings, select Drive 1 and click “None.” VPC will tell you that it has moved Drive 1 into a separate document.

Third, in the new PC’s settings, select Drive 2 and click “Select…” Direct VPC to the separate document that it just created.

Fourth, start up the new PC and get a command prompt.

Now do this:

D:
attrib -R -A -S -H boot.ini
C:
xcopy /ah C:\boot.ini d:

(to the question “Overwrite boot.ini,” answer “Y”)

D:
attrib +S +H +R boot.ini

This sequence first makes it so you can overwrite the broken boot.ini, copies the hidden boot.ini from your C: drive to your broken D: drive, and it reassigns the attributes to the boot.ini file that make it system, hidden, and, I presume, read-only.

Shut down the new PC and in its settings, select “None” for Drive 2.

Open the settings for the broken PC and click “Select…” for Drive 1. Point VPC to the separate document. Then start up the broken PC.

Now, you may have other problems with that PC. Mine, for example, simply didn’t want to run Windows XP happily and I had to do a repair installation on the disk. But that’s a topic for another note.

Hope this was of some use to someone…

Which dialog box? This one. The bane of my MacOS Xistence. And this is how it looks when you open it up using Go>Connect to Server:

So, what’s so wrong with it? It’s straight-forward enough, right?

Problem 1: There are two active-looking controls when the dialog box appears. One is a list, for which up and down arrows should work, especially since there’s a selected server in the list. The other is a text entry field, for which the up and down arrows should also work, as well as the left and right arrows, for that matter, especially since there’s selected text in the field. And both highlights are blue.

Which one is the real active field? Yes, it’s the one with the blue highlight around the box, not the one with the blue highlighted text, which would lead you to think there are two active controls in this dialog. How wrong you are!

The fix? Other Mac apps, including Safari, which I’m using right now, grey out the selection in an inactive list, and completely unselect the text in an inactive text entry field. On opening, this dialog box should have either one line selected in blue in the list or the text selected in blue in the text entry field, possibly with the last-used favorite in the list selected in grey (but definitely not blue).

Problem 2: Well, I decide that I’m trainable and, since I most often want to use a previously-used selection, my first thought is to hit tab, which correctly de-highlights the text in the text entry field, but inexplicably de-highlights the previously-used selection in the list, too! Now nothing is highlighted.

My brain, which was previously drawn to the previously-used selection, is now left thinking, WTF? Do I hit up or down arrow now? I was thinking “Up arrow, because I want to get to that one above the current selection,” but now I’m wondering what an arrow key will do, because there’s nothing obvious about what should happen next.

The solution is for the dialog box to behave properly with the highlighting of the various active and inactive elements. Were the highlight grey in the first place and I hit tab to get to the list box, it should turn the highlight to blue and I would be left with no wondering at all about what the up or down arrow might do. That ought to be pretty easy to fix.

Problem 3: The dialog box isn’t really a dialog box, so it has some strange behaviors. Like resizing the window makes the selection in the list box get unselected. And there’s no green dot, either. (Why not? Couldn’t clicking the green dot make the window expand to a size that is wide enough to show the complete server addresses and tall enough to show all server addresses? But the green dot behavior, in general, sucks in MacOS X and is one of the few things that Windows gets right… Ouch.)

Problem 4: This isn’t a problem with the above-shown “Connect to Server” dialog box, it’s a problem with the inexplicable nature of the Finder sidebar. (And with the Open/Save dialog box, too.)

Let’s say I used the above-shown “Connect to Server” dialog box and connect to Home. Funny thing is it doesn’t show up in the sidebar as I think it should. Instead, the server, shr-g5, shows up. Yeah, yeah, I know, the item in Finder>Preferences>Sidebar says under “Show these items in the Sidebar:” “Connected Servers,” not “Connected Volumes.”

But why doesn’t it? Why, when I want to get to Home do I have to wait for Finder to connect to shr-g5 and see what volumes are shared in order that I may eventually click on Home? Perhaps this is useful for folks who regularly need to look at different volumes on the same server and only want to have to navigate that silly “Connect to Server” dialog once per boot. But me? I want to see Home listed somewhere in that list, whether it’s under Devices (it would fit perfectly under iDisk, which isn’t a “device” either) or in Shared, where it really would belong, too.

Aw, Bill, you’re just cranky because you have to wait for the Finder to connect… No, I’m cranky because I just got off a 35-mile bike ride which was uphill all the way (OK, not really, but it sure felt like it!) and I’m not cranky as much as I am just plain tired, and, well, Apple gets the brunt of it today.

And maybe I am a bit cranky because I didn’t make it up Plains Road, whose approximately-25% grade will require more stamina and less weight for me to make it up. Sorry, Apple.