Thursday, 22 January 2009, 00:10:14 EDT
When I first tried Mac OS X I found the window manager to be extremely frustrating. I couldn't figure out why most applications would continue to run after closing the last window, and only a few would behave as I expected. Over time I've come accept (actually, prefer) the way OS X does this, but I don't think I ever fully understood it until today. Ars Technica, in reviewing the new taskbar in Windows 7, has clarified this for me. The description of each operating system's window management is the best I have ever read:
The fundamental distinction between OS X and Windows is that, in general, windows on Mac OS X represent documents; on Windows, they represent applications. This conceptual difference motivates many of the UI features of both OSes, and understanding it is key to understanding the two operating systems.
Before reading Ars's review, I felt like Microsoft was copying OS X's Dock system. Now, I see that they are superficially similar, but functionally different. Yes, Windows 7's taskbar shows large icons for each program running. And yes, it allows you to always display a program's icon — even when the program ... (view rest)
Friday, 17 March 2006, 08:36:32 EDT
It has been a little over a year since I bought my PowerBook, my first Macintosh. One of the deciding factors in my purchase was the availability of free software; either Free Open Source Software (FOSS) or plain old freeware. The FOSS movement is still gaining ground in the Mac world. But those developers that haven't quite succumbed to the FOSS philosophy, are mostly offering the fruits of their labor as freeware. In fact, the free software movement is growing so much that there is a website, freemacware.com, dedicated to reviewing the best free software available on the Macintosh. Which brings me to the point of this post. Freemacware.com is having a contest regarding freeware and this is my entry. I am going to cover five of the programs they have listed, which I use regularly, if not on a daily basis. So, let's get started.
The first I want to cover is Coconut Battery. This is an awesome program which keeps track of your laptop's battery life. It reports the current battery charge, maximum battery charge, current battery capacity, and the original battery capacity along with a percentage left thereof. It also reports the number of load cycles the battery has gone through. All of this information can be saved and reviewed later. For example, my current battery capacity is 3430mAh out of an original 4400mAh; or, 77% of the original battery life. I intend to buy a new battery when I get to 50% original life and this program makes it very easy to determine when that will be.
Second, is Cyberduck. Cyberduck is an FTP/SFTP client with a builtin bookmark manager. I covered this program briefly in my Quicksilver write-up. I don't think I could get by on a Mac without Cyberduck. I do a lot of transferring via SFTP and Cyberduck makes this very easy with its full drag-n-drop support. One really awesome thing about Cyberduck is its integration with various freeware text editors, such as Smultron. This integration makes it super easy to edit remote documents "locally." Basically, you select the remote document you would like to edit, click the editor button in Cyberduck, edit the file like normal, and then save in place — Cyberduck takes care of the rest.
Next up is Disk-Inventory-X. This is a port of a KDE program. With Disk-Inventory-X, you can quickly find the largest files and directories on your hard drive. This makes it super easy to reclaim disk space when you suddenly find you are out. The program is difficult to put into words. You just have to try it to understand it. Yes, there is a Windows port.
Another neat application is Paparazzi!. It's not a program I use a whole lot, but it is definitely handy to have around. Paparazzi! will take a "picture" of any given website (provided it isn't password protected). You can save specific regions of the site, e.g. the region you can see in a standard web browser viewport, or the whole thing. A good example of the latter option is this atrocity of a Covertte that I found on eBay a few months ... (view rest)
Friday, 17 February 2006, 09:43:03 EDT
How about some Apple stuff to break up the silence?
If you are using OS X, you owe it to yourself to check out Quicksilver. Quicksilver is one of the applications that convinced me to buy a Mac. Just reading about it, I knew I would love it. The application is hard to describe, though. It is sort of a local search engine for your computer; one that learns your query habits. But it can also be a file manager, or hotkey engine, or whatever. It is very powerful and very fast. I mostly use it to launch applications. I don't like digging through my filesystem to find the application I want to run and then double clicking it. Typing the first letter or two of the application name and then pressing enter to launch it is much faster. I have been expanding my knowledge of Quicksilver past using it for an application launcher, recently.
I've added the shelf, a couple of triggers, and some application specific searches to my repertoire. The shelf is great for moving files in conjunction with the Finder. Using a trigger that I defined, I can pull up the shelf at any time, drop some files (or really anything) onto it, navigate to the location I want to place the files, and then drag the files from the shelf to the new location. It is much easier that using drag-and-drop in conjunction with Finder's "spring loaded folders." And using Quicksilver to immediately go to my Cyberduck favorites is awesome. Instead of using Quicksilver to launch Cyberduck and then open the favorite from its sidebar, or using the slow Spotlight search to find the favorite, I can use Quicksilver to directly launch Cyberduck to the FTP/SFTP site I want to open. Absolutely wonderful.
That description of Quicksilver doesn't even scratch the surface. The program can be used for much, much more. For some better descriptions, and tutorials, check out the Quicksilver Tutorials Round-up post over at The Apple Blog. The first tutorial in ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 18 January 2006, 09:26:28 EDT
Categories:
I haven't been very lively lately. A particular R.E.M. song sort of gets my recent mood; it is more extreme than my actual mood but it is similar. Any way, that is the reason there haven't been any posts recently — apathy. That is also why I haven't finished my gallery script. I got to the point where I need to parse sub-albums and just haven't felt like writing the code to do it. Plus, classes have started and the ones I am taking are not easy and are very time consuming.
Having said that bunch of garbage, I have a small rant to vent in Hewlett-Packard's general direction. I don't have a scanner, so I use one that is available in Student Software Support Services on campus. It is an HP ScanJet. Since it is a USB scanner I just plug it into my laptop and scan directly to my computer. Well, the scanner, being an HP product, isn't so simple to use where that is all I have to do to use it. I had to download a 50MB driver package, which comes with way more software than anyone needs, just to be able to scan with the scanner. I've had this stuff installed on my computer for a couple semesters now because I like to scan in my graded assignments and tests for future reference. That way I don't have to keep stacks and stacks of paper. When I first installed the software, it placed an application in my dock that automatically started every time I logged in. I quickly got rid of that; I don't want crap software starting up that I use only occasionally.
Thinking I was done with that, I went on my merry computing way until I need to track down a rogue process and noticed that the damn thing was still running on start up! It seems that HP really wants their "HP ScanJet Manager" to run all the time after it is installed. Evidently, the application just waits for buttons to be pressed on the scanner so it can intercept their signals and do fancy "one button scan" garbage. As I write this, it is using almost 7% of my processor's time to do absolutely nothing. In other words, HP installed a constant battery drainer on my computer. I finally got fed up enough with this program today to track down how I can prevent it from starting. There are a lot of old posts, one or two years old, on the internet that say to remove it from either a) "/Library/StartupItems" (which I didn't know existed) or b) your user profile startup items under system preferences. If the application were installed in "/Library/StartupItems" I would be able to delete it from that location and all would be well. If it were in my user profile, it would be as simple as highlighting the entry and clicking a remove button. Neither is the case.
Some time in the past couple of years (so it seems), Hewlett-Packard got crafty. They found an API called AutoLaunchedApplicationDictionary in Apple's Core Foundation classes. How did I figure this out? It wasn't too simple. There is no information, that I have been able to find, on the internet about this. First, I had to find the "HP ScanJet Manager" application since it isn't installed in a typical "startup location". Spotlight to the rescue! Using Spotlight from a finder window, I was able to find the application in "/Library/Application Support/Hewlett-Packard/HP Scanjet/Scanner". This directory contains three files: the offending program, an XML data file, and an application to install the offending program to the system startup items. Using ... (view rest)
Saturday, 09 July 2005, 15:46:53 EDT
Every time I use Windows I hate it just a little bit more; okay, maybe more than a little bit. I recently purchased a wireless print server. I had become frustrated trying to get my Powerbook to use my printer shared via my Ubuntu desktop. For some reason OS X just refused to work with the printer and I was tired of fighting with it. The print server was on sale, actually on sale, no mail in rebates, at CompUSA and my local store had some in stock. The device isn't what I would call quality hardware but it works. I can print to my printer, connected to the print server, via OS X and Ubuntu by using the LPD protocol; each OS uses the Gimp-Print system so I don't have to track down drivers for my printer, they are just there.
So, why does all of this make me dislike Windows even more? Well, the print server is technically designed to work with Windows just like 98% of all the hardware out there. Since it is designed to work with Windows one would assume that it should be insanely easy to set up the printer in Windows, right? Not the case. The print server comes with some software for Windows that is supposed to search the network for the print server and automatically configure a new printer port on the system and then walk the user through configuring the printer drivers. The software does not f ... (view rest)