Noted

Thursday, 5 June 2003

401(ok) Restores Internet Sharing to iTunes 4.0.1

James G. Speth, author of iCommune, posting to the iCommune Users mailing list:

Well, I whipped up a crappy little application called 401(ok) that combines a few hacks to restore internet-wide sharing to iTunes 4.0.1. I know I really liked the ability to access *my* music from anywhere, and I didn’t like that the 4.0.1 update removed that feature. Steve giveth, and Steve taketh away.

You can download it from: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/icommune/401ok-0.1.sit?download

I made it as quickly as I could, and it could use a lot of improvement. I’ll make it better if people think the basic functionality is worthwhile.

(Thanks to Morbus Iff for the link.)

On Acrobat 6

Sven-S. Porst thinks the new “Adobe Reader” (née Acrobat Reader) stinks:

Nothing new but useless junk and corporate bollocks. The product that should be a simple document viewer now looks and feels like it was from Microsoft.

Whereas Andy Ihnatko loves the full Acrobat package. (I’d link to Ihnatko’s review itself, but the Chicago Sun Times web site apparently doesn’t keep any articles other than Roger Ebert’s available for longer than a week. And while I’m at it, where better than in a parenthetical pertaining to Andy Ihnatko to veer even further off on a tangent? This article by Ebert, wherein he responds to a poorly-reviewed filmmaker [Ebert deemed the fellow’s movie the worst ever in the history of the Cannes Film Festival] who subsequently lashed out against Ebert in the press [he called Ebert a “fat pig” with “the physique of a slave-trader”] is a genuine pisser. Roger Ebert is a funny guy.)

A ‘.rose’ by Any Other Name Extension Is Not a Rose

Jonathan Rentzsch on why you need to turn on the OS X Finder’s “Always show file extensions” preference (which defaults to off):

And here’s the “feature”. Try to rename Foo.txt back to Foo.bar.

You can’t.

Oh sure, the Finder will list the file’s name as Foo.bar again, but the Finder is lying to you. Really, the file’s name is now Foo.bar.txt. You can get the Finder to give up its pretenses by using Get Info on the file, and opening the little Name and Extension inspector panel.

Personally, I think these file suffix-hiding shenanigans are the single most un-Mac-like aspect of Mac OS X. (Not necessarily the worst aspect overall, just the most un-Mac-like.) It’s like a smelly deposit of dog shit on the carpet. Mac OS X users have learned to hold their breath and walk around it; whereas Mac OS 9 users gag, and demand to know why Apple hasn’t cleaned this up.

That Darn Finder

Pierre Igot skewers the OS X Finder for yet another of its glaring inconsistencies when in List view:

If you have a Finder window in List view mode in Mac OS X, and you click on the name of a file or folder in the list, the Finder selects the item, and, after a fraction of a second, it makes the name editable. On the other hand, if you click on the icon of the item, the Finder just selects it.

This is the standard behaviour, and it is no different from what used to happen in the classic Mac OS.

What is different, however, is that, when the name of the item is editable, the cmd-delete shortcut to put the item in the Trash does not work.

This only affects the List view mode in Mac OS X.

Hints vs. Hacks

Nat Irons offers a brief comparison of two similar-sounding titles from O’Reilly, Mac OS X Hacks and Mac OS X Hints, and includes a really nifty tip from the Hints book: in the midst of a drag-and-drop operation on Mac OS X, you can use Command-Tab to switch applications. Wow.

And this brings us full circle for the day, since the co-author of Mac OS X Hacks is Kevin Hemenway, a.k.a. Morbus Iff, who sent me the heads up regarding 401(ok).