Linked List: February 20, 2006

Monday, 20 February 2006

Malicious Bundles on OS X 

Google’s cached copy from January 25, 2006 of an unbylined article published on MacHacking.net, entitled “Malicious Bundles on OS X”. This article is pretty much a how-to guide that could have — and I’m guessing, probably was — used by the author of the recently-released Oompa Loompa Trojan horse. The original URL for the article is now a 404, and the source code examples are not in Google’s cache and, like the article itself, are no longer available at MacHacking.net.

(Via today’s issue of MDJ, which contained an exemplary feature on the Oompa Loompa saga. If you’ve never tried a trial subscription to MDJ or MWJ, you ought to.)

Joy of Tech on Dvorak 

Severe delusions and intense psychosis.

Mythbusters: The Office 12 New UI 

According to Jensen Harris, Microsoft’s lead user experience program manager for Office, the UI theme shown in all existing screenshots of Office 12 is not the theme they intend to ship. I don’t care what the final theme looks like, though, I still think the new “ribbon” is cluttered.

Paths in the Grass 

John Siracusa on why the Mac OS X haxie situation defies a simple summary:

People are inscrutable; Mac users, doubly so. Their computing desires follow suit. You can waste all the time and energy you want explaining why some feature is dumb or foolish or will actually make the people who use it less effective or efficient or whatever objective metric you’re using to judge such things. But if it makes someone happy, you’re sunk. Argument over.

Dipshit Washington Post Columnist Richard Cohen Claims Algebra is Useless 

P.Z. Myers calls him out as the moron that he is. (Via Atrios.)

Windows of Perception 

Daniel Jalkut explains why there are more windows, a lot more, in Mac OS X than you probably think. E.g. NSStatusItem icon menus are in fact drawn in a “window”:

I’m running Adium right now, with a single chat window open and activated. Adium is configured to show its NSStatusItem-based window in the menu bar. The above script, instead of returning the focused chat window, returns the sneaky little NSStatusItem window! So a user who relies on the functionality of AppleScript now has to know that “for Cocoa applications with NSStatusItems installed, the secret status item window is window 1.” That’s total BS. This window is broken.

This also explains why, if you click on a regular menu item title (like “File”) and then run your mouse across the menu, NSStatusItem menus won’t drop down, but NSMenuExtras will.