Linked List: August 2006

Thursday, 31 August 2006

CGSSetWindowWarp Explained ★: Kevin Ballard’s analysis of the undocumented system call behind the “live window” Genie special effects. He made use of it in his Ironcoder contest entry, DaliClock. (Via Mark Dalrymple via email.)
Minimized Window Trick ★: Not news to me that windows being sucked into the Dock are “live” (try the slow-minimize effect with a running QuickTime movie, for example), but this is a neat trick nonetheless, and it’s one of those things most people probably don’t realize. (Thanks to Chris Ryland for the link.)

Wednesday, 30 August 2006

In Defense of WWDC 2006 ★

Scott Stevenson, and most of his commenters, push back against Matt Neuburg’s criticism of the food and accommodations at WWDC 2006.

Advertise on The Deck ★

One spot open for September; get it while the getting is good. (Send your inquiries to deck@coudal.com.)

My thanks to August’s Deck advertisers: DesignerID, Adobe, Fresh Books, Adaptive Path UX Week, Carson Systems, O’Reilly, Text Link Ads, Jewelboxing, Squarespace, and Veer. Their support for Daring Fireball is much appreciated.

Tuesday, 29 August 2006

Midnight Inbox 0.9 ★

Public beta — complete with warnings that there are missing features, bugs, and that the data store is not to be trusted yet — Getting Things Done app.

Musicast 1.0 ★

Very well-done new app ($18) for sharing your iTunes music over the Internet. You select which of your playlists you want to share, and Musicast runs a web server on your Mac that shares those songs. The web interface has a very slick UI (as does the Musicast app itself), and it also publishes your playlists in RSS format for iTunes (or whatever other feed reader you want to use).

Jeremy Bogan’s Telemarketer Trap ★

He’s set up a special line where he forwards telemarketers, with a playback loop full of comments intended to keep them on the line for as long as possible (“Why don’t you tell me a bit more about what you’re offering...”). He’s recording the resulting calls and posting the funniest ones.

Evan Williams: Pageviews are Obsolete ★

I’ve long thought that equating pageviews with popularity leads to site design that requires users to reload pages over and over — e.g. the way many “news” sites break up articles into two or three pages to load.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt Joins Apple’s Board of Directors ★

Interesting:

“Eric is obviously doing a terrific job as CEO of Google, and we look forward to his contributions as a member of Apple’s board of directors,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Like Apple, Google is very focused on innovation and we think Eric’s insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Apple in the years ahead.”

Unlike Microsoft, Apple clearly doesn’t consider Google a competitor.

Let’s hope this leads to Google producing better Mac desktop software.

Universal Backs Free-With-Advertising Music Rival to iTunes ★

Universal has apparently agreed to participate in SpiralFrog, an upcoming new music service that plans to make music available without charge, but to get the downloads, you’ll have to sit through advertisements (or perhaps the ads will be attached to the downloaded songs?), and the music will be encoded in a protected WMA format, which means it won’t work on iPods. And users will have to keep coming back to the SpiralFrog web site once per month to watch more ads to keep all of their previous downloads enabled.

I smell yet another dud.

Monday, 28 August 2006

Dave Nanian on Time Machine ★

Dave Nanian of Shirt Pocket software — developers of the excellent SuperDuper backup utility for Mac OS X — on Time Machine:

Some sort of backup functionality belongs in the OS. It’s been a long time coming. The fact that it wasn’t there left opportunities for third parties, but that doesn’t mean Apple shouldn’t address the missing functionality.

Web Forms 2.0 Spec Published as W3C Working Draft ★

Ian Hickson:

The best part of all this, though, is that I managed to get the word “frankensteinesque” onto the /TR/ page!

Mac OS X Server: AppleShare Performance Tuning for Client and Server ★

Detailed Apple KnowledgeBase article with advanced techniques for tuning AppleShare performance. (Via Nat Irons via email.)

Apple Cracks ‘Bushism’ Syntax Joke ★

Apple, on a page touting the Mac’s security advantage versus Windows (emphasis added):

On a Windows PC, software (both good and evil) can change the system without your even knowing about it. In order for software to significantly modify Mac OS X, you have to type in your password. You’re the decider. You approve changes to your system.

George W. Bush, linguistic trend-setter.

(Thanks to DF reader Nathan Henderson for the link.)

MondoMouse ★

$15 mouse hack for Mac OS X adds focus-follows-mouse behavior, along with the ability to resize, move, and identify background windows without clicking on them. I wouldn’t use this, but it might be popular with recent switchers who gripe about the focus-follows-mouse thing. (Via Jesper via AIM.)

Quinn 3.3.4 ★

Last month, developer Simon Haertel stopped distributing his excellent freeware game Quinn after receiving a legal nastygram from The Tetris Company. After evaluating his legal position, Quinn is back, and now described thusly:

Quinn is an implementation of a popular falling-blocks game, which, according to the Tetris Company, must not be named here.

Use the Edge of an Extra PowerBook Battery to Pop Out the Current One ★

I just learned this trick a few weeks ago at WWDC from Ben Artin of Fetch Softworks.

New Features at Upcoming.org ★

Upcoming.org:

Yeah, we’ve been busy. What’s new? Undiscovered events, Flickr photos for events, buddy icons, new event pages, and more than we can remember.

I love the Flickr integration, and the “undiscovered events” feature gives Upcoming users access to thousands of events from Yahoo Local.

Helvetica, the Motion Picture ★

Upcoming documentary about “typography, graphic design, and global visual culture”.

(In)stalled? ★

Clever idea for Dock icon badges for Apple’s Installer. (Via Rentzsch.)

Dave Shea Reviews Apple’s Mighty Mouse ★

“Don’t even get me started on this one.”

Saturday, 26 August 2006

Kiko Sold for $258,100 ★

Typical eBay bid pattern — it went from around $75,000 to $250,000 in the last 12 minutes.

The Decline of WWDC ★

Matt Neuburg on the rather crummy food and accommodations at WWDC 2006 earlier this month:

Lunches were plastic salad and plastic sandwiches in plastic containers; breakfast was nearly non-existent. Snacks between talks were dried-up pastry. One evening there was something that pretended to be pizza; it was so bad that people were literally gasping in disbelief.

I pretty much concur completely.

Office 2007 and Fitts’s Law ★

Jensen Harris on how the UI designers on the Office 2007 team tried to pay attention to Fitts’s Law. Excellent usability discussion.

Friday, 25 August 2006

Crazy Apple Rumors Site on George Ou ★

Totally serious, yet still hilarious.

Flaming Out ★

George Ou responds to my coverage of the MacBook wireless hack saga.

Apple Recalls Sony-Made PowerBook and iBook Batteries ★

I had a feeling Dell’s recall announcement was bad news for Apple, too.

Artie MacStrawman ★

Crazy Apple Rumors Site:

Mac users will remember MacStrawman as the Mac user who:

Says the Mac is utterly invulnerable to any and all malicious attack.

Mindlessly worships Steve Jobs.

Blindly buys anything Apple releases no matter how dumb and stupid and dumb it is.

Refuses to accept that Windows might be better at anything. Even being Windows.

Emails death threats to anyone who disagrees with him.

Thursday, 24 August 2006

Official Google Blog: Exploring the Scholarly Neighborhood ★

A “more like this” feature for Google Scholar. (Via Jesper via email.)

Another Take on the Mac Wireless Hack ★

Rich Mogull’s alternate theory on the MacBook wireless hack saga. Possible, but in my opinion, not likely.

Details on CSS Changes for IE7 ★

Lots of bug fixes, but only four new features from CSS 2.1. In my experience — limited these days, thankfully — IE7 isn’t that much easier to accommodate than IE6.

Apple Pays $100 Million to Settle Patent Dispute With Creative ★

Probably more money than Creative ever made selling their players, and a relative drop in the bucket on Apple’s part — even if they’d continued to fight it, they would have spent tens of millions in legal fees, and they would have risked a fiasco like what happened to BlackBerry maker RIM.

“Creative is very fortunate to have been granted this early patent,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “This settlement resolves all of our differences with Creative, including the five lawsuits currently pending between the companies, and removes the uncertainty and distraction of prolonged litigation.”

I love that dig from Jobs in the first sentence. He couldn’t even let the PR go out without making it clear that he hates giving them a nickel for that patent.

GigaOm’s Apple-YouTube Speculation ★

What a dumb idea. YouTube is feared and despised by the record/movie/TV companies that Apple is courting for the iTunes Music Store. I love YouTube, but the simple truth is that their stock in trade is redistributing without permission video clips whose copyrights are held by others. (Also: “Steve Jobs” wouldn’t be the one to buy YouTube; “Apple Computer” would.)

MacNN: Dell Withdraws From MP3 Player Market ★

I love saying “I told you so.”

Monday, 21 August 2006

15-Inch MacBook Pro Battery Exchange Program ★: Battery exchange program for “certain rechargeable batteries that were sold for use with 15-inch MacBook Pro computer systems from February 2006 through May 2006”. Not, however, a safety issue; they’re being recalled because they “do not meet [Apple’s] high standards for battery performance”.

Sunday, 20 August 2006

Jason Hoffman on Google Analytics ★

Jason Hoffman:

[...] I can see it doing to Mint what Google Calendar did to Kiko.

Mint certainly looks nicer, that’s for sure. And given Google’s design record, that’s likely to remain true. But Google Analytics’s web pages load much faster than Mint’s (much faster for me at least), Google stores your stats for you (whereas Mint requires you to have and configure a MySQL database), and, most obviously, Google Analytics is free.

Google Analytics ★

Google Analytics — based on the web stats package formerly known as Urchin — is now open for anyone, for free. I’ve been using it for a few days and it’s pretty nice. My biggest complaint so far is that it shows almost no information at all about your incoming referrers.

FlickrExport 2.0.1 ★

If you use Frasier Speirs’s excellent FlickrExport plug-in for iPhoto — as I do — you need this update, because Flickr changed their API in such a way that broke previous versions.

Saturday, 19 August 2006

The Right-Wing New York Times ★: What right-wingers see when they read The New York Times. (Via Khoi Vinh.)
Deep Thought: Mac Pro vs. Dell Precision: The Real Price Comparison ★: Martin Pilkington’s price comparison between the Mac Pro and Dell Precision 3.0 GHz workstations.
Google Does Not Render Resistance Futile ★: David Heinemeier Hansson, responding to Paul Graham’s Google-Calendar-killed-Kiko argument:

No. Don’t run, don’t hide. Be different. You can’t outdo Google by trying to match them point-by-point, but you don’t have to. There are other, better ways to fight. Compete differently.

Friday, 18 August 2006

Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator ★: Helps with your Web 2.0 business plans (or perhaps with your pitch for a session at the Web 2.0 conference?).
MailTags 2.0 Public Beta ★: Tagging plug-in for Apple Mail, now with support for IMAP (so that you can tag messages on one machine and see the same tags on another.
Jesus ⌘S’s ★: Very funny shirt. (Thanks to Jim Correia for the link.)
OmniWeb 5.5b3 ★: I want to like OmniWeb 5.5, but truth be told I’m having a hard time getting used to its tabs after spending a year or so using Safari and Camino. I’ll give it another shot, though.
The Kiko Affair ★: Paul Graham (who, as a principal at Y Combinator, funded Kiko):

What nailed Kiko was Google Calendar. Once that came out, not only did Kiko’s growth stop, but a lot of existing users defected. Justin and Emmett told me a large fraction of Kiko’s users had Gmail addresses.
MacMall Selling MacBooks With Windows XP Pre-Installed ★: $150 for XP Home, $205 for XP Pro. This is certainly one way for Mac resellers to distinguish themselves from the Apple Store. (Via Chris Pepper via AIM.)
AP Story on Apple’s iPod Labor Investigation ★: The Associated Press:

Apple Computer Inc.’s investigation into claims of poor conditions at a Chinese iPod factory found no forced labor but revealed that workers were exceeding the company’s limits on hours and days to be worked per week, the company said Friday.
Microsoft Increases Buyback Plan by $16 Billion ★: The plan goes all the way to 2011, but still, investing $36 billion into their own stock seems like a big-time bet to me.
HOWTO: Adding an RSS Feed to a Subversion Server ★: Bill Bumgarner:

I have now gone on stage twice and talked about how useful an RSS feed is for a subversion server. About time I actually document how to set up such a thing.
Kiko Calendar Is Up for Sale on eBay ★: Jason Hoffman on Kiko, the Y Combinator-funded web calendaring startup that has placed its assets up for sale on eBay:

I love it.

Even the “Condition” is stated as “Used”, and the shipping is free.

Thursday, 17 August 2006

Apple: Report on iPod Manufacturing ★

Apple has published a report on their investigation regarding charges of poor living and working conditions at a Chinese factory where iPods are manufactured:

In response to the allegations, we immediately dispatched an audit team comprised of members from our human resources, legal and operations groups to carry out a thorough investigation of the conditions at the manufacturing site. The audit covered the areas of labor standards, working and living environment, compensation, overtime and worker treatment.

(Thanks to Jesper for the link.)

VoodooPad 3.0.2 ★

Bug fixes and minor feature upgrades to Gus Mueller’s innovate wiki-style notes app.

Flame 0.2.1 ★

Free Bonjour discovery tool by Tom Insam and Paul Mison at 2lmc Spool.

Macworld: MacBook Wi-Fi Hack Didn’t Use Apple Drivers ★

Jim Dalrymple:

“Despite SecureWorks being quoted saying the Mac is threatened by the exploit demonstrated at Black Hat, they have provided no evidence that in fact it is,” Apple Director of Mac PR, Lynn Fox, told Macworld.

Lenovo Teams Up With Novell for New, Pricey Linux ThinkPads ★

Can someone explain why these cost more — as in like $800 more — than similarly equipped ThinkPads with Windows XP? Shouldn’t the Linux ones be cheaper?

More ‘Leaked’ Zune Details at iLounge ★

The “wheel” isn’t actually a scroll wheel, it’s just four buttons arranged in a wheel. (WTF?) The Wi-Fi features aren’t operational yet.

John Siracusa: LLVM in Leopard and Beyond ★

LLVM as an eventual successor to GCC as the default compiler for Mac OS X? The LLVM-powered World of Warcraft demo at WWDC was impressive.

iPod Dominates the U.S. Market Again ★

75.6 percent share for Apple, followed by 9.7 percent for Sandisk, 4.3 for Creative, 2.5 for Samsung, and, embarrasingly, a mere 1.9 percent for Sony.

The Windows Apps You Never Need To Install ★

Anil Dash on frequently-recommended Windows apps that are in fact either unnecessary or outright harmful. Useful advice for Mac nerds dipping their toes into Windows via Boot Camp and Parallels.

NSA Eavesdropping Program Ruled Unconstitutional ★

CNN:

The government argued that the program is well within the president’s authority, but said proving that would require revealing state secrets.

Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown ★

A little bit of the old ultra-violence, Charlie Brown-style. (Via Andy Baio.)

FlexTime 1.0 ★

Daniel Jalkut’s $19 utility for setting alarms and scheduling repetitive tasks is out of beta. It’s hard to categorize FlexTime, as it’s not really like any other app I’ve ever seen.

Time Capsules ★

How come no one told me Douglas Coupland was writing a weblog for The New York Times?

Low End Mac: PowerBooks and the Mac Portable ★

Low End Mac’s index page for 68K-based PowerBooks. Apple shipped over 20 different notebooks using the “PowerBook” brand before the switch to PowerPC processors. The “Power” in “PowerBook” did not stand for “PowerPC”.

Tim Bray: Back on the Mac ★

Ubuntu toe-dipper Tim Bray’s PowerBook is back from the shop, and so he’s back on Mac OS X. His thoughts on the switch are, as usual, interesting.

Parallels ★

Dave Shea, on using Parallels to run Windows for browser compatibility testing with IE:

I’m becoming more and more convinced that the new Intel-based Macs are the ultimate web designer’s companion [...]

Bob Barker’s First Episode as Host of ‘The Price Is Right’ ★

September 4, 1972. One of my very favorite TV shows as a kid. I’ve always been a fan of Bob Barker — the guy knows how to host a game show, and you can tell from this clip that he had it down pat right from the start. The fact that stuff like this is on YouTube is just amazing. (Via Digg.)

David Young on the WWDC Moscone Security Staff ★

David Young (not the same David Young who’s the CEO/founder of Joyent):

Holy smokes, the security staff at Moscone West are assholes. They’re a blemish on the otherwise pleasant experience of WWDC — imagine, you are busy talking about some new idea and some fat woman, smacking her gum, leans into you and yells USE THE OTHER DOOR. TURN YOUR BADGE AROUND. YOU CAN’T USE THIS ESCALATOR.

Why were they keeping people from using the up escalator right by the front doors?

Never Check Your Email First or Last ★

I’m going to try this. (Via Wolf Rentzsch.)

Wednesday, 16 August 2006

Intype ★

Vaporware in-development “clone” of TextMate for Windows.

Resolution Independence and Iconography ★

Iconfactory’s Craig Hockenberry on the future of icon design in a world of significantly higher resolution displays. See also: Jasper Hauser on the same topic.

Leaked Leopard Screenshots Galore ★

Dozens of screenshots from the Mac OS X 10.5 seed distributed at WWDC last week. Hooray for the new Finder preference that lets you turn off the asinine warning when changing a file name extension.

John Siracusa on Time Machine and the Future of the File System ★

I particularly enjoyed the footnote wherein he speculates on what a Microsoft UI for a Time Machine-style feature would look like.

AOL Employees Gaming Digg to Boost Weblogs Inc. Traffic? ★

Digg is ripe for this sort of abuse. (Via Andy Baio.)

Google Launches WiFi Network in Mountain View ★

Om Malik:

Less than a year after the search engine giant said that it would unwire its hometown of Mountain View, California, GoogleFi is now open for packets.

Boot Camp 1.1 Beta ★

Adds support for new Intel-based Macs, iSight cameras, right-clicking in Windows by holding the right-hand Apple key (no idea why only the right one), and installing Windows XP on any internal disk. Recommended for anyone using previous versions of Boot Camp.

Update: Apparently the new right-clicking feature only uses the right-side Apple key because the left one is mapped as the Windows key; in previous Boot Camp betas the right-side Apple key did nothing. It also occurs to me that this feature really only ought to matter to notebook users; desktop users can just get a real multi-button mouse.

Tuesday, 15 August 2006

Energy-Efficient New Servers From Sun ★: Sun’s new UltraSPARC servers are so energy-efficient that California’s PG&E utility company is offering a rebate to companies that use them. Sun CEO Jonathan Swartz writes:

If you ever get asked by a cynic, or your management “what’s the real value of being green?,” I can give you a very specific answer, at least for Sun. In the State of California, it’s worth $700 to $1000 per server. I did say per server. Every single bid we’re in across the state just got $700 to $1,000 per server more competitive.
8020 Publishing ★: Derek Powazek’s new venture, “out to create the ultimate web/print hybrid magazines”. Intriguing.
Blake Seely on Keyboard List Selection ★: Blake Seely:

Why cognitive dissonance? Well, I think the anchored selection style is more difficult to implement, so I just never considered it.
Flash 9 Universal Binary ★: I’m trying to remember if there’s any other software from Adobe that isn’t universal yet...
What’s New in JavaScript 1.7 ★: Very nice additions to the language.
Only 40 Percent of Americans Accept Evolution ★: Humiliating, really. (Via Kottke.)
Hardmac.com: Leopard Preview ★: Screenshots of the developer seed of Leopard.

Monday, 14 August 2006

Dell Recalls Batteries Because of Fire Threat ★

Damon Darlin reporting for The New York Times:

That same month, a Dell notebook in the cab of a pickup parked alongside Lake Mead in Nevada caught fire, igniting ammunition in the glove box and then the gas tanks. The truck exploded. “A few minutes later and we’d have been coming up out of the canyon when the notebook blew up,” said Thomas Forqueran, owner of the laptop and truck. “Somebody is going to wind up getting killed.”

Yikes. The 4.1 million batteries they’re recalling constitute the largest safety recall in consumer electronics history.

No gloating, though: this might be a problem with many lithium-ion batteries manufactured by Sony, not a problem specific to Dell.

Usable Keychain Scripting ★

Daniel Jalkut’s new tool for scripting access to keychain entries is over 200 times faster than Apple’s bizarrely slow Keychain Scripting scripting addition.

Grand Theft Auto: All Coked Up ★

Brilliant commercial. (Via Greg Storey.)

Problems With Mac Pros and Four 750 GB Drives ★

Bare Feats:

We put four 750GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drives inside the Mac Pro. We booted from the original factory boot drive which we installed in a GLYPH external SATA-to-FW800 enclosure. We had strange results. Weird results.

Mac Pro at Amazon: $2499 ★

Buy a Mac Pro (or any other Mac hardware) at Amazon via this link and help support Daring Fireball. (Considering how many people I met at WWDC who have already ordered one, I clearly should have done this last week.)

Also: Anyone who orders a new Mac from Amazon via the Daring Fireball referral link gets a free one-year DF membership. I can’t track this automatically, so you’ll have to email me after placing your order and I’ll create (or extend) your membership by hand.

Sunday, 13 August 2006

There’s Must Be a Lot of Wrong-Atude in Wikipedia ★

Keith Stattenfield, who was the lead engineer for Mac OS 9.0 and 9.1, tried three times to correct an egregious error in the Wikipedia entry for Mac OS 9, but his correction kept getting yanked.

I see now that the entry has been updated, but rather than just remove the falsehood completely, it’s been edited to say that it’s something that “some people have incorrectly claimed”, with a link to the false AppleInsider story that made the claim. If you know it’s incorrect, why mention it at all?

Meet the Ape ★

Tim Bray:

I’ve just put up a prototype of something I call the Atom Protocol Exerciser. It might evolve to become a sanity-checking tool something along the lines of the Feed Validator. I don’t want to call it a “validator” because a feed can be said unambiguously to be valid, or not; but a publishing-system interface might be unusably buggy or slow or have moronic authentication policies; all the Exerciser (let’s just say “the Ape” for short) does is perform a bunch of operations that a typical APP client might, and report the results.

Friday, 11 August 2006

Jackass of the Week: Leander Kahney ★

Leander “Cult of Mac” Kahney, complaining that he was bored by the WWDC keynote address:

Granted, the system as a whole looks slick, and Jobs said he was keeping some new features “top secret” to stop Microsoft from copying them. But the sneak peek just confirmed what we already know: OS X is so mature and polished, major system upgrades are more about tweaks than big new functions. (Yeah, I know there’s a lot of technical wizardry under the hood, but that’s for the geeks).

[...]

This week’s developer’s conference is a big show for Mac nerds. More than 4,000 of them paid a pretty penny to be here this week, and Jobs’ talk is the highlight of the show. For many of them, this is the only chance they get to see their hero in the flesh.

Kahney seems to have completely missed that this was Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference, not the World Wide Jackass Non-Technical I-Treat-the-Mac-as-a-Cult-Rather-Than-a-Computing-Platform Hack Conference.

WWDC attendees didn’t spend “a pretty penny” to see the fucking keynote; they spent their money so they could get the technical low-down on what’s new in 10.5, and so they could get face time with Apple engineers. Apple announced a lot of cool new stuff: garbage collection for Objective-C, Xcode 3.0, Core Animation, 64-bit support for the entire OS, the first new interface for Interface Builder since way back in the Next era — the list of “cool new shit” that was announced is really pretty long.

Complaining that the announcements at WWDC only appealed to “the geeks” is like going to a rock concert and complaining that all they did was play loud music.

Also Sprach Miyamoto ★

Genius fusion of Kubrick and Nintendo nerdery. (Via Dan Benjamin via email.)

Law.com Article on Apple Stock Options Backdating Probe Law.com - Apple Execs, Former GC Seek Counsel in Face of Backdating Probe ★

I was not previously aware of this particular connotation of the word “irregularities”. This is starting to sound Not Good.

As for Apple, deeper trouble could be signified by its use of the term “irregularities” to describe what initial inquiries into grant practices had found. That term was used again in the announcement earlier this month indicating that options problems were bad enough to require a restatement of past earnings.

Several Silicon Valley defense lawyers — all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they have ties either to Apple or to other backdating cases — said that in accounting parlance, “irregularities” generally indicates a problem that’s not accidental.

Saying Goodbye to Visual Basic ★

Eric Schwiebert from the Mac BU on Microsoft’s decision to drop support for Visual Basic in the upcoming release of Office for Mac. This is an extraordinarily comprehensive and technical overview of the reasons behind their decision — before the era of weblogs, we’d never have gotten anything other than a message filtered through Microsoft’s marketing department.

AFP-Over-SSH in Mac OS X ★

Chris Pepper:

Apple provides a neat feature for automatically tunneling AFP through ssh, but unfortunately it’s broken in half a dozen ways...

Thursday, 10 August 2006

Dash Clipping ★: “Shameless rip-off” of Apple’s new web clipping widget tool coming in Leopard. (Via Tim Gaden’s new X Factor weblog.)
Leopard Developer Improvements ★: Nice overview of the major developer-level announcements regarding Leopard.
Apple’s Mac Pro: A Discussion of Specifications ★: In-depth analysis of the tech specs of the Mac Pros.

Wednesday, 9 August 2006

More WWDC Photos ★: I’ve tossed a handful of additional photos up on Flickr.
Rob Griffiths on Time Machine ★: Many people here at WWDC have, shall we say, strong opinions on the Time Machine UI.
Mac Pro: What You Need to Know ★: Macworld’s Jason Snell and Jonathan Seff on the new Mac Pros.
Macworld on Leopard’s Dashboard ★: The web clip feature in Safari is really pretty cool.
Xcode 3.0 and Objective-C 2.0 ★: Xcode 3 adds an innovative UI for code folding, where the gutter gets darker as an indication of the indent level. Objective-C 2.0 adds garbage collection and a foreach-style variant of the for loop for iterating. Apple says Xcode 3 was written using Objective-C 2 with garbage collection turned on.
Leopard Server Sneak Peek: iCal Server ★: Read-write shared calendar access from iCal, with support for Sunbird and Outlook as clients, too.
Leopard Server Sneak Peek: Wiki Server ★: Brand-new written-by-Apple wiki/weblog software, with the best WYSIWYG web-based editor I’ve ever seen. This is a big part of Apple’s new “Teams” app.

Tuesday, 8 August 2006

ADA: EnzymeX 3.1 ★: Enzyme analysis tool for molecular biologists wins for Best Scientific Computing Solution.
ADA: FuzzMeasure ★: Christopher Liscio’s sound measurement utility wins the runner-up for Best Scientific Computing Solution.
ADA: The Sims 2 ★: Aspyr wins for Best Game. Not much shooting in this game.
ADA: Wingnuts 2 ★: Freeverse wins the runner-up for Best Game. “You won’t run out of things to shoot.”
ADA: TextMate 1.5.2 ★: Allan Odgaard’s text editor wins for Best Developer Tool. Raucous applause when this one was announced.
ADA: F-Script ★: Phillipe Mougin’s Cocoa scripting tool wins the runner-up for Best Developer Tool.
ADA: Build Real Estate Catalog ★: InDesign workflow wins for Best Automator Workflow.
ADA: Modo Luxology ★: 3D modeling and animation app wins for Best Use of Graphics on Mac OS X. Very cool-looking app. Extra credit for having a morph filter called “eyes wide shut”.
ADA: Unity ★: Game development tool; runner-up for Best Use of Mac OS X Graphics.
ADA: iClip Lite ★: Inventive’s multi-clipboard tool wins for Best Dashboard Widget. Looks both very cool and very useful. Well-deserved victory.
ADA: WeatherBug ★: Runner-up for Best Dashboard Widget.
ADA: iSale 3.1 ★: Equinux’s eBay auction manager wins for Best Mac OS X User Experience. Features slick integration with iSight cameras for taking pictures of the items you want to sell.
ADA: FotoMagico 1.7 ★: Boinx Software’s photo slideshow app is the runner-up for Best Mac OS X User Experience.
ADA: Lineform 1.1 ★: William Thimbleby’s vector art app wins the Apple Design Award for best student project. Very impressive app.
Voice Candy 1.1 ★: Potion Factory’s $13 audio recorder with a bunch of built-in filters. Sort of like Photo Booth for audio.
Discontiguous Multiple Item Selection Via the Keyboard in Windows ★: Microsoft’s Raymond Chen on how Windows uses Shift-F8 to enter a discontiguous multiple-item selection mode in listbox controls. Wacky.
Teams — New Group Collaboration App From Apple ★: I’m not yet sure what exactly it is, but the word on the street is that it’s some hot shit.
ADC Puff Piece on Yojimbo ★: I’m hoping that Yojimbo wins an Apple Design Award tonight.
Apple Opens Up: Kernel, Mac OS Forge, iCal Server, Bonjour, Launchd ★: Lots and lots of open source announcements from Apple, including the x86 kernel source code, Apache-licensed Bonjour and Launchd source code, and a new “Mac OS Forge” community web site to host these projects.
Apple Includes Rails With Leopard ★: They plan to ship with Mongrel support by the time Leopard goes GM.
GetWebKit ★: Open source Windows web browser based on Apple’s Web Kit rendering engine. Not sure if they really mean “Web Kit” instead of “WebCore”, and using that icon is almost certainly a no-no that’ll spark a nastygram from Apple’s lawyers.

Monday, 7 August 2006

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium ★: CalConnect is the consortium behind the standards behind iCal Server.
Darwin Calendar Server ★: Open source group calendar from Apple; the guts behind Leopard’s iCal Server.
WWDC Photos ★: A few photos from WWDC.
VMware Beta for Mac OS X ★: Competition for Parallels. (Via Dan Benjamin.)

Saturday, 5 August 2006

Macworld: ‘Repairing Permissions: What You Need to Know’ ★: Comprehensive overview of the “Repair Permissions” feature in Apple’s Disk Utility by Macworld’s Dan Frakes. Outstanding.

Friday, 4 August 2006

Jim Thompson on the Supposed MacBook Wi-Fi Exploit ★

Jim Thompson:

Ellch and Maynor didn’t present a paper titled, “we can create a covert channel by having control of the software on both sides of a communication link” because its trivial to do so. Instead they did exacty that, but colored it so people would be mystified, perplexed and think that there was some new exploit buried deep in the 802.11 protocol, when, point-in-fact, there is not.

(Via Glenn Fleishman.)

The Kiss Up Culture of Apple and Why It Matters ★

In light of the stock options back-dating problem, former Apple employee David Sobotta paints an ugly picture of Apple’s upper-level executive culture. (Via Joe Clark via email.)

Mira 1.1.5 ★

$16 System Prefs panel adds a bunch of customizable features to the Apple Remote. (Via Tao of Mac.)

Steven Frank on WWDC Anticipation ★

Love the photo.

Apple and 3 Automakers Plan Alliances on iPod Use ★

70 percent of 2007 model-year cars sold in the U.S. will feature iPod integration.

Apple May Restate Results Amid Inquiry ★

The Associated Press:

Apple Computer Inc. shares sank nearly 5 percent Friday, a day after the computer and software maker said it expects to restate some of its financial results as a probe into its granting of stock options widens, threatening years of profit.

Napster Imploding ★

Losing subscribers and losing money, Napster is looking to sell itself.

Thursday, 3 August 2006

‘OMG DRM is r33ly bad!’ ★

Nice response from Charles Wiltgen to Cory Doctorow’s anti-ITMS screed in InformationWeek. Update: The link went 404 for a few hours, but it’s back now.

Update From Josh Marshall on His Switch to the Mac ★

Remember back in March when Josh Marshall switched to the Mac? Today he published an update on how it’s gone. In a nut, he’s in love.

Brent Simmons’s UI-Related Guesses Regarding Mac OS X 10.5 ★

Also not to miss: this follow-up where he expounds upon the need for a standard tabbed-document control widget.

Cider ★

Interesting WINE-like library for porting Windows games to Intel-based Macs:

Cider works by directly loading a Windows program into memory on an Intel-Mac and linking it to an optimized version of the Win32 APIs. Games are simply wrapped up in the Cider engine and they work on the Mac. This means developers only have one code base to maintain while keeping the ability to target multiple platforms. Cider powered games use the same copy protection, lobbies, game matching and connectivity as the original. All this means less work and lower costs. Cider is targeted at game developers and publishers and, unlike Cedega, is not an end user product.

(Via Jesper via AIM.)

Supposed MacBook Wireless Networking Exploit ★

The Washington Post’s Brian Krebs reports on a supposed wireless networking exploit that allows a MacBook to be hijacked. I smell bullshit, though — if you watch the video, the exploit apparently requires the MacBook to be using a third-party wireless card. Given that all MacBooks come with built-in AirPort support, how many MacBook users are actually susceptible to this? Any?

Worse, Krebs’s post makes no mention of this, instead making it sound as though the exploit works against MacBooks using their built-in wireless cards and drivers. If it’s truly the case that this particular exploit only works if a MacBook is using a third-party Wi-Fi card and driver software, it’s sensationalism at its worst — a case of supposed security experts impugning Apple’s reputation for the sole purpose of drawing attention to themselves.

Wednesday, 2 August 2006

Picasa Web Albums Uploader for Mac ★: iPhoto plug-in and standalone app for Google’s photo sharing service.
Scorecard 1.0 ★: New golf stats app for Mac OS X.
Tables ★: Public beta of new spreadsheet app for Mac OS X. Doesn’t do graphs, and the price isn’t set yet, but it looks like a good start.

Tuesday, 1 August 2006

Fixing the Stupidity of the Flip4Mac Installer ★: John C. Welch:

What happens when you say, dump this installer .mpkg on a bunch of machines at the login window via Apple Remote Desktop or some other tool?

Why, Flip4Mac helpfully creates, UNDER THE LOGIN WINDOW, a full GUI root login. Finder and everything.
How Do I Make An Amazon S3 Hosted Website Using Interarchy? ★: Peter N. Lewis:

Rather than write a blog entry about how to do this, I figured I would just go ahead and make a simple website hosted by Amazon S3 showing how to make a simple website hosted by Amazon S3 using Interarchy. Very recursive.
Wolf Rentzsch: Mac OS X Server Firewall Serial Hole ★: If you manually disable port 626 in Mac OS X Server’s firewall settings — which port is used by Apple for serial number checking — the serialnumberd daemon will re-enable it behind your back about a minute later.
Kubrick Film Art ★: Posters and lobby cards from all of Kubrick’s major motion pictures. This one from 2001: A Space Odyssey is a personal favorite. (Via Kottke.)