Linked List: November 16, 2007

Friday, 16 November 2007

The End of Netinfo 

John C. Welch:

When I say “end,” I mean it in the most “end-ish” sense. In Mac OS X 10.5, Netinfo is gone. Not “deprecated,” not “hidden away for only the most advanced users.” It’s gone. Deleted. It does not exist. No more Netinfo database, no more Netinfo Utilities such as nicl, no more Netinfo Manager. The entire structure for managing local users, groups, and other such things has been completely replaced by local Directory Services, and the Netinfo Database is now a series of XML files living in /var/db/dslocal/.

Freetards Turn on Google 

Fake Steve on GPL advocates who are pissed at Google for releasing Android under the “you can do whatever you want with it, including building non-open-source stuff on top of it” Apache license rather than the GPL. Hard to see why Google wouldn’t choose to use the GPL, given how many wonderful user experiences the GPL has led to.

Not The Daily Show, With Some Writer 

Daily Show-style coverage of the WGA strike, from the writing staff of The Daily Show. Outstanding.

Not Actually Ironic at All 

Robert Scoble:

What’s ironic is lots of other computer companies would LOVE to give me free stuff (I don’t take it) but Apple is the only company that’s never raised a PR finger to help me. Instead I feel so honored to spend my money on this crap. Why? Just to have a shiny machine?

I would love to know what he thinks “ironic” means.

FileMaker’s Bento: Undercooked and Slightly Fishy 

Jeff Porten reviews the Bento public beta for TidBITS.

Android, With More Optimism 

Nice piece by Steven Frank on Android, now that we’ve seen the SDK:

Commoditizing the hardware will keep the price of Android phones down, which is certainly desirable. But I fear they’re going to run into the same quagmire that Windows Mobile has.

You don’t know if any given Windows Mobile device is going to have a touchscreen, a QWERTY keyboard, a numeric pad, WiFi, cellular access, Bluetooth, GPS… How can you design software that’s in any way elegant for an unknown combination of hardware? How well would the iPhone work if you couldn’t assume a touchscreen?

I’ve been thinking along similar lines — the coolest potential Android apps might only run on specific higher-end Android phones. And conversely, apps written to run on any Android phone, no matter how minimal the hardware, are likely to be uncool.

Miro 1.0 

Formerly known as Democracy Player, Miro is a nice, free video player with features that allow you to subscribe to video podcasts and create your own “channels”.

Andy Ihnatko Reviews the New Zunes 

Andy Ihnatko:

Zune 2.0 won’t knock the iPod off of its perch, but Microsoft performed a miracle nonetheless: It scrubbed the awful taste of Zune 1.0 out of my mouth.

(Is it just me, or is the paragraph at the very end a private note from Ihnatko to his editors at the Sun-Times, not intended for publication? Update: Apparently so, since it was yanked shortly thereafter. I saved an archive in Safari’s webarchive format here.)

Proper Gmail IMAP for iPhone and Apple Mail 

Much more complete setup instructions than Google’s own. By mapping Apple Mail’s special folders (Drafts, Trash, Spam) to Gmail’s built-in special folders, the “right thing” just happens. E.g., all of your sent mail goes into the same Sent Mail mailbox, whether you sent it from Mail on your Mac, MobileMail on your iPhone, or Gmail’s web interface.

System Domain Hack to Turn Off Leopard’s Translucent Menu Bar 

Not for the faint of heart, as it requires diddling with a plist file in the /System/Library/ folder — the “this stuff is not meant for users to diddle with” part of OS X. However, it works, by setting an environment variable that tricks WindowServer into disabling the translucent menu bar.

The original tip from Steve Miner suggests a setting of “1”; this results in an old-school pure white menu bar, which is what we had in the good old days, when we walked six miles to school through three feet of snow, and we liked it. A setting of “0” gives you a dark gray menu bar, and fractions in between 0 and 1 give you varying shades of gray. Commenters at MacOSXHints have deduced that a setting of “0.63” gives you a menu bar that looks pretty close, if not exactly, like the opaque menu bar Leopard shows on systems with older video cards.

Update: DF reader Emiel Efdee concluded that “0.62” is in fact the precise value needed to duplicate Leopard’s “standard” non-translucent menu bar. I hereby name Emiel “DF Reader of the Week”.

Lightroom 1.3 

Fixes Leopard compatibility issues (Lightroom 1.2 couldn’t print on Leopard) and adds support for a bunch of recent new cameras. Even better: Adobe has released a preview release of the Lightroom developer SDK. Someone ping Fraser Speirs.