Mac Mini Media Centre

(This post is a work in progress, that I will continue to update and tweak. The comments are great, with a whole variety of suggestions and details of other setups. I’ll try and keep the comments open as long as I can)

Apple TV or Mac Mini?

No getting away from it – I still yearned for a Mac based media centre. I’d hoped Wii Transfer would fit the bill, but the quality of the video streaming isn’t good enough (yet?).

That meant either a Mac Mini or an Apple TV, but that’s a hard decision. Apple TV has the ease of use that makes it ideal for the home. No fiddling about, but no PVR functionality either. In the end, I went for the Mac Mini’s potential over the Apple TV ‘just works’, and using FrontRow and EyeTV to provide the interface.

But, I’d dabbled with a Mac Mini media Centre a couple of years ago, with a G4 Mini hacked to use FrontRow. I gave up on it a few months after, but recently decided that the time was now right. So what’s different this time around?

Front Row built into Leopard – rather than tied to particular machines and requiring a hack to make it work. Front Row 2 also adopts the plugin ‘appliance’ architecture of Apple TV, as well as supporting sharing from other macs. As far as I can see it only lacks the YouTube feature of the Apple TV.

Screen sharing – After using other VNC clients, the inbuilt screen sharing facility is easy and responsive. I can barely notice a difference in performance between administering the Mac Mini and working on my MacBook Pro.

Intel Mac Minis – Compared the original G4 Mac Mini I was trying to use, the new Intel Mac Minis are faster, have larger hard drives and Bluetooth and airport as standard (which the G4 didn’t have). They also come with a built in remote and receiver. I previously used a bluetooth phone and Salling Clicker, which works, but it isn’t the kind of ‘slick solution’ you can hand to someone else and expect them to want to use it. The Apple remote works very well, and isn’t too simple (it is easier to lose though, and you can’t ring it to find out where it is.)

Leopard brings everything you need to run a media centre, with the exception of a PVR, and an automagic system for adding new content to the Mini. Finally, I was trying to run the last system through our old CRT telly, that only had 2 scart inputs. It looks like ass. Now that we have an LCD, it doesn’t.

So after studying the Apple Refurb Store for a few weeks, I picked up a good deal:

So, onto the setup…

Preferences

One of the first things you’ll want to do is minimise the possibility of the OS giving you messages, so go to System Preferences > Bluetooth, and make sure this option isn’t ticked:

Otherwise you’ll get interfering messages, worrying about the lack of a keyboard attached. Likewise, go to System Preferences > Software Update and make sure it isn’t checking for updates.

Hardware

This is how my hardware is setup: A Mac Mini sends video to the TV with a DVI to HDMI cable, while the sound is sent through my stereo with a headphone to dual composite cable. If I wasn’t playing music, I would just send the audio to the TV. I’m using a Western Digital MyBook external drive to store everything on, but I’d like to replace this with something larger, quieter and (if possible) no blinking lights! The only other piece of hardware is the EyeTV Hybrid dongle.

Essential Apps and plugins

You probably have a different list of essentials, but having tried a lot of potential apps, these are the ones I’ve settled into using:

Perian

A plugin that allows playback of .avi, .flv (amongst many others) in Front Row. Installs as a System Preference.

Syncopation

I use this to automate the adding of new content from my MacBook. You set the Mac mini to subscribe to however many Macs you want, and as long as its open on both, it will suck in any new tracks, movies etc. Works really well, I just wish it had some way of letting you know on the MacBook end that all new tracks have been imported. For Movies though, I’m finding it easier to share the Movies folder on the Mini and just drop the files in there, rather than try and get them into iTunes.

Handbrake

For ripping your DVDs, everyone should know about this!

EyeTV

Along with an Elgato Hybrid stick, this provides the PVR functionality, along with more recording features than my DVD Recorder does. Being able to set up smart recording schedules is genius, and I tend set every recording to automatically export as Apple TV, which adds it to iTunes for me.

PyeTV

A ‘Front Row Appliance’, which adds an EyeTV menu item to Front Row. This has now reached version 1, is easier to install, and the transitions between EyeTV and FrontRow are smoother.

Also, I haven’t tried it yet, but Sapphire looks interesting.

Moving the iTunes Library

I soon ran out of space on the Mac Mini, and while I was loathe to add yet another bloody plug to the overloaded adaptors behind the telly, it had to be done. (An external hard drive doesn’t tend to be as quiet as the Mac Mini either!). Relocating the Movies folder to the external hard drive was as easy as using an alias, but the iTunes library is a bit more troublesome. It should be as easy as choosing the new location in iTunes Preferences > Advanced, but I couldn’t manage to do this and retain paths. Everytime I wanted to play something, I had to select the new path to the file.

Instead, I created a folder on the hard drive, and rather than copy across everything manually, I chose this new folder as the library location in the advanced preferences, and used ‘consolidate library’. This not only copied everything across, but this time updated the paths to the media files, and everything plays as it should!

Switching between FrontRow and EyeTV

Everything works well in this setup, with the exception of navigating between the 2 applications – Frontrow and EyeTV. There are a few ways around this:

1. Before launching FrontRow, I make sure that EyeTV is open, and on fullscreen mode (see below). Then I can go back to EyeTV by pressing the menu button on the FrontRow main screen. Pressing and holding the menu button in EyeTV shows it’s onscreen menu (in which you can do almost all the work that you’ll need to do). Pressing menu once will return you to FrontRow. Sometimes it can be annoying if you don’t remember to press and hold in EyeTV, and you get whisked away to FrontRow.
2. The Pye TV plugin for FrontRow adds an EyeTV menu, from which you can launch FrontRow, its recordings, or the programme guide.
3. Setting recordings to automatically export to Apple TV means that they will appear in FrontRow’s ‘TV Shows’ menu a few hours afterwards (depending on the length of recording, processor speed etc).

Finally, you’ll want to make sure that Syncopation, EyeTV and FrontRow are all set to open at startup. If EyeTV is set to ‘Start EyeTV in full screen’ (Preferences > Full Screen), then when the Mac restarts everything is ready to go.

Downsides

When it works, it’s great. The trouble is that 15% of the time something happens – EyeTV crashes, iTunes has been updated and won’t let you play anything until you’ve accepted terms and conditions, or another app is telling you that an update is available.

For these times, I don’t have an easy solution, other than to screen share and sort it out with the MacBook. Sometimes (like in the instance of EyeTV crashing) you just have to restart.

I’ll add more detail and photos when I can…

Tags: eyetv, frontrow, macmini, mediacentre, osx

Custom webclip icon on the iPhone/iPod Touch

The new 1.1.3 firmware for the iPhone and iPodTouch brings with it the ability to add a ‘webclip’ from Safari to your home screen.

Thanks to this tip you can easily create a custom icon for people visiting your site, that works just like your favicon. Its just a shame you can’t add your own for other sites – I would love a custom Google Reader icon.

EXTRA : Having tried Nathans suggestion of 158×158px I can confirm that this size does indeed produce a crisper icon. Also, Drew has come come up with a way of using custom icons. I’ve put one up for Google Reader here

Tags: icons, iphone, osx

My MacWorld Prediction

Its probably the most exciting time of the year for me – the anticipation of new Apple products. I’m really hoping for a revised Apple TV with slick Eye TV integration, but I know that’s not going to happen. It’ll probably just be a Movie Rentals, and US only. Meh.

Anyway, onto my prediction. All this talk of the MacBook Air/super-portable mac is a red herring I believe. The product Apple will unveil later today, to an awed crowd of reckless spendthrifts will be:

The MacBook Grande

A 32” widescreen notebook with the strapline “Your home cinema, to go“

Apologies for the lack of a mockup, but you’ll see it later anyway.

Tags: macs, macworld, nostradamus, osx

Quickly add movies to Wii Transfer

One of the things that finally swung it for me to get a Wii was the Mac App Wii Transfer. It’s not quite as slick as the Apple TV, but fits nicely with my fetish for using things for other things. The music application works really well, but movies need to be converted before they can be streamed, which can take a while.

Only recently did I have a poke around and realise that movies are converted to Flash Video (.flv) and stored in /Library/Caches/Wii Transfer/Converted Movies/ folder. Using a handy bookmarklet I can now save YouTube videos directly to this folder and have them immediately available in Wii Transfer.

Tags: movies, osx, tips, wii

My 2007 in Blogs, Music, Events and Apps!

As has been my wont since the early 90’s, I like to write up the things that have tickled my fancy for the past year…

Blogs

This is should actually be in the singular, as there has been one particular blog that has lit my fire like no others.

Ace Jet 170 seems to have the ability to find objects that trigger the same emotional reactions, like these Routemaster and Underground Signs. A new AceJet post is often followed by a trawl on ebay…

Music

As usual, not everything in this list was released in 2007, but I couldn’t leave out Midlake’s Trials of Van Occupanther – 2006 be damned! Along with Midlake, the other big discovery for me was Band of Horses, and in particular ‘Cease to Begin’.

So limiting myself to only one song from each of my favourite albums, here is the top 20, in playlist style order:

There are few that didn’t quite make the final list, such as Of Montreal and Hammock.

Apps that have changed the way I work

Two apps have changed the way I work in 2007 like no others.

Coda

Since I first raved about Coda, I’ve met people who have either hated it, or see it as manna from heaven. As I suspected, it doesn’t really suit the hardcore TextMate users, but for me Coda has caused some big shifts in the way I work, and everything I do bar graphics is made in Coda these days.

The biggest change for me is that web development tools in browsers have become less of a necessity. The browser is regaining its position of being ‘pleasure’ while Coda is for everything that’s ‘work’ – like the distinction between home and office. I don’t even use Firefox & Firebug anymore, the revised Web Inspector in Leopard has been incorporated in Coda and that does everything I need and more.

My design process has also been changed by Coda. I’m working on visuals less and less in Fireworks and Illustrator, and starting on the HTML/CSS much much earlier. There are so many things that are hard to convey in a static mockup, and writing the CSS and HTML in Coda is so fast, there seems little point making one. I feel that I can iterate quickly and try out ideas. I still sketch and plan on paper, but a middle man has been cut out.

There’s more to love. The ‘Sites’ view has become more like a project folder or workspace. The saved tabs in a site can include not only the site files, but the remote and local previews, the Textpattern admin panels, phpMyAdmin and the project on Basecamp. I can’t do that in Textmate. The split views in Coda are another favourite feature. Apps like CSS Edit have useful tools, like the ability to override site styles, but the multiple windows for editing and previewing drive me mad.

I could go on, but in short, if I ever see someone from Panic, they’re in danger of getting a big kiss.

Billings

I mentioned Billings fairly recently, but beyond being a very well thought out time tracking and invoicing application, it’s meant that I have for the first time been aware of just how long I spend doing various different tasks, and how much I spend in terms of expenses and meetings. Having a timer in the menubar wins over a dashboard widget or floating window anyday.

Its also been a great motivator, making me more aware of time I haven’t spent working, without being annoying about it. If I had one request of Marketcircle though, it would be a quicker way of seeing which invoices are unpaid (such as an link in the sidebar), something I need to refer to a lot!

Events

• Moving into the Rissington offices with John, Jon and Simon, and recording The Rissington Podcast. Its the design studio I always wanted.
• The iPhone. Crappy camera aside, its the convergent device of my dreams. I can’t wait to see what happens when proper 3rd party apps are written for it. In particular I’d like a cut down version of Coda and a way of playing music wirelessly through airtunes.
• 2007 has been a good year for visitors – Luke Dorny, Scott Boms, Derek Featherstone and Ms Jen (thrice!) popping by to see family Hicks.
• Oxford Geek Nights are really something special
• First year of partnership with Leigh! Many people ask me how well we’re working together, but not only does she run her own projects, she’s also busy making stuff.
• The National, Imogen Heap and The Hold Steady were gig highlights.

Thanks for letting me get that out of my system – I’m done till next year!

Tags: 2007, apps, blogs, music, osx, review

Yojimbo 1.5 Widescreen

I’ve updated the Yojimbo widescreen hack for version 1.5 (which supports adding images and icons by the way!).

Download

Yojimbo.zip

Installation

This hack is for Yojimbo v1.5, and has only been tested on Leopard. It should work on Tiger too, but I can’t guarantee it!

Backup Yojimbo first. Nothing bad should happen, but belts-and-braces, you know? Also, if you get sick of this view and want the old one back, just replace it with the backup.

To install, ctrl-click on Yojimbo in the Finder, choose ‘Show Package Contents’ from the context menu. Navigate to /Contents/Resources/English.lproj/ and replace the OGMainWindow.nib file with the one in the download.

Tags: hacks, osx, yojimbo

Return of MYOB

Last week I was contacted by the Mac team at MYOB, the software that I briefly wrote about 2 years ago. There isn’t a lot in that post, but it’s negative, and apparently showing up rather high in UK only searches for ‘MYOB’.

The chap I spoke to explained how much MYOB had improved since v11 (the last one I used), so I felt it was my duty to at least give a trial (even though I am now hiring a Bookkeeper for my finances). I offered to hide the original post while I did so, as I felt really sorry for them. After giving v16 a spin, I made the post live again (which is why it suddenly popped up again as the latest post on Monday – doh!) and here is the feedback I sent to them:

• Installation took over 40 mins! A .sit file had to be expanded, followed by a .dmg and then an installer where the location had to be chosen. First of all, stuffit no longer comes with Mac by default (so I had to download an application to open the .sit file), a .zip would’ve been better. Secondly, Mac users are used to just dragging and dropping an application into their applications folder – simple and straightforward. Many developers are now doing away with drive images, and simply zipping the application itself, which is even better. The Aladdin installer not only took ages to install, but looked very dated. The instruction text looked like OS 9!

• Once installed, it launched the ‘whats new’ page in Safari, rather than respecting my default browser setting.

• Opening the app and creating a new company file, the Assistant featured a badly aliased and compressed oval image. Form fields are the OS 9 style text (Geneva?), and go to Anti-Aliased Lucida Grande once filled in – looks horrible!

• The ‘Command Centre’ interface is still the same horrible mess from v11. It still looks and acts like a PC application that has been ported to OS 9, and then to X. Functions and features are still hidden behind layers of tabs and windows and dropdowns. Aside from a new application icon (which is a bit of a confused mess in itself) I see no interface changes that make this look and act more like a Mac application.

• Address Book integration. The fact that it has to ‘sync’ addresses, and then warns you to back up addressbook data meant I didn’t want to proceed! How unnerving is that? I use Billings to do my invoices, and that simply uses an Address Book group (which it creates automatically) to read addresses from – no syncing needed!

• The invoice template customisation is better, but nowhere near good enough. There are also no controls for things like line-spacing

• Apparently iCal integration is coming, but as it isn’t yet available, I can’t comment on that. Quite frankly I didn’t want to go any further.

Overall, MYOB still feels un-intuitive, messy and distinctly un Mac-like. Maybe these things don’t matter much to the rest of MYOB’s market, but they do to me.

If you want to see a Mac finance app done right, look at the wonderful Billings, my invoice application and job timer of choice. It’s everything that MYOB isn’t: usable and native.

Tags: myob, osx, rants

What colour is that?

Being colourblind, “What colour is that?” is a question I’ve had to ask too many times. If there’s no one around to check with it means taking a screenshot and dissecting the CMYK values (I still can’t think in RGB) in a graphics editor. Do-able, but a bit of a pain the ass quite frankly. In particular, the hardest for me are those itty-bitty colour swatches you get in Photoshop and Fireworks. The smaller the area of colour, the harder it is for me to distinguish blue from purple, grey from pink and green from brown.

A wonderful new app for OS X has been released, called Color Decoder, and it solves this problem in a really simple way. Just hover over an element with the loupe and the colour is displayed in a way that I can understand:

My eyes and sanity are saved!

Tags: colourblindness, osx

Kestrel

Uh oh, the Browser Radar™ has been twitching again. I have high hopes for Kestrel, the codename of Opera 9.5, soon to be available as pre-release weekly builds. Aside from the CSS3 support, the section under ‘Platform integration’ caught my eye (emphasis mine of course):

“To make sure that Opera remains the best choice on your platform, we spend a lot of time making Opera feel more integrated with your platform. Mac users can expect a nice new visual look and feel. Opera for Linux will add a QT4 build, so you can easily adjust the skin to match with desktop. There will also be 64-bit Linux/FreeBSD packages made available.”

I’ve been impressed with Opera abilities since about v8, and especially with 9, but the ‘Opera Standard’ interface looks more Mac-like than the ‘Native Macintosh’ skin to me. I use Opera Mini on my mobiles all the time, but it’s never made the leap to my desktop due to its look and feel. I believe that 9.2 introduced proper system-drawn OS X widgets which is a step forward for sure, but with Leopard on the horizon, Opera feels as if it’s still clinging on to a Jaguar look. Sadly, I’ve never had the time to have a go at making my own skin – the process seemed too daunting.

So, I’m quite looking forward to seeing this ‘nice new visual look and feel’, and hoping that it won’t be a disappointment. If anyone at Opera just happens to be reading this, any chance of posting a few screenshots to sate the curiosity?

Tags: browsers, opera, osx

Safari 3 thoughts

Apple has announced Safari 3 beta for OS X and Windows. To make room for more important thoughts in my head, here’s the associated Brain Dump™.

• Updated version of WebKit. Nothing new to Omniweb 5.5 users, but my un-scientific perception is that it’s speedier. I think there will be some users complaining of ‘ugly form buttons’ though…
• Draggable Tabs. Yay!
• Inline Find, and very nicely implemented it is too. Yay!
• Resizable textareas, extra yay. Is this the only browser to do this by default?
• The Web Inspector is in there too. Not a patch on Firebug, but a welcome addition.
• Its wonderful looking at a website on XP, and seeing gorgeous text smoothing. Even the apps menu’s are smooth – presumably it’s using webkit to display the interface too?
• WebClips are conspicuous by their absence, but I’m assuming that this is a Leopard only feature.
• No session saving. I wasn’t really expecting it, but this does make Safari the only browser that doesn’t reopen your tabs inbetween launches. As some commenters have pointed out, you can ‘Reopen previous windows’ from the History menu, but sorry, there really needs to be a preference for this, so that the process is automatic.
• Looking at the preferences window in Windows is slightly scary. Like those PC-esque interfaces in early version of Firebird/Firefox for the Mac. I did feel that the interface should’ve been a better Windows Citizen.
• I wondered if installing this on Windows would make Lucide Grande available to the OS. It seems that like iTunes, it doesn’t and keeps it to itself. Shame, I really hoped it would available to IE, Firefox and Opera as well, although as Ben Darlow points out, it does look ropey when aliased!
• Also wondering if Apple will give a copy of the updated webkit to 10.4 users, in the same way they did for Panther users?
• The sizable textareas thing and smooth text rendering seem to be only new browser features to Windows users. Is that right? If you’re a Windows user, and have tried the Safari 3 beta, I’d love to know what you think: Does it make you want to switch over?
• Developing Javascript to work in Safari in the past has been a pain in the arse, so I would love to know from any Javascript developers whether the situation is improved in v3.
• I wonder if/when developers of Saft, SafariStand and Inquisitor will update their plugins for SF3? My money is on Hetima getting a SafariStand b18 out first. (Update: Inquisitor actually works fine! Also, SafariStand will work if you turn off ‘Enable Site Alteration’).
• I find the new interface too dark, but I use the Uno shade which for me is just right. To clarify: I’m referring to the screenshots of the Leopard version, which I find darker than the brushed metal. The UNO shade I find just right.

Tags: braindump, browsers, osx, safari

Camino One Point Five

Much kudos the Camino developers – Camino 1.5 is released today. With so many new features, such as RSS detection and Session Saving (Ha! Take that one Safari!) it was decided that this was a 1.5, rather than a 1.1 release.

I love Camino. In February last year I wrote about being a Browser Polygamist but only a few days after that post, Camino became my default, and a year and half later, it still is. I never thought that would happen. You can keep your whines about ‘lack of Firefox extensions’, Camino’s Mozilla power and Mac style hits the spot for me everytime. What’s more, its only going to get better.

Tags: browsers, camino, osx

An end to Browser pimping?

Thanks go to Doug March, who pointed me to an article on Ars Technica on Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5). In particular, it was this paragraph that Doug wanted to draw my attention to:

“One more tip we got regarding Leopard, is that InputManager plugins are no longer allowed. That’s right… no more little hacks from anybody besides Apple. No more Apple menu hacks. No more Safari plugins.”

Oh shit! No more InputManagers = no more useful plugins like Saft or Inquisitor. OK, the use of the word ‘plugin’ is up for debate (Haxie is maybe a more appropriate term), but these are little caffeine boosts to apps with no plugin API, and I for one love them.”

The article continues:

“Apple isn’t really broken up about it since InputManagers were often used for nefarious purposes anyway,” our sources said, but the loss of InputManager control will break a lot of shareware and commercial software that currently makes use of that control.

It was news to me, but apparently InputManagers are a security risk. I was well aware of the chance of crashing and sluggish performance, but not malware using it to do BadStuff™ to your Mac.

What isn’t clear at this stage, is whether this applies to SIMBL, a method of applying hacks to a specific app. InputManagers load for every application, whether it’s intended for it or not, although not necessarily being active in those apps. SIMBL got around that and could be more targeted. I’ve asked Mike Solomon if he knows, but I guess until he gets his hands on Leopard, there’s no way to be sure.

It does mention that “InputManager is not exactly the same as APE, by the way”, so perhaps Unsanity’s APE (Application Enhancer) system could be used? I must say though, I’ve not had the greatest experience with their APE modules.

There is another way of course. Apple could develop a proper plugin API for their apps (Safari in particular), but something tells me that ‘giving up control’ is not something they’d want to do, and for good reason. As the Camino developers experienced recently, 3rd party plugins/hacks can really screw with day to day bug tracking and resolution.

Somehow, I can’t help feeling optimistic that someone somewhere will find a way, and a good way at that…

Tags: browsers, osx, plugins, security

Yojimbo widescreen view hack

Having tried just about every notebook, organiser and outliner app over the last 3 years, I’ve become an eager convert to Yojimbo. Here’s a little hack that makes the main window use a 3 vertical pane view, like the letterbox plugin does for Apple Mail.

There is a wee bug to be aware of. when you resize it too small, the list pane jumps right and covers up the preview. Clicking the splitter bar (the bit inbetween the 2 panes with an indented dot) brings it back though.

Download

Yojimbo.zip

Installation

This hack is for Yojimbo v1.4. Please make sure you update before installing this hack.

Backup Yojimbo first. Nothing bad should happen, but belts-and-braces, you know? Also, if you get sick of this view and want the old one back, just replace it with the backup.

To install, ctrl-click on Yojimbo in the Finder, choose ‘Show Package Contents’ from the context menu. Navigate to /Contents/Resources/English.lproj/ and replace the OGMainWindow.nib file with the one in the download.

Tags: hacks, osx, software, yojimbo

The gadget I'm most excited about

It’s been a good week for the gadget obsessed, what with CES and Macworld. I practically wet my pants about the iPhone, but there are just a few things that hold it back from the “Gadget I’m most excited about right now”. Namely, the fact that we won’t get one until the end of the year, that it won’t allow third-party applications and not knowing what the price/contract tie-in will be in the UK.

Its not Apple TV either, although I was expecting it to be. What does Apple TV give me that my Front-Row equipped Macbook and a video cable doesn’t? 40gb isn’t enough for my music and videos, so presumably the rest has to be streamed, bringing a performance hit with it? Hmm, I hoped for more functionality. Now if they included a CD/DVD drive and integration with EyeTV we’d be talking.

No, the gadget I’m most wooping about is a new bluetooth device announced by Belkin. It’s the Bluetooth Dock Adaptor

I’ve always thought that most remote controls fail the task of navigating and playing iPod music, and that the iPod itself is the best remote you’ll ever get. There have been solutions launched recently even look just like an iPod, with an LCD screen. Why bother recreating the iPod? Why not just use the iPod? Thats where this comes in.

No extra plugs, batteries or wires, just 2, small dock connected devices and you’re away.

It doesn’t stream video, but that’s less of a concern for me. Assuming there isn’t any loss of audio quality (I’ll wait for the iLounge review), the battery life of the iPod is the only real drawback. The Belkin TuneStage II will use a ‘pass through’ connector so that you can use the iPod adaptor while charging it, and I’m hoping this will have the same.

Now imagine this. Connect one of these to the dock connector on an iPhone, and navigate & play your music using the widescreen coverflow view. Now that’s what I’ve always wanted to play my music!

Tags: audio, belkin, bluetooth, hardware, ipod, osx

I want to hear from Parallels users

Is anyone out there using Parallels on either a MacBook or MacBook Pro? Hard disk and RAM needs aside, do you find that it works as a testing environment for Windows and Linux? I’ve been burnt by previous experiences with sluggard Virtual PC, so for the last 3 years I’ve been using a PC Laptop. It was this dual-computer usage that led Leigh to call me “Web Design’s Rick Wakeman”.

However, the sheer convenience and electrical economy of one-machine-to-do-everything sounds too good to be true. Is it? Please leave me your thoughts and experiences! Thanks!

Update Thanks follks, the message came through loud and clear. An MacBook Pro is now on its way! :D

Tags: intel, osx, parallels, software

Very quick thoughts on Leopard

So, this is Leopard, and these are my off-the-cuff reactions.

Time Machine

Great idea, but my goodness, Apple’s designers must’ve been overdoing the weed. That is the cheesiest interface I’ve seen in a long time.

Spaces

Everyone is going to say it. Virtue Desktops

iCal

I was really hoping for a new non-metal interface, but alas. The new collaboration features make up for that though, this is something I’ve been wanting.

Mail

More for me to get excited about here. I already use Mail to keep notes to myself (as drafts), but the todos feature looks great. Initially I’d missed that Mail was getting support for RSS feeds too. Many will hate this idea, but it suits the way I use RSS, so I’m keen to see this in action.

iChat

Unified interface! Yes! Screen sharing! Yes!! Fun wacky backgrounds and effects!! Oh, if you must.

Voice over

The new synthesised voice sounds amazing, but I would like one that sounds like my wife’s scottish tones.

There are more new features to come apparently. Generally, I was hoping for more advancement in unifying the interface, as well as new hotness in Safari, but maybe that can still happen. Like Tiger, a lot of Leopard’s strengths seem to be in the underlying technologies like 64bit applications and core animation.

Tags: osx

A Proposal for a Safari Microformats plugin

In a nutshell, I want to be able to easily take advantage of Microformats. I want to know about and get that information with the same ease as RSS Feeds, and I want it to work on a Mac.

Firefox already has its ‘Tails’ extension, but this currently only displays microformats in the sidebar. There’s the TailsExport extension for exporting the data found, but sadly, this is Windows only.

So what tools do we have on OS X? Tantek has put up some bookmarklets that will do the export for you, but the trick is detection – knowing that there is data present in the first place. So either the site author needs to announce the presence of microformats (in the same way that they would display an icon for RSS feeds), or the browser has to check and inform you. I prefer the latter, but currently, Endo is the only OS X app I know that detects (it looks for the hCalendar format and passes it onto iCal).

What I’m doing here is illustrating a request I sent to Hao Li (Saft), Hetima (SafariStand) and Kasper Nauwelaerts (Safari Tidy), all developers of excellent Safari plugins. I can’t imagine that Apple are intending to integrate Microformats any time soon, so I thought it was worth trying the plugin developers. If you don’t ask, you don’t get!

Here’s what I’m imagining in Safari (although I would equally welcome this in Camino and Omniweb). Microformats are detected and announced the same as RSS feeds – an icon appears in the location bar to warn you. (Incidentally, in these screenshots, I’m using Safari Standardized Feed Icon from Mac Specialist). I’ve picked on Chris Messina’s Blog here, as it had a post with plenty of hCalendar love:

(Click to see the full image)

Clicking the icon reveals a sheet, with details of all the available data on that site hCards, hCalendars and so on. Each type is represented by an familiar OS X system icon:

(Click to see the full image)

Data can be added individually, or all in one go. An option to cancel is there too. I’m not sure about the small + button, but you get the idea. I also think the ‘hCard’ bit is too techie – perhaps something like an email address or phone number?

I don’t know how hard this would be to implement, but I certainly needed to illustrate what I was asking for. Cross fingers! Any further suggestions and ideas welcome.

Update: Ben Ward had a similiar idea at the same time, but Ben expands the idea further. I like the concept of a ‘downloads’ style window. Go see.

Another Update: Remy Sharp has implemented this functionality as a bookmarklet !

Tags: browsers, microformats, osx, safari

Cocoalicious Hack

I fancied having a play with Apple Interface Builder to remove the margins in Cocoalicious, and moving the buttons and search to the bottom, mimicking Newsfire. Here’s the result!

(Click image for original size) | The site in the screenshot is London Views, the work of Radiohead’s artist-in-residence Stanley Donwood.

If you fancy trying it out yourself…

To Install:

Download this file: ccl.zip
Ctrl-click on Cocoalicious, choose “show package contents” and then go to Contents > Resources > English.lproj and replace the ‘MainMenu.nib’ file with the one in the download folder. Best back up first!

Tags: cocoalicious, delicious, interface, osx, theming

Firefox becomes a contender

Up until a few months ago, Firefox was never on my list of browsers that I flirted with. It was never opened, not even for the hallowed web developer toolbar that so many swear by.

But then a few things changed. I discovered the Tails extension (for revealing Microformats) and the Firebug extension (sooo good). Combining this with Neil Lee’s G4 optimised build (with cocoa style widgets), Tab Sidebar and one of Aronnax’s pro themes I had something that looked and acted pretty much like my ideal browser. The sheer flexibility of Firefox was starting to outweigh the lack of Mac feel and behaviour.

Now, we all know that Firefox’s greatest asset is it’s extensions, but a benefit of this has only just got through to me. It allows for developers to add support for fledgling web 2.0 services (such as CoComment and the aforementioned Tails) without relying on the browser vendor to implement integration (if indeed it ever came). This flexibility is mind-blowing.

Now take a look at the new features being implemented in the Firefox 2.0 developer previews (Known as ‘Bon Echo’). SVG Text, Microsummaries, Inline Spell Checking (although I guess not using the OS X dictionary) and search suggestions. Most exciting of all, is the move to the Cairo graphics library, which on OS X, will allow Firefox (and Camino) to use the new shiny Quartz renderer, rather than the old Quickdraw, which should make a real difference to looks. I’m looking forward to this!

My hope is that the Firefox Mac theme sees an update too. Less stripes, more recent style preferences tabs and generally more Tiger styling. Aronnax has put together a proposal theme for the Bon Echo builds, but I strongly suggest setting up a new profile or user account for trying out Bon Echo. It’s not called a developer preview for nothing.

Sure, there are still plenty of annoyances, and its not seeing as much action as current faves Omniweb 5.5 and Camino, but it’s now a contender, which it’s never been before. So the browser indecision continues, only much worse, and I feel more than ever that I really should try and get out more.

Tags: bonecho, browsers, firefox, osx, polygamy

Omniweb theme 1.2

Since last weeks update, I’ve not only refined the Safari style buttons, but the iTunes style buttons too. These look miles better, so if you’re using the round buttons, please re-download and install.

This will be the last update to the Omniweb theme for a while, but I will be updating my Camino theme with these new icons soonish.

Download the Tiger theme for Omniweb 5.5 (888k)

Tags: browser, omniweb, osx, themes, updates

Tiger Theme for Omniweb 5.5

I’ve finally updated my Omniweb theme to work with the sneaky peeks

Changes for this version include:

• New Icons: Mark page, Next Mark, Previous Mark, Favourites Folder, News Feed Folder. Thanks go to Dan Carson who created the ‘Mark page’ and ‘Favourites folder’ icons.
• Added ‘small size’ icons for the main toolbar icons.
• Improved close tab icons.
• Added the large bookmarks image for the tab drawer.
• Redone splash page.
• It no longer replaces the Omniweb application icon.
• Downloads window – tweaked to allow it to be resized narrower (like Safari). This may compress text when smaller, but I prefer a narrower window
• Workspaces window- Changed from a ‘utility’ window to a normal one, with margins removed.
• New Change (4.5.06)- Improved the smoothness of the Safari-esque buttons. Please re-download and re-install to get the improved icons.

As before, if you want to pick and choose which icons you want to install, all the original files are included, as well as goodies folders of applescripts and sample workspaces. Don’t forget to back up Omniweb first.

Download the Tiger theme for Omniweb 5.5 (888k)

Tags: browsers, hicksdesign, omniweb, osx, theme, updates

A quick guide to Omniweb 5.5 sp6

Omniweb 5.5 is finally a public beta! It felt like it would never see the light of day, but here it is. To get it, you need to register on the new Omnigroup Forums, and then view this thread for download information.

Notable changes in this version are:

• Omnigroup have converted Omniweb to use WebKit, rather than Webcore rendering. In fact 5.5 is using a more up to date version of WebKit than Safari is – its the one that enables unstyled form buttons. (See this post by Dave Hyatt for more information). All Omniweb’s previous problems with sites like Flickr are past!
• With the change of rendering, Omniweb is much, much faster. I’d say as fast as Safari is on my powerbook. I never thought I’d describe Omniweb as ‘snappy’, but thats how it is!
• While the system-wide dictionary look-up doesn’t appear in the context menus, the keyboard shortcut – Apple Ctrl D – works just fine.
• You can now specify CSS rules per site, as part of the extensive site preferences feature. On a site you want to change, select the CSS file to use, and the view is immediately updated! Per site CSS is nothing new to Mozilla browsers, but this has a nice easy GUI, as well as instant gratification!
• There are still a few Omniweb features that need re-implementing, most importantly the wonderful zoomed text editor. For anyone not familiar with this, it provides a separate window for writing and editing text in textareas. I hope that gets back in soon.
• Pop up windows are now opened as new tabs.
• Finally – unified toolbars! Hallelujah!

The focus on this release was very much on the huge code change from Webcore to Webkit, so its nice to see new features like per site CSS sneak in.

Last, but not least, the spanky new Web Inspector (DOM Inspector to you and I) works too. To enable this is a similar process to Safari. Open Terminal and type:

defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniWeb5 WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true

Next time you launch Omniweb, the ‘Inspect Element’ command is found in the context menu. I love the iLIfe/Aperture style HUD inspector, and use this a lot to look at styles affecting elements in the DOM.

Finally, if you want to hide the stripey ‘Under Construction’ banner in the toolbar, type this into Terminal (as of the new sp7 release):

defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniWeb5 HideConstructionWarning -bool true

While I’m still hoping for updates and improvements to Omniweb’s interface, this release makes it feel great again. This just causes me more browser indecision!

A wee note for anyone using my Omniweb theme. Don’t – not on 5.5 anyway. It adds some images that Omniweb no longer needs, and seems to muck things up a bit. I’ll try and get a revised theme out soon.

Tags: browsers, omniweb, osx

Mac Media Centre - iTunes Remotes

Despite constant bribes the children still haven’t broken the old telly, so for now, the Mac Mini is acting solely as a server for iTunes and iPhoto. Thats just fine though, as it was mainly for music that I wanted to use it, and there isn’t much time for TV/DVDs. What I have done though is pick up a cheap Airport Express off ebay which is a great for sending music to the stereo without trailing wires.

So far, I’d been using my s700i phone with Salling Clicker to control everything, and this worked great. The only drawback is that when I’m away with my phone, Leigh is left without a remote. (There’s still VNC of course, but its not really a ‘small remote’!) . So I’ve been looking into other options available.

The Keyspan Express remote and particularly the ATI Remote Wonder, are possibilites, but when navigating iTunes without the TV & FrontRow, you really need visuals for choosing albums and playlists. What you need is basically an iPod Nano that acts as a remote. Actually, hang that, how about a 40” screen displaying Coverflow with just a Griffin PowerMate underneath?!

Next up was Coverbuddy. If you have a Sony PSP, Coverbuddy’s web interface has a special version sized for it, and it makes a nice remote. However, not only do i not have a PSP, but Coverbuddy only plays albums, not playlists. webRemote does both playlists and library, but seemed quite clunky after what I was used to on Salling Clicker. Like Coverbuddy, it also needs a web browser to work from.

Cut to the chase, it just occurred to me that Leigh had a Palm Tungsten C, and that I could use Salling Clicker with that. This meant enjoying the full graphics glory of the buillt-in iTunes Controller that I didn’t get on my Sony Erricson s700i. It worked so well, I just laughed for about an hour, punching the air like I was ‘Living on a Prayer’. Job done.

The 3 yr old Tungsten C is a maybe little bulky by todays PDA standards, but I’m sure that somewhere there is a smallish, light, supported handheld (or phone with a reasonable sized screen) thats also cheap to grab off ebay. I’d be keen to hear what device you’re using with Salling Clicker that gives you graphics.

Tags: itunes, mac, music, osx

Happy old man

To balance the curmudgeonly talk of the last two posts, here are a few things I’m really happy about:

Kilts! I wore a kilt for the first time last weekend, and I am smitten. For a start if you have a rather more portly frame (such as myself) its quite forgiving. Also, while it was a freezing weekend, I can confirm that underneath all that tartan, there is a zone of warmth. AND, you get to put a dagger (Skean Dubh, sorry) in your sock. AND you get some where to put your camera at last (in the Sporran of course).

I did the whole traditional regalia, except for keeping my pants on. There are no photos sadly.

AppZapper – Yes, to uninstall an app in OS X you can just drag it to the bin, but there are still other files associated with it – preferences, Application Support files and caches. Looking through my Library folder its littered with the remnants of apps that I’ve tried out and dumped, and this mess annoys me. One technique is to do a search using the app name, but this can still miss some files. Now I just drag the app to AppZapper and ‘ZZZZap!’ The action of zapping is childishly pleasing one! For someone like me who is always trying out new stuff, this is a boon.

Salling Clicker – Although I’ve had this for a while, its only now with the Mac Mini as (primarily) a jukebox, that this has really seen some use. Beauty!

Segpub – I don’t get paid to pimp Segpub, or receive any referral fees, but I do get excellent service, uptime and support. Thanks for everything you do Jeremy, thou truly are a Creative Bastard.

Tags: hosting, osx, software

Mac Media Centre part two - Software

FrontRow vs Others

So, now that everything is up and working, its time to find a GUI that will wrap it altogether. I could just use the default scripts in Salling Clicker to navigate between iPhoto, iTunes and DVD player using my phone, and this certainly works just fine. Lets face it though, a screen based interface is much nicer, and Frontrow is just the job. There’s the hack to get Frontrow running on macs that it isn’t meant to, and as mentioned above this works really well, but It’s a bit naughty, so lets look at the alternatives:

As mentioned in my sidenotes before, MediaCentral is a freeware FrontRow alternative. Its has a very simple interface – no icons or previews, just text arranged in a very iPod/Frontrow kind of way. This makes it faster to navigate, and works great. It has advantages over FrontRow too, as it also supports WebTV, EyeTV, AVI files and Video_TS folders. There is a Salling Clicker script to control it, but it isn’t as smooth as the FrontRow controller. Instead of just using the up/down/select buttons to navigate what you see on screen, it relays the menus back to the phone display, which I don’t find as easy. Also, there’s no option to view images in iPhoto.

Centerstage is another project aimed at this area, and does include the functionality to view images from iPhoto. The initial screen where you choose which media to play looks good, but the interface from then on looks a little busy. Overall, Centerstage feels less like something I would want to use to browse, but its early days yet.

iTheater also looks promising (its open source too), and a public version is due to be released on 31st of this month, although this is a date thats been moving a lot in the past. Judging by the Storyboard PDF you can download from the site, it looks like a winner, but until the public release is out, who knows? One to watch.

Those are the dedicated ‘media centre’ apps, but there are 2 iTunes apps are worth mentioning:

Coverflow is my ideal way of browsing iTunes. I’d love it if this could be integrated into something like MediaCental as another way of browsing (you’d still need to access playlists and such easily, which you can’t do in Coverflow).

Coverbuddy offers a full screen view, but as far as I know, can’t be controlled by Salling Clicker. I also find its performance a bit jerky, even with a plain background. Handy if you have a Sony PSP though, as it can be used as a remote control.

There’s also the recently announced GriffinTuneCenter, but the limitations of iPod HD sizes rule that out for me.

So far, my favourite Frontrow alternative is Mediacentral, but I’m keen to see what iTheater have to offer. None of them quite have the finesse of FrontRow or the features of Windows Media Center, but it feels as if things are just starting to warm up.

Have I missed any? Let me know!

Tags: itunes, mac, mediacentre, osx

Mac Media Centre part one - hardware

For a few months now, I’ve been bitten by the desire for a Mac based ‘Home Media Centre’. I have all these scattered elements – music in various iTunes libraries, photos in various iPhoto libraries (We’d been using Old Faithful for downloading and keeping all the family photos), as well as DVDs and movies. I felt that I could bring these together somehow, but I also didn’t want to buy lots of new kit in order to do it. What follows is my experience in setting up a basic media thingy.

First of all, I’m a muppet when it comes anything video related. Emails back and forth with Siobhan who knows about such things helped me learn my coaxial from my s-video, and formulate some plans. Originally I wondered if I could use my G5 to double up as a ‘centre’, but looking through the January sales in Glasgow, I found a low spec ex-demo Mac Mini going cheap. It went against the ‘spending too much money’ rule, but it was a bargain. There was no damage – just a bit dusty on top.

Being the lower model, it lacked a few features, most of which I could compensate for:

• No Bluetooth, but I did have a USB dongle I could bung in the back, so that wasn’t an issue.
• No Airport, but no problem as it would be sitting a couple of feet away from my wireless modem/router, and I could just run an ethernet cable to it.
• Only 512mb RAM, which is OK, but replacing the RAM is straightforward as this model doesn’t have a bluetooth module or airport card to be disconnected first. All you need is a thin putty knife to unclip the base.
• No DVD Writer. This was more of a problem, as the intention was to combine it with EyeTV at some point in the future, and the ability to burn off a DVD would’ve been ideal. Never mind, I could just grab the files onto the powerbook or G5 to burn a DVD.
• Small hard drive, but then again, even the larger spec 80gb model probably wouldn’t be enough. I knew I would have to use an external hard drive anyway. Word of warning though: If you want to buy one of those firewire drives that sits underneath the Mini, get the Lacie mini drive, not the Iomega Minimax. I got the Iomega solely because it was available on Amazon, and I’d saved up some gift vouchers. The problem is that it takes less than a minute of being underneath the Mini for the drive to get too hot and start emitting a loud, high-pitched whine. The Lacie drive has a stand built in to allow cooling, so it shouldn’t get this problem.

So, connecting it all up. At the moment, the iPod dock, bluetooth dongle and firewire drive plug into the mini, and the mini is connected the telly by Scart connector with audio coming from the headphone socket, and video passing through an Apple DVI Video adaptor (which converts the DVI connection to s-video).

Once the hardware was set up, it was time to set up the software:

• Installed OSXVNC and set it to run at startup. As it has Tiger, I could’ve enabled “Remote Desktop” in the Sharing preference pane to activate OS X’s in-built VNC server. However, I’d heard reports of this being slower than OSX VNC, and that was certainly my experience.
• Disabled “Open Bluetooth setup assistant at startup when no input devide is present” in the Bluetooth preferences as I was going to be running it without no keyboard or mouse.
• Installed Salling Clicker and the FrontRow Controller script, and set up the connection to my bluetooth phone.
• Installed Chicken of the VNC on my powerbook to setup and control the Mini via VNC.
• All my media files were copied to the firewire drive, and then I set up iTunes to use the library on the drive, rather than the Mini. To get iPhoto to do this too, I simply removed the pictures folder, and started up iPhoto. It then asks you where the library is located, and gives you the opportunity to choose the firewire drive instead. In iTunes and iPhoto this worked fine, but when trying FrontRow (more on that in part 2), it has problems accessing the files. Instead, I created symbolic links (with this easy context menu tool: SymbolicLinker ) of the Movies folder, and iTunes/iPhoto libraries, and that worked a treat. I haven’t tried a plain old alias, but that might work too. iTunes and iPhoto were also set to share their libraries so that we could listen/view on them on the powerbook as well.

Final note – if you’re ever trying to get Apple DVD player working when there isn’t a display connected (as I was, using VNC), it won’t work. DVD player doesn’t like this situation and will refuse to play. VLC doesn’t however. I spent ages trying to work out what was up with it. Doh.

It all works, except…

The upshot is that this works just fine, apart from my TV, its not one of these fancy ones with a DVI or VGA connection. The S-Video to Scart connection works, but the picture quality isn’t brilliant (looks better on DVD’s though). This is the limitation of the s-video connection, I was a bit naive to think that it would be enough. The sound quality playing music through the TV’s speakers is made ‘fairly good’ by using the Volume Logic plugin for iTunes, but it lacks a bit of oomph. Music could be fed to a stereo via Airport Express, but while Airfoil allows you to send audio from other apps, the small time lag means this wouldn’t work for playing DVDs. At least thats what I figure – if you have any experience with using an Airport Express like this, please leave a comment!

So that’s the only limitation so far, but there’s not much we can do about that. Unless I can arrange the children to have a little ‘accident’ with the telly, there’s not enough justification to get a new one!

Now, read Part two: software

Tags: mac, osx

Spotlight indexing considered chuffing annoying

Until recently, Omniweb 5 was running significantly slower on my G5 than my lesser spec-ed G4 Powerbook. It was snappy on the powerbook, but sluggish on the G5. Both machines have near-identical files, as they are daily kept in sync with Chronosync. I couldn’t see how the better spec Mac was so slow.

After a post I made to the Omniweb Mailing List about this, the culprit was found to be Spotlight. There seems to be a known bug, whereby OS X can can forget privacy settings for a removable firewire drive. Therefore, every morning when I attached my powerbook to my G5 via target disk mode for syncing, the system would start re-indexing the powerbook.

Stopping the indexing resulted in a much happier G5, and in particular the apps that were using the most CPU – Omniweb and Fireworks.

I’ve seen a few suggestions bandied about for this – but most involve disabling spotlight altogether. I actually find spotlight rather handy, so would prefer to keep this on. Another suggestion involved adding the drive name to a hidden preference file, but ‘Macintosh HD’ could cause some problems there.

If anyone has discovered a way around this – please let me know!

Tags: omniweb, osx, spotlight

Ideal OS X Text Editor?

That last post got me thinking. My ideal text editor for OS X is out there, but all the elements I want are in different apps! If I could somehow melt these bits together (like melting 4 chunky kit-kats together and pretending they’re the old style kit-kats), these are the ingredients I would use.

• SubEthaEdit’s collaboration ability, split-view, web preview (just prefer it to Textmate’s), code navigation and general cocoa feel. Textmate allows you to navigate the code, but its a separate window. skEdit puts its navigation menu in the toolbar (where it should be), but SubEthaEdit’s implementation includes icons that find easier to scan.
• skEdit’s code hinting, colour blender and project management. Its code hinting makes writing CSS and HTML so quick and painless, and its the only one that allows you to create a list of projects to open. In Textmate, I’ve got around this by keeping a folder of aliases to ’.tmproj’ files in my dock for quick and easy project opening.
• Textmate’s project drawer, code-folding, bundle editor and CSS & HTML validator. skEdit has snippets, but Textmate takes this much further with its bundle editor. Unfortunately, Textmate doesn’t use a standard cocoa textfield, so services items such as lipServiceX’s Generate Lorem Ipsum aren’t accessible.

With the exception of a built-in Textile filter (which can be added in Textmate, as Drew shows), this would do me nicely thankyou!

Please, don’t start talking Vim or Emacs to me. It always happens when I mention text editors, and It’ll just fall on deaf ears. Hopefully from reading the list above, you’ll get the impression that I’m just not a vim kind of guy! ;o)

Tags: code, osx, software

10 Mac Apps

Om Malik has started a meme, and as much as I try to fight it, I can’t resist butting into this one. The premise is:

“ask Mac Lovers – their ten most favorite apps. Forget, the Microsoft Office, or any of the applications that are bundled with an Apple. Instead, focus on small freeware and shareware applications that have helped you get the most out of your Mac.”

So Safari, iPhoto and Fireworks MX are out I guess! No problem, as I have a habit of buying a lot of shareware mac apps, even though (in some cases) I end up not using them after a few months. I hide the embarrassment of my spending by telling myself how good it is to support developers (which of course it is). Also, when it comes down to it, most apps (by the time the exchange rate has done its work) are the cost of a UK magazine. Bingo!

So with no more ado, these are my favourites:

Voodoo Pad – The desktop Wiki. How I love this app – I think of it as my brain dump. Anything I need to write down or remember goes in here. I can’t really express my love for this app, and version 2.0 has bought various features that have solidified it in my affection, especially categories. I’ve tried a lot of notebook style apps, but this one hits the spot for me. Thankyou Gus.

Skype – Not Mac only of course, but I use this such a lot. After overcoming the foolish feeling from wearing a headset (“Hicksdesign, how may I help you today?”), I find this a much more convenient way of talking. I can speak to clients in the U.S for free, and with an infinitely superior sound quality to my land line (most of the time).

Flickr Export” – If it wasn’t for this, I would never have started using Flickr, it’s as simple as that. I love it when I don’t have to open a separate app to do another job, and iPhoto (not eligible for this list) is a app of desire for me. Thankyou Fraser.

Chronosync – Ethan tipped me on this one. It syncs everything I want it to – iTunes, iPhoto, NewsFire. Every day I connect my Powerbook to my G5 by firewire, and my home folders are kept up to date. I also use it to schedule backups. After a careful initial set up, its job done.

Transmit – Its kind of an obvious one these days, I rarely see other FTP apps talked about (with maybe the exception of Fugu).

Newsfire – my news reader of choice. Its made reading my feeds speedy and pleasurable, and the new 1.2 betas bring in features I’d missing – subscribing via services menu or dragging links to the dock icon. After it first came out, you saw a lot of news readers trying to copy the minimal, but slick style, but none have grasped it. Hey, it can even perform incredible feats of shopping!

Cocoalicious – An exception to my rule of ‘not liking to open a separate app’ rule. Whether its browsing delicious links, or adding them, its all done in cocoalicious.

Omniweb – I’ve wittered on about how much I like Omniweb too many times before, so I won’t repeat myself!

Camino – If I’m not in Omniweb, or I need to test something in Gecko (without going to Firefox), its Camino. Fast.

skEdit – I still try other text editors (and have licenses for BBEdit, Textmate and SubEthaEdit), and while Textmate is coming close, its not quite close enough to replace this. That code hinting, easy to configure snippets, site management and image preview has me hooked. It makes writing CSS and HTML painless.

There were a few that didn’t quite make the list here – Quicksilver and xScope for example. They only lost out because these I use these more.

Tags: memes, osx, software

Mighty Mouse

As soon as the announcement was made about Apple’s new Mighty Mouse, I was placing an order within seconds. I’d been wanting, not necessarily a two button mouse, but a scrollwheel mouse, for a long time. I’d tried the various PC mice offerings (even the ‘MacMice’) but none of them had that great feel of the Apple Pro mouse. The low profile, and smooth glassy feel was what I wanted, but Mr Jobs had already said he wasn’t for making 2 buttons on his mice. The announcement was a surprise to say the least, but a welcome one.

Anyway, within 3 days, it arrived, and I’ve been using it constantly ever since. Having seen a lot of mixed reviews, I wanted to pitch in and say that I think its well worth it. I’ve not had any of the problems some seem to have experienced with the buttons. The lack of bluetoothness isn’t a concern for me (although the cable is a little short), but I have had 2 issues, which I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere:

1. Setting the side squeezy buttons to Expose all windows: Windows became inactive after clicking on them. Expose > select > click on any part of the window, it becomes inactive – unclickable. Very odd. Only keyboard commands would work.
2. The scroll nipple. Just lIke the balls on the bottom mice of old, I found this can become clogged easily. It doesn’t take much, and suddenly up or down scrolling is prevented. It just needs a wee rub with a tissue to get it working again though. Maybe this is just my extra sweaty finger? Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned that one..

Tags: hardware, osx, reviews

Browser Survey Results

OK, the results are in – this was a hard one to count, but I reckon I got them fairly accurate. The numbers won’t tally exactly with the number of comments – just to pre-warn any lurking pedants. Thanks to everyone who took part – it was a tremendous response.

(apologies for the fuzzy crapness of this image, but I really can’t be arsed doing it again)

The Results:

Number of people who didn’t read the rules first: 25 ;o)

No surprise there I guess, Safari is king. I remember seeing another survey that showed Firefox much more on a par with Safari, but that certainly wasn’t the case here. Most people preferred it for speed, UI and OS X integration. Firefox’s popularity seems mainly due to the web developer toolbar, which lets face it, is a genius piece of work. There were a large number of Safari users who were put off Firefox as default due to its interface and lack of mac-ness.

Pretty much all those on Camino stated they were using the bleeding-edge nightly builds, which I’m not surprised at. They’re solid, stable and go like the clappers. Mozilla power, Mac Style indeed.

I’m not too surprised at Omniweb’s lack of votes, but I did hope for a lot more. Sluggishness seems to be the main issue for people not using it. Glad to hear no moans about having to pay for it though, as I did expect some “why pay when there are free browsers?” comments.

Opera and IE languish at the bottom with one vote each. I’m not assuming the IE vote was a joke, as IE Mac does have some nice features, so you never know.

Receiving no votes was poor old iCab. I expected at least one person using iCab 3 beta to come forward, but it appears not. Has Safari trampled all over iCab’s possible market?

Also, no one seemed to pick up on that fact that someone used Firefox for its ‘live boobmarks’ – maybe it was just me that found that funny?

and now.. my vote

What about me? Browser hopping as usual. I would love to say Omniweb as my default, but there are some niggles that stop that – performance, not yet updated to the latest rendering engine, doesn’t work well with Flickr, various unpolished areas of the UI and lack of find as you type. Maybe a future release will see improvements, but to be honest, I’ve not got any great hopes. Omnigroup – please surprise me!

I guess Safari would be my default, but lately I’ve been using Camino nightly builds, and found myself falling in love with my old favourite all over again. The UI is clean and looking good, and while it lacks some features I’d love (mainly RSS detection to pass URLs into NewsFire and ability to restore tabs at startup) I’m finding myself using it anyway. Its so nice to be using a fast, responsive browser again, especially after Safari overloaded with plugins. I guess its the downfall of installing plugins, but its either Safari with a features and a slightly unresponsive interface, or no Safari at all for me. Page rendering speed is fast, but simple tasks such as clicking a bookmark bar folder can sometimes take seconds to appear. Infuriating.

Shiira, while impressing with useful innovative features like tab expose, goes and adds things like the cheesy ‘page transition effect’. I’m not sure that the direction for Shiira is quite clear, but its still one to keep an eye on.

Opera is impressive, and I like the idea of combing email & browser. There’s a lot of features in there, but it looks like a dogs dinner, has strange key combos (cmd-T for adding bookmarks? Whats that all about?!) and calls tabs pages. Joe Clark has a more eloquent list of its failings – but if you’re using it and like it, good for you. I can kinds see why you’re attracted.

Firefox (Deer Park) is better, but its still no Mac app bless it.

So, while it should be a Safari/Omniweb split, I’m going to vote Camino here, especially as its an underdog in the ratings, and I think it deserves more!

Tags: browsers, osx, surveys

OS X Browser Survey 2005

The question is simple: What browser are you using the most on OS X? With so much (good) choice on Mac these days, and the ‘field’ being very different to a year ago, I’d like to know what peoples tastes are.

This is a survey in the form of the Comping app and Text Editor surveys from last year (I.e – not very scientific). Is Safari the favourite? Have Firefox and Camino eaten into its share? Has support for underdogs (Shiira, Omniweb, Opera, iCab) increased? Or are you using apps like NetNewsWire for their browsing needs?

How to take part : Name your default browser in the first line (to make it easy for me to count), followed by a short sentence on the next line, saying what it is about that browser that ‘makes’ it for you. The only other rule: this is OS X only I’m afraid. Unlike the previous surveys, I’m going to be very strict on that point this time, you have been warned! I’ll leave comments open for a week or two before I publish the results.

Go!

Tags: browsers, osx, surveys

A list of typography things

• I love shopping for type, and have just started a de.licio.us tag for typeIwanttobuy, a kind of Amazon wishlist. As you can see – they’re mostly from Veer. The experience of browsing, previewing and puchasing type from Veer is the best I’ve found anywhere, its a joy to use. The fact that you can preview your own text, and download a gif image (with no watermarks) is so much more usable than the normal flash-based font preview utilities.
• There are many ‘font finder’ type utilities on the interweb, but one I’ve recently discovered – Fontshop’s Type Navigator – is definitely worth a try.
• I recently gave the new improved-for-Tiger Apple Font Book at spin, and went through hell. I love the simple, ordered interface of the app, but it really caused suffering with my font menus. Typefaces that should’ve been disabled were showing up, and it was as slow as molasses. I went back to Suitcase X1, and all was well with the world once more – especially in my Adobe apps with fonts being auto-activated.
• The day I organised my fonts by foundry and added each foundry folder to Suitcase was time well spent. I don’t get out much.
• Welcome to the new type foundry Village, with the beautiful face Omnes by Joshua Darden, creator of the popular Freight Family. Expect to see this adorning freshly designed sites soon.

Tags: osx, software, typography

Using things for other things

Use your IMAP email account as a way of storing notes to view between machines. In the ‘To’ field, write a category (such as ‘To do’) and the note name in the subject, and save as a draft.

Set up a web scrapbook album in iPhoto. See an icon or logo you like? Stick it in there. Like a site design/colour scheme? Take a screenshot and bung that in there too. It may not be there next time you look. (A wee mention for Chronosync which can sync your iPhoto libraries, as well as everything else on your Mac).

Use the superb Sidenote to store a collection of form widgets/logos for use on side design mockups. Copying and pasting from The Designers Toolbox works a treat.

You can also drop files (which creates an alias) or links in there for easy access/relevance to the note.

How about using NetNewsWire as a browser? It has many browser features beyond the tabbed browsing interface, such as appearance settings and downloads manager. It uses the same Safari shortcuts for navigating pages and tabs, and saves your tabs between launches. What’s more, tab setups can be synced across macs with either a .mac or FTP account. It shares cookies with Safari, so if you already have your details saved for someones blog comments, the fields will be autofilled as they would be in Safari. Extend its functionality by:

• Using a Floppymoose usercontent.css file, for ad-blocking abilities.
• Drag and dropyour Firefox bookmarks.html file into a tab. As NNW remember tabs when you shut down, you can keep this open all the time to see your bookmarks. Cmd-click will open your bookmarks in a new tab as normal.
• Setting your ‘External weblog Editor’ to ‘Cocoalicious’, so that you can add links to delicious by using ‘post to weblog’. Alternatively, use this applescript to post via Safari (will also work in Omniweb, just change the application name in the script).
• Bookmark a site in Omniweb with this applescript.
• Take this a little further with the web apps now available, NetNewsWire becomes an email client (GMail) and Project Manager (Basecamp etc).

Please share if you have anymore!

Tags: organisation, osx, software

Friday Question: Useful Dashboard Widgets?

After that little rant about useless Dashboard widgets, I feel the need to redress the balance. My problem with widgets is that most seem fall into 3 categories:

1. Searching widgets that are no more convenient than just searching in a browser (especially when most browsers have some way of adding search engines to the default google bar)
2. Widgets that display information from other apps – viewing iCal events, or unread mail.
3. Widgets that are just a way of viewing a single RSS feed.

Apart from the default calculator, these are the two that I’ve found worthwhile:

Capture (More than what you can do with keystrokes, it lets you choose filetypes, scale and saving destination)

Google Maps (the one widget that I’ve found to be more convenient than going to the browser)

There must be some useful widgets out there, but maybe there are some little gems that you’ve discovered? Show me your widgets!

Tags: osx, questions, widgets

Jeremy is right! Tiger underwhelms, except for...

I have to come out and agree with Jeremy, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is a little underwhelming. I’ve been using it for 8 weeks now, and overall, I’m not as wowed as I was with the Jaguar>Panther upgrade. Sure, there are a lot of improvements, but I’ve not found a use for Dashboard and Spotlight, the supposed major features. I’m still missing uControl’s virtual scrolling, and haven’t found any suitable replacement. Thats a sore point.

Dashboard takes a while to ‘kick in’, as you watch the widgets load slowly. I think this is still yet to reveal its usefulness, as a lot of widgets are things like ‘Amazon Search’. Hmm, referrer fees are wonderful thing aren’t they? Even the Transmit widget isn’t that useful. Why use that when I can just drag files to a dock or finder sidebar icon? It also seems to use up CPU unnecessarily, and since turning it off with DashOnOff on my powerbook is improved. Those widgets that I actually use (Calculator and currency converter) I have bookmarked in Safari, and open them in a tab. (To do this, ctrl-click the widget, and open the main .html file found inside).

To be honest, I still prefer my neat little Stattoo.

Spotlight is nowhere near as quick to use as Quicksilver (although, to be fair, I find the fact that it indexes text in PDFs quite useful). The jumpiness of its search results are annoying to say the least.

I think there are sleepy features that will reveal their usefulness over time, such as Automator, but until then, the one thing that has made me glad to upgrade is Safari 2. Not only for its new features (little things like undos in textareas), but for its RSS Reader. I had very low expectations for the in-built RSS reader, despite really wanting a browser+RSS solution. I’ve now found myself using it all the time. Its convenient, feeds are synced along with my bookmarks, and it suits my style of reading perfectly. I always prefer to view the actual content in the browser, using RSS readers as little more than a notification of updates. It also seems to cope well the 250+ feeds that I subscribe to – no speed problems at all.

Admitting this makes me feel very guilty though, as if I’m personally betraying Brent Simmons and David Watanabe.

I’ve had a few questions about how I use the RSS feature, so I thought I’d just quickly outline what I do. In my bookmarks toolbar is an ‘RSS Feeds’ folder, in which there are sub-folders for ‘Mac’, ‘Music’, ‘Design’ and so on. This means that each sub folder has a ‘View all RSS articles’ command at the bottom its menu, which means I can view feeds together, or just in 1 category. New feeds are set to be coloured red, and sorted by ‘new’. Finally, I’ve hacked the appearance to be little less vanilla. I love the fact that that I can do it all within the browser.

In fact, there is only one drawback I’ve come across. Sometimes it takes two goes to get the RSS feeds displayed. Click ‘View all RSS Articles’ once – nothing. Go back and do it again, it works fine. I’ve also seen this happen on individual feeds, but there doesn’t seem to be any reason or reproducible steps to it. Has anyone else found this? Its odd, but I find that I can put up with this (and hopefully its a bug that’ll be fixed in the future).

So thats the way it is now, at least until NetNewsWire gets even more browser features…

Tags: osx, rss, safari, software, tiger

Looking for a MYOB replacement

I’m looking for an app, and I hope someone out there can help me! I’m fed up with the crappy carbonised MYOB for doing my accounting, and I can’t help but think there is a more native OS X app out there that would suit my needs better.

Ideally I’m looking for:

• iCal integration
• AddressBook integration
• Ability to create invoices as pdfs, with a template thats fully customisable. MYOB is severely restricted when it comes to designing in invoice template. If it can then email the invoice at the end of it, that would be even better!
• Basic reporting, but must include VAT Returns.
• Import of MYOB accounts

iBiz has some of these features, but the current version just locks up on my G5. It also only handles invoicing, and needs iBank for the actual accounting features. Ideally, I’m looking for just one app to serve both needs. Let me know if I’m missing out on some great app here.

Update: Thanks for the recommendations so far, although Quickbooks isn’t an option, as the UK version is PC only. Using it via Virtual PC isn’t much better than what I’m using. Studiometry looks good, but lacks the accounting features I need – it can only do invoices as far as I can tell, and I need to track purchases and supplier payments as well.

Tags: osx, software

Tiger-r-r-r-r

One ‘archive and install’ later, and I’m now running on 10.4. This is just a quick post to offload the Tiger related thoughts in my head to make room for more important matters.

Apart from all the obvious shiny bits (dashboard, mail 2, saved searches, spotlight, etc) these are things I love so far:

• Overall it seems very snappy. I’m not sure if this is due to a fresh install, but it feels very responsive and peppy – hooray! Jeff Croft found this too.
• One of the best features of Safari RSS, which no one seems to have mentioned yet, is the way it handles pages it can’t find. No longer do you get a sheet which you have to ‘OK’. Just a error message displayed in the browser window – just like every other browser, and its so much less irritating for it.
• Safari’s in-built RSS reader is actually much better than I expected. It now occupies a tab, rather than using the separate, overlayed window that was shown in the preview demonstrations. Great for small amounts of feeds, but lacks features such as mark as read/unread functions to make it practical.
• NewsFire is faster again, and it doesn’t suffer from the constant crashing that 10.3.9 was causing it to do. I’m torn between this and NetNewsWire yet again, and NewsFire is winning at the moment.
• I love being able to add the ‘unified toolbar’ look to Omniweb (using Interface Builder), without resorting to shapeshifter themes. I guess t