Macs

I revisited PimpMySafari and one of the three must have utilities was Safari Stand. I wasn’t sure I would be impressed and I’m always afraid of slowing down Safari with more stuff. I’ve been keeping it pretty lean with just PithHelmet and AcidSearch. So far, I like what it brings to the table. It has a lot of neat features, like adding keyword searching, auto download window closing, and my personal favorite, source editing. You can visit a web page, tweak the source code and see the result of your change right in the Safari window. ...

Not from Mac to Windows, or vice versa, but rather in a more important way. I’ve switched from the fabulous LaunchBar to the very new and slick Quicksilver. Between those two and Butler, if they’re mentioned in the same breath to a large crowd, you can expect some blood to be spilled. You’d see a religious war that would rival the Mac OS X text editor war (BBEdit vs. SubEthaEdit vs. TextMate etc.). ...

This is a strange predicament that I’ve been placed in. Normally, I agree with what most Mac pundits say. However, many of them are being over-confident and taking Steve’s word for gospel. They’re not doing any analysis or technical reviews of the transition. Rather, they believe the marketing hype otherwise known as a keynote. One of the primary concerns was the ability to run PowerPC software. This was addressed with a slick piece of software called Rosetta. Slick though it may be, it’s still emulation. In other words, it’s slow. To put that concern to rest, Steve told us it was fast enough. Fast enough? What kind of vague bullshit is that? I can let that go because, as I said before, keynotes are marketing hype. What’s sickening is the way in which evangelists are parroting this as if it was the result of some kind of scientific study. ...

Apple released Security Update 2005-006. I’m not going to do my breakdown this time as I’m pretty busy. However, Apple’s notes should be fairy self-explanatory. ...

It’s not often that I can find fault with John Gruber of Daring Fireball. However, I think he may be downplaying some things in his latest entry Bombs Away. Considering all computer users are always looking towards their next purchase, the issue of when to buy is always paramount. He said: This transition period is going to be hard on Apple, not hard on Mac users. If you?ve just purchased a machine recently, or need to buy one soon, you?re no worse off than you would have been if Apple had remained committed to producing new PowerPC hardware ? today?s machines would have been obsoleted by even-better machines next year no matter what processors they contained. And no one is abandoning PowerPC software development. I see no reason to expect Intel-only Mac software in the near future. Universal Binaries take full advantage of both Intel and PowerPC Macs. That?s worth repeating: Universal Binaries take full advantage of both Intel and PowerPC Macs. ...

One of the more overlooked aspects of the transition from PowerPC to Intel x86 CPUs is the effect it will have on the software you can run. I’ll be discussing this move and my take on it in a later article, but I think a subset of the transition strategy needs highlighting first. You Won’t Feel a Thing Steve made the transition sound utterly painless. According to him, developers will have to do little more than recompile their cocoa software. But what about existing software? Rosetta is the answer proclaimed Steve. Processor emulation will make it all better. Now, for the time being, I’m willing to ignore the inevitable confirmed speed cost, but what about compatibility and functionality? The keynote seems to make it seem like all your old software will just work. Well, I wasn’t buying that, My suspicion was rewarded when I read Apple’s document on Universal Binaries. ...

Well, I’m sure most everyone has read the CNet story on Apple switching Macs to Intel, the Wall Street Journal story, the Inquirer version, the Yahoo/AP version, or even the New York Times version. The number of sources coming forward to confidently say that they are has turned even ardent disbelievers in the rumor, such as John Gruber, the other way (or maybe not). I’m personally in the “I think this is a load of crap” camp. ...

Growl is an awesome piece of freeware that supplies a universal event notification system. Sounds complicated, but basically, it gives applications alternate ways to tell you things. One of the new features in the 0.7 version is the ability to send these events to networked computers via Bon Jour. For example, let’s say you have a downloading application that issues events upon completion. However, you kicked that download off at your desktop and you want to use your laptop. You don’t want to babysit your desktop to know when it reached completion. ...

I added my Feedburner feed to the site’s header to make it more easily accessible to users. Firefox users get to see the entire list of feeds. Safari users are less blessed. They can only click the singular RSS button in the location bar. According to Apple, Safari uses the Atom Feed Autodiscovery standard. When Safari displays a web page, Safari RSS looks in the HEAD element for a LINK tag that points to an Atom or RSS feed. The schema for these links is fairly standard and is supported by most news readers. It is described on page 40 of O’Reilly’s Content Syndication With RSS, and in Mark Pilgrim’s draft document on Atom Feed Autodiscovery. ...

Apple has released Mac OS X 10.4.1, the first update to Tiger. In addition to the improvements below, Apple has fixed the Widget exploit that had so many panties in a twist. In fact, they implmented the fix exactly as I would have, by adding a confirmation dialog when downloading. ...