Rich Text (HTML) signatures in Mail.app

I was recently asked to help with setting up an HTML signature in Mail.app. "No problem", I thought. Unfortunately after a few quick attempts I quickly discovered that Mail.app's signature system is atrocious. Typing in plain text signatures (all I've ever done prior to this) is easy. Entering an Rich Text¹ signature is not.

The problem is mainly that the editor window is difficult to use. For one thing it relies on the available-to-all-Cocoa-apps Fonts and Colors floating selection windows - which are elegant but seem to be constantly getting in the way just when you least expect it. Also using images in your signature is a pain because the signature window inexplicably doesn't display images you drop into it.

The line spacing in the signature window is also buggy. On several occasions while switching from one signature to another I saw random increases in line spacing as well as inserted line breaks in the middle of sentences. These random increases were cumulative, so after several switches the gap between two lines of text was several centimetres. I encountered similar problems with the "Always match my default message font" checkbox. Selecting and unselecting the checkbox repeatedly again caused the line height to increase to gigantic proportions.

The bug is difficult to reproduce but you can see a hint of it here:



After taking the first screenshot I selected and unselected the "Always match ..." checkbox. As you can see in the first image the image is at the end of line 1, but in the second image there are two line breaks between line 1 and the image.

In my search for a solution I found this hint at MacOSXHints. The 6-step method is a bit of a pain, but it works - albeit with a little tweaking:

1. In step 3 the HTML page you create must use FONT tags to control the text colour and size. Using CSS won't work. Nor will using a BODY TEXT tag.
2. In step 6 the easiest way to determine which signature file you need to replace is to modify the signature file you wish to replace and quit Mail.app. Now when you open the ~/Library/Mail/Signatures folder you can replace the most recently modified signature file.
3. And when you eventually send your signed emails, the body of the email must be in Rich Text format, otherwise your finely crafted signature will be displayed as plain text (and also without images).

This method results in HTML signatures in Mail.app which display correctly in Mail.app's signature window without any weird line spacing issues and display correctly in the recipient's email client. It also can't be broken by clicking the "Always match ..." checkbox. All of this is good news, but my main feeling after this is that the whole procedure really should have been much easier.


¹ Mail.app's Rich Text format is actually HTML.

Burning DVDs from AirDisk

To put it bluntly, think carefully before you try this. Yes, the AirDisk appears to be a normal network drive. However I just burnt a 4.2GB DVD full of jpegs (each approximately 2 - 3 MB) and it took over 6 hours! Throughout that period my Airport throughput meter (courtesy of the indispensable MenuMeters) fluctuated between 50 and 300KB/s transfer from the AirDisk to my MacBook Pro. I don't know why the AirDisk transferred data so slowly - normally I can achieve around 3MB/s for large files and half that for small ones.

iPhone frenzy

Well, it's finally been announced, and it has far surpassed the expectations of even the most optimistic Apple fan! I wrote a lengthy piece about it on my mobile phone blog. I bet Bill Ray is feeling pretty foolish right about now

Roll your own .Mac

Whilst browsing through my newsreader today I noticed an article on Lifehacker about replicating .Mac services for free. Long-time readers will now that Apple's infamous bait-and-switch routine with .Mac really irritated me. So this is right up my street. The original article is at 5thirtyone, and is well worth reading. The box.net revelations were particularly interesting,

Preventing iPhoto albums from appearing in your screensavers preference pane

While searching for a solution to iPhoto polluting my screensavers list with hundreds of albums I found this thread over on the Apple discussion forums. Since those forum posts will expire after a few months I am posting gryphonent's solution here for my own records. if you do read through the thread, be sure to look out for the amusingly smarmy posts by the improbably-named Al Van Malsen.

To disable the iPhoto screen saver from showing your albums try this:

1.) Launch the Terminal application
2.) Type the following command (all on one line) and hit return
defaults delete com.apple.iApps iPhotoRecentDatabases ; chflags uchg ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iApps.plist

I have done this on my computer and have not noticed any ill effects from it. Essentially the command deletes the "iPhotoRecentDatabases" key from the "com.apple.iApps.plist" preference file and then locks the file so iPhoto can't write back to it the next time you launch iPhoto.

If you do experience any strange behavior after trying this you can unlock the "com.apple.iApps.plist" file in the Finder's "Get Info" window or you can issue the following command in the Terminal application:
chflags nouchg ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iApps.plist

17" MacBook Pro in da house - one user's gripes

It's happened. I hinted at it several times before, but as of 7 days ago I am the proud owner of a new 17" 2.16GHz MacBook Pro with the 100GB 7200rpm drive. Once Apple announced the speed bump and price reductions across the line at the end of May I knew that it was time to splash the cash. Luckily for me the other half is a secondary school teacher, so we qualified for Apple's excellent education discount. Instead of paying £1900, we got the beast for a 'mere' £1750. Add in another £110 or so for a 1GB memory stick from Crucial (significantly better than the £200 Apple would have charged) and the grand total was around £1850. Not a small chunk of change by anyone's standards, but given that my venerable 667MHz Titanium Powerbook is definitely showing its age, it's a worthwhile buy.

Having had the machine for almost a week now, I can definitely say that the speed increase has been wonderful. Apps launch almost instantly. Spotlight is finally a useful tool. Web pages render with far more of that near-mythical 'snappy'. Programs that were as slow as molasses on the old laptop (Dreamweaver MX 2004 I'm lookin' at you) are now quite usable on the MacBook Pro even under Rosetta emulation. I am aware that these are all fairly subjective measurements, so as a test I whipped out my trusty old copy of DVD2OneX. The results were approximately what I expected, but it was still nice to see the results firsthand. Processing a 7GB DVD on the old Powerbook takes about an hour. Using the universal binary version of DVD2OneX on the MacBook Pro this now takes approximately 12 minutes! Absolutely fantastic, or as Jeremy Clarkson might say, "enough to give me a semi"

Despite all the good experiences of the last few days, there have been a few negatives. The MacBook Pro itself exhibits several of the problems reported by other people:

Heat
The MacBook Pro certainly gets quite hot. After a few hours of casual use the left palm rest gets very warm - not uncomfortable but enough to make your palm a bit sweaty! Also the strip of case between the keyboard and the screen (just above the air vent) gets extremely hot, to the point where extended contact is certainly uncomfortable, and even slightly painful. I have yet to run any lengthy CPU-intensive tasks, but I plan on remedying that situation in the next day or two. As long as it doesn't get any hotter than it is now I think it is fairly warm but acceptable.

Warped screen case
The case around the screen exhibits a slight warp when the lid is closed, i.e. when it is closed the gap between the screen and the body of the laptop isn't even. The gap is noticeably wider at the front corners of the machine than it is at the central latch area, i.e. perhaps 0.75mm at the latches and 1.5mm at the corners. This is also apparently a fairly common problem, but other than the slight annoyance of a cosmetic flaw in a £1850 laptop, it doesn't really bother me.
[Update: while taking these photos I've now concluded that the screen warp has at least partially corrected itself. As you can see from the photo above it is still noticeable, but it is not as bad as it was when I first unpacked the laptop.]

Other screen issues
I had previously noticed the new (compared to the Powerbook) hinge design during my last visit to an Apple Store. While I can see the logic of the new design in that it reduces the depth of the laptop, I wasn't so happy to find that I could no longer really use my laptop while standing up because the screen cannot fold back nearly as far as my Powerbook. This results in me having to bend down to properly read the screen.

Secondly, despite Apple offering a choice between glossy and matte screens, the matte screen of my MacBook Pro is noticeably glossier than the Powerbook's. Not a huge deal, but something I noticed immediately.

The third issue is the new hinge mechanism. It is far looser than the hinge on my almost-4-year-old Powerbook. Admittedly the MacBook Pro's screen glides very smoothly and is easily adjusted with a light push from a single finger while the Powerbook screen takes two hands to adjust (one to move the screen and one to hold the base of the laptop to stop it moving!). However there is a flaw - if you lie down on your back in bed or on a sofa with your knees bent, putting the MacBook Pro on your lap results in the screen falling down and closing itself! This was a feasible (and fairly comfortable!) position with my old Powerbook.

My final quibble is with the (admittedly cool) keyboard backlighting. This seems to be somehow connected to the ambient light screen brightness controller, in that when the keyboard backlight automatically turns off after a few minutes of non-use (despite being set to never turn off) the screen also gets significantly dimmer. I suspect that the light from the keyboard backlight is affecting the ambient light sensor for the screen brightness, so when the keyboard backlight switches off, the screen dims due to reduced ambient light. This may be the intended design, but I find it quite distracting.

Tiny return key, and other keyboard annoyances
I haven't seen anyone else mention this yet, but this is annoying the crap out of me. The return key on the MacBook Pro keyboard is positively tiny compared to one on the Titanium Powerbook. This is evidently so they could squeeze in an extra key (more on that later). I'm hoping that I will get used to the tiny key, but after a week it is still a bit of a lottery which key I will actually press when going for the return key. More often than not it is the backslash key. In fact the whole keyboard is taking some getting used to.

For some inexplicable reason Apple have also decided to move the tilde (~) key and replace it with a new key (which produces the § and ± symbols). Now I don't have a problem with this, but it certainly fucks up application switching. In the past we used command-tab to cycle forwards through applications, and command-tilde to cycle backwards. This was great when the tilde key was above the tab key, but is not so great with the tilde key's new position. It also screws up window switching within an application (command-tilde).

Strange noises
One of the major issues reported by hundreds of different users has been strange noises coming from their MacBook Pros. Most commonly this is reported as a high-pitched whine coming from the base of the screen, possibly from a power inverter. Others have reported a 'mooing' noise which seems to be related to a misaligned fan. I, of course, have a completely different noise What I get is a white noise/static sound coming from the right speaker. it sounds exactly like a vinyl record player on high volume when it is in between tracks on the record (i.e. a kind of hissing and popping noise). The noise lasts for around 5 or 10 seconds. It has only happened 5 or 6 times so far, almost always when I am booting the laptop or waking it from sleep. Rather worryingly, these are two things I rarely do - the laptop is usually powered-on and on a table 24/7. Strangely enough the strange noise has also occurred once when I was booting under Windows XP via Bootcamp. This makes me wonder if it is a hardware fault, rather than a speaker driver problem. The noise isn't solely restricted to bootup and waking from sleep though. I've also heard it once when launching an application. For me this noise is a show-stopper. If I cannot find a fix for it I shall be returning this machine.

Closing thoughts
I should note that this is far from a complete review of the 17" MacBook Pro. I'll leave that to others. This piece simply states my impressions of the laptop after a week of use. I should add that despite my extensive moaning above, this is far and away the fastest and slickest laptop I've ever used. It is, on the whole, a hell of an improvement on my aged Powerbook. The MacBook Pro looks great, and the performance is simply stunning. I will probably even get used to the keyboard eventually. It is just that for the hefty price tag I want a perfect machine. That means a laptop that doesn't get too hot to touch, doesn't have no stinkin' warped screen, and absolutely, positively, does not make inexplicable noises at seemingly random times.

Blocking a website with /etc/hosts in OS X

In an article on parental control of OS X, namely blocking children from accessing myspace.com, Dave Taylor proposes using the /etc/hosts file to accomplish the task. While experimenting with the method I found that I was unable to control the process, no matter what the contents of /etc/hosts.

After much trial and error I discovered that it is the lookupd process that needs to be restarted in order to respect changes to the /etc/hosts file. A reboot will accomplish the same thing, but twiddling my thumbs for several minutes through a shutdown and startup routine was not an acceptable solution.

In case anyone else has the same problem, here is the breakdown of this two-step process:

The default /etc/hosts file looks like this:

To block both http://myspace.com and http://www.myspace.com add a line such as 127.0.0.1 myspace.com www.myspace.com. Fire up Terminal.app and enter these commands:

Now you need to fire up Activity Monitor (Located in OS X's /Utilities folder) and force quit the process named lookupd. You will need to enter your administrator password.

Fire up a web browser and enter http://www.myspace.com. You should now find that the browser is redirected to the localhost at 127.0.0.1. This will be the contents of OS X's /Library/Webserver/Documents/ folder.

Reversing the procedure

First you need to remove the myspace line from /etc/hosts. Head back to Terminal and reissue the pico command you used earlier:

And delete the myspace line. Once again, hit ctrl-X, Y to save and exit.

You now need to again launch the Activity Monitor and force quit the process named lookupd. You will need to enter your administrator password again.

Open up a new web browser window and enter http://www.myspace.com. The browser should once again connect as usual.

Don't chuck out Virtual PC yet, the MacBook doesn't do Windows

Once again, Ars Technica dishes the dirt. It seems the lack of a BIOS on the MacBook means that it will never be able to run any current version of Windows. The MacBook uses Intel's far more capable Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) instead of a BIOS, but the only current versions of Windows which support EFI are the Itanium and 64 bit versions, neither of which will run on the 32 bit Core Duo processor. So, it's Windows Vista or nothing, and Vista won't be out until late this year at the very earliest.

In the article Ars also casually note that once Microsoft recompiles Virtual PC for the MacBook users will be able to run Windows apps at near-native speeds. However I have to ask how likely is it that MS will make the effort in a timely fashion? And how will Microsoft's hardware partners feel about the decision? Would they see it as unwanted competition for their PC systems? Or will MS place greater weight on the extra revenue and greater market share that will result if Mac users start buying copies of Windows? So many questions, when all I want is to be able to test designs in WinIE without enduring Virtual PC's geologic response time.

Mail.app nightmare over

Back in April, I posted a rant about Mail.app's handling of inline images. The gist of my tirade was that Mail.app insisted (nothing's changed - it still does) on displaying images inline, rather than as attachments. The problem here is that messages with inline images or PDF documents take an age to open. This glacial response time is infinitely more aggravating when there are several such emails to open in succession (for instance when searching for one particular image out of dozens emailed to you). Mail.app does offer you the ability to right-click an image and choose 'display as icon', but close and re-open the email and you'll find that Mail.app will blithely continue to display the image as if you'd never told it otherwise. Even worse, there is no global preference to alter this behaviour.

This glaring tidbit of user-interface idiocy is particularly frustrating for me since I was a long-time Eudora user prior to the arrival of Mail.app and Eudora has always, for at least a decade, clearly distinguished between inline images and attachment images. Those of you who have never used any email client other than Mail.app may wonder what I am blithering on about. The basic explanation is that 'inline' should mean that the image is displayed along with the text of your email, whereas an 'attachment' should properly be an image (or other file) that is sent with the email as a file attachment but is not displayed with the text of your email.

The 'official' description of the difference between 'inline' and 'attachment' can be found in this RFC document, the relevant part of which is:

2.9 Content-Disposition and Multipart

If a Content-Disposition header is used on a multipart body part, it applies to the multipart as a whole, not the individual subparts. The disposition types of the subparts do not need to be consulted until the multipart itself is presented. When the multipart is displayed, then the dispositions of the subparts should be respected.

If the `inline' disposition is used, the multipart should be displayed as normal; however, an `attachment' subpart should require action from the user to display.

If the `attachment' disposition is used, presentation of the multipart should not proceed without explicit user action. Once the user has chosen to display the multipart, the individual subpart dispositions should be consulted to determine how to present the subparts.

Thus concludes Mac History 101.

"So", I hear you ask, "why are you moaning about this again?". Despair not dear reader - there is a solution! I have recently discovered that I am not alone in my Mail.app nightmare. Adam Nohejl of Czech outfit Loki Software must have been a fellow resident of inline-hell, but unlike yours truly he actually did something about it, writing a wonderful piece of $6 shareware named Mail Attachment Iconizer. This program does one thing only, and by God does it well. Simply fire up the installer and Mail Attachment Iconizer will modify your copy of Mail.app and forever turn those inline images into image icons. Double click 'em and they expand into images or PDFs; double-click a second time and they revert to icons. Apple - are you watching? This is the way it should have been done from the start.

For those of you wondering why I switched from Eudora in the first place if it was so damned wonderful, the answer is that Eudora at the time did not make the transition to OS X very well and wasn't updated for at least two years. It also didn't have Mail.app's tight integration with Address Book and the iLife apps. Not to mention the fact that Mail.app is free, whereas Eudora requires an annual (annual!) payment for the ad-free version.

Mail.app single keystroke insta-quit

A headline in MacFixit's RSS feed caught my eye today. They report that pressing the control-T key combination in Mail.app's compose window (with your cursor in the message box) causes an immediate quit without any confirmation. I confirmed this on my PowerBook.

Update: MacFixit have posted a workaround

Airport Express 6.2.0 firmware update = no more internet

While adjusting some settings in Airport Admin Utility today I was prompted to update my Airport Express firmware to version 6.2.0. I knew that this firmware update was included with the OS X Airport 4.2 update from back in July 2005, but although I had updated my Mac's Airport software at the time I had never got around to applying the included update to the Airport Express's firmware. "What the hell", I thought, "perhaps it'll solve the occasional freezes I get" (every few weeks my connection seems to lock up, and resetting my D-Link modem fixes it).

Updating the Airport Express firmware was, as it turned out, a god-awful idea. After the update my internet connection immediately stopped working. I could see the Airport network and connect to it but nothing else worked. Internet Connect reported that I was connected to the internet. Network Diagnostics reported that my connection made it as far as my ISP but not to the internet itself. Several resets of the modem and Airport Express did nothing. Nor did a reboot of my Mac.

Eventually I fired up my trusty old dial-up modem and connected to the net to begin searching for clues. In the UK NASCR are a convenient source of dial-up services - no monthly charges and you just pay local-call rates on your phone bill. Having an account with them has saved me more than once!

After some slow-as-hell web browsing, I eventually found the solution. This comment on Versiontracker led me to discover many useful threads on the Apple discussion forums. Several people suggested that the Airport Express 6.2.0 firmware update breaks PPPoE on DSL connections, and reverting to 6.1.1 would fix it. I don't actually use PPPoE to connect, but I still thought that reverting was worth a try. Sure enough, after downloading and installing the Airport Express 6.1.1 updater, my Mac miraculously had an internet connection again!

Comment
This is ridiculous. This firmware update was released over 2 months ago, but I found several recent references to this connection problem in just 5 minutes of browsing of Apple's forums (at a snail's pace, mind you!). If this is such a common problem why hasn't there been a fix? It's hardly as if DSL connections are uncommon.

As an aside, surfing the net via dial-up modem was an edifying experience. For one thing I discovered that my very own website loads extremely slowly on dial-up! I used to pride myself on small fast webpages suitable for dial-up connections - evidently a few years of broadband has desensitized me to the needs of my dial-up brethren! I shall rectify that, but the whole episode also makes me appreciate my 2 megabit connection more than ever!

(Better late than never) DoubleCommand on Tiger!

Don't take the title the wrong way - I'm incredibly pleased that Michael Baltaks has updated DoubleCommand! It's just that happened a month ago and I've only just noticed it! This was the final piece of the jigsaw in my migration from Panther. DoubleCommand allows many unusual key remapping combinations, but for me it is the ability to remap a PowerBook's enter key to a function key, in order to allow for one-handed pageups and pagedowns, that makes it indispensable. DoubleCommand is donationware.

eWeek embarrasses themselves

The venerable eWeek, normally a fairly reputable online news outlet, embarrasses themselves with an apparently serious comparison of Apple's OS X Tiger and Microsoft's Windows Vista. What's that I hear you say? What sense does it make to compare Tiger, which has been available for 6 months, with Vista, which will be available in 18 months? That's a very good question, and one to which I know no answer.

Mighty Mouse!

Apple introduces the Mighty Mouse! I first learnt about this $49 USB mouse via Tech Ronin, and after reading a little more, all I can say is that it sounds great! You've gotta hand it to Apple, they don't do things by halves.

Buttontastic
As you can see in the image, the Mighty Mouse keeps Apple's favoured 'simple mouse' philosophy. They have kept the appearance of a single mouse button, but by using the touch sensitive technology used on the iPod's scroll wheel users can assign the left and right forward quadrants to react as left and right buttons. This is apparently customisable, so presumably a single button will still be the default behaviour. In addition to the touch-sensitive main buttons, the mouse also has two old-fashioned buttons on either side of the body. The idea is that the user squeezes the mouse to activate a user-defined function (this is likely intended for Exposé ). A good idea, but perhaps a step too far in attempting to be original. The squeezing motion certainly doesn't sound all that comfortable, and apparently the buttons are not individually programmable. I think simply adding a third button assignable to Exposé might have been a simpler and less RSI-inducing approach. Speaking of third buttons, the division of what is presumably a single large touch-sensitive area into two sections seems purely arbitrary. Look out for unofficial hacks to divide the touch-sensitive area into three or more discrete 'buttons'.

Balls to that
Not content with simply improving button aesthetics, Apple have also taken the scroll wheel concept a step further by implementing a "Scroll Ball". Don't get me wrong, scroll wheels are great - I don't function well without them. But the current implementations for scrolling sideways - such as positioning the cursor over a window's horizontal scroll bar before using the scroll wheel - are simply unsatisfactory. Granted, Apple themselves appear to concede that the scroll ball will only work in certain 'scroll-ball-enabled' apps - iPhoto, iMovie HD, Final Cut Pro, GarageBand and Logic Pro are mentioned by name on Apple's Mighty Mouse page. The ball does not seem to be pressable in the way some scroll wheels are.

Click chirp beep swoosh
Yet another (as far this technology geek is aware) "innovation" is embedding a speaker into the mouse. This is to provide audible feedback of various mouse functions, primarily clicking to add feedback to the touch-sensitive 'buttons', but likely also including scrolling and dragging. This will clearly be divisive, with some loving and some hating it. Hopefully users will be able to control the volume, if not completely silence it if they wish.

Still smilin'
Apple have been seen exercising their sense of humour in public on a few occasions recently, but giving a high-profile product a name like Mighty Mouse takes the cake. For those of you too young to remember, Mighty Mouse was a superman-clone (but obviously a cartoon mouse instead of a being from Krypton) who featured in an eponymous Saturday morning TV show with its origins in the 1940s. This was incidentally a particular favorite of mine as a pre-teen. Apple credit the Mighty Mouse name on their page, with acknowledgment going to Viacom International. Interestingly, while 'borrowing' Apple's image of the (computer) mouse used at the beginning of this article I noticed that the name of the JPEG file was "mightymousehero". Which I thought was a nice touch.

Why no blue teeth?
The burning and obvious question - why isn't this mouse Bluetooth capable? Some are speculating (fairly wildly in my opinion) that Apple are waiting to sell a few million of these mice before introducing a wireless version. That doesn't quite ring true - I see a design issue as carrying heavier weight here. Perhaps the batteries increase the mouse's size too much. Or perhaps the Apple design philosophy requires something more elegant than batteries or a power cable, such as a recharging dock, but a dock pushes the price up to unpopular levels. I prefer the latter explanation, and wouldn't be surprised to see a "pro" wireless version, with snazzy Apple dock (and obligatory pulsating light), available next year sometime.

Good mouse? Bad mouse?
On paper, Apple's new super-hero mouse packs a KABAAM-like punch. It is cunningly innovative in so many ways that it simply screams Apple quality. The price tag isn't overly outrageous, and given the fact that it is Windows XP/2000 compatible it will surely lure some curious PC users into a test drive and, if all goes to Apple's master plan, perhaps encourage them to consider an Apple option when it comes time to upgrade the home PC. It's not all rosy though - initial reports suggest some problems with the touch-sensitive buttons, for instance not being able to 'press' one button while a finger is still touching the other. This will likely be fixed in a coming software update. A more serious complaint I've read is that some find it difficult to 'squeeze' the side buttons. The mouse is also only compatible with OS X 10.4.2 and later, which rules it out for those Mac users still happily using Panther and Jaguar. Still, if you are running the latest version of OS X, and need a new mouse, this Mighty Mouse appears to be worth a try.

Update: c0nsumer has posted an initial review with images and screenshots.

Final update, I promise: Engadget have posted links to no less than six reviews of this mouse. When was the last time you ever heard of a mouse getting this much attention?

Tri-booting Intel-Macs

Read it while you can: How to install OS X, Win XP and Linux on an Intel-Mac. Probably won't be long before they receive an Apple "Cease & Desist" letter! Via MacSlash.

Update - 8 hours later: Apple has had a quiet word with the author resulting in him removing the article. Unfortunately, as is ALWAYS the case, the rabbit is out of the bag and there ain't no puttin' it back. Don't these companies ever learn? It is impossible to suppress anything on the internet, and trying to do so gives you a lousy reputation. Apple is, sadly, particularly obnoxious in this regard.

OS X anti virus

Although there are famously no viruses on OS X other than artificial "proof-of-concept" examples, OS X Guide have posted a tutorial on how to use the open-source Clam anti-virus. Apparently the main reason is so that you don't inadvertently pass on Windows viruses. All very well-intentioned, but surely by the same rationale we should be scanning for OS 9, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Linux viruses...

Password assistant

I've used Keychain Access for quite a while now, both to store logins and passwords for websites and for personal information such as banking and identification details. So it was a bit of a surprise when I finally clicked that key-shaped button next to the password field: Pretty nifty, especially in this day and age when ordinary people have to come up with more and more non-trivial passwords.

Developers' Intel-Macs much faster than expected

AppleInsider published a fascinating article yesterday, which contained some great information about the speed of the $999 for-developers-only Intel-based Macs. My favorite part:

"It's fast," said one developer source of Mac OS X running on Intel's Pentium processors. "Faster than [Mac OS X] on my Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5." In addition to booting Windows XP at blazing speeds, the included version of Mac OS X for Intel takes "as little as 10 seconds" to boot to the Desktop from when the Apple logo first displays on screen.

SlashDot discussion here.

Drastically reduce mailbox disk usage

Thanks to this hint on MacOSXHints today, I have just reduced my Mail.app mailbox from 860MB down to 460MB in about 10 seconds. Apparently this only applies if you imported your pre-Tiger mailbox. Still, this is the kind of hint I love

More WebKit and SVG news

Some news about the future of SVG in Safari. I made a few notes about this a few days ago.

Tiger Notes, vol. 4

Finally, Mail.appetizer has been updated to work with Tiger! There is a new compatible beta available for download! Cue angels bursting into song...

The last major (for me) item is still DoubleCommand.

Google toolbar for Mac Firefox

Although this unofficial hack already exists, this unconfirmed mailing list post states that Google are about to release an official Google Toolbar for Firefox.

Dock icon visual feedback

The OS X Dock has been the subject of a love-hate relationship from many Mac users since the launch of OS X. The 'magnification' effect has been dismissed by many who, claiming it does nothing to make the Dock more usable, dismiss it as marketing-department eye candy designed to wow would-be customers at Apple Stores. I must admit that despite initially loving the magnification effect, I have long since disabled it after getting fed up of dock icons magnifying themselves out of my way while I was trying to drop a document on them.

Another widely condemned "feature" is the Dock's cute bouncing behaviour when a program is launching or a background program needs your attention. While both behaviours do serve a limited purpose, there needs to be some configurability for those who desire it. I know that I for one would appreciate a setting to stop an attention-seeking background application's icon bouncing after a certain number of bounces. Toast 6, when it is hidden, commits this bouncing sin at the end of a disc burn and is a prime example of a situation where this setting would be a blessing.

Finally, there is the 'puff of smoke animation when removing Dock icons'. The less said about that the better.

"So", I hear you say, "is there anything good about the Dock?" The answer is yes! As amply demonstrated by the rotating 3-D cube of the CPU monitor X3, the Dock is capable of significant graphical gymnastics and is not limited to manipulation of the original program icon. The image to the left doesn't do X3 justice, the cube (X3 comes with a variety of icons) rotates through several dimensions and the speed of rotation correlates to CPU activity.

While X3 with its significant CPU drain may be overkill (somewhere around 10% on a 667MHz G4), the majority of Dock icons could still do with some sort of visual feedback, showing relevant information whenever an application is hidden. Irrespective of any other failings the OS might have, some Windows programs do this very well by displaying relevant information in the taskbar button when minimised. The amazing wish-there-was-a-Mac-version DVDShrink is a great example, showing elapsed and remaining time in its button.

Having said that, a few select OS X applications do make good use of the Dock's abilities. Prime amongst these is Apple's own Activity Monitor app, which has no less than 5 different animated Dock icons for displaying CPU, hard disk, and network activity. These icons display several different items of information each in the form of charts, but at a cost of measurable CPU drain. A further drawback is that the more frequently updated charts, for instance the CPU history meter, the Disk activity meter and Network activity meter, can be visually distracting.


Less intrusive but still useful is the 'display a single variable' approach used by Apple's Mail, and Ranchero's NetNewsWire. Both use their Dock icons to show unread material in the form of a number displayed on the icon. This approach is more than adequate for these types of programs, although some sort of font size control (particularly in Mail), would be nice.


A different approach is to use the Dock icon to display a progress bar, as seen in Toast and DVD2OneX. This is in my opinion the best use of Dock icon feedback and should really be mandatory behaviour for any program which has lengthy delays when processing data. MacTheRipper will apparently have a similar Dock icon progress bar in its next revision, but interestingly the DVD2OneX readme includes thanks to the MacTheRipper author for the progress bar code!


Finally we have Dock icons which merely display whether a certain state is true or false, for instance Virtual PC's Dock icon shows an OS X style spinning wheel on the PC monitor when saving a session, while Transmit's Dock icon shows a small arrow to indicate if it is uploading or downloading. In both cases a progress bar would make so much more sense, but I guess any feedback is better than none at all and I should be happy the authors have at least made an effort!


And that is, to the best of my knowledge, all of them. It seems like such a paltry selection given the thousands of OS X applications out there. Can anyone add any other programs to this list?

Update: I forgot about the fantastic BluePhoneElite. I usually have the Dock icon disabled so I had forgotten the feedback it gives (I use the menubar feedback instead). The Dock icon shows a signal meter and a battery meter consisting of graduated blocks similar to Nokia phones.


Update: I also forgot iCal! The Apple calendar program's Dock icon is deceptively sophisticated and displays an image of a paper desktop calendar which shows the correct month and date. Luckily most of us don't need a calendar to know what month it currently is - the month on the iCal icon can be very difficult to read.

Scalable Vector Graphics on a Mac

I was browsing around today (using Safari 2.0 on Tiger) when I came across this entry on Jacques Distler's Musings blog which produced a 'missing plugin' message:


A quick google told me that "image/svg+xml" was the MIME type for Scalable Vector Graphics, developed by Adobe and Macromedia back when they were separate entities (Adobe offers standalone SVG viewers an SVG plugin for download here). Further searches revealed that WebKit does not support SVG, so getting it to work in Safari wasn't likely.

I then fired up a few more browsers to see which, if any, of them worked. The WebKit-based Shiira 1.0 unsurprisingly did not show anything. However both Opera 8.0.1 and Firefox 1.0 do support SVG and displayed the image. Control-clicking the SVG brings up the zoom menu.


The image at normal size



The image zoomed in

Update: thanks to Jacques's comment below, I have now installed the Adobe plugin mentioned above. This is what the image looks like now:

Tiger and OS9 warning

Alice Wang over at Techie Geeky Mac Stuff reports on a serious problem with booting to OS9 on a Mac with Tiger installed. Presumably this only applies if you performed an upgrade install of Tiger. If like me you erased your hard disk and did a clean install then, well, no need to worry - you don't have OS9 on your drive anyway.

Tiger Notes, vol. 3

When copying a file in Tiger, the progress box and the text within it have both become smaller. I like it.

Spotlight has taken over the world. It is now quite fiddly to do a simple Finder search for one named file in the folder you currently have open. Update: MacOSXHints recently noted that enclosing your search term in double quotes ( " ) seems to restricts the search to 'by name' only.

The truly awesome mail notification plugin Mail.appetizer no longer works, although Mail didn't actually notify me of this until after I had updated to 10.4.1.

DoubleCommand still hasn't been updated. Web browsing feels broken without one-handed page downs.

Major Tiger bug destroys data

While doing some research on using SuperDuper as an alternative to the not-yet-Tiger-compatible Carbon Copy Cloner, I stumbled across this warning from the authors of SuperDuper. Despite the warning being a week old, I haven't seen any mention of this anywhere else. This lack of publicity would be unusual for what should be a major Apple news story so it may be that this is a false alarm, however it's always better to be safe than sorry. The essence of the bug is that mounting sparse disk images over 1GB in size will corrupt the image, destroying all data in it.

Spotlight refinements

The venerable TidBITS posted an interesting note on adding qualifying keywords to Spotlight searches. It seems they had just complained about the lack of information when Apple updated a Spotlight Tips page. The keyword tips are useful, if a bit cumbersome to type, but the highlight of the page is the reappearance of Apple's sense of humour:

Widget weakness

The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a reference to an interesting article on stephan.com on virus-like activity via Dashboard Widgets. The danger exists if you are running Tiger and have Safari's Open "safe" files after downloading option checked. See the stephan.com page for a (harmless) example.

Happy tenth birthday, DragThing!

DragThing, one of the greatest accessories in Mac history, is celebrating its 10th birthday! The author James Thomson has posted a great history of the program which is well worth a read. There's a lovely 'coolware' anecdote in there as well

The article will be updated regularly over the next 10 days with even more DragThing trivia, and also contains a link to a US$10 discount page.

When I started reading the article I was convinced that I had been a DragThing user since System 7, but after looking at the comparison 'about page' screenshots, I now suspect I jumped on the bandwagon with DragThing 2 and OS 8. I seem to recall that my first use of DragThing was when it shipped with my PowerMac 6100/60 which would place it sometime in 1994/95, but the year seems wrong so perhaps I'm thinking of my subsequent Mac, the 8600/250 (bought in late 1997). In any case, I have used DragThing without interruption since then, right up to DragThing 4.5 which is installed on my Mac right now. I've been so happy with DragThing 4.5 for the last couple of years that I haven't even tested any newer version! Sorry James!

Tiger notes, vol. 2

Spotlight is still slow. Top tip of the day: don't make any spelling mistakes in your spotlight query.
Solution: possibly re-install QuickSilver and use it solely for launching apps.

Safari RSS no longer works with HSBC's online banking site. Safari didn't work at first too. That finally got fixed by the 1.2 update. Back to square one.
Solution: use FireFox.

DoubleCommand no longer loads.
Solution: Daring Fireball notes that Apple have added some of DoubleCommand's functionality, but alas not including the ability to remap a PowerBook's 'enter' key. The developer's says on his site that he is aware of the incompatibility, but is unsure when a patch will be available.

KeyChain Access has changed for the worse. It now takes several extra clicks to make clipboard copies of certain information.
Solution: none yet.

Not specifically Tiger related, but since my copy of iClock vanished after installing Tiger I took the opportunity to upgrade to iClock 2. However there is a major problem - this new version has an annoying iClockWarnings icon taking up valuable dock space
Solution: none yet. May try and revert to the old iClock.

Quartz Composer

Stumbled across an interesting blog entry on Quartz Composer today.

Update: Someone's already launched a dedicated site.

Tiger review revisited

Not to be outdone by Ars, AnandTech have published their own Tiger review. It's a good review, and very detailed (although not to quite the geek level of the Ars review).

Tiger notes

My Tiger notes so far:

Spotlight is quite slow on my 667MHz G4. Using it to launch apps (granted, not it's primary function) is several times slower than with QuickSilver.

Dashboard is fast. Especially once you remove all animated Dashboard widgets since they hog so much CPU - the analog World Clock widget eats around 5-10% of my CPU, but the third-party Dash Monitors is by far the worst culprit (up to 40% CPU in full graphical mode).

Automator is fast (and awesome). My favorite workflow so far is Mail Images.

iPhoto was broken. Trashing plists and library did not fix it.
Solution: delete and reinstall.

iSync crashes upon launch. Trashed plists. Now launches but crashes as soon as I attempt to connect to the phone.
Solution: None yet.

Little Snitch was broken.
Solution: install new 1.2b3 version.

iClock had vanished.
Solution: downloaded and installed newest version.

Fire crashes on launch.
Solution: Apparently recompiling from source using XCode2 will fix this. I've switched to AdiumX.

MySQL acting strangely. After a reboot mysqld sometimes (but not every time) jumps to 100% CPU and gets stuck there.
Solution: force quitting mysqld and manually restarting in terminal fixes the problem (until your next reboot).

BitTorrent official client crashes on launch.
Solution: use Tomato Torrent Bits on Wheels (having to find a new BT app led me to discover Bits on Wheels. It's much more informative than both the original client and Tomato. Azureus provides similar information, but the obvious java-ness really grates on me).

Ecto behaves strangely. For instance Command-Shift-U used to insert a hyperlink of the clipboard contents. Now it sometimes does this, but at other times it does nothing.
Solution: Upgrade to new 2.3 version.

Safari annoyance eliminated, finally

They've finally fixed my Safari bugbear!

Tiger review like you've never seen

Nobody reviews like Ars Technica. They've just posted an in-depth Tiger review here - just to give you an idea of how thorough this is, the pdf version is 106 pages!

Upgrade to Tiger, PHP and MySQL broken

I quickly noticed after upgrading to OS X 10.4 that PHP includes were not executing and MySQL queries were once again producing the dreaded 'cannot connect' error message which 10.3.9 had introduced:

Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2)

Fixing the broken PHP was easy. I simply installed Mark Liyange's PHP 5.0.4 package. Tiger ships with 4.3.10.

For the MySQL error, for reasons I have not yet looked into the previous solution (repairing the ownership of the /usr/local/mysql/data folder) did not fix the problem. And trying to load mysqld in the Terminal showed that it not have permission to access the /usr/local/mysql/data folder. Since changing its ownership to the 'mysql' user did not help, I tried changing to it my user account instead (in my case the command was sudo chown -R thoughton data/.) Bingo, that did the trick! Everything works again.

A word of caution, this is just a quick fix while learning the ins and outs of Tiger, I wouldn't be surprised if doing this has opened up some huge security hole - so do it at your own risk and always keep a backup.

Tiger in da house

It's arrived!

MySQL broken by 10.3.9?

I noticed today that my MySQL install seemed to have broken. I was getting an error when I tried to post a new entry via Ecto, and after poking around a bit I discovered that any query involving the mysql database (such as a site search) produced the same error:

Further investigation seemed to indicate this was a permissions problem. The only thing I've installed recently has been the OS X 10.3.9 update, so I'm guessing it happened then. After much googling I found the fix.

Change directory to your mysql directory:

And enter this change ownership command:

And voila! Everything works again.

Tiger benchmarks

There's plenty of news out there about the forthcoming Tiger release on 29th April 2005 so I wasn't planning on mentioning it here, but the French site MacTouch has an article comparing Jaguar and Tiger (English Google translation here) with a particularly interesting graph of speed benchmarks for both systems running on a variety of Macs.

Mail.app inline image annoyance

I've noticed for a while that Mail.app seems to insist on displaying image attachments inline. This is fine for small web-optimised images, but becomes intensely annoying when you are trying to read several emails in succession, all of which have one or more large (1MB+) image attachments, because Mail takes several seconds to open each email due to the huge image that it insists on displaying inline.

I had always intended to figure out a solution, but today when I actually sat down and looked for one, I had nasty surprise. There is no solution. Apple really needs to sort this out, it's enough to make me consider ditching Mail.app.

Pausing DVD2OneX

I recently discovered, quite by accident, that DVD2OneX will pause its processing if you put the Mac to sleep! This may be old news to some people, but until these last few weeks I had virtually never put my laptop to sleep before, so discovering this was a real bonus. I've been wishing the program had this ability every since I started using it! That said, the ability to pause processing without sleeping (so the user can do something else in another CPU intensive program) would still be useful!

PowerBook Motion Sensor goodness

If you have a recent PowerBook with Apple's motion sensor, check out this series of software for some amazing, albeit frivolous, demonstrations of it in action.

Build your own Salling Clicker

The Unofficial Apple Weblog commented on a very interesting MacDevCenter article today detailing how to control iTunes from an internet-enabled mobile phone via a WAP browser and OS X's built-in Apache webserver. Great stuff, but hang on a minute ...

If you already own the incredible Salling Clicker, you're probably wondering what all the fuss is about. With Clicker you can already do everything described in the article without typing a single line of code. Furthermore you can view album art and playlists on the phone, which really has to be seen to be appreciated. And to top it all off it's not only iTunes - Clicker also has controls for iPhoto, DVD Player, Keynote and PowerPoint, as well as numerous third party plugins (admittedly of varying quality).

Given the all-round awesomeness of Clicker, it was the ability to script apps other than iTunes that really intrigued me about the MacDevCenter article. One such use I will be looking into is toggling P800 Manager's internet sharing. Since Clicker can activate the BlueTooth connection from the phone, this would eliminate the need to physically visit your Mac to start P800 Manager's internet sharing. It may be that P800 Manager is not scriptable, in which case I'll be looking into applescripts which enable internet sharing over bluetooth.

Back to the MacDevCenter article, the use of a web interface was also interesting - on the plus side it is not range-limited like the BlueTooth-based Clicker is, but on the down side internet access on a phone costs money (quite a lot in most cases). I suppose if you have an unusually large home the web interface may be the best option, but I for one cannot imagine any other need for the greater range.

One free alternative that comes to mind is sharing your Mac's internet via BlueTooth to access the web from your phone, all in order to surf to your Mac's webserver and control iTunes. How's that for convoluted? But we're now back to limited BlueTooth range, which kind of defeats the purpose. I think I'll be sticking with Salling Clicker, at least for iTunes control.

Keyword Assistant updated!

I mentioned in this entry that Keyword Assistant, an indispensable iPhoto plugin, was broken by the upgrade to iPhoto 5. Have no fear, life is good again - author yesterday released an update which works with iPhoto 5. Phew!