MidKnight Gallery

Once upon a time I had a killer program from an outfit called Cultured Code called Xyle Scope that made it as painless as possible to see what style sheet settings affected what text and blocks on a web page, making it far, far easier to make web pages look consistent, and figure out what bit of .css code you needed to adjust.

I realized today, when troubleshooting some display issues in Safari, that I hadn’t used Xyle in a while.

The problem is that there are other options that have improved. Not only does Firefox have a killer javascript debugger that I’ve only scratched the surface of, but has a few decent css debugging tools as well (though not as good as Xyle…). I leave even that alone, because now Safari is up to version 4. The web elements inspector under the debug menu is somewhat clunkier in use, but just as useful information wise. The javascript features give me enough info to fix most of my problems without going into a full debugger. The real killer app feature of this though, and why Xyle hasn’t been opened in forever, is that unlike Xyle Scope, the web elements inspector allows me to see the styling and elements of the web page is it is currently rendered, after content has been dynamically modified via javascript, and not just in the initial load state of the basic web code.

Apparently, even the guys who made it agree, as cultured code no longer even links to it off of their front page.

Hooookay. Again the geekery, and also dabbing a toe into a subject that if anything, gets geeks even more fired up than the platform wars (Unix/Mac/Windows/Whatever).

Editors.

One is left wondering how they got themselves into this.

The long and the short is that I saw an article where someone was discussing the power of an ancient, and highly honed text editor in the *nix world called emacs, and how it was again becoming the cool kid on the block. It didn’t hurt that a few days before that I saw one of the guys from Digital Domain at my son’s High School (he was an alumnus there) showing off some of his work – and using a customized emacs editor.

So I took a plunge, tried the different versions, decided that of the commonly available flavors the current “carbon emacs” was the best, but…..

It just wasn’t me. Powerful, yes, and something I’ll need to ramp up on a bit along with vi when editing text remotely on a server, but….

It was too much work to learn a new set of tools.

Which brought me to another quandary, my two preferred sets of tools. TextMate and BBEdit.

Why two? because neither is exactly what I want either.

Textmate is fresher, more customizable, seems to have a better intuitive grasp of languages, and can easily create some truly killer code snippets I can fire off with a few letters and a tab.

On the other hand, it chokes on some of the larger logfiles I have to parse through, the “find” features don’t color code the matching syntax, comparing two files line by line is so utterly painful I go out o my way to open up BBEdit just to do it when I hit that brick wall, and it can be far too aggressively helpful when it comes to single and double quotes.

I don’t really want or need all of BBEdit’s features… I’ve stripped down my TextMate feature set to just what I need as it is….

But…

If it would deal with large files smoothly without beachballing (for minutes even….), and if the file comparison using “diff” gave me results like BBEdit, I’d be a happy camper and forgive the rest of the annoyances.

I’d also like it if the long-promised version 2 that would make use of the then-new 10.5 “Leopard” features would finally, finally come out.

I’ve spent nearly a straight week poking into an operating system to a degree and intensity that I never have before. Yes, many of the things I was poking at I’d done before, but rarely had I so intensely poked, pushed, and prodded to see what broke.

Honestly, rarely have I had to push and prod so much to find things to break.

Word of warning. I am fully certain I will be recommending this update to every client that has an intel based Mac. I’m already getting questions on it.

Yet.

I can NOT recommend this in good faith right this second to anyone with an established workflow in mission-critical software that has not yet been certified and updated specifically to run on Snow Leopard. Wait a few weeks. Try a test platform.

That said. Wow.

Installation on my laptop was less painful than installing Leopard onto my wife’s MacBook Pro. Or my old iBook. Or my G5. Since I didn’t run into the blue screen (thank you again Logitech. Your hardware is great, your drivers uniformly create a perfect vacuum… on every platform), it was far easier than my last major upgrade.

Starting up and shutting down, among other things, are both faster. So is time machine. Mail hasn’t flaked out in any weird ways, and is also much faster (and can now incorporate hyperlinks within signatures. I can hear the text-only purists grinding their teeth). Most programs are noticably snappier, and many, despite apple releasing ahead of schedule, already had verified their software was compatible. Thus my list of stuff that was broken was very, very short.

Most of my programs worked without hiccups. Predictably, almost every non-apple program was 32 bit. Surprisingly, among the tiny handful of Apple programs that are not 64 bit are front row and the DVD player.

The first category of programs I looked at were those with only PowerPC code. While I expected this from my copy of Office (I still run 2004. Anything newer I translate into Pages or NeoOffice…), I didn’t realize that Zterm, Disk Inventory X, Pic2Icon, or the graphical version of NetHack had never been rebuilt as intel-native programs. While most non-techies could care less about most of those programs, and can get a newer version of the office suite – MS or not – Disk Inventory is a useful tool for us crazies and for normal people that lets you very easily hunt down where space is getting used up on your hard drive, by giving you a nice, graphical, color-coded mapping.

I may have to bit the bullet and either get by without it (I don’t need it that often), or hope somebody updates it, and the rest of the powerPC programs. Office, I’ll just have to work in NeoOffice and Pages until I decide it’s worth ponying up for the Microsoft product. I’ve taken NetHack in an even _more_ retro direction by downloading and installing the text-only version.

Let’s get to what broke, shall we?

Cooliris, a wonderful web plugin for navigating pictures in sites like Flickr and Facebook, still works in Firefox, but the Safari version is broken, and now pending.

NeoOffice did not work – would not even start up, but has been patched and will now work after the update. There are still a couple bugs related to the image browser and networked file saves, but those are survivable. Once Apple gets the x.1 round of updates out of the way and the stable release of NeoOffice 3.1 arrives, we should be good to go.

I expected OnyX to fail – it’s a very version-specific cleanup utility for nuking corrupt caches, etc, and I would not expect the 10.5 version to work safely on Snow leopard than I would expect the 10.4 version to. Winclone surprised me a bit – I would not have thought it would be affected.

Another geeky program, nmap – used for security and network analysis – had an oddball issue properly scanning the local network. There is a workaround for it.

Predictably, the Cisco VPN software broke, just like many OS updates – even minor ones – have done in the past. Fortunately reinstalling the latest version worked great. A lot of other programs I use had minor updates and seem to work great (haven’t run into any obvious bugs) in 32 bit mode.

Interestingly, while Tweetdeck runs fine, it’s predictably enough in 32 bit mode as it’s based on Adobe Air. The Tweetie client is actually a full 64-bit app. This has shifted me even more to the point where I’m using that for quick posts, and tweetdeck when I’m doing serious searching and monitoring – which is rare.

Many apps got updated, and work fine. Of the ones that haven’t been updated, I’ve not noticed anything wrong with the vast majority. Even Microsoft’s Silverlight – their answer to adobe Flash and Air which netflix uses for their movie streaming service – worked great once updated.

Video playback and preference panes got hit the hardest. As of this writing, neither Microsoft, nor Flip4Mac (which is where MS has pointed people for several years now) have a version of their windows media codec that plays on my system without significant issues. Fortunately, VLC does, and plays flash video files as well.

Several third party preference panes (Perian, Weathercal, Hazel) have been updated to full 64-bit status, and don’t force the preference pane to restart. Most third-party preference panes still force a restart of system preferences as of this writing. While my WMV playback only seems to work in VLC, Perian seems to be handling everything else just fine even in Quicktime Player X.

I’ve yet to see how well the Adobe Creative Suite programs work, and I’m disappointed that Mailtags is broken and will be a paid upgrade, which brings me to the last point.

Mailtags is an awesome plugin for mail that allows you to apply arbitrary tags and metadata to mail messages. Incredibly useful in association with smart folders – and in principle similar to what Google mail does even though most mail programs present Google mail’s labels as traditional “folders”.

As extensive as the backend changes were to the Mac OS, I am saddened, but hardly surprised that Mailtags broke. My regret is that getting the functionality back will involve a paid upgrade for a program I’ve already paid for, or I lose the functionality utterly due to my system upgrade. Being fair, I’ve had two years of use out of it already, and they will be doing a lot of work getting it improved – it’s well worth the money.

Textmate – which is neck in neck with BBedit as my favorite coding and plain text editor, has hardly improved in forever. While only a few bugs cropped up – none showstoppers – and I’m glad to see some new updates and life on the website, it’s high time we see some progress made.

I am less forgiving of Adobe. I understand many of the technical difficulties involved, and am sympathetic. I also get the distinct feeling that getting their products in sync with the roadmap of technology changes for the Mac has been lacking in dedication and sincere effort. This ironically echoes the position Quark was in with their page layout program QuarkXpress – resting comfortably on their laurels with no competitors in sight – before InDesign swooped in and stole the mindshare, and the majority of the marketshare, from them. Intel was on the roadmap long before CS3 – even before CS2. They had a lot of time to deal with the reality of 64-bit Macs as the norm (It’s hard for even me to remember how long the Mac Pro’s have been out already). It’s one thing to prioritize getting the current shipping product, CS4, debugged before putting major efforts into supporting CS3. It’s another to make customers who bought CS3 as a current product just under a year ago feel like they’re being left out in the cold if they don’t pay up for the new software instead of skipping a version. Many shops didn’t consider the new features in version 4 enough to justify the ever steeper upgrade costs – and in the past, Adobe software was usually good for several years. Worse, Adobe’s initial statements regarding CS3 strongly implied you were on your own if anything broke. Period.

I haven’t seen how the backend changes affect Video editing tools dependent on Quicktime, how Filemaker, etc. are affected, and how some business-critical programs like PowerCADD that have proven notoriously sensitive to changes (in one case – to differing version numbers between the 10.4 and 10.5 (unicode) versions of the Helvetica font )

I also can’t wait until this view in the activity window is all Intel 64…..

There are three main options for people who wish to run Windows on the Mac. The first is “Boot Camp,” the second is “Fusion” from VMWare, and the last is “Parallels.”

Boot Camp is Apple’s method of partitioning (splitting up) the hard drive so that a separate section of the drive is used to run Windows. Pros? Runs as fast as any other Windows computer with similar hardware. Cons? It requires a total reboot into Windows, and another total restart to get back to your Mac.

Parallels and Fusion instead create a little sandbox that runs in a window while the rest of your Mac is running. This little sandbox pretends that it’s a whole separate computer. Cons? Not as fast as Boot camp, especially if trying to play games. Pros? More than fast enough to run Quickbooks, etc., much easier to switch in and out of (including copying, pasting and file transfers), And you can easily back up your entire virtual windows machine with all your settings intact by copying a disk image.

Which is best? Well, Parallels, from the newer kids on the virtualization block, tends to have the niftiest features first. It tends to run a bit faster. Fusion tends to be slower and more staid. When it catches up features-wise it tends to be implemented smoother and more mac-like. Finally, it tends to be more stable and deal better with any updates that Apple throws around.

I have at least one client actively switching over to Fusion with every computer they buy a copy for or as they update past version 3, because of two issues. One – a time where an Apple update kept them from printing to USB printers out of Paralells for three days. Worse, the fact that two sets of automatic updates have been corrupted and required workarounds to download a valid updater. We discovered the updating issue when trying to get a fix for video display problems within Parallels. I can understand the USB issue – it was in part a matter of timing as Apple had released an almost simultaneous update. The video issue is less forgivable, but also understandable. The problems where two sets of updates failed at different times because the downloaded updater was corrupt is just embarrassing.

With a recent announcement by Google, you can almost hear the air getting sucked out of .mac’s sails.

Say what?

OK. .mac is Apple’s much touted, and honestly, underdeveloped mail hosting service/sync service/online disk space/remote access service that was recently rebranded as mobileme/.me. Frankly, it’s a bastard stepchild. While I’ve had legitimate uses for it and it’s premium pricing (just wait, I’ll explain), most users have never needed most of what it offers, or could easily get it for free. The biggest thing going for it lately was .mac-based syncing for the iPhone, that offered a compelling reason to shell out the bucks.

Well, Google is now offering exchange-server based syncing called Mobile Sync that works with a number of smart phones – including the iPhone. With it, you can keep your gmail-based contacts and Google calendars wirelessly synchronized with your iPhone. And it’s free.

OK. It’s hardly the end of the world. There are still a number of advantages that .mac has, but Google sync just made it a lot less compelling.

Pro’s for Google Mobile Sync:

• Easy to share calendars with other people and fairly easy to see other people’s shared calendars as long as they’re on Google. Google calendars has it all over iCal here.
• Reliable. You don’t have to deal with the vagaries of Apple’s built-in syncing services. Google has the server, Google keeps the calendar. Any changes you make to it after using the calDav tools like Calaboration to give you direct access to your Google calendar in iCal will be reflected within minutes no matter where else you look at your calendar. The calendar and contacts are synchronized over the relatively tried and tested (yes, I’m grinding my teeth saying it, but credit where due) Exchange activesync services. Since the current Apple Address Book app in Leopard natively syncs to any specified Google Mail account, this gives you a completely different channel to keep your mail and contacts and calendars synchronized on your phone and desktop. It also makes them available via the web, while letting you use the interface (web or local) that best suits your way of working.

Cons:

• Privacy. Well – there are some who worry about Google and privacy. I understand these concerns, but don’t worry enough to not use them where they’re the best tool for the job.
• Five Calendars synchronized. You can have more than five calendars, but only five of them can be synchronized to your smartphone. I solved this by grouping what used to be separate calendars together.
• Ease of setup. If you have a new computer and iPhone – great. No problem. However, if, like me, you have a bunch of contact and calendar information already, then .mac is still the clear winner here. Between consolidating calendars, backing up data on the phone and the computers, exporting out individual calendars to import into Google cal, importing them, etc… it’s hardly a painless synchronization  or one-click export. If, on the other hand, you already use Google and never used iCal anyway, then you still have the option of viewing the calendars in iCal. This is useful because a lot of programs in OSX are aware of the address book and the iCal calendars.
• .mac plays better with mail programs than GMAIL. Especially the built in Apple Mail.app. Go figure. That said, this is true because Google does a few non-standard things to make tags work within the folder paradigm that most mail programs use.
• Doesn’t replace the “Back to My Mac” functionality. – though as I recall LogMeIn now has a free mac program that allows you to get some of that (remotely controlling your computer) for free.

So… getting all this to work can be a little harder than .mac, and you still don’t get to synch bookmarks, but it’s free, and it works. For people like me who’ve had a .mac address for years, well, we’re not giving it up. At this point though, I can’t really point to mobileme sync as a compelling reason to push .mac/.me/mobileme.

Well. Some of us already have our kids back in school, and some don’t. Some won’t this year, but the advice here applies to a lot of people wanting to lock down their laptops a little better for public use.

One word: Amen

Ars Technica, the source of many fine articles related to computers, just published an excellent little primer on how to keep your computer secure. It includes information for Linux and Mac users as well.

I’ve had backup means in place before Leopard came out. Specifically, a snapshot based setup using rsync and hard links on my linux box. Nonetheless, it hasn’t been half as useful as time machine – if for no other reason than the ability to do bare metal restores.

I’ve had to do them twice now.

The first time was when my laptop was dropped shortly after closing the lid while still writing out. The drive had to be replaced and restored from an external TM backup. I’m writing this on it now, as a matter of fact.

The second time was the other day – discovering my desktop hung up (which has effectively become a household media server and sandboxed surfstation for the kids). Turns out the boot drive was suffering from a string of communications errors, though the diagnostics and file repair programs said everything was fine. One trip to Staples and a few hours later and I had a restored desktop.

I’ll say it now. It isn’t perfect. Super Duper would have allowed me to have a bootable replica of the entire drive that I could have switched to and continued to work off of.  It would have been just as effective for a bare metal restore if that had been needed. I’m a huge fan of super duper.

What SD doesn’t do is snapshots. Changes in files overwrite old files. Deleted files are never erased and just accumulate. There is effectively no way to go back and recover the email, file, picture, or system state that existed at time x before you accidentally made the wrong change and hit “save”.

Ideally, I’d use both.

edit: cut down next-to-last paragraph to save space and clarify meaning.

The compatibility of the text editor with Safari has simply grown by leaps and bounds.