And now a LaunchBar 4 beta is available for download. The new features look fantastic, and are far too numerous to list here. The battle for domination of Command-Space is on!

10:17 AM | Paul Bissex

Todd Dominey of What Do I Know has found a potential competitor to LaunchBar: QuickSilver.

Now being a dues-paying member of the Cult of LaunchBar™ I know this sounds like heresy. It might very well be. But the price to check out Quicksilver is very small. Free in fact, for now at least. The source isn't up yet, but it will be.

But the crazy bit is that this is supposedly just the beginning.

Quicksilver is an evolving structure for manipulating any form of data.

Regardless, it looks like LaunchBar is getting some competition.

9:12 AM | Patrick Berry

I wanted to post a little bit about using Ogg Vorbis under OS X. Vorbis is a patent-free, open format with better quality-to-size ratios than MP3. I searched the archives (thanks to Steve's recent addition of the Google search box at left) and found that it's been almost two years since Chris's thorough post. It turns out that almost everything I wanted to mention is already in that post -- meaning, disappointingly, that there has not been a lot of movement with Vorbis and OS X in the past couple years. And we still don't have Vorbis encoding in iTunes, or Vorbis playback on the iPod.

So, what is new? There are some new players (e.g. Whamb). There are iPod alternatives that do play Vorbis files, most interesting among them being Neuros. Most of the software Chris mentions has seen updates. I also recently discovered tenc, which is rough but still makes ripping CDs less work than with Ogg Drop, and good enough to get me to temporarily abandon the oggenc wrapper I was working on. I've also exchanged some e-mail with the Ogg Drop developers, who are working on an exciting-sounding expansion of that app.

Discuss

8:02 AM | Paul Bissex

Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks is a great book. I posted a longer review of it on my blog, but the bottom line is that the book is useful to many OS X users, not just Unix geeks.

1:24 PM | Paul Hoffman

Following on a post by Eric Raymond about the challenges of Linux printing (using CUPS), Jon Udell offers an interesting post about "Aunt Millie" "Aunt Tillie" (your typical and oft-forgotten non-technical computer user) and how she might fare with printing in OS X. His conclusion: there's still a bit of work to be done.

4:49 PM | Paul Bissex

Warning: tangent. A few FA:OSX bloggers are also denizens of The Well, a 20-year-old virtual community based in San Francisco but with members around the world. I've been there for almost ten years myself. In fact, the Well's most excellent Mac conference is where I first heard news of this blog. It's also where I've exchanged information, tips, and frustrations about everything from emacs to Quark XPress to FileMaker Pro to OpenOffice.org. With an active population of Unix as well as Mac experts, we've got some great cross-pollination going on. Katie Hafner's 1997 Wired mag article (all 20,000 words of it) famously dubbed the Well "the world's most influential online community" (as of 1997 at any rate). For a lighter take, see the somewhat more recent set of first-person stories in Salon. But you don't have to read any of that stuff to see what the Well is about, and now I am getting around to the point of this post. During March, they're running a special offer -- join for $2, check it out for two months, and stay if you like. It's full of sharp people (double meaning intended -- smart and spiny both) and interesting discussions. In an era where every teen haX0r has his own free PHP bulletin board, you may wonder why it would be worth paying $10-$15 per month to type at other people. This is a great way to find out. Link to more info on the special deal Discuss

6:30 AM | Paul Bissex

Over on my blog I pointed out the reasons that, as a general rule, I tend not to bother checking out version 1.x software on MacUpdate. Quite honestly 1.x software tends to be lacking.

Happily there are exceptions to this rule and Curio is one of them. Thanks go to Adam for pointing me to it. Competitively it's in the same space as OmniGraffle with some notable differences. Where OmniGraffle is quite clearly designed for chart making Curio is designed for much more free-form, creative brainstorming. My perfect app would be the offspring of the two.

I've been corresponding with the developers a bit, mainly requesting features, and they've been great at accepting suggestions and offering pointers on how to use it. My only real complaint about Curio is the price. $99 is pretty steep, all things considered. I can't help but wonder if the developers are setting the price based on the amount of effort it took to create Curio rather than as a reflection of the total value it offers to the user.

That said, my experience with it and with the developers leaves me with little doubt that Curio will become an app worth $99 some day, I just hope it's sooner than later. If you're looking for a brainstorming/notetaking/designing app give Curio a look.

Discuss

4:08 PM | Chris Cummer

Mac-owning coders interested in the Palm platform should know about PRC-Tools for OS X. With this package you can do C/C++ Palm development in XCode. I haven't done much more than build a sample app, but it's pretty impressive. (Plus, the site design is pretty.) Discuss

12:55 PM | Paul Bissex

A friend is having a problem with MPEG-2 video and Final Cut Pro. FA: OSX readers have thus far managed to answer almost every esoteric question posted here thus far so I figure this one ought'a be easy:

I'm using a Mac G5 and Final Cut Pro. I have lots of video I edit directly from the DV camera and other video that has already been saved in MPEG-2 format. When I put the clips together I want to be able to use it in MPEG-2 so it works universally on any PC.

I have been having trouble editing MPEG-2 video on this system, however. When I import it into Final Cut, there is no audio track. I assume this is because on MPEG-2 the audio is interleaved but there should still be a way to convert it. I have the "Compressor" that comes with Final Cut which seems like it should be the way to do it but it can import anything but MPEG-2.

If you have any advice I'd appreciate it. I'm sure its a simple answer.

8:36 AM | Chris Cummer

More from the Palm Files: one glitch with using iSync/iCal/Address Book as a replacement for the Palm Desktop app is that there's no Memo Pad support. On my Palm page I mention MacNoteTaker, which I only recently discovered, as a possible solution. The key is the conduit (the OS X version of the conduit is beta, BTW, but it's working fine for me) -- each handheld note becomes a text file on the desktop, and vice-versa. Simple and smart. Apple should add this capabilty to iSync posthaste.

5:23 AM | Paul Bissex

A few months ago, a friend came to me with a broken cd-rom drive and a new copy of Panther. It occured to me that I could install Panther onto his machine by running the installer on my machine and targeting his hard drive mounted over FireWire. Thankfully, Apple hasn't crippled their OS with DRM otherwise this might not be possible. The first installer disk accepted the firewire drive but the second didn't, I had to copy it's contents onto the target drive and finish the installation locally.

Thank you, Apple.

I bring this up because I've noticed that a couple of other OS X blogs have mentioned it recently and thought it'd be nice if I corroborated their stories.

9:28 PM | steve jenson

"The Challenges of Integrating the Unix and Mac OS Environments" by Wilfredo Sanchez

6:53 PM | steve jenson

I recently picked up a Palm Tungsten T, having taken a hiatus from the platform after my old m105 fell ill. One thing that I missed was reading web pages offline via AvantGo, whose official OS X conduit has yet to appear. It turns out there are several workarounds. If you are wedded to AvantGo, there's MAL Conduit or The Missing Sync.

I decided to abandon AvantGo entirely and go with the open-source Plucker. Configuration is a little click-intensive, but it all works very well, and the reader is excellent (especially with some nice fonts). If you want to read RSS feeds, there's JPluck, though I just use my own little RSS-to-HTML converter tool with the regular Plucker desktop client. Discuss

8:32 AM | Paul Bissex

If you're like me and you do any PHP/Perl/MySQL development on your local machine then you probably spend a lot of time looking at your Apache error logs to determine what's gone wrong with your app. I used to use tail /var/log/httpd/error_log in a Terminal window to do this because it was nice and fast. Used to, that is, until I came across GeekTool:

GeekTool is a PrefPane (System Preferences module) for Panther or Jaguar to show system logs, unix commands output, or images (i.e. from the internet) on your desktop (or even in front of all windows).

Here's how:
1. Install GeekTool
2. Create a new entry
3. Add the path to your error log (in my case: /var/log/httpd/error_log, probably yours too)
4. Set the Location to x:10, y:22

Ta daa! Discuss

11:50 AM | Chris Cummer

If you have one those spiffy new ATI RADEON cards, you might want to check out these screen savers from ATI, because there is nothing quite like watching something as useless as a screen saver max out a machine. But at least now you can say, "Aha! All that is now off-loaded to the video card!" Runs on the following cards:

• RADEON 9800 Pro Mac Special Edition 256MB
• RADEON 9800 Pro Mac Edition 128MB
• RADEON 9800 Pro 128MB
• RADEON 9700 Pro 128MB
• RADEON 9600 Pro 64MB
• MOBILITY RADEON 9600 64MB

Seems they ported all their DirectX 9 demos over to OpenGL. (via Todd @ What Do I Know - Enjoying)

9:23 AM | Patrick Berry

iPhoto has come a long way since it debuted. So far in fact that it skipped an entire version number, 3. But I'm not here to rehash iPhoto itself, rather a couple of 3rd party enhancements that make iPhoto all that more useful.

The first is iPhotoToGallery. I'll admit that this is useful to me because I use Gallery on my web server to manage my online photos and it will only be useful to you if you do the same. That being said, it's nice that iPhoto has the ability to be extended like this. Before this plug-in I had to export the photos, then upload them, and finally do all the Gallery album configurations. Now I export directly from iPhoto to Gallery, doing all the configuration in the plug-in interface. Slick. The newest version has Keychain support and other security enhancing features.

The second unfortunately isn't out yet, but it hooks iPhoto up to Typepad using the Atom API. I don't have a Typepad account and I don't have the code, but again I feel this is a very cool way to extend iPhoto.

This by no means covers all the ways that iPhoto has been extended, just ways that caught my fancy. You can always search VersionTracker, or your favorite mac update site for iPhoto goodies.

By the way, does anybody know what the check mark keyword in iPhoto is for? It adds a little icon to the thumbnail preview and I can't find out what significance it has. Drop a note in the QuickTopic if you have any clues.

8:31 AM | Patrick Berry

For those of you using GPGMail to sign or encrypt your mail, you might want to check which version you are using. An update (GPGMail 1.0.1 (v33)) sneaked past me late last year and it has some important fixes, like no longer leaving orphan GPGMEProxyServer processes on a quit or a crash. I can't prove it, but I think this issue was causing me a lot of problems with Mail.app and since the update, all has been clear.

Then again, it could have been those darn flying elves...

8:23 AM | Patrick Berry

From the Some-News-Is-Bad-News Dept.: According to brighthand.com, Palm (or Pa1mOne if you prefer) is dropping support for the Mac. Palm Desktop has been atrophying for long enough that many people (including me) have switched over to iCal and Address Book, but that's not enough -- unless I'm missing something, there is now no plan for a general conduit architecture that runs on the Mac and works with PalmOS 6 ("Cobalt"). iSync is dandy but it depends on the current Palm HotSync software to function. The Missing Sync is promised to work with PalmOS 6, but having to spend an extra $40 on an intrinsic function like sync is somewhat galling. Here's hoping Apple picks up the slack, or Palm changes their minds. Discuss

12:13 PM | Paul Bissex

From the KDE 3.2 release:

• Working in concert with Apple Computer Inc.'s Safari web browser team, KDE's web support has seen huge performance boosts as well as increased compliance with widely accepted web standards

Now while companies giving back is nothing new (Apache, Linux kernel, et cetera) it's still a good thing to see. I remember there was a lot of suspicion towards the original post about Apple diving in to the code on the khtml list. I haven't been following the developer list, but it sounds like things are going well.

9:37 AM | Patrick Berry

I've reconstituted the OSXHack mailing list, for those of you still feeling the urge to beat your Mac (OS (X)) into submission.

3:22 AM | Faisal N. Jawdat

wincent.org - Making the most out of a busy connection with throttled [via VarChars]

10:46 PM | steve jenson

O'Reilly Network: XGrid or the future of computing [Jan. 28, 2004]. Next weekend, I'll give a status report after trying this out on a cluster *cough* of tibook/667, powermac/400, and ibook/700. [via rootprompt]

10:45 PM | steve jenson

Remember nntp? If you do you're probably using some variant of the NewsWatcher family (I always liked YA-NewsWatcher/Thoth until I stopped reading newsgroups a while ago). If you don't you're probably a post-web internet user and here's your chance to go old-skool: Panic has just released v1.0 of Unison, a drop-dead gorgeous newsreader with some very sweet looking threading and downloading features.

Discuss

11:41 AM | Chris Cummer

Much like in a relationship, a company rarely gets kudos for doing what it is supposed to do. Apple rolled out the 2004-01-26 Security Update for 10.3.2 client/server, 10.2.8 client/server and 10.1.5 client/server at the same time. Software Update 'em if ya got 'em.

Dear Apple,

Kudos.

Love, Pat

1:57 PM | Patrick Berry

Fun with Mail.app: Mail.appetizer, a cool little Mail pref that pops up a semi-transparent window informing you of any new mail that's arrived in your Inbox.

Three things I'd like to see added to this:
1. Let me resize the window. By default it's too large for my liking.
2. Let me define which properties of the email are displayed. I only need to see the From: and Subject: lines to know if it's worth reading or not.
3. Let me change the colour of th window. That white on black is a bit harsh. Very cyberpunk, but it doesn't fit with the rest of my OS.

Other than those minor quibbles, I like it alot.

Update: I'd like my preferences to be remembered as well.

Discuss

6:17 PM | Chris Cummer

Noah Kravitz at PowerBookCentral.com has posted what looks to be one in a series of pieces on Windows XP vs. MacOS in schools, from his perspective as Mac user and XP admin. Non-polemical cross-platform comparisons are surprisingly rare, so I'm looking forward to hearing more from Noah. The two bullet points from the first installment: "OS X Crashes, but Win XP Crashes More" and "Quirky Mac Innovations are Cool at Home, But Inexcuseable at Work." Link

6:24 AM | Paul Bissex

For those of you wondering about the speed of VirtualPC 6.1, I did a test. I got a copy of VirtualPC 6.1, I put FreeBSD (command-line only) on it, and used "openssl speed" to measure the CPU speed doing a reasonable mix of complex things that don't involve the disk. Virtual PC is almost exactly 20% as fast as the native CPU on my iBook G3 600 MHz. So, VirtualPC is probably reasonable for people who have to have one or two non-CPU-intensive Windows apps running sometimes, but not much more than that. They say there will be speed improvements in VirtualPC 7, but I'll believe that when I see it.

10:43 AM | Paul Hoffman

Recently I wanted to set an environment variable so that a standard, double-clickable-from-the-Finder Cocoa app could see it. Apple Technical Q&A #1067 has the lowdown on how one does this, but basically you need to create a ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist file (you can use /Developer/Applications/PropertyListEditor.app to create and edit this file).

7:35 PM | John Wiseman

I quote:

Most Mac OS X users prefer to use GUI tools to make Installations of software. By providing GNU software ported or built for the Apple Installer we are providing a needed service for the OS X community. Our Goal is to produce Tools for the OS X Package Installer/Maker and to port all Free/Open source software to the OS X Installer system as is possible. - THE GNU MAC OS X Public Archive

11:21 PM | Chris Cummer

Lead and they will follow: WinExpose.

8:20 PM | Chris Cummer