Classes

• Support for Traits (i.e., mix-ins; addresses the multiple-inheritance problem).
• Support for chaining from the constructor: (new Class)->method()
• Support for Class::{expr}() syntax.
• Closures inherit $this from the outer scope.
• Added ReflectionClass::newInstanceWithoutConstructor() to create a new instance of a class without invoking its constructor.
• Added a new typehint: callable

Improvements

• Array dereferencing and short array syntax: echo [1, 2, 3][0]
• json_encode() now supports these additional flags: JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE, JSON_BIGINT_AS_STRING, JSON_NUMERIC_CHECK, JSON_PRETTY_PRINT and JSON_UNESCAPED_SLASHES.
• Multibyte support is enabled by default.
• Faster unserialize() and ternary operator performance.
• IPv6 support.

Fixing the cruft

• ext/mysql, mysqli and pdo_mysql now use mysqlnd by default.
• Removed magic quotes, safe mode, register globals, allow call-time pass-by-reference, and more!
• Default character set is now UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1.

Preface

I feel that I should start by saying that I’m an Apple guy; or more specifically that I’ve always been an Apple guy. I was converted to the Mac platform back in the early 90′s when my Junior High school’s library got a new shipment of Apple Macintosh LC IIs. I’ve never really looked back.

That said, this certainly isn’t a blind love for Apple. Over the years, Apple has earned my trust by providing high-quality products, software and support that puts the consumer first. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ve liked every single decicion they’ve made, but all-in-all I have Apple’s back because I believe that Apple has mine.

Let’s look at the competition:

• RIM: RIM is dead. Sell your stock.
• Microsoft: Irrelevant in this day and age.
• Google:
  1. They’d screw me in a second if they could sell more data about me to advertisers.
  2. Google values engineering above all else. Unfortunately for Google, Design > Engineering.
  3. Andy Rubin has as much dumb stuff come out of his mouth as Steve Ballmer.
  4. Google recently kicked off a whine-fest because they lost a patent auction.
• Palm: CEO was a high-ranking lieutenant at Apple in charge of the iPod. Lots of former Apple engineers. Sweet new OS for mobile devices. Hmmm…

Piqued Interest

I have no interest in Android. I’m a bit of a quality snob, and an ease-of-use snob, and most of Google’s products are just not there. Android in particular (and Microsoft’s Windows CE, palm-sized PC, PocketPC, Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC Phone Edition, Windows Mobile, Windows Embedded Handheld, Windows Phone 7 Series, Windows Phone 7 devices) all suffer from what’s called The Paradox of Choice (TED video) (Wikipedia summary). The short version is that while people like Steve Ballmer and Andy Rubin are all touting how wonderful it is to have a plethora of devices available, it’s actually harmful to the customer experience.

So when Palm/HP announced the TouchPad, I was intrigued. I’d always thought that Palm’s webOS was a clear stand-out among mobile OSs, but the faulty Pre hardware and a poor at-launch partner (Sprint), and terrible marketing all worked in concert to kill Palm’s chances of making a dent in the marketplace. Palm also was in the poor position of needing a serious influx of cash if they were to continue operating. That kind of split focus is never good for a company.

Seeing some gorgeous screenshots of the OS and devices on Sebastiaan de With’s blog pretty much sealed the deal for me: I was a webOS fan. Unfortunately for Palm/HP, there was no way I was going to spend money on a TouchPad when I could get an iPad.

Comparing the TouchPad and the iPad 2

I ordered my iPad 2 at the end of July, so I’ve only had my iPad 2 for about 3 weeks. I also have an iPhone 4, so picking up and using an iPad was effortless. Because of this, the iPad has set an awfully high bar in my mind.

After spending a little less than 24 hours with my new 32GB HP TouchPad, here are my thoughts:

Pros

• Palm/HP definitely got the packaging right. It’s the most Apple-like experience for any non-Apple product I’ve ever seen.
• webOS is gorgeous, with an emphasis on black/charcoal colors, the Prelude system font, and high-quality iconography derived from the circle shape (Palm owns the circle). If you believe (as I do) that a software environment should look as good as it works, webOS is fantastic.
• The TouchPad hardware is nice to the eyes and the touch. It has a sturdy (although somewhat plastic-y) feel to it.
• Neither Netflix nor Hulu are filtering the TouchPad’s user-agent string. Hulu seems to maintain a black list for devices (Hulu has to pro-actively block devices), while Netflix seems to maintain a white list for devices (Netflix has to pro-actively allow devices). While I can watch Hulu content on my TouchPad (which comes with Flash), I can’t watch Netflix content (which requires Silverlight).
• The bezel/cards UI is awesome.
• Built-in support for several third-party accounts, including Skype and Dropbox. While iOS (and Mac OS X Lion) also has this, webOS’s integration seems to go a lot deeper — specifically in being able to do a decent job of merging contacts together across the various services.
• The Facebook app (developed by Palm) beats the pants off of the phone-only iOS Facebook app. The closest competitor available for the iPad is an app called MyPad+.
• The Last.fm app is also designed for the TouchPad, easily beating the phone-only iOS Last.fm app.
• The photo app has built-in support for Facebook photos and videos built right in.
• The on-screen keyboard has digits as part of its first screen. You don’t need to tap shift to get to them.

Cons

• It’s a lot heavier than my iPad 2.
• The screen and iPhone 3G-ish style back attract fingerprints like its their job.
• The UI doesn’t track finger movements as quickly as iOS, so the touch/scroll responsiveness feels laggy compared to the iPhone 4 and iPad 2.
• Actually, the whole OS is a bit laggy. It’s as if it takes a moment to “spin-up” after I launch an application or switch from one screen to another.
• The TouchPad uses a non-standard Mini-USB cable, so my cache of leftover cables from my BlackBerry Pearl days are still as useless to me as they’ve been since I upgraded to the iPhone.
• It doesn’t seem to charge when connected to my computer, so I need to disconnect it, climb down underneath my desk, and plug it in to get it to charge.
• Ever heard of BeatsAudio? It’s the technology that powers the Beats by Dre headphone that are so freaking awesome. Yeah, not feeling it here. The iPad 2 speakers are better.
• The app selection is downright awful. All of the apps that I take for granted on iOS (e.g., Netflix, Hulu, Twitter, Instapaper, Flipboard) are nowhere to be found on the HP App Catalog.
• While the photo app supports Facebook, it doesn’t support Flickr which is where I have a 6-year investment in photos.
• Although the webOS browser is based on WebKit (the same engine that powers Safari and Chrome on the desktop and the web browsers built into iOS, Android and Blackberry OS 6), it is much slower than those other devices. As a matter of fact, I’ve been trying to run through the Browserscope test suite for the past couple of hours and it’s still nowhere near complete.
• The UI doesn’t change between portrait and landscape modes. iOS understands that the portrait orientation is narrower than the landscape orientation, so it adjusts the UI accordingly (see Mail). In webOS, it simply takes the UI and squishes everything together in portrait orientation.
• Syncing sucks. Even with the HP Play software that you can download, it’s still a pretty awful syncing experience.

Conclusion

All-in-all, the TouchPad is a mixed bag.

I think that the core of the experience (i.e., webOS itself) is a good OS with lots of potential. Remember iPhone OS 1.0? Or even 2.0? webOS 3.0 is clearly a better user experience and I believe that with more resources, webOS could definitely be a contender in the mobile space.

Unfortunately, the rest of the experience is pretty poor. The hardware — while feeling and looking good — is too slow to be of any real use to anybody. The TouchPad doesn’t charge over USB from my computer (early 2011 MacBook Pro), and doesn’t support standard-sized Mini-USB cables. The selection of apps is so paltry that it only took me about 15 minutes to look through every single app in the entire store catalog.

Would I have paid $499 or $599 for one of these? Not a chance. How about at $100 off like they were last week? No way, José. But $150 for a 32 GB model still feels like a good deal. Maybe a touch high ($129 would feel like a more appropriate price), but I don’t really have any regrets about yesterday’s purchase.

A couple of years ago, the kids would play with mine and Sarah’s Nintendo DSs when we were all in the car. Unfortunately, we only had one copy of New Super Mario Bros. and they would constantly fight over who would get to play it. In the end, we decided to spend $40 on a second copy of the game. The result was the wonderful peace and quiet that came from two happy children playing video games in the back seat. Totally worth it.

Likewise, I bought the TouchPad primarily for the kids to play with so that they stop stealing my iPad from me. When we’re at home, one of them is typically playing video games in the living room while the other is playing with the iPad. I think it was money well-spent to have two movie/music/game-playing tablets available for trips and long car rides. My daughter, Julianna, is also getting to the age where a computer is starting to feel more appropriate, so I think that the TouchPad will be a great device for her.

If you’re looking for a tablet for yourself, though, I would definitely say to skip the TouchPad and every single Android Honeycomb device out there. Spend the $499 on an iPad instead. You’ll get a better value per dollar spent with an iPad than with anything else right now.

Epilogue: Side-by-side Photos

In this first photo, you can see their shapes. The TouchPad has a much larger border radius than the iPad. In both cases, the displays are nice and bright.

Here they are at a slightly different angle with the displays turned off.

Here is a comparison of their thicknesses. As you can see, the TouchPad is roughly twice as thick as the iPad 2.

(Photo credits: First photo by HP/Palm. Second and third photos by Sebastiaan de With. Fourth, fifth and sixth photos by Ryan Parman.)

Update: Micro-USB (2011-08-25)

Thanks to a comment below, I’ve learned that there is apparently a new USB port size du jour called Micro USB. The TouchPad uses the Micro-B flavor, which is why my Mini USB cables didn’t work. However, I would argue with the commenter’s assertion that Micro USB is “the primary standard for every single other device on the market.” I have plenty of other devices at my fingertips that don’t use Micro USB.

Update: Hulu (2011-08-25)

Over the past couple of days, Hulu has now added the TouchPad to their blacklist. Sorry, but no more Hulu for TouchPad users.

Update: Preware (2011-08-25)

Last night, while I was digging through webOS-related resources, I discovered Preware. Preware allows you to install homebrew apps, much like Cydia and Rock Your Phone for jailbroken iOS devices. The difference here is that because of the relaxed sandboxing that webOS uses, you don’t need to jailbreak anything to use it (Palm/HP is actually quite OK with this community).

As part of digging around, I found a write-up by Jeffrey Van Kamp of Digital Trends entitled “Got a slow HP TouchPad? Here are 3 easy ways to speed it up.” The first thing you learn is that webOS does a ton of logging in the background. While potentially useful for debugging, it also uses up a tremendous amount of system resources. The article discusses how to turn it off by enabling developer mode, installing Preware, and then installing a homebrew package that disables the logging. Also, if you’re interested in squeezing even more juice out of your TouchPad, the article also discusses how to overclock your TouchPad from 1.2 GHz to 1.5 GHz.

Another article by John Biehler entitled “How to install Preware onto your HP TouchPad on a Mac” suggests a few other packages you can install to improve the general responsiveness of webOS on the TouchPad. There are a few others you can install to just make life a little simpler as well. I chose to install the following patches:

• Advanced Reset Options
• Faster Card Animations HYPER Version
• Increase Touch Sensitivity and Smoothness 10
• Just Charge By Default
• Muffle System Logging
• Private Browsing
• Remove Tap Ripple
• Unthrottle Download Manager

That last one is interesting. I had wondered why downloads seemed so slow on the TouchPad compared to my iOS devices. As it turns out, webOS throttles download speeds down to 64 kbps. Applying the patch to unthrottle the download manager sped up my TouchPad downloads dramatically.

One tool that has been an important part of my workflow is a tool called delimport, which automatically indexes my Delicious bookmarks and makes them available via Spotlight and Spotlight-powered tools (e.g. Alfred) on Mac OS X.

While delimport hasn’t been updated since 2007, it has continued to work remarkably well. The upside is that the project has an open-source repository available, but I still ran into a few issues. Here’s how I added Pinboard support to delimport.

Getting Started

The first thing to note is that I’m running Mac OS X 10.6.5 and Xcode 3.2.5. This is notable because it’s what caused several of my problems while trying to solve this puzzle. We’ll get to that in a minute.

1. I needed to pull down the delimport source code. This required additional steps.
   1. Install MacPorts if you haven’t already.
   2. Update MacPorts and its files to the latest version.

      sudo port -d selfupdate

   3. Install Darcs.

      sudo port install darcs

   4. Pull down the source code.

      darcs get http://ianhenderson.org/repos/delimport

2. I’ll save you the time and tell you that delimport will not compile in Xcode 3.2. You’ll need to revert to an older version of Xcode, 3.1.4.
   1. Go to connect.apple.com and login.
   2. In the sidebar, choose Developer Tools.
   3. Scroll down and find the section labelled Xcode 3.1.4 Developer Tools.
   4. Choose the Xcode 3.1.4 Developer DVD (Disk Image) which clocks in at 993 MB.
   5. While waiting for that, you’ll need to uninstall your current version of Xcode.

      sudo /Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools –mode=all

3. Once the Xcode 3.1.4 disk image is downloaded, install it.
   1. Make sure you include the Mac OS X 10.4 SDK as well.
   2. After the install has completed, restart your computer. No seriously.

Editing and Compiling

Note: A couple of people have asked why I don’t just redistribute a modified version of the app. The reason is licensing. As far as I can tell, the source code is 100% copyrighted with no license for redistributing modifications to the source or the app. As such, I’m providing instructions for modifying the app but you’ll need to compile it yourself.

1. Once your system is back up, locate the delimport.xcodeproj file and open it in Xcode 3.1.4.

2. Change the Base SDK pulldown to Deployment.

   

3. In the sidebar, choose the delimport project, right-click (or control-click), and choose Get Info.

   

4. From the resulting dialog box, change the value of the Architectures setting to 32/64-bit Universal.

   

5. Click the checkbox for Build Active Architecture Only.

6. For the Valid Architectures setting, there are more architectures than we need. Remove all architectures except for i386 and x86_64.

   

7. While delimport is still selected in the sidebar, choose Project > Edit Active Target “delimport” from the menubar. Choose the Properties tab from the resulting dialog box. Change the version number to 0.3.1u which says that you’re using an unofficial modification (just in case the developer releases an official 0.3.1 version).

   

8. Open the Classes folder in the sidebar and find the DIBookmarksController.m file. Make the following changes to the file.

   --- DIBookmarksController-old.m	2011-01-01 15:04:30.000000000 -0800
   +++ DIBookmarksController.m	2011-01-01 15:19:23.000000000 -0800
   @@ -86,21 +86,21 @@
    							  @"loginwindow", kCFPreferencesCurrentUser, kCFPreferencesAnyHost); 
    		CFPreferencesSynchronize((CFStringRef) @"loginwindow", kCFPreferencesCurrentUser, kCFPreferencesAnyHost); 
    	}
    	[loginItems release]; 
    }
    
    - (KeychainItem *)getKeychainUserAndPass
    {
    	KeychainSearch * search = [[KeychainSearch alloc] init];
    	
   -	[search setServer:@"del.icio.us"];
   +	[search setServer:@"pinboard.in"];
    
    	NSArray *results = [search internetSearchResults];
    	[search release];
    	if ([results count] <= 0) {
    		return nil;
    	}
    	KeychainItem *item = [results objectAtIndex:0];
    	[username release];
    	username = [[item account] retain];
    	[password release];
   @@ -137,25 +137,25 @@
    - (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(NSNotification *)notification
    {
    	[self addToLoginItems];
    	[self getKeychainUserAndPass];
    	[self updateList:nil];
    }
    
    
    - (NSXMLDocument *)deliciousAPIResponseToRequest:(NSString *)request
    {
   -	NSString *apiPath = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"https://%@:%@@api.del.icio.us/v1/", username, password, nil];
   +	NSString *apiPath = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"https://%@:%@@api.pinboard.in/v1/", username, password, nil];
    	NSError *error;
    	NSURL *requestURL = [NSURL URLWithString:[apiPath stringByAppendingString:request]];
    	NSMutableURLRequest *URLRequest = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:requestURL];
   -	[URLRequest setValue: @"delimport/0.3" forHTTPHeaderField: @"User-Agent"];
   +	[URLRequest setValue: @"delimport/0.3.1-unofficial" forHTTPHeaderField: @"User-Agent"];
    	// NSLog(@"%f", [URLRequest timeoutInterval]);
    	
    	NSHTTPURLResponse *response;
    	NSData * xmlData = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:URLRequest returningResponse:&response error:&error];
    	NSLog(@"API request: '%@', response: %i, d/l size: %i", request, [response statusCode], [xmlData length], nil);
    	if ([response statusCode] == 401) {
    		[self logIn];
    		return nil;
    	}
    	if ([response statusCode] == 503) {
   @@ -190,21 +190,21 @@
    {
    	[username release];
    	[password release];
    	[loginController getUsername:&username password:&password];
    	
    	[username retain];
    	[password retain];
    
    	Keychain *keychain = [Keychain defaultKeychain];
    
   -	[keychain addInternetPassword:password onServer:@"del.icio.us" forAccount:username port:80 path:@"" inSecurityDomain:@"" protocol:kSecProtocolTypeHTTP auth:kSecAuthenticationTypeHTTPDigest replaceExisting:YES];
   +	[keychain addInternetPassword:password onServer:@"pinboard.in" forAccount:username port:443 path:@"" inSecurityDomain:@"" protocol:kSecProtocolTypeHTTP auth:kSecAuthenticationTypeHTTPDigest replaceExisting:YES];
    
    }
    
    - (NSDate *)dateFromXMLDateString:(NSString *)string
    {
    	NSMutableString *dateString = [[string mutableCopy] autorelease];
    	[dateString replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"T" withString:@" " options:NSLiteralSearch range:NSMakeRange(0, [dateString length])];
    	[dateString replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"Z" withString:@" " options:NSLiteralSearch range:NSMakeRange(0, [dateString length])];
    	[dateString appendString:@"+0000"];
    	return [NSDate dateWithString:dateString];
   
   

   view raw DIBookmarksController.diff This Gist brought to you by GitHub.
9. In the menubar, choose Build > Build. If all is well, the source should compile with no errors.

Cleaning Up

First, let’s clean up after the old version of delimport.

1. Shutdown any running copies of delimport by launching Activity Monitor, searching for delimport, clicking the Quit Process button in the toolbar, and choosing either Quit or Force Quit from the resulting dialog.

   

2. Open up your Accounts preference pane, click on the Login Items tab, and delete any entries that contain delimport.

   

3. Open your Terminal and run the following commands.

   rm -Rf ~/Library/Caches/org.ianhenderson.delimport &&
   rm -Rf ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/delimport/ &&
   rm -f ~/Library/Preferences/org.ianhenderson.delimport.plist
   

Installation

Once we’ve removed the old cruft, let’s install our new app.

1. From your delimport source code directory, open build/Deployment to find delimport.app.

   

2. Drag the app into your /Applications or /Applications/Utilities directory.

3. Launch the app.
4. Since we deleted all of the previous settings, your computer will think that this is the first time that we’ve launched the app. It will ask you if you want to launch it on login. Choose Add.
   
5. If you already have your credentials for Pinboard stored in your Keychain, it will ask if you want to give delimport access to your Pinboard credentials. Choose Always Allow.
6. If you don’t have your credentials saved, delimport will ask for your Pinboard credentials. Go ahead and enter them.
7. Within a few moments, you’ll be able to use Spotlight to access your Pinboard bookmarks.

Post-mortem

Once everything is installed and working, you’ll probably want to remove Xcode 3.1.4 and reinstall the latest version. Simply follow the aforementioned uninstallation instructions to remove the old Xcode, then install the latest Xcode.

If you don’t have the installer on-hand, you can always download the latest version from the logged-in version of developer.apple.com/mac.

Snow Stacks

(Can’t see the video? Watch it directly.)

Image Fly

(Can’t see the video? Watch it directly.)

Prerequisites

• Install MacPorts

Also, make sure that your MacPorts install is completely up-to-date with:

sudo port -d selfupdate

Installation

Now, I’ve never used MacPorts to install PHP or Apache before, so I’m starting with a clean slate. If you’ve already installed PHP or Apache with MacPorts, your steps may be different. As always, your mileage may vary. For me, I develop several open-source projects, so I need things that others may not. Adjust these steps as necessary.

1. Using “Web Sharing” in your Sharing Preferences should be turned off. Currently this points to the (old) Apple Apache installation, although we’ll change that later.
2. From Terminal, install PHP 5.3 + Apache, and some other stuff. This will likely take quite a while. I’m installing SQLite, MySQL, and PostgreSQL because of my work on CacheCore, so you may or may not need those. mysqlnd is the new PHP Native Driver for MySQL and is supposed to be better, so we’ll use that. We also need to enable non-default settings for cURL.

   sudo port install curl +ssl+ipv6+ares+idn+gss+openldap+sftp_scp \
   php5 +apache2+fastcgi+pear

   You can see all available options by running port variants php5

3. The new Apache configuration file is stored at /opt/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf while the old one was at /etc/apache2/conf/httpd.conf. Take a moment to copy over any settings you’ll want to maintain into the new Apache installation.
4. You’ll also want to include your extra settings. Toward the bottom of your httpd.conf file, add the following line:

   # All settings
   Include conf/extra/*.conf

5. If you don’t have an SSL certificate, rename your SSL configuration:

   cd /opt/local/apache2;
   sudo mv conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf-disabled

6. You’ll also want to enable PHP in Apache:

   sudo mv conf/extras-conf/mod_php.conf conf/extra/mod_php.conf

7. The new PHP configuration file is stored at /opt/local/etc/php5/php.ini while the old one was at /etc/php.ini. Take a moment to copy over any settings you’ll want to maintain into the new PHP installation.
8. You’ll need to tell Apache to enable PHP support. Open your new httpd.conf file, find where the extensions are loaded (with LoadModule), and add this to the end of the line:

   LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5.so

9. Restart Apache. If you were using apachectl before, it still points to the old Apache, so we’ll want to point specifically to the new one.

   sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl restart

At this point, PHP 5.3 with Apache 2.2 and the new mysqlnd extension are all installed.

Extra stuff

1. I generally prefer to have lots more stuff installed locally so that I can worry more about developing and less about installing. Because of this, I also install a few other things.

   sudo port install memcached \
       php5-apc \
       php5-curl \
       php5-gd \
       php5-http \
       php5-iconv \
       php5-imagick \
       php5-mbstring \
       php5-memcache \
       php5-mysql \
       php5-openssl \
       php5-postgresql \
       php5-sockets \
       php5-sqlite \
       php5-tidy \
       php5-xdebug

2. Restart Apache with:

   sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl restart

Replacing older versions

Now, we want to continue using our command-line PHP scripts and the “Web Sharing” checkbox in the Sharing Preference Pane, so let’s make sure that those are all pointing to the new locations instead. We’ll be backing up and redirecting php, apachectl, and httpd.

1. Open up your Sharing Preference Pane, and disable Web Sharing
2. Run the following command on the Terminal:

   sudo mv /usr/bin/php /usr/bin/php.bak && sudo ln -s /opt/local/bin/php /usr/bin/php; \
   sudo mv /usr/sbin/apachectl /usr/sbin/apachectl.bak && sudo ln -s /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl /usr/sbin/apachectl; \
   sudo mv /usr/sbin/httpd /usr/sbin/httpd.bak && sudo ln -s /opt/local/apache2/bin/httpd /usr/sbin/httpd; \

3. Re-enable Web Sharing in the preference pane.

Shortcuts

Lastly, I like to set up some shortcuts so that I can access all of my important localhost stuff from one place. I’ll create a new directory called www-config and then I’ll place symlinks into it for quick access to Apache and PHP configuration files.

sudo mkdir /www-config && \
cd /www-config && \
sudo ln -s /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl /www-config/apachectl && \
sudo ln -s /opt/local/apache2/conf/ /www-config/httpd-conf && \
sudo ln -s /opt/local/apache2/logs/ /www-config/logs && \
sudo ln -s /opt/local/var/db/php5/ /www-config/php-ini && \
sudo ln -s /opt/local/etc/php5/php.ini /www-config/php.ini

Update: Microsoft’s images are broken, and don’t work on anything except VirtualPC now. Mac and Linux users are out of luck for the time being. More information on the subject can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/petel/archive/2009/09/09/running-the-ie-vpc-s-on-other-vpc-hosts.aspx.

If you’ve not yet read the related post, “Run Internet Explorer 6 (or IE7, or IE8) images in VMWare Fusion on Mac OS X,” you should. This is a follow up on how to take those virtual machines (which we’ve already done a lot of work on), and convert them for use VirtualBox.

Prerequisites

• You need to have access to a Mac OS X machine.
• A broadband connection would be quite helpful.
• A USB flash drive (or some other way to copy files to the VM before you have network access enabled).

VMWare Fusion uses the .vmdk disk format for its virtual drives. VirtualBox uses the .vdi format. Although VirtualBox can use the existing .vmdk images, you get better performance if you convert them to .vdi.

Downloading and Preparing stuff

1. Download and install VirtualBox. It should live in the /Applications directory.
2. Download and install Q (a Mac version of Qemu). It should live in the /Applications directory.
3. Download and decompress an IE6, IE7, or IE8 VMWare Fusion image that I’ve posted previously. If you need ALL of them, you can save yourself the bandwidth by downloading the IE6 image, making a copy of the file, and upgrading that copy to IE7 or IE8.

Extracting the disk image

1. When you decompress the VMWare Fusion image, you should end up with a folder containing 3 files: Two text files, and a .vmware file.
2. Right-click (or command-click) the .vmware file and choose “Show package contents.” This will open up a new window.
3. Find the .vmdk file and drag it some place that’s easy to find. In this tutorial, we’ll use the desktop.

Converting the VMWare image to a VirtualBox image (Optional)

This step is optional. VirtualBox can read the VMWare Fusion disk image format if you’re short on time. However, you get better performance if you convert to the native VirtualBox format.

1. Fire up Terminal.app. It lives inside your /Applications/Utilities directory.
2. Move to your desktop directory:

   cd ~/Desktop

3. We’ll convert the .vmdk file into a raw hard drive file, then convert that raw file into the native .vdi format:

   /Applications/Q.app/Contents/MacOS/qemu-img convert -O raw IE6-XP.vmdk IE6-XP.raw && /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxManage convertdd IE6-XP.raw IE6-XP.vdi && rm IE6-XP.raw

4. Wait. Depending on your computer, this will probably take 20-45 minutes.
5. Once it’s done, you can delete the IE6-XP.vmdk file.

Configuring the VM

1. Move the new .vdi file to wherever you’ll want your virtual machines to live.
2. Launch VirtualBox. You’ll be presented with the “Welcome to VirtualBox” dialog.
3. Click “New.” A “Create new virtual machine” dialog box will pop up. Click “Next.”
4. Name your virtual machine. I named mine “IE6-XP.”
5. Operating system is “Microsoft Windows.” Version is “Windows XP.” Click “Next.”
6. Determine the amount of RAM you want to allow the virtual machine to use. I have 4 GB of RAM, so I allow 512 MB. Adjust as necessary, but I wouldn’t go below 192 MB. Click “Next.”
7. Here, you select the disk image to use. Choose “Use existing hard disk.” There is a pull-down menu that says “<no media>”. Click the icon to the right of it.
8. The “Virtual Media Manager” dialog should pop up. Click “Add.”
9. Find where you saved the .vdi file to, and select it. Once that’s done, click the “Select” button. This will close the Virtual Media Manager” dialog.
10. Back on the “Create new virtual machine” dialog, the pull-down menu that used to say “<no media>” should now say something along the lines of “IE6-XP.vdi (Normal, 16.00 GB).” Click “Next,” then “Finish.”
11. From there, click “Settings” along the top of the application.
12. Click the “Audio” tab, and deselect “Enable audio.” We don’t have the drivers for this, so we’ll save ourselves the nag-ware.
13. Click the “Network” tab, and choose “Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop” from the Adapter Type pull-down.
14. Leave everything else as default, and click OK.
15. Click “Start” along the top of the application to start the virtual machine.

Installing the drivers and Guest Additions

1. When the virtual machine starts, the viewport will be very small. Windows also may be asking you to find drivers. Make it go away for now.
2. In the “Devices” menu, choose “Install Guest Additions.” This will load a virtual CD-ROM.
3. The setup should begin automatically. If it doesn’t, go to the Start Menu, choose “My Computer,” then double-click on “VirtualBox Guest Additions.”
4. Go through the process and install the software, then restart your VM.
5. While that restarts, switch back to Mac OS X and download the driver for the Intel PRO/1000 MT ethernet card. Download the version for Windows XP (32-bit). Copy it to your USB flash drive.
6. When the virtual machine comes back up, you’ll need to connect your USB flash drive to your virtual machine. To do this, you’ll need to drag the flash drive icon to the trash from Mac OS X (but leave it physically connected). In VirtualBox, go to the menubar and choose Devices > USB Devices > USB Flash Drive.
7. Navigate to the installer on your flash drive, and install the Intel drivers.
8. Lastly, go to Start Menu > Run, then in the dialog type the following so that you can keep the additional drivers on your VM:

   D:\VBoxWindowsAdditions-x86.exe /extract /D=C:\Drivers

Done!

You should be all set! If you want to get all super-hacky, you can check out “Create IE VBox” for geekier details.

Because of that, we need to go the long way. We’ll download the “officially sanctioned” VirtualPC images containing a time-limited version of Windows XP SP3 and Internet Explorer 6.0, and then we’ll convert these images to the kind that work with VMware Fusion (which works on Mac OS X). This should only need to be done every 3 or 4 months when the images expire.

These instructions are loosely based on the ones found at Running IE6, IE7 and IE8 on your Mac.

Update: Microsoft’s images are broken, and don’t work on anything except VirtualPC now. Mac and Linux users are out of luck for the time being. More information on the subject can be found at http://petelepage.com/blog/2009/09/running-the-ie-vpcs-on-other-vpc-hosts/.

Prerequisites

• You need to have VMware Fusion installed on your Mac.
• You need to have access to a Windows XP machine, as this is where the converting will happen.

Installing Qemu (FIRST-TIME ONLY)

1. Download a small application to our Windows machine called Qemu. At the time of this writing, you want to download the regular version 0.9.1. Once it’s done, unzip it someplace that’s easy to get to via the command line (e.g. c:\qemu).
2. Go into the Qemu folder, then into the bin folder and copy all of the files in the bin folder back to the original Qemu folder (you can simply copy-paste).

Downloading and Preparing stuff

1. On Microsoft’s website, they have a page entitled Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image where you can download various time-limited images that allow you to test combinations of Windows XP SP3 or Vista, along with Internet Explorer 6.0, 7.0, and the 8.0 betas. In this example, we’re going to install the IE6/XP image but you can do whatever you need to do.
2. We’ll need to unpack this download in Windows, so if you haven’t already, make sure you’re doing this part in Windows.
3. Double-click it (in Windows) to begin unpacking it. It will warn you that it has an expiration date. On that date, we’ll have to download a fresh VPC image from Microsoft and do this all over again.

Converting the image

1. You’ll want to copy the XP SP3 with IE6.vhd file into the Qemu folder. This will allow us to use simpler, more consistent commands to convert the image.
2. In your Windows VM go to Start Menu > Run, type the cmd command, and click OK.
3. Using your deftly intimate knowledge of MS-DOS, use commands like cd to navigate to where you unpacked Qemu.
4. If you don’t know MS-DOS commands from a hole in the wall, you can download Open Command Window Here from Microsoft, install it, find the Qemu folder in the normal Windows Explorer, right-click, and choose “Open Command Window Here”. One method is shorter and harder, while the other is easier and slower. Take your pick.
5. Type the following command in your MS-DOS window:

   qemu-img.exe convert -f vpc "XP SP3 with IE6.vhd" -O vmdk IE6-XP.vmdk

   Note that “XP SP3 with IE6.vhd” is the path to the IE6 VPC file you downloaded, while “IE6-XP.vmdk” is the new file that VMWare Fusion will use.

6. Wait. This will probably take 5-10 minutes.

Configuring the VM

1. Move the new .vmdk file to your Mac.
2. Open VMWare Fusion (or shutdown the Windows VM you may already have running) and click File > New.
3. Go through the wizard and when you get to the “Virtual Hard Disk” page, expand “Advanced disk options”, check “Use an existing virtual disk” and use the dropdown to find the new .vmdk image you just copied back to your Mac.
4. Finish the wizard and start it! If prompted to upgrade the virtual hard drive, click “Yes.”

Installing the drivers and VMWare Tools

1. With VMWare Fusion running, download and decompress vmware_xpsp3_drivers.tar.gz. Copy all of the resulting files to c:\windows\system32\drivers. Make sure you install these BEFORE the VMware tools!
2. Download vmware_mouse.reg and double-click it to load its settings into the Windows registry. VMware doesn’t correctly overwrite these setting upon install of the VMware tools, and the mouse can start doing wonky things. These registry settings fix it.
3. In VMware, click Virtual Machine > Install VMWare Tools.
4. Follow the instructions. If Windows asks for additional drivers, point it to c:\windows\system32\drivers.
5. Make sure that you shutdown the VM and configure your memory (etc.) settings appropriately.

These instructions apply to a 32-bit Fedora 8 installation. The hardware I primarily use happens to be on EC2, but these instructions aren’t specific to EC2. You may need to tweak things a smidge for an x64 system.

Preparing the LAMP stack (and a few other things)

For FFMPEG-PHP to work, you need to have a web server with PHP support up and running. You’ll definitely need GD for image processing and mbstring is helpful in conjunction with PHP5′s built-in iconv support for managing multiple character sets in ID3 tags.

1. Install PHP, necessary extensions and supporting software.

   yum -y install php-devel php-gd php-mbstring gcc gcc-c++ libtool svn git yasm gsm-devel libogg-devel libvorbis-devel libtheora-devel;

2. Also, I like to create a directory with symlinks to important files so that I can access everything more efficiently. These will be used throughout this tutorial.

   mkdir /www-config; \
   ln -s /etc/init.d/httpd /www-config/httpd; \
   ln -s /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf /www-config/httpd.conf; \
   ln -s /var/log/httpd/ /www-config/logs; \
   ln -s /usr/lib/php/modules/ /www-config/php5-extensions; \
   ln -s /etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf /www-config/php.conf; \
   ln -s /etc/httpd/conf.d/ /www-config/apache-conf; \
   ln -s /etc/php.ini /www-config/php.ini; \
   ln -s /etc/php.d/ /www-config/php-ini; \
   ln -s /var/www/html/ /www-config/public-html; \
   /www-config/httpd restart;

PHP 5.x should now be installed and you should have a directory prepared that lets you easily access important files for managing your configuration.

Installing FFMPEG

FFMPEG can be fairly complicated to get running properly, so here’s what I’ve gotten working thus far.

1. Download FFMPEG source. Export the latest FFMPEG trunk from Subversion, then change to the source directory.

   svn export svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk /ffmpeg-trunk-source; \
   cd /ffmpeg-trunk-source;

2. Install x264. Export the latest x264 trunk from Git. Enter the directory, make, install, and go back to the parent directory.

   git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264.git; \
   cd x264; \
   ./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-shared --enable-pthread; \
   make; \
   make install; \
   cd ..;

3. Install liba52. Download the latest version of liba52 (Currently 0.7.4). Decompress the package, enter the directory, run configure, make, install, and go back to the parent directory.

   wget http://liba52.sourceforge.net/files/a52dec-0.7.4.tar.gz; \
   tar -zxvf a52dec-0.7.4.tar.gz; \
   cd a52dec-0.7.4; \
   ./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-double; \
   make; \
   make install; \
   cd ..;

4. Install FAAC. Download the latest version of FAAC (Currently 1.26). Decompress the package, enter the directory, create the configure file, run configure, make, install, and go back to the parent directory.

   wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/faac/faac-1.26.tar.gz; \
   tar -zxvf faac-1.26.tar.gz; \
   cd faac; \
   autoreconf -vif; \
   ./configure --prefix=/usr; \
   make; \
   make install; \
   cd ..;

5. Install FAAD. Download the latest version of FAAD (Currently 2.6.1). Decompress the package, enter the directory, create the configure file, run configure, make, install, and go back to the parent directory.

   wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/faac/faad2-2.6.1.tar.gz; \
   tar -zxvf faad2-2.6.1.tar.gz; \
   cd faad2; \
   autoreconf -vif; \
   ./configure --prefix=/usr; \
   make; \
   make install; \
   cd ..;

6. Install LAME. Download the latest version of LAME (Currently 3.98b8). Decompress the package, enter the directory, run configure, make, install, and go back to the parent directory.

   wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/lame/lame-3.98b8.tar.gz; \
   tar -zxvf lame-3.98b8.tar.gz; \
   cd lame-3.98b8; \
   ./configure --prefix=/usr; \
   make; \
   make install; \
   cd ..;

7. Install libmpeg2. Download the latest version of libmpeg2 (Currently 0.4.1). Decompress the package, enter the directory, run configure, make, install, and go back to the parent directory.

   wget http://libmpeg2.sourceforge.net/files/mpeg2dec-0.4.1.tar.gz; \
   tar -zxvf mpeg2dec-0.4.1.tar.gz; \
   cd mpeg2dec-0.4.1; \
   ./configure --prefix=/usr; \
   make; \
   make install; \
   cd ..;

8. Install Xvid. Download the latest version of Xvid (Currently 1.1.3). Decompress the package, enter the directory, run configure, make, install, and go back to the parent directory.

   wget http://downloads.xvid.org/downloads/xvidcore-1.1.3.tar.gz; \
   tar -zxvf xvidcore-1.1.3.tar.gz; \
   cd xvidcore-1.1.3/build/generic; \
   ./configure --prefix=/usr; \
   make; \
   make install; \
   cd ../../../;

9. Install AMR/3GPP. Download the latest version of AMR (Currently 7.0.0.1). Decompress the package, enter the directory, run configure, make, install, and go back to the parent directory.

   wget http://ftp.penguin.cz/pub/users/utx/amr/amrnb-7.0.0.1.tar.bz2; \
   tar -jxvf amrnb-7.0.0.1.tar.bz2; \
   cd amrnb-7.0.0.1; \
   ./configure --prefix=/usr; \
   make; \
   make install; \
   cd ../;

10. Compile FFMPEG. Configure, make, and install the software, including all options that enable enhanced functionality.

    ./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-static --enable-shared --enable-gpl --enable-nonfree --enable-postproc --enable-avfilter --enable-avfilter-lavf --enable-liba52 --enable-liba52bin --enable-libamr-nb --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libfaadbin --enable-libgsm --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libx264 --enable-libxvid; \
    make; make install;

Installing FFMPEG-PHP

Once you have FFMPEG functioning properly, you can install the FFMPEG-PHP extension.

1. Download and install FFMPEG-PHP source. Enter the directory, download the source, run phpize, configure, make, install, and go back to the parent directory.

   cd /ffmpeg-trunk-source; \
   wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/ffmpeg-php/ffmpeg-php-0.5.3.1.tbz2; \
   tar -jxvf ffmpeg-php-0.5.3.1.tbz2; \
   cd ffmpeg-php-0.5.3.1; \
   phpize; \
   ./configure --prefix=/usr; \
   make; \
   make install; \
   cd ..;

2. Add FFMPEG-PHP to the PHP configuration.

   echo "extension=ffmpeg.so" > /www-config/php-ini/ffmpeg.ini

3. Restart Apache.

   /www-config/httpd restart

All done!

FFMPEG and FFMPEG-PHP should now be installed and ready to go. Make sure to check your error log if something isn’t working properly.

cat /www-config/logs/error_log

I’m an information junkie with a limited attention span. Twitter has all of the interesting links and thoughts of a Digg, Newspond, del.icio.us, or Ma.gnolia, but is filtered by people I follow, giving me a much higher signal to noise ratio for links and services that require my attention (or that I may want to give my attention to).

I’m interested in what people are thinking about. Twitter is perfect for this. “Tell us what you’re doing, in 140 characters or less” is fantastic because it forces the short, to-the-point posts. As a “thought publisher” on Twitter, it’s less demanding than, say, writing a blog post.

I work on a couple of open-source projects, as well as a commercial project. We’ve configured our subversion post-commit hook to trigger a Twitter update containing the log message. As we all work on the project throughout the day, I’m able to have up-to-the-minute notifications that tell me where in the development process we are at any given time. My commercial project has protected updates, and my open-source project has public updates so that our technically-oriented end-users can follow progress.

Twitter has become an indispensable utility for me. Being a Mac user, Twitter is as critical of a utility to me as Mail, Address Book, QuickSilver, Growl, and Adium. I don’t have to put a lot of time and effort into it, it has a very specific purpose, and I can engage with it passively if I choose to (I receive Growl notifications via Twitterrific, for example).

Twitter is interesting, useful, and non-demanding (both as a “publisher” of tweets as well as a “consumer” of tweets).

My only half-hearted complaint is that the Flash widgets are ugly as sin, but that’s why we have RSS feeds and open-source tools such as SimplePie to parse them, right?

1. Install MacFUSE. This is a Google project that allows you to mount other file systems on your desktop, including even things like SSH and FTP.
2. Install the NTFS-3G plugin for MacFUSE, which will allow us to not only read, but also write to NTFS drives.
3. Install the Mac OS X Developer Tools. They should be an optional install on the Mac OS X install disc, or I believe you can download them manually.
4. According to Garbage In, Garbage Out, simply copy-paste this line into your Terminal, and press Enter:

   /Developer/Tools/SetFile -a V /Volumes/Untitled; killall Finder;

Your Boot Camp drive icon should be hidden from your desktop, but may still show up in things like open/save dialogs.

Everybody needs this! Even those of us who have spent lots and lots of time around the web, this is a good thing. It’s especially good for people like my in-laws and many of my other friends and family.

Besides that, here’s some good information my wife passed along to me:

Having worked for a bank for over 5 years, I will tell you that a little bit of education goes a long way. Never ever EVER give out your pin # to ANYONE!!! Banks will never ask for this information (Other than asking you to enter you own pin # into a machine). Bank employees don’t even have access to your pin #. Your bank would never send you an email asking you to verify your personal information — the bank already has it if they need it.

I recently received an email (I think that it was a bank from Tenessee); When I clicked on the link, it took me to a sign on page. It was really quite clever, you could enter any user ID, and any password. Then, they asked you to verify your bank information. (Including your pin) The other type of phishing email that I have been receiving a lot lately, has been on behalf of phony people from other countries. These people will ask you to reply to their email with your contact info. Then, they will try to get you to cash a fake cashier’s check from them of some ridiculously large amount. They will tell you that your cut is 30% or 40% in some cases. Don’t be fooled by these either.

If you receive an email asking you for any sort of financial information/help know that it is probably a scam, you should delete it at once, or you can forward it to the Federal Trade Commission at spam@uce.gov, or contact them at www.consumer.gov/idtheft or 877.IDTHEFT (877.438.4338).

Nearly every major feature has been enhanced, as well as the addition of several new ones. Be sure to read the upgrade docs if you’re upgrading from Beta 1 or the Preview Release. People who were using trunk builds should be able to just drop this file in as a replacement for any previous simplepie.inc file.

We’ve also added a WordPress plugin and a MediaWiki extension to the mix. And as always, if you have any questions, comments, or need clarification on anything, be sure to swing by the support forums. We’re there a lot.

Enjoy!

Lots of information can be found about IE7, specifically improved CSS compliance (hasn’t yet been updated with the current build information, but will). This build is supposed to be rendering engine complete, meaning that this build will render webpages the same way that the final release will.

I’m tempted to do a full install of IE7, and simply run IE6 standalone from now on…

This is the download package that was made available as the Internet Explorer 7.0 Beta 2 Public Preview. This version of IE7 writes a couple of keys to your registry.

Don’t try to run the iexplore.exe like you have in the past (even with the standalones). Instead, run the __RUN_ME.bat file. This will make sure that the above-mentioned registry entries are removed, and will automatically add the .local file, etc.

I had a problem for a while where IE7 would “flicker-quit”. As in, a window would display for a fraction of a second, and then quit. This is the only package that worked for me, but even then it didn’t work at first. Here’s what I was doing when it magically began working.

• I ran the normal iexplore.exe file
• I ran the __RUN_ME.bat file (didn’t work, btw)
• Went into the update folder, and double-clicked the IE icon. It started the installer.
• Went back to the root folder and tried __RUN_ME.bat again.
• Out of frustration, ran __RUN_ME.bat yet again just so that I could get angrier at the IE team.
• IE7b2 magically worked.

I’m still not sure which part of my voodoo worked, but I have it running. I may have had some problems because I was previously running the IE7b1 standalone.

This is completely unsupported — completely. The official word from Microsoft is that we shouldn’t be running them in standalone mode anyways.

Stop yelling at me like that! You’re preaching to the choir, brother (or sister)! I know that Microsoft really needs to release official standalone packages for developers to work and test with that are available from MSDN, and not intended for public consumption. But I don’t make the rules—I just break the bad ones.

When Microsoft said “your potential, our passion”, they weren’t talking about web designers. But maybe they should have been… How’s this for an idea: Microsoft has been pretty responsive to our requests for a better browser with IE7. How about we bombard them with comments and such letting them know that we want our standalone mode in order to fix the mess they made in the first place.

Here’s the URL for the IE Blog. Let them know how you feel. Pester the crap out of Chris Wilson, Al Billings, and the rest of the ‘softies that simply barking “unsupported” is unacceptable, and that they need to help us fix the problem by either producing official IE standalones, or by not making it so freaking hard to make happen.

«Update» The zipped package now uses version 1.4 of the IE Launch Script. Now supports conditional comments.

I could sit here and go over each and every things that’s new or better or changed, but I’ve already done that. To find out more about SimplePie, and what all it can do, check out the official SimplePie website.

It’s been a year since the last SimplePie release, but that doesn’t mean the project is dead. Fortunately I was able to get some help from Geoffers, and he actually ended up driving most of the development since he came on board over the summer.

I wish I could tell you that a shiny new version 1.0 was available, but alas, not yet. What we do have, however, is a shiny new Preview Release — soon.

What is SimplePie? Let me tell you:

SimplePie is a very fast and easy-to-use class, written in PHP, for reading RSS and Atom syndication feeds. By keeping it simple, and focusing on what’s important, we’ve built a pretty sweet little API. SimplePie’s focus has been two-fold: speed and ease of use, and has been very successful on both fronts.

Expect to see a new SimplePie Preview Release and a matching website in the next few days.

You can download the new release from Mozilla.com, or if the servers are overloaded, you can get them from Skyzyx: Downloads.

• Firefox 1.5 for Windows
• Firefox 1.5 for Mac OS X

Most implementations typically involve clicking a button or link to go to the Edit page. From there, you typically have to go through some moderately unusable process for reordering links, changing descriptions or current links, or adding new links. This may or may not include several pages and several page refreshes to get it all done the way you want it to be. Quite frankly, that sucks.

So, I spent several hours over the weekend digging through the documentation for Prototype and Scriptaculous in order to build a much more usable, natural, intuitive system for making these kinds of customizations. It’s not quite the same as the lists used in Basecamp, Backpack, or Ta-Da lists, but these services were definitely an inspiration. Here’s a video of what I’ve got so far. The video is a little tall for standard 1024×768 monitors, so you may have to size it down a smidge to see it all. QuickTime 6 or 7 should be plenty new enough to watch the video.

I’m not quite ready to release the code yet, as it’s not completely done, but once I add the few more things to it that I plan to, you can download the code and do whatever you want with it. The backend is done in PHP with text files, and shouldn’t require anything special except for a relatively modern browser (released in 2001 or later).

I have tons of clippings from old Mac magazines like MacAddict (back when they were still edgy and cool) still plastered on walls and binders left over from high school. To name a few:

• [MacAddict] Fighting back for the Mac – 225 MHz! “Let’s kick Intel’s ass…”
• [Power Computing] We lost our license for speeding… (the last ad due to Apple’s purchase of Power Computing and subsequent revocation of the Mac Clone license)
• [Apple] Mac OS 8: An operating system so advanced, it could only come from Apple.
• [MacWeek] Have a look at Apple’s new system… Mac OS 8 (with screenshots of the ill-fated Copland project)
• [MacWorld] BeOS: Apple’s Next Operating System

When I heard the news that Apple really was switching to Intel — and not just Intel, but Intel x86 — I felt completely deflated… sick to my stomach even. PowerPC’s are awesome processors, and Apple has invested a ton time and energy into this architecture, but although the switch was a surprise to some (including me), it’s not all that far-fetched.

NeXTStep (including OPENSTEP, Rhapsody, and the Mach Microkernel) ran on multiple architectures including PowerPC, Intel x86, SPARC, and even the old Motorola 680×0. Although Apple “officially” discontinued the x86 development after Rhapsody DP2, we now know they didn’t. NeXTStep (which Mac OS X is a direct relative to) was built to be cross-platform after NeXT moved from PowerPC hardware to x86 back in the 1990′s.

Now, having the Mac OS run on an Intel chip has been long-rumored since the days of the Star Trek project, and since that project was abandoned then we know that running Classic on x86 isn’t going to happen. Although I’m a bit disappointed about Apple leaving the PowerPC (which is really Motorola and IBM’s fault), I must say how impressed I am that Mac OS X runs so well on a Pentium 4, and I think that it’ll be interesting to see how this transition plays out for Apple and all of us Mac users.

Actually, this isn’t even the first time we’ve seen the “little checkbox thingie” that Steve Jobs mentioned when discussing the compiling of applications for both architectures. We saw this feature in Rhapsody builds of Project Builder (left over from the NeXTStep days, and was later was renamed Xcode). See for yourself:

The only remaining questions I have (being the detail-oriented, organized person I am) is what on earth are they going to call the new systems? The G-series has always been a PowerPC nomenclature. G6? Gi686? Gx86? PowerMac²? We’ll have to wait and see.

Since the last time I talked about my Tiger experience, I’ve reinstalled Tiger using the “Archive and Install” option as opposed to the “Simple Install” option I used the first time. This cleared up my problem of the phantom ClamAV user account I’d mentioned before. As a bit of context, I have a 1.33 GHz 17-inch PowerBook G4 with 1GB RAM.

Tiger Features and Applications

Safari 2:

Super, super, super fast. Far and away the fastest browser I’ve ever worked with (Firefox Deer Park Alpha 1 for OSX is second fastest). It’s also standards-compliant so I never have to worry about how sites are going to look switching between Safari, and my Windows browser of choice, Firefox. I’m also running the current nightly build of Safari, thanks to the recent open-source release by Apple of the WebKit CVS repositories compiled with Xcode 2.1.

I’ve left Safari set as the default RSS reader on my system (so that clicking on the RSS icon will allow me to read selected feeds in Safari RSS), although in reality I still use NetNewsWire synced with Bloglines (which, in turn, syncs with FeedDemon on my Windows machine).

Tiger Mail (Mail 2):

Tiger Mail is not too shabby. I switched from Thunderbird to Panther Mail back in April in anticipation of a smooth transition to Tiger Mail. Everything has gone flawlessly since the move. Smart folders have made my email organization much more productive.

Now, for all of you complaining about the new UI in Tiger Mail, quit complaining. If your beef is with the violation of Apple’s own Human Interface Guidelines, fine. But from an aesthetic point of view, Tiger Mail looks a lot better than earlier versions of Mail.

Spotlight:

I use this feature constantly. For any application that isn’t in my Dock, it’s just a command-space away. But the normal Spolight search, although useful, isn’t as helpful as the new Spotlight-powered Smart Folders.

Smart Folders:

I’m a neat, organized person, who likes to keep all of my applications and utilities organized away in intelligent groups and subfolders within the Applications folder. The main problem with this is using Software Update, as most Apple applications won’t update if they aren’t currently residing in their Apple-approved homes. In other words, Apple’s “application dump” style organization goes head-to-head with my neat-freak organization style.

So, I decided to do the next best thing: Create a “Smart Applications” folder where I run all of my apps from, that I can keep organized however I want. I dumped all of my apps into the Applications folder, and all of my utilities into /Applications/Utilities/. Then, I tagged the Spotlight comments of each item with a special code (@org-utilities-network, @org-graphics), appropriate for the group(s) I wanted the app to be associated with. From there, I created Smart Folders for each group of applications, telling them to only search in the Applications folder, rather than the whole drive. This speeds up performance considerably.

Automator

Organizing all of my apps this way by hand would have been a total pain, but Automator made it a piece of cake. After taking the time to build the appropriate Automator app, I was able to just drag-and-drop whole folders of applications and have all of the items set with the appropriate Spotlight comments.

I also have a bit of repetitive image manipulation that I do rather frequently. It used to take forever to do each image manually with Fireworks, but now, I just drop a folder of images onto my Automator app, go get a glass of milk, come back and it’s done! Brilliant!

The only thing missing for me is the Automator equivalent of Folder Actions from Mac OS 9. I want to be able to fire an Automator action on an item whenever that item gets dropped on a folder. Anyone know how to do that?

iChat 3:

Still haven’t used it much, but I’m planning to give it an honest go-round. Adium and Gaim don’t seem to write my buddy lists back to the server correctly, so my iChat buddy list is all messed up. I need to fix that.

Burnable Folders:

Finally, a better way to burn data CD’s. Instead of having the Finder copy all of the files I want to burn to a temporary folder, it simply creates aliases, then resolves them during the burn. This allows the whole CD burning process to go much faster on Tiger.

Due to this limitation in Panther, I began using a nifty little app called Burnz. Burnz was a lifesaver during the Panther days. Since my car stereo plays MP3 CD’s, I burn a lot of them, and Tiger just made it easier for me.

iCal 2:

I honestly have no idea what the difference is between iCal 1.5.5 and iCal 2.0, but hey, as long as it works. The only problem that I’ve had is that in Panther, I was able to sync my calendars with a PHPiCalendar installation. Now, it doesn’t work anymore. I can, however, sync with .Mac.

iSync 2:

Before I got my new Motorola v330 phone, I just used iSync to occasionally sync my contacts and calendars to my iPod.

After I got my phone, I found out that with a little hacking, iSync will support my new phone. I did the hackjob, and it worked. So, I synced all of the phone numbers between my computer and my phone. Problem was, I ended up with double numbers in my phone (as I already had many of my contacts in there), and nothing new in my Address Book.

So, I deleted all of the numbers in my phone and decided to start over fresh. Big mistake. Between the two devices, the most recent modified date was on my phone, so when I synced, I wiped out all of the phone numbers I had in my entire world. This was a sad, sad day. It toook me about 8 hours worth of phone calls and digging through my wife’s Palm to get all of my numbers back. I finally realized that I had a month-old backup on my iPod, so I was able to pull most numbers from there. iSync saving me from iSync.

Now, iSync and I are friends again. Couple that with BluePhoneElite, and I’m a happy camper.

.Mac:

I had an iTools account back in 1999 or 2000. That expired back when Apple changed iTools to .Mac and started charging a subscription fee. Nowadays, I use this about 95% for syncing and about 5% for using the iDisk to exchange data between my personal PowerBook and my work PC.

QuickTime 7:

The coolest thing about QuickTime 7 is the super-huge trailers available from the HD QuickTime Gallery. Beyond that, the improvements are completely lost on me. It’s awesome to see fantastic clarity when I play an HD trailer in full-screen without it looking like crap.

Address Book:

As with Panther, I use my Address Book constantly. It was a huge help when I wiped out all of my phone numbers (read the iSync section above). I created a set of Smart Groups that listed people in my Address Book that were (are) missing entries for phone number, address, IM name, etc., so I always know who I need to pester about getting information from.

Unified Theme:

I’m a big fan of OSX’s “Aqua” theme, paticularly Panther’s Aqua. On the other hand, I can’t stand “Brushed Metal”. I think it’s a horrible theme, and should be killed. So when Apple came up with the “Unified” theme (which I’ve referred to as “toolbar-in-titlebar” in the past), I was pleasantly surprised.

Unified is basically a “smooth metal” version of Aqua. It takes the toned-down pinstripes of Panther, the multicolored close/minimize/resize buttons and throbbing blue buttons of Aqua, and combines it with a sleek metallic toolbar-in-title bar look. I think it’s fantastic, and I’m a big fan.

I think that from here, Apple should add system-level theming — much like the feature of Copland that didn’t quite make it into Tempo, although all the architecture was already in place. The preference panel would allow users to choose whether they want Classic Aqua (Jaguar and older), New Aqua (Panther), Brushed Metal (iTunes and Safari), Pro (Apple’s Pro line of applications), or Unified (Tiger-style Aqua). This setting would persist across all applications in the OS, so that all apps would have a consistent look across the board (much like the UI consistency in Mac OS 9 or Windows XP).

A good overview of the “many faces of Mac OS X” can be found at Rob’s Observatory.

System Performance:

Tiger made my PowerBook feel snappier after the Simple Install I did, but it feels even faster after the Archive and Install I did two weeks ago. Beyond all Microsoftian comprehension, Tiger runs faster on the same hardware compared to Panther. How sweet is that?

Any Problems?

Just two. Sometimes my phone doesn’t sync right unless I turn it off then back on again. I think that has more to do with the fact that my phone isn’t officially supported by iSync yet.

The second is that I can’t browse to my Windows SMB shares without locking up the Finder. I can connect via IP, but not by browsing to the share. I’m hoping that this will be fixed in 10.4.2 coming up this week or next.

What has Tiger enabled me to do over Panther?

• Organize my apps and utilities more intelligently
• Launch (almost) any app, (almost) straight from the desktop
• Save myself from myself with iSync, .Mac, and Address Book
• Save time and stay organized better by automating several repetitive tasks
• Burn data CD’s faster
• Sync devices and data easily and automatically
• Watch full-screen trailers that actually look good full-screen
• Surf the web at blazing speeds with incredible response time
• Organize my email more intelligently
• More stuff that I just can’t think of right now.

At this point, I’d say that any “laggards” that haven’t yet upgraded to Tiger should do so ASAP. Once you figure out how to make features like Spotlight and Automator work for you, you’ll be amazed by what all you can accomplish.

Depending on your phone’s level of compatibility with Bluetooth and such, you can:

1. Have an alert show up on your screen when someone calls you, listing their name, phone number, and picture — pulled straight from your Address Book!
2. Send SMS messages straight from your computer!
3. Show you your signal strength and remaining battery life in either your dock, your menubar, or both!

Now, my Motorola v330 isn’t officially supported by iSync or BluePhoneElite. However, I hacked in support for my phone into iSync 2.0 last week. When I installed BluePhoneElite, it picked my phone right up — no problems.

Very, very cool.

After reading MacWorld articles about the new system back in 2000, I actually remember seeing these screenshots. Does this look familiar to you?

Heh… old skool. Just for copyright’s sake, these images are from Ars Technica. Follow the links below to read about the growth in each successive version of Mac OS X.

1. Rhapsody (Mac OS X Developer Preview 2)
2. Rhapsody (Mac OS X Developer Preview with Aqua)
3. Mac OS X Public Beta
4. Mac OS X 10.0 (Cheetah)
5. Mac OS X 10.1 (Puma)
6. Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar)
7. Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther)
8. Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)

If you (1) have Tiger, (2) are looking for an iCal Widget, or (3) haven’t already purchased Konfabulator 2 (which includes a state-of-the-art iCal Widget), you should definitely give this one a try. iCal Events.

Thanks so much for the widget, Ben!

« Update » Ben has asked me to remove my customized version of his widget. If you want to make the changes yourself, you can open the widget package, edit the CSS file, change all references of Helvetica to Verdana, and fiddle with some of the font sizes so that everything fits nicely.

1. Video Playback Option: In the advanced preferences, there’s an option for how video files should be displayed. Can we look forward to movies in iTunes 5?
2. “Now Playing” Artwork: I’ve been looking for an AppleScript to do this for a while, but never found one. In the album art preview pane, there’s a little arrow that allows you to see the album art of the currently playing track (assuming you’ve added it of course). Granted you need to have a lot of your album art in place for this to be useful, and I do. Yippee!
3. Digital Rights Enablers: iTunes 4.8 doesn’t take away my fair use rights that I’ve enabled with JHymn… which is good, because this is a deal-breaker for me.

Anyone else have any thoughts to this minor iTunes update?

What do we need?

Before we get started, we need to make sure that we have everything we need:

1. Either a Windows 2000/XP PC or a Mac running OSX
2. A TV (which I think just about everyone has)
3. A Networked TiVo Series2 with system software 7.1 or better
4. iTunes
5. TiVo2Go Software (Mac or PC)
6. iSee iTunes software (Mac or PC)
7. Airport Express
8. Speakers of some sort that are connected to your Airport Expres

This next part is the initial setup that you’ll need for the method that I’m about to explain.

Prepping your TiVo

If you haven’t already, you’ll want to begin by connecting your TiVo to your home network. You can get started by going over the TiVo Network Setup Instructions. This will involve purchasing either a wired or wireless (11 Mbps; 802.11b) network adapter for your TiVo. If you’re going wireless, remember to allow 802.11b devices on your network, and understand that TiVo only understands WEP security — not the newer WPA. I was ready to rip my hair out over this before I figured out what the problem was.

Next you’ll need to get system software version 7.1 (or newer) installed. Assuming you know how to work a TiVo, go into the System Settings screen and check what software version you have. If it’s older than v7.1, you’ll have to request the update. It can take up to 3 days for your TiVo to receive the software update.

After you’ve got version 7.1 or newer installed, you have to enable a hidden mode called the HME mode (which I think stands for Home Media Entertainment, although I could be completely wrong). Instructions taken from this page are as follows:

You can tell that HME is activated if on the Main TiVo Screen the “Music & Photos” menu option is now called “Music, Photos & More”.

You will need to re-enable HME every time your TiVo Reboots.

If HME isn’t already enabled on your Tivo running Software verson 7.x or above go all the way into the System Infomation screen and enter CLEAR-CLEAR-0-0 on your remote (there will be no direct feedback that it did anything).

Return to the Main TiVo Screen and you should see “Music, Photos & More” listed.

Prepping your computer

Go ahead and connect the Airport Express to your home network, if you haven’t already. The instructions for that are outside the scope of this posting. Connect your speakers (home stereo or surround sound system, preferably) to your Airport Express.

Launch the iSee iTunes application and allow it to start up. On Mac OS X, I had to open a port to make it all work properly. Open up the “Sharing” System Preference, and go to the “Firewall” tab. Create a new entry called “iSee iTunes” (or whatever you want to name it), and set the port value to 7288. Hopefully it’s the same on your system. If not, you can run Rendezvous Browser (OSX-only) to find what port iSee iTunes is wanting to run on.

Bringing It All Home

Launch iTunes, and start playing the music through your Airport Express to your home stereo (or whatever you’re using to play the audio through). I assume that it will be in the same room as your TiVo’d TV (since that would make the most sense).

Turn on your TV, and bring up the TiVo main menu. Choose “Music, Photos & More”, and then “iSee iTunes on <server name>“. When the iSee iTunes menu comes up, choose the “Now Playing” option, and iSee iTunes will display the track name, artist, rating, and album art on your TV. The forward and back buttons work the Next/Previous track in iTunes. You can even pause as necessary.

There! You now have your music playing on your home stereo and a visual layout of the track info and album art all together. (Almost-)instant Home Media Center!

Alternate Method

An alternative method that I’ve tried out worked well since I have a PC and TiVo’d TV in my bedroom, and I have some 5.1 Surround speakers connected to my Windows XP machine. I launched iTunes, iSee iTunes, and Nicecast on my Powerbook. I broadcast a signal (via Nicecast) to iTunes on my PC, and had the audio play through my fancy speakers. Meanwhile, I used iSee iTunes to display the cool music info on my TV screen. Not quite as fancy, but still works well.

Normally, I don’t post about the latest updates to the Mac operating system, but this time is special. This is the most special of all updates because it fixes the two major problems that I’ve had ever since I bought my Powerbook G4 over the summer.

1. “…a problem in which, on rare occasions, a PowerBook G4 would wake from sleep with a black screen and not respond to keyboard or mouse input” which I have been a victim of at least 50 times since June, and…
2. “…also deals with ‘jumping cursor’ issues that might occur while using one’s thumb or the side of one’s thumb to navigate on a laptop Mac”, which has also plagued me time and time again since I bought my Powerbook.

Apple’s “geniuses” haven’t ever been able to figure out why this has been happening to my Powerbook. Now it’s fixed! I’m so happy!

With a small, one-time change, Conditional Comments will work again and recognize the values 5.0 and 6.0, again; however, it will not recognize 5.5.

How is it done? Go to the registry and look in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Version Vector\ for the key IE. Simply get rid of it by renaming it to zIE — that’s it!

As I had installed IE 6.0, I looked into the registry for its version number “6.0.2800.1106″ and found 7 entries in HKLM, 3 of them belonging to the key “Internet Explorer”: Wizard Version, Version and Build. I looked also into the module iexplore.exe and found this information 4 times. All these 11 occurrences appear to be character data with minor variations in format, but no one was compatible with the design for the Conditional Comments!

So to meet the specifications, a new structure was created, the “Version Vector”. IE reads the information (currently 5.0002, 5.5000, or 6.0000) from there when it is started: if the program cannot find it, it gets the information from the module. This also means that IE has to be closed and restarted to get the change.

Now in case of IE 5.5 we can see the incompatibility which forced the creation of a new structure: CC gives true for “gte IE 5.999″ and “lte IE 5.9990″! As CC cannot be nested there is no way to identify IE 5.5 properly.

For example the following CC’s will work even with multiple IE’s installed:

1. “if IE 6″ or “if IE 6.0″ — for use with IE 6.0
2. “if IE 5″ or “if lte IE 5.5″ — for use with IE 5.01 and 5.5
3. “if IE 5.0″ — for use with IE 5.01
4. “if gte IE 5.5″ — for use with IE 5.5 and 6.0
5. “if IE” or “if lte IE 6.0″ — for use with IE 5.01, 5.5, and 6.0

This CC will still not work when multiple IE’s are installed:

1. “if IE 5.5″ — for use with IE 5.5

To see this run the above mentioned test. For better understanding CC you might want to read About Conditional Comments.

I have tested quite a lot on my Win98, but as the whole structure was build exclusively for CC, I would expect no real problems with later versions.

You can discuss this further at the Skyzyx Support Forums.

After scanning the file and finding no viruses, I ran the executable. How stupid. It immediately began installing adware and my antivirus app began showing warnings of a trojan being installed. I quarantined the files that were causing problems, and while I was doing that, a few more non-cancellable installers ran before I could stop them. I immediately pulled the power plug from the wall.

It took me about 2 hours to get everything worked out last night, but in the end I learned two things: (A) Don’t be a freakin’ moron, you freakin’ moron, and (B) there are some really good anti-adware tools out there that I didn’t know about. Here are a few useful tools/apps that I want to share with those that may not know about them:

1. How to fix mom’s computer. Sounds like what I did over the holidays. Use this guide to fix your parents (or your own) adware-infested computer.
2. Online Port Scan. This free online utility checks your computer for ports that may be open to attack.
3. Ad-Aware. Spyware scan and removal utility.
4. ZoneAlarm. A very good software firewall application and AntiVirus application. Free version available.
5. Spybot Search & Destroy. This application prevents bad software from being installed in the first place.
6. AntiVir. A free AntiVirus application for Windows, protecting against over 80,000 viruses. (I’ve already got Norton AntiVirus, and ZoneAlarm has their own AV app)
7. Hijack-This. This application tracks what processes are currently running. Great for detecting malware.

I’ve now learned that it doesn’t matter how good you are. If you’re willing to take a risk, you need to be willing to accept the consequences of that risk. Anyway, I hope this helps.

• Windows Installer
• Mac OS X Disk Image
• Linux Installer

The Mac platform just doesn’t work the same. I suppose I could just leave the app open, but I have a habit of quitting apps when I’m done with them. Because it always takes Firefox so much longer to start up than Safari, usually I just use Safari for normal surfing, and only open Firefox if I need to do something that requires better JavaScript/DOM/XML/Whatever support than Safari provides.

But today I came across something very, very cool. Firefox builds that are optimized for the PowerBook G4. Instead of waiting the usual 6-7 Dock bounces for Firefox to start up, it only takes one, and everything else about it is significantly faster than the default builds.

I came across the forum for optimized builds over at MozillaZine.org. Here is some linkage:

• Firefox optimized for OSX on a G4.
• Firefox optimized for Panther (OSX 10.3.x) on a G5
• Other Firefox builds optimized for Windows, Mac, and Linux

Firefox is now running zippier than ever on my PowerBook. I hope these’ll help you out!

Also, for those using Panther, v10.3.5 is now available from Software Update. The only problem is that it doesn’t set the disk permissions properly. To fix this, go into Applications » Utilities » Disk Utility, and choose to repair permissions. Voila!

I agree and disagree — both concurrently.

On one hand, I see people going overboard about making sure that absolutely everything is flawless code, or else they freak out. On the other hand, I see people who intentionally invalidate their code to try to make a point. Both groups are wrong.

Standards-compliance is a journey, not necessarily a destination. It’s a matter of doing the best you can with the tools and options before you. Had we (Netscape and Microsoft) done things correctly from the get-go, this wouldn’t even be an issue. All websites would be valid, semantic, XHTML 1.0 Strict web documents fed to browsers as application/xml+xhtml. With the current state of the web, this just isn’t possible. At the same time, this doesn’t excuse us from writing the best quality code we possibly can.

You start with the best code in the best browser, and work your way down. Occassionally, you’ll have a loose ampersand, or a tag that has no purely semantic value. If this were an XML world, those things would be unacceptable. But we’re not living in an XML world — we’re living in a much looser HTML world. Web browsers, as good as they’ve become in recent years, are still far from perfect. IE6 still holds the majority of the market share. This isn’t because it’s a better browser, it’s just human nature to take the path of least resistance. This is the kind of world we’re looking at for the next several years. Granted all of this depends on whether Microsoft fixes IE in time for Longhorn or not, otherwise we all simply have to accept the imperfect world that we live in.

Andy said something last January that really made sense. It shouldn’t be about freaking out over a loose ampersand or feeding your sites in a mimetype that IE doesn’t support. At the same time, I’ve seen standards advocates intentionally invalidate their markup to make a point opposite of the first group.

Keith made another interesting point, that standards shouldn’t be something you think about. Standards should just be your de facto method of designing — that’s it!

So far, I’ve agreed with Darice 100%… except for this part:

“Everyone should use the method that fits their design best. The discussion should not be about what method is best but what different method fits which situation best.”

… to which I agree, except when it comes to tables. There are enough standards-aware browsers, and good XHTML+CSS methods to replace any table-based layout… even the complex ones. It might take a bit more work, but that’s how you produce a quality website. Granted, I’m also talking from the side of the gorge that doesn’t use tables anymore anyways.

For those who are still on the table side of the web design gorge, jumping straight into XHTML+CSS design is a pretty tall order. I worked for 3 months solid on a redesign for my website that debuted back in March 2003, and it still used one table to hold everything together (I didn’t understand the CSS box model yet). If we, as standards-compliant designers, come across people wanting to make the jump, we need to help and encourage them to use better methods.

People have asked me why I’ve helped completely random people to build better and better standards-compliant websites, seemingly with no benefit of my own. The reason is because helping one designer build a better website makes the web, as a whole, a better place for everyone. The more people with valid, usable, accessible websites, the fewer bad websites we all have to deal with.

Anyways, these are my thoughts on the issue. I want to thank Darice for inspiring this.

My biggest issue is just wanting to play the music that I’ve purchased anywhere I want. Hymn is a very good DRE (digital rights enabler) for iTunes Music Store files.

Since IE6 supports the correct CSS box model (in “almost standards” mode), I’m not going to bother with the CSS box model hack in the new design. This is 2004 people… get with the program. If users insist on hanging on to outdated technology, then they need to understand that at some point they’re going to be left behind.

Microsoft has left behind Windows 95/98/Me, Apple has let go of anything prior to Mac OS X 10.1.5 (pretty much), and I’ve let go of IE prior to 6.0. At some point, you just need to bite the bullet and let the legacy code go. That’s where I’m at.

If you’re a die-hard Internet Explorer 5.0 user, sorry. If your company still hasn’t upgraded their systems with IE6, either find a new one that’s on-the-ball, or create a fuss to get IE6 installed (if not a better browser like Firefox).

The first is Gaim. Gaim is an IM client for Windows/Linux that can log into AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, and others. I know that a lot of people use Trillian, and it already does that. Two features that make me suggest Gaim over Trillian are: (1) You can give people real names (you can set aliases), rather than being stuck with screen names. (2) You can group multiple screen names together as a single person. This is very helpful if some of your buddies have multiple screen names, or are logged on to multiple services at once. Instead of listing your best friend 5 times, you only see them once in your buddy list. Very handy.

The next is Adium X. Adium X is an IM client for Mac OS X. It is very customizable, and the development team seems to want to create a fun product… which is what they’ve done. You can customize sound sets, smileys, IM message display, the Dock icon, and a few other things.

For RSS readers, I’d suggest Feed Demon for Windows and Pulp Fiction for Mac OS X. Both of them cost money, but they both seem to be worth it. I’ve been using Feed Demon since November, and absolutely love it. I just started using Pulp Fiction tonight, but it’s already better than Shrook and NetNewsWire Lite. There’s a 15 day trial for PF, so I’d recommend checking it out.

Flash FXP is a terrific FTP client for Windows. I used to use CuteFTP and FTP Voyager, and Flash FXP is far better than both. Transmit was recommended on Whitespace a couple of months back for Mac OS X. I gave it a try, and I love it.

That’s enough promoting for tonight. I’m going to bed. G’nite.

• Tiger is a fully 64-bit OS… which is gonna allow the PowerMac G5′s to move so fast that they catch fire.
• “Expose for Widgets”, which is super similar to Konfabulator
• “Spotlight” which sounds an awful lot like the planned database-style search integration in Longhorn.
• 30-inch (wipe off your drool) displays
• RSS intregration in Safari

I was able to keep up with the play-by-play via Mac Minute, Apple-X, and Mac Update. You can read more about Tiger from Apple.com.

Lastly, I was able to get copies of these images before they got pulled from the MacMinute.com site. They’re awfully clever.

Because there hasn’t been a native “Aquification” release of OpenOffice, I started reading directions about installing XDarwin — an open source version of the X-Windows X11 windowing system. Time to fire up the old command line. Woo-hoo!

I’ve spent a bit of time fooling around with both BeOS 5 and Red Hat Linux 8.0, so the Posix-compliant shell isn’t new to me. I’ve also spent quite a bit of time in MS-DOS, so that isn’t much of a problem.

After downloading the necessary .tgz files, figuring out how to run the Xinstall.sh file as ‘root’, and getting everything worked out, I’d get the dialog box asking me if I wanted to use Full Screen or Rootless mode, and as soon as I’d choose one, XDarwin would close. No explanation or anything.

Welcome to the world of Unix.

I then downloaded and installed OroborOSX. What I didn’t know was that OroborOSX requires XDarwin… and XDarwin kept crashing. Well crap.

I did quite a bit more digging around, and came across information on downloading Apple’s semi-open-source X11.app. Voila! OpenOffice was able to launch with no problems! The only thing I don’t like about it — which is extremely minor — is that the X11.app doesn’t minimize when Open Office starts.

The other thing is that it looks way more like Unix than it does Mac OS X. I was under the belief that OroborOSX adds some cool OSX-like widgets, but I could never get it to run.

This Mac OS X stuff is cool! I’m off to do more of it! Anyone got any insight about getting XDarwin to work?

Quoted from the bug report:

Here’s the layman’s explanation:

1. In the address bar, type about:config and press Enter
2. Search for a Preference named dom.event.contextmenu.enabled
3. Double click its entry and change it to false

Mozilla will now show the context menu even in pages that try to hide or replace it.

How cool is that?

I also remember seeing the teaser for ALA 3.0. I couldn’t wait for the awesome design that would come out of the mind of my favorite web guy, Jeffrey Zeldman. Then it debuted. Ugh. Are they serious?

But, as many people commented, the content is key. And even though I’m not too fond of the current design of ALA, they still have some of the most informative articles around to help us all grow as web designers.

However, over time, I realized that I would avoid going to the ALA site because I had a hard time reading it. Everything seemed to blur together, sections of the article weren’t made obvious enough to be able to visibly scan, and so I’ve missed out on some fantastic articles over the last few months. Grrr…

So, this morning, I was sitting at work going through my feeds in Feed Demon. CSS Vault had some nice new designs, and so did the Zen Garden (you can find the feed URL by looking at the source). I noticed that ALA had two new articles posted, so I clicked through and opened them up in my browser. Drat. Readability is foiled again!

I finally decided to do something about it. I realized that my complaining isn’t going to change Zeldman’s mind about certain design elements, but I can always change them myself through the use of a favelet! I spent a couple of hours writing scripts and tweaking things until I got it how I liked it. Here you go: ALA Styles Favelet

You should right/command-click the favelet link and save it to your clipboard, then create a new bookmark with this as the location.

Thankfully, ALA is very standards compliant, so I didn’t have to do a lot of CSS hacking through JavaScript. Although this Favelet is only intended to alter the design of ALA to be more readable and aesthetically pleasing, it might very well work on other standards-compliant sites as well. Who knows.

If you like it, let me know. If you hate it, let me know. If you think I could improve, let me know.

From now on, RSS 0.91 and RSS 1.0 feeds will contain summary posts, and the RSS 2.0 feed will contain full posts. That way, people can pick and choose which they want. My Atom feed contains both.

It’s pretty simple, I think. Those of you who subscribe to the Atom feed have the best of both worlds. I’m not sure if there is a news aggregator out there yet that can switch between summaries and full posts in Atom feeds, but I’ve filed a request with Nick Bradbury to add this functionality to Feed Demon. We’ll see what happens with this in the Feed Demon 1.1 Final.

Is this a good move? Should I change it back to all summaries? Let me know your thoughts.

I’ve just started using the brand-new Basecamp™ project management system (created by 37 Signals) to begin handling a few web design projects that I have going right now.

So far, I’m impressed.

It really says a lot, actually. It takes a lot to impress me. Sure there are plenty of things out there that are cool, but they’re not necessarily impressive. Basecamp is impressive.

One of the niftiest features, is that it generates both an RSS feed (which is great for an RSS-junkie like me), and an iCal file (compatible with Apple’s iCal as well as Mozilla Calendar). This makes it easy to keep up with my client’s comments as well as my upcoming milestones (deadlines).

I’d suggest it to just about anyone who has a need for (or could benefit from) a project management system. There’s even a free trial. Have a look.

Anyways, the only real problem I had with Feed Demon was that it didn’t properly parse the feed for Dunstan’s blog. I went back and looked at his XML, and he wasn’t using a <link> tag for his permalinks. He was using the <guid> tag instead. Hmmm…

I went and dug up the RSS 2.0 specification so that I could read up on the <guid> tag. The tags details say this:

If the guid element has an attribute named isPermaLink with a value of true, the reader may assume that it is a permalink to the item, that is, a url that can be opened in a Web browser, that points to the full item described by the <item> element.

That’s all fine and dandy, but Dunstan’s <guid> tag didn’t have that. Oh no! Was Dunstan’s XML feed not well-formed? *Gasp!* I read on, and came across this:

isPermaLink is optional, its default value is true. If its value is false, the guid may not be assumed to be a url, or a url to anything in particular.

Okay, okay. So Dunstan knows what he’s doing. Fair enough. But will my favorite feed reader never be able to properly read Dunstan’s Permalinks?

I submitted this as a bug report on the Feed Demon newsgroup last week. Today, Nick Bradbury released Feed Demon 1.1 Beta 1 (it kinda rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?). This issue is fixed in this release. Woo-hoo! There’s also basic support for Atom 0.3, which is kinda cool too.

I love the power of feedback.

The naming convention for Winamp 5 has already been discussed, and I’ve made available my favorite Winamp skins.

Although I wasn’t much of a fan of Winamp 3 in terms of using it (it was very, very slow), the thing that I did think was fantastic was Wasabi. Even though it was slow, it was a brilliant piece of work that had much potential to be something really useful.

According to C|Net, Brennan Underwood (the head honcho behind Wasabi) has been laid-off by AOL. Apparently, it seems as though AOL is making more and more mistakes with the technology that it owns, which leads me to believe that AOL won’t be around for much longer.

The Wasabi Development Board over at the Winamp Forums has a posting about making Wasabi an open-source project. The WasabiDev website says pretty much the same thing. I know that Winamp 5 has compatibility with the Wasabi API, since the whole point of Winamp 5 was to “Wasabify Winamp 2″. So far, so good.

Although I’m kinda bummed that Wasabi Development at Nullsoft is being abandoned (although I’m sure that other Nullsofters will contribute time and code to the new project), I’m sure that the newly dubbed “wasabi.player” (based on Winamp 3) will do very well once the API matures. Winamp 5 support for Wasabi will probably be limited to skinning and components — the same as it is now. I’d be suprised if AOL continued to pay their Nullsoft employees to continue work on their own Wasabi, separate from the open-source Wasabi.

All of that aside, I’m loving the new Winamp 5 Final release. It’s fast, supports cool skins, and even plays my excessively large video files like a champ.

In the end, I just chalked it up to Internet Explorer sucking, and left it alone. Recently, however, my question was answered.

For elements that act as though they were relatively positioned, then go ahead and use position:relative; on it. It seems to fix it without a hitch.

Just thought I’d pass this along.

At one point, I made available the PHP code that I use to do it, once Magpie is already installed. If you do a search on this site, you can probably find it. I’ve been very happy with Magpie since I first began using it last summer. It was way better than the parser I’d written in JavaScript, and a lot faster too.

If you look at the left-hand menu, you’ll see that I’ve added an RSS News Reader section. This is much like the RSS section that I had a few months ago that ended up getting merged with the Blogs I Read section. The reader is also powered by Magpie, and I hope it does some people some good.

In an effort to better track who is reading this site (and who isn’t), I’ve moved the location of my RSS feed. You can get the current URL from the RSS section. I might even add more of a variety of feeds, depending on the response I get from people. I’ll play that one by ear.

Lastly, I’ve made some ever-so-slight adjustments to the order of the menu. If you don’t see a menu option where it normally is, look lower.

Hat tip: Taylor McKnight.

I downloaded Winamp 5.0rc8 today, and began toying around with it. In my previous Winamp 5 post, I talked about how Winamp 2 was so much faster, but Winamp 3 had so much more potential. I will now say that Winamp 5 is a beautiful cross between the two, keeping the best things from Winamp 3, and adding them to Winamp 2 to create a super-fast, magnificent audio player that supports the skins from both earlier versions! This was definitely the coolest part of it all.

Now, I’m picky when it comes to my Winamp skins. I like to find one or two that I like, and stick with them. Winamp 2 skins were very intuitive and easy to use, but not usually very exciting. Winamp 3 skins looked awesome and were very exciting, but were often times difficult to navigate and use. Hopefully, native Winamp 5 skins will also take the best of both worlds.

Here are my personal favorite skins, available for download. You’ll want to right-click (or control-click for Mac users) and choose to “Save Target As…”

• BlackDawn (Winamp 2)
• D-Shock (Winamp 3)
• Echo (Winamp 3)
• MMD3 (Winamp 3)

To save some people the hassle, I’ve gone ahead and zipped each stand-alone installation and made them available for download. I’ve tested them on Windows 2000 and XP. You’d just need to upgrade your Windows 2000 installation with Internet Explorer 6.0, then download and unzip these files wherever you want (I put them in my Internet Explorer folder, myself).

Update — Just so that everyone is aware, the official version number of Internet Explorer 4.01 is v4.01. The internal version number for Internet Explorer 4.01 is v4.72. Why? I’m not sure, but this is the case. Some websites are reporting that you can download IE 4.72, when they really mean IE 4.01. Blame Microsoft for the confusion.

Update: Dec 3, 2003 — Just wanted to say hello to everyone visiting from the Web Standards Project and WebMonkey.

Update: Feb 16, 2006 — Looking for IE7 info? Find it here: Internet Explorer 7.0 Beta 2 Standalone is available

Update: Jan 1, 2008 — A company called Tredosoft has put together an installer that comes with fixes for things like cookies and conditional comments. Check it out!

One of the many things that I still don’t understand is what the crap is wrong with our server. I’m trying to get the internet connected to our small domain at work. I’ve got two NIC’s connected to the server: one for the DSL connection, and one for the internal network. I’ve got Network Address Translation enabled and working… more or less.

I can ping the IP of the router from the internal network, which tells me that NAT is working. I can ping the IP for this website from the internal network as well. When I’d gotten that far I got pretty excited. I fired up Mozilla Firebird with giddy glee and saw this:

The server can get on the internet no problem using domain names, but I can’t. I’m stuck having to ping various websites from the server to get the IP address, and surf the web punching in addresses like 216.239.57.99 and 216.223.215.11. It’s all very irritating.

I know that the problem lies with the server not translating the DNS properly, and that just sucks. I guess it’s back to screaming and swearing at TCP / IP again…