Default Folder X makes the Finder... a Finder
With powerful Finder navigation and features that feel like Apple should have built them first, Default Folder X is a powerful companion for file junkies, and version 4.0 adds a lot of cool, new stuff.Read More...
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10 ways to get the most out of Quick Look
Filed under: OS, LeopardWhen Steve first demonstrated Quick Look, I though it looked gimmicky. Interesting, for sure, but nothing I'd use regularly. Much like Star Wars Episode I: Fun when viewed for the first time, but I'll never watch it again.Three months later, Quick Look is my favorite feature of Leopard. It's convenient, useful and very fast. With a tap of the space bar, I can identify files in the Finder without having to open a separate application.Of course, it goes beyond that. With a little effort (and in some cases, plug-ins), you can get even more out of Quick Look. Here's how. Identify files on remote machines. I've been using Remote Desktop at my day job for a couple of years now. With a few clicks, I can observe or control a remote Mac. Leopard brings this convenience to home users with Screen Sharing. It's useful, but files appear quite tiny when viewed on this screen-within-a-screen (and titles even smaller). Fortunately, Quick Look makes things much more legible. Preview the contents of Zip files (plug-in required). BetterZip and the Zip Quick Look Plug-in both let you view the contents of a zipped file with Quick Look. In fact, Zip Quick Look's display is dependent on a HTML file which you may alter to your liking. Here's how to install Quick Look plug-ins. Preview the contents of a folder (plug-in required). Much like BetterZip and Zip Quick Look, the Folder List plug-in lets you preview the contents of a folder. You can also customize its HTML-powered display and show or hide hidden files or time stamps. Examine snippets of code with syntax highlighting intact. Here's another tip that requires a plug-in. Qlcolorcode lets you preview your code with all the helpful highlighting you expect. Examine files in the trash. Until Leopard, the Finder's trash would keep its contents to itself. Anything you wanted to examine had to be moved back to the desktop. Fortunately, Quick Look lets you preview trashed items. Now you know precisely which item to yank out of there. Prep your iWork documents for use with Quick Look. When you create a document with Numbers, Pages or Keynote, you can ensure that its preview will display the proper formatting by selecting the Include Preview in Document check box whey you save (or turn this feature on by default in the general preference pane). Enhance TextMate. TextMate is the editor that geeks everywhere love (including the geeks at TUAW). Ciarán Walsh has written two Quick Look plug-ins for TextMate that let you preview items in a project or render Quick Look previews (for certain file types) using the TextMate syntax highlighter, respectively. Preview fonts. Open a Finder window, select Cover Flow view and navigate to the font you're interested in. Click the space bar and presto! Instant preview. Quick Look and Cover Flow. I love the combination of Cover Flow and Quick Look. Open a bulging folder in the Finder and select Cover Flow view. Tap the space bar to preview the 1st file and then use the arrow keys to move the next one and so on. You'll stay in Quick Look mode! Very cool. Send images to iPhoto. When viewing an image with Quick Look - either from the Finder or attached to a Mail message - you'll see a tiny iPhoto icon at the bottom of the window. Click it to send that image to iPhoto. I hope you found these tips useful. And I still dislike Episode I.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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★ Bento
Daniel Jalkut has some astute observations regarding Bento, FileMaker’s new “personal database”: What inspired this? I can imagine a few scenarios. Bento looks a lot like what might have come about if some strategists at Apple were sitting around planning the future of the iWork suite of applications. They scroll down the list of “office suiteâ€? applications and check them off as they ship. Word Processor? Check. Presentation? Check. Spreadsheet? Check. Then somebody pulls out their dusty copy of ClarisWorks and says, “Wait a minute. We forgot the database!â€? No question Bento looks a lot like an iWork app — the template picker for a new Bento library is a dead ringer for the template pickers for new documents in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers. Jalkut continues speculating: So the iWork team at Apple starts putting their work into the “database for everyday use.â€? It looks a lot like the other iWork applications in form and function. Things are going brilliantly when somebody gets whiff of the news over at FileMaker and starts screaming bloody murder. Because FileMaker is the database subsidiary of Apple, you can be damn sure that if Apple ships a consumer-oriented database app, they want to be the ones to ship it! Possible. It’s also equally possible that Bento has been an original product from FileMaker all along, and that it’s visual similarities to iWork apps are just that, visual similarities. There are a slew of recent apps from indie developers that take visual cues from the UI of the iWork suite; there’s no reason to think FileMaker’s developers aren’t just as likely to do the same with a brand new app. Another possibility that springs to my mind, though, is sort of the opposite of Jalkut’s scenario: that perhaps Bento began life with the idea of it being included in iWork, but it was rejected and spun out on its own. Rejected not because it wasn’t good, but because it overlaps too much with Numbers. Much of what Numbers can do is really ad-hoc database design and storage. E.g., one of Numbers’s default templates is “Event Planner”; one of Bento’s is “Event Planning”. Both Numbers and Bento have default templates titled “Expenses”. That’s not to say that anyone who already uses Numbers couldn’t make good use of Bento, too. They do different things, and even where they overlap, they do things in different ways. But that they overlap at all, at such a basic level (“I’d like to create a list of records”) makes it clear that Bento works better as a standalone product than as a possible fourth iWork member. Conceptually, Bento stands apart from all three iWork apps in a fundamental way: it is not document-based. Keynote, Pages, and Numbers all follow the basic document-centric model: you create documents, and then save them as files, assigning each one a file name and a location in your hierarchical file system.1 No such thing in Bento. In Bento, there’s one main Bento window, and when you create a new library — which is the basic top-level “new database” in Bento — it appears as a source list item in the main Bento window. Bento has no open or save dialog, and there’s no such thing as a Bento document. You can import and export libraries to and from Bento, but there are no documents to manage. In this way, Bento is more like Mail or Yojimbo than an iWork app. In the same way that you, the user, never need to worry about where and how your mailbox files are stored on disk by Mail, you never need to worry about where and how your Bento libraries are stored on disk. If you drag a library from Bento’s source list to the Finder, it exports a .csv file with the data from that library. I’m a huge fan of this library-based (rather than document-based) concept for applications. From the user’s perspective, it boils down to creating the illusion that data lives inside the application’s main window rather than living as files in the file system that the user must name, locate, remember, and manage by hand. I’m not sure that would work for any of the iWork apps — much of the business of using presentation, word processing, and spreadsheet software is the business of exchanging documents with other people. For Bento, though, it’s perfect. Behind the scenes, Bento must store your data somewhere on disk, of course. That somewhere is ~/Libary/Application Support/Bento/bento.bentodb, which is a bundle containing an SQLite database and a Media folder for storing pictures, movies, and music stored in Bento libraries. I presume Bento is using Core Data (which is backed by SQLite), but regardless, it’s certainly not using a FileMaker-style database. A few other tidbits: Jalkut points out that the Bento .app bundle contains, presumably inadvertently, a release notes document with information pertaining to Bento’s development. It’s at ~/Applications/Bento.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/release_notes.html. In addition to good old-fashioned nosiness, it’s worth reading for some insight into the app’s design. For example, “Opening the exported file in Microsoft Excel is the primary goal of exporting CSV, as the file format is centered around the behavior application. Thus Excel should serve as the standard for how our exported CSV is read.” If you poke around Bento’s .app bundle, you can glean that the app’s code name was “Gluon”. The name change to Bento may have been fairly recent — the Bento-specific classes and command in the app’s AppleScript dictionary are in the “Gluon Scripting”. (And it looks like the AppleScript support, at least judging by the dictionary, is serious. Numbers, on the other hand, doesn’t even have an AppleScript dictionary.) Yes, all three iWork apps actually store their documents as bundles — folders that the Finder treats as a single discrete item, just like with .app application bundles. From a user’s perspective, that doesn’t make a difference in the basic concept. ↩
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Default Folder X 4.0 refined for Leopard
Filed under: Software, Productivity, LeopardSt. Clair Software has just released version 4.0 of its well-known Default Folder X for both Leopard and Tiger. This utility enhances OS X's Open and Save dialogs in a number of ways, allowing easy access to favorites and Spotlight comments, defining a per-application default folder, integrating with open Finder windows and more. The new version revamps the interface with a more HUD-like Leopard look and offers support for Quick Look as you can see above. Last week Macworld posted a preview video that does a good job of explaining just what makes Default Folder X so handy.Default Folder X is $34.95 and a demo is available. The upgrade is free to registered users of version 3 who purchased after June 1, 2007. The upgrade cost for other OS X registered users is $14.95 (and $19.95 for OS 9 registered users).[via Macminute]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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★ Leopard
The two and a half years between the debut of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and today’s release of 10.5 Leopard feels long, not just because it’s been the longest-ever stretch between major Mac OS X revisions, but also because it’s been an eventful two and a half years. How eventful? Think about this: When 10.4.0 shipped, it was PowerPC-only; Intel-based Macs existed only in secret Cupertino labs. There are plenty of other writers who’ve written excellent, top-to-bottom reviews of Leopard as a whole. If you read no other today, read Jason Snell’s at Macworld. (And, of course, stay tuned for John Siracusa’s, coming Sunday at Ars Technica, which will cover not just the new-to-Leopard UI minutia, but also the numerous significant developer-level additions — be prepared for a lot of Leopard-only apps from indie developers in the immediate future.) My nutshell take is this: I’ve been using Leopard full-time for about three months, and there’s no question it’s a worthy update. Is 10.5.0 truly ready for production use, or would most users be better off waiting for 10.5.1? We’ll see. No one ever got hurt by waiting a week or two to install a new OS. But there’s no question that most of the new features and changes in Leopard are winners. There are some turds, too, but the ratio of improvements-to-regressions is pretty high by my score. The most significant new feature in Leopard is Time Machine. That’s why the retail packaging and default desktop picture are Time-Machine-flavored, and a few years from now when we’re installing Mac OS X 10.7 Feral Alley Cat, it’s the feature we’ll remember when reminiscing about what was new in 10.5. The most striking aspect of Time Machine is its UI. When it debuted at WWDC 2006, it immediately faced criticism that it was just downright gimmicky. It is in fact gimmicky, but, I think, that’s actually a good thing in Time Machine’s particular and unique case. Apple has made something so effect-laden and so extraordinary that users want to see it in action — the fact that that something is backups, which, let’s face it, is effectively a chore, is a noteworthy achievement. Making backup software that people can’t wait to try, and which, once activated, just automatically kicks in and does its thing on a regular schedule, is like making people want to go ahead and sign up for life insurance. The argument for Time Machine’s game-like UI isn’t that it’s more usable, but that more people will use it. That’s actually more important in the case of backup software: there will be data saved that would otherwise have been lost if Time Machine instead sported a more traditional, straightforward visual appearance, because there will be some number of users who will have turned Time Machine on in the first place only because it looks so damn cool. It’s results that matter most, and the result of Time Machine is going to be that more Mac users will be backing up their data regularly than ever before. For some Mac users, who otherwise still wouldn’t be backing up regularly, it’s going to end up being the most important feature Apple has ever added to the Mac OS. The design of Time Machine is the single most Apple-like thing in Leopard. No way would a UI like this have come from anyone else, including the old pre-return-of-Steve-Jobs Apple Computer — if anything, the old Apple of the 1990’s was more traditional than any other UI design company. After Time Machine, it’s the little things that stand out most in Leopard. Quick Look, for example, is a joy to use. Just select a file in the Finder and hit the space bar. Boom, you have an instant preview. Hit space again and it goes away. (Apple’s choice of the space bar as the toggle is perfect.) It takes about 30 seconds of playing with Quick Look to wonder how you ever lived without it. The same goes for the finally-unified window chrome look-and-feel. Spend a day or two in Leopard, then sit down in front of Tiger, and the brushed metal really just looks absurd. (On the Leopard turd front, however, we’ll be saying the same thing about the translucent menu bar when 10.6 comes out — it’s a gimmick that makes menu text harder to read.) But what I like best, and what I think Apple deserves the most praise for, is that fact that they’ve gone back and refined all sorts of little things, changes so small that they fall far beneath the not-that-high-in-the-first-place threshold of Apple’s own “300+ New Features” list. E.g. the way that when you rename files in the Finder now, you get a default text selection of just the name part, without the file extension. Or, take this example (which example will sure make mine the Leopard review with the least exciting screenshots in the world). Here’s a segment of the Keyboard tab in the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences panel from 10.4: This isn’t the worst UI copy in the world, but it’s not great. How many users really understand what exactly the difference is between “hardware” and “software” features, here? Here’s how this looks in Leopard: This isn’t just slightly better wording, it’s completely better. Same exact feature, but someone at Apple took the time to rewrite the UI copy, and it’s better for it. Leopard is chock full of details like this — little things that won’t be promoted on the box cover or mentioned in mainstream media reviews, but which, taken cumulatively, epitomize why Mac OS X keeps getting better with each major release.
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How to back up hidden files/folders in Apple's Backup
I just got a .mac account, use GnuPG, and want Apple's Backup to store my keyring on my iDisk regularly in a custom Backup plan. However, he keyring is by default located at /Users/myuser/.gnupg, which is a hidden folder in the Finder, and that makes Backup's standard folder and file browser not see it. However, it is possible to do this with drag and drop. But it works differently for files than for folders. For both types of hidden items, one has to open the hidden folder in a Finder window (eg. Command-Shift-G and then insert the above folder path). The files one wants can now be selected, dragged, and dropped into the list of the opened custom Backup Plan. If one wants to back up the whole folder instead, one can't just do it this way. From the Finder window of the open .gnupg folder, one has to open the Information window (eg. Command-I), and then click the triangle to open the Preview row of the Information window. This ico...
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★ ‘message:’ URLs in Leopard Mail
The new version of Mail in Leopard introduces a ‘message:’ URL handler that allows you to refer to individual messages in Mail from other applications. You can use a utility such as RCDefaultApp to see that Mail registers as the default handler for the “message:” pseudo-protocol. That Mail now supports these URLs does not seem to be documented by Apple anywhere, but it’s fairly simple, and very useful. It’s one of my favorite new features in Leopard Mail.1 The structure of these URLs is fairly simple: (1) the “message:” pseudo-protocol, followed by (2) the message-id of the message, enclosed in angle brackets (“”). The message-id is specified in each message’s “Message-ID” header field, which is part of the Internet email standard. Every message-id should be universally unique, and every message should have a message-id. In my testing, the only messages I could find that didn’t have Message-ID headers were spam; such messages cannot be referred to by Mail’s “message:” URLs.2 The following formats all work: message:%3cMESSAGE-ID%3e message://%3cMESSAGE-ID%3e message: message:// In other words, the double slashes after the “message:” are optional, and the angle brackets surrounding the message-id value can be literal or URL-encoded. (“%3c” and “%3e” are the URL-encoded values for “”, respectively.) If you omit the angle brackets completely, the URLs will not work. There is no menu command in Mail to access these “message:” URLs; the only way I’ve found to reference one, other than creating them manually with AppleScript (see below), is by drag-and-drop. Most apps do not accept this URL data on the drag pasteboard, however. Three apps I’ve found that do are Yojimbo, VoodooPad, and DragThing. With Yojimbo, you can drag a message from Mail to Yojimbo’s main window, or to Yojimbo’s Drop Dock. When Yojimbo accepts the drop, it creates a new bookmark item with the title set to the email message’s subject, and the URL set to the “message:” URL. With VoodooPad, you can drop a message from Mail in a document window and VoodooPad will create an inline hyperlink; the text of the link is the message subject. With DragThing, dropping a message onto a palette creates a new URL clipping. With all three apps, dragging messages from Mail only works with one message at a time. If you drag multiple messages at once, the drop is rejected. I don’t think there’s anything these apps can do about this. If you drag a message from Mail to the Finder, however, rather than getting a URL clipping file (such as when you drag a URL from Safari’s location bar to the Finder), you get an exported version of the entire message. (This matches the behavior of previous versions of Mac OS X.) The first URL format listed above — message:%3cMESSAGE-ID%3e (no slashes) — is the one that Mail generates when you drag a message out of Mail. However, I have found that the second format — message://%3cMESSAGE-ID%3e (with slashes) — is better. Here’s why: if you paste the URL itself into a text field in any Cocoa app that uses NSTextView, you can then Control-click anywhere in the URL itself and use the Open URL and Make Link at the top of the contextual menu, because Cocoa will recognize the text as a URL. What’s essential to note about this is that you don’t have to select the entire URL first — you can just Control-click anywhere in the text of the “message:” URL and the entire URL will be selected for you, and the top two items in the contextual menu will be the two most applicable to a URL. With the other three formats, Cocoa won’t recognize the “message:” URL as a URL even if you select it exactly before invoking the contextual menu. (In short, it seems to me that Cocoa’s URL guessing parser assumes that URLs contain slashes after the colon.3) AppleScript to Copy the ‘message:’ URLs for Selected Messages I named the following AppleScript “Copy Message Link”. Select one or more messages in Mail, then invoke the script, and it will place “message:” URLs for each message, one per line, on the clipboard, ready to paste anywhere. It uses the “with slashes” format that works better in Cocoa NSTextViews. tell application "Mail" set _sel to get selection set _links to {} repeat with _msg in _sel set _messageURL to "message://%3c" & _msg's message id & "%3e" set end of _links to _messageURL end repeat set AppleScript's text item delimiters to return set the clipboard to (_links as string) end tell Save it in your ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail/ folder, and it will appear in Mac OS X’s [Script menu] when Mail is frontmost. Or, better, use Red Sweater’s FastScripts and you can assign it a keyboard shortcut. Mailsmith has supported a similar feature for quite some time, and many other apps offer something similar for referencing individual items inside a “library” database, e.g. VoodooPad and Yojimbo. It may sound trivial, but it’s one of the things I most missed about Mailsmith when I switched to Mail on Tiger back in June. ↩ The same goes for messages with malformed Message-ID headers, such as when the message-id is not enclosed within angle brackets in the header. Mail will produce “message:” URLs for such messages, but the URLs don’t actual resolve back to the original message. Again, however, in my cursory testing, the only messages with malformed Message-ID headers were spam. ↩ BBEdit’s URL parser is smart enough to grok either of the first two formats — so you can Command-click a “message:” URL in a BBEdit document whether it has slashes or not, so long as the angle brackets are encoded. ↩
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Mac 101: Four simple ways to make your Mac more efficient
Filed under: Mac 101Mac users love their machines for the "ease of use" and "simplicity." We agree, but completing a few simple steps (free and built-in, mind you), will make things even better.1. Easy access from the dockI always drag my hard drive and Applications folder into the dock. No need to minimize windows, invoke Expose or, worst of all, shuffle windows around manually to reach the folder or file you want. Just click to reveal a speedy, hierarchical menu.2. Learn some keyboard shortcutsMouse jockeys will balk, but memorizing even a few keyboard shortcuts will save you much time in the long run. For instance, most web browsers will select the address field with Command - L.Things get even more fun with the Finder. Shift-Option-D brings up the Desktop Folder. Shift-Option-A presents the Applications folder. Command-M minimizes the frontmost window. Is the dock in your way? Command-Option-D hides it away, and then calls it back. There are many shortcuts to choose from, but find the four or five that address the tasks you perform most often. Sure, it only takes a second to move from the keyboard to your mouse and back again, but seconds add up.3. Embrace the menu barSeveral applications offer functionality that can be accessed from the menu bar. For instance, you can set your iChat status and even monitor which of your buddies are online without launching the application. First, launch iChat and select "Preferences" from the iChat menu. Select "Show status in the menu bar" from the General tab. If someone initiates a chat with you, the application will launch in full and ask if you'd like to receive the invitation.There are others, of course. Initiate a sync (for MobileMe customers) or Time Machine backup, alter display settings, select a wireless network or check the date and time without exiting the program or project you're woring on. Many third party applications will let you interact with them via the menu bar as well.4. Mod your windowsThere's a lot of room for customization in Mac OS X's Finder windows. For instance, you can easily drag frequently accessed applications, files or folders into the sidebar. I keep AppZapper in the sidebar to quickly eliminate unwanted applications. To remove something from the sidebar, simply drag it out and let go. Poof! It's gone.The toolbar at the top of Finder windows is equally flexible. Again, you can drag files, folders or applications up there for one-click access. No more hunting through nested folders.Change the default icons by right-clicking (or Control-clicking) any neutral space in the toolbar and selecting "Customize toolbar..." from the resulting contextual menu. A sheet will appear with several options. Just drag-and-drop.Finally, you can keep related files color coded. Simpy right- or Control-click any file or folder and select the color you like under "Label" in the resulting contextual menu.So there you have it. This list is by no means exahustive, but represents four simple things you can do in fifteen minutes or less to make your Mac more effecient and fun. Best of all, there was nothing additional to buy or install. Happy computing!Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Ten Big New Features in Mac OS X Snow Leopard
Daniel Eran Dilger Apple is marketing the idea of there being “no new features� for Snow Leopard and instead promising an overall improvement in how Mac OS X works under the hood, thanks to a diligent code optimization and refactoring cycle discussed in the previous article. At the same time, there are plenty of significant new features coming in Snow Leopard to look forward to. Here are ten big new features (plus a few minor ones) that you probably haven't heard much about from anywhere else, including my previous articles on the subject that already described QuickTime X, Grand Central, and OpenCL. WWDC 2008: New in Mac OS X Snow Leopard Snow Leopard Server Takes on Exchange, SharePoint Pulling Invisible New Features into Snow Leopard. Apple's increasing collaborations with the open source community have pulled back the veil of secrecy on several new but mostly invisible enhancements that will be showing up in Snow Leopard. One relates to LLVM, the Low Level Virtual Machine compiler architecture project originally founded at the University of Illinois. Apple began contributing to LLVM development in 2005, and started using it Leopard to expand support for OpenGL hardware features. Lower-end Macs that lack the silicon to interpret that specialize graphics code can now do it in software. LLVM is also working its way into Apple's Xcode IDE, initially as a highly efficient optimizer and code generator that works as a bolt-on upgrade to components of GCC, but eventually as a complete compiler replacement. That project, known as Clang, was opened up last year. LLVM compiler technology not only makes developers more productive, but also results in code that runs significantly faster on the same hardware. Apple's other open secret: the LLVM Complier The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure Project Another openly hidden secret in Mac OS X is CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System. Beginning with Jaguar in 2002, Apple adopted and licensed CUPS from its developer as Mac OS X's printing engine. It then purchased the project outright. CUPS is also the de facto printing system for Linux distros and is available for BSD and other commercial Unix systems. That means Apple owns the project that develops the printing architecture for Linux. That's not an issue because Apple has established a reputation in open source as a strong contributor and open sharer. According to a review of bug fixes and improvements in CUPS software, 24% of the enhancements came from Apple while 76% came from free and open source software contributors working with Linux, OpenSolaris, and other projects. Of course, 100% of both sides benefited from that sharing. CUPS collaboration has resulted in high quality code and the advancement of new features. CUPS 1.4, the version sources say Snow Leopard will use, adds performance enhancements and a variety of security improvements that use sandboxing to prevent malware attacks on the printing system from being able to read sensitive documents that may be in use by printers. Common UNIX Printing System A third significant new feature originating from an open source project in Snow Leopard is ZFS support, portions of which come from the OpenSolaris project (along with Sun's DTrace technology, which Apple uses in its Instruments performance profiling tool). Leopard debuted read-only ZFS features, but Snow Leopard and Snow Leopard Server will provide both read and write support for Sun's new 128-bit file system. ZFS was designed to provide “simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability.� ZFS hype during the development of Leopard helped the new file system reach buzzword status as news of the three letter acronym swept through blogs and the tech media. It is frequently described as being the imminent replacement for the Mac's native HFS+. However, the benefits of ZFS including as storage pooling, data redundancy, automatic error correction, dynamic volume expansion, and snapshots all apply primarily to servers and higher-end workstation users who deal with multiple disk drives. ZFS isn't going to replace HFS+ outright in Snow Leopard, and has limited relevance today to desktop and laptop users, particularly those who never move beyond the single disk drive installed in their system. More Predictions for WWDC 2007: Solaris, Google, Surround Apple - Mac OS X Leopard - Developer Tools - Instruments Symbiotic: What Apple Does for Open Source Apple's Open Source Assault Pushing Visible New Features in Snow Leopard. Apple's extensive work in developing push support for Exchange Server on the iPhone will also be included in Snow Leopard's Mail, Address Book, and iCal. Push support in those client side apps are also being used to power MobileMe's push messaging subscription service and Snow Leopard Server's push messaging services. Apple will be offering both in parallel as alternatives to Exchange, thanks to smart planning on the part of Apple's engineers to develop an interoperable push architecture in Mac OS X and on the iPhone. There is also a fourth application of push that has developed alongside push messaging: Apple's new Push Notification Service. PNS allows iPhone and iPod touch users to set up server side notification alerts that don't require mobile applications to stay running in the background just to update users of the external events they track. Along with Bonjour discovery, PNS will keep iPhones wirelessly connected in all sorts of sophisticated ways that third party developers can imagine in their applications. Whether Apple will integrate a listener for the same PNS system into the desktop side of Mac OS X remains to be seen, but it would allow a single, unified interface for alerting client users of new events. I proposed a system wide, Growl-style notification system in the Leopard Wish List published back in 2005. Snow Leopard Server Takes on Exchange, SharePoint Apple’s Mobile Me Takes On Exchange, Mobile Mesh With the strong push into push messaging, Apple will make mobile devices even more tightly integrated with its desktop products. Leopard delivered Back To My Mac as a novel way to use Wide Area Bonjour's dynamic service registration as a mechanism for sharing resources served from home to any location without configuring static naming services for address lookups. Because any software can register itself with .Mac/MobileMe, this opens the door to third party developers with the vision to exploit the potential of these enabling technologies. A Global Upgrade for Bonjour: AirPort, iPhone, Leopard, .Mac Ten Big Predictions for Apple in 2008 Among the technologies profiled earlier in Myth 3 that have been trickling from the iPhone into Mac OS X, there's at least one idea I proposed for the iPhone that will be in Snow Leopard's Safari: self contained web apps. The new feature will allow users to run web applications as a local app in its own window, essentially making the web platform into a native-looking app that can run outside of Safari. I proposed a similar feature as a possibility for the iPhone prior to the announcement of the Cocoa Touch SDK: web apps packaged up into a set of files that could be run on the device as a Dashboard widget-like standalone app, even when off the network. Why Apple hasn't pursued such an obvious strategy is a little hard to figure out, but it seems they've got the ball rolling on the desktop. That ball will be rolling even faster thanks to SquirrelFish, a new JavaScript interpreter that will make Safari and any other WebKit-based browsers, standalone self contained apps, and Dashboard widgets all a lot faster. Apple's MobileMe, Yahoo's Flickr, and Google various web apps will all gain new speed thanks to faster JavaScript execution. SquirrelFish will also raise the bar in performance and efficiency in the Rich Internet Applications sector in general, giving Flash, Silverlight, and Java a faster, simpler, and more openly interoperable runtime to compete against. RoughlyDrafted: Leopard Wish List: 2005 How Open will the iPhone Get? Surfin’ Safari » Announcing SquirrelFish Microsoft's Application Features in Mac OS X, System Wide. Microsoft's business model of tacking on features hasn't been a total wash. The company's desperate efforts to invent novel marketing features for every new release of Windows and Office have pioneered a number of ideas that have later found their way into Mac OS X. One example is the idea of Fast User Switching, which Apple added to Panther. Windows XP pioneered the trick, but built it upon the kluge that is Terminal Services. Microsoft also helped originate the basis of Ajax web apps by inventing XMLHttpRequest in order to make its Outlook Web Access 2000 web app work decently within Internet Explorer. Today, standards-based web apps are eating a hole into Microsoft's monopoly on the proprietary desktop platform, and tools such as SproutCore and resulting products such as MobileMe are poised to tear down interoperability barriers and level the playing field. Microsoft may now regret having opened Pandora's Box in terms of standards-based web applications, but its efforts to seal the web back up with the proprietary Silverlight plugin, which turns web apps into .NET programs, will now be next to impossible. Another example of a Microsoft innovation are the fancy text features in Word, such as red underlining to highlight spelling mistakes and the green squiggle for grammar errors. Word also features a variety of word auto correction, smart dash insertion, and text replacement features (such as typing TM to get the ™ character). The former have already become system-wide features in Mac OS X, while sources indicate that the latter text processing features will find their way into Snow Leopard, and therefore every application that runs on it. RoughlyDrafted: Remote Display part 3: Terminal Server Cocoa for Windows + Flash Killer = SproutCore Super Size Me. On top of injecting Word features into its OS for the use of every application, Apple will also expand the use of its own Data Detectors, a technology it invented in the mid 90s for identifying useful bits of text and making it actionable. Leopard introduced Data Detectors in Mail as a way to extract contacts and events for use in Address Book and iCal, but Snow Leopard will expose Data Detectors everywhere it draws text. Sources also indicate Snow Leopard will expand upon Font Book to provide full Auto Activation of any fonts requested by any application, using Spotlight to track them down. Snow Leopard is also suggested to have a new set of frameworks specifically for working with multitouch trackpad gestures, patterned after those introduced with the MacBook Air. Speaking of the ultra-thin Air, sometimes less is more. However, the high cost and relatively low capacity of Solid State Drives like the $1000, 64 GB SSD option offered for the Air means that one Microsoft feature Snow Leopard could do without is bloat. As one reader noted, “Currently, Leopard requires 9 GB of available disk space for installation and iLife requires an additional 3 GB. This means that a product such as the [SSD] MacBook Air comes with the hard drive 20% full.� How the MacBook Air stacks up against other ultra-light notebooks Leopard Predictions for WWDC 2006 WWDC 2007: An Inside Perspective From the Halfway Point Think Small. Snow Leopard aims below the bloat to accommodate the coming wave of SSD-based systems. In the latest build, sources say Apple's own apps are losing weigh dramatically across the board. The apps in the Utilities folder all drop from 468 MB to 111.6 MB, for example. Other apps are similarly svelte, as the graph below indicates. Is this the product of just code optimization and shared resources? One factor likely relates to work on Resolution Independence, which substitutes bitmapped raster graphics (which define every pixel) with smaller vector graphics files (which draw GUI elements and controls by recipe). Vector graphics can be scaled to any size while retaining a high quality appearance, while bitmapped graphics can quickly look blocky when scaled up. Adding larger bitmapped versions can solve that problem, but at the cost of consuming more disk space. Apple earlier told developers it would be providing a library of shared, high quality vector graphics they could use instead of each packaging their own bitmapped art into every app. The dramatic size reductions in these apps must also involve more efficient Localization. For example, Mac OS X Leopard's Mail currently weighs in at over 285 MB, but the majority of its bulk comes from 18 language localizations inside the application bundle that consume 276 MB. The actual Universal Binary code is only a few megabytes and even its associated graphics and other resources only amount to 2.8 MB. Why does Apple default to dumping support for 18 or more languages in every app without providing any simple, centralized way to get rid of the unnecessary ones? Perhaps that question is answered in Snow Leopard, where Mail is reportedly just 91 MB. That's too big to simply to be an English-only, stripped down version for developers, but still far smaller than than Leopard's. Across the board, it appears Snow Leopard apps are about a third as large as their Leopard equivalents. And so while Snow Leopard paradoxically gains more useful features through code improvements and under-the-hood retooling rather than from a Microsoft-style new feature focus that aims to deliver “wow� with flashy marketing gimmicks, the system is also getting smaller and tighter. There must also be some other subtraction, right? Will Snow Leopard scrape away the old Carbon API? That's the next myth. WWDC 2008: New in Mac OS X Snow Leopard WWDC 2008: Is Mac OS X 10.6 the Death of Carbon? I really like to hear from readers. Comment in the Forum or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to my podcast! Submit to Reddit or Slashdot, or consider making a small donation supporting this site. Thanks! Technorati Tags: Apple, Development, Mac, Software
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Together updates to 2.1
Filed under: Software, ProductivityTogether 2.1 is a major upgrade for this ever-evolving information management application. Steve Harris, author of Together (and Feeder), has listened very carefully to user feedback and is turning up the heat with features that I've personally been waiting anxiously for. I'm a fickle suitor of many apps in this genre, constantly switching amongst the likes of Yojimbo, DEVONthink, Evernote, EagleFiler, SOHO Notes and some of my own concoctions. I've always liked Together's interface ... it just lacked certain functionality in some key areas of my workflow. Version 2.1 makes great strides to fill those gaps. My current workflow -- one that's lasted long enough for me to call it my system -- is heavily based on Spotlight comment tagging for gathering project-related information. This is rapidly becoming a universally-accepted method and is supported by many applications which can read and write their internal tags to and from Spotlight comments. Together has added both read and write functionality for such tags with a user-definable prefix, as well as the option to import keywords as tags. This means that the system I use in applications like Leap, Mail.app (with Mailtags), FileSpot and directly in Finder (with Spotlight) work hand-in-hand with Together now. You can even define default tags for groups and folders to assign to imported items, and Together can now automatically import files saved by external programs into its Library folders. The new support for external linking to internal items and a complete AppleScript dictionary kick off the highlights of the extensive release notes. A few other highlights include: Smart groups can now be based on other groups (including other smart groups) Recording of the date items are imported The option to create visually accurate Web PDFs instead of web archives A system-wide import hotkey A more useful Shelf that can tag and sort quick notes Quick Look in the Shelf Performance improvements in multiple areas Text highlighting in notes and documents Extensive preview options Text in imported emails is now selectable One deciding factor for me in choosing a system is the database vs. file system debate. It's a debate that spurs quasi-theological discussion, but ultimately it's a personal choice and somewhat dependent on your particular needs. I like file system storage as found in Together and EagleFiler because of its automatic integration with the rest of my applications. Files edited in an external application from Together are treated just like regular Finder files (because they are) and will show up in Recent Files menus and your Spotlight index. Yes, Yojimbo and DEVONthink have Spotlight plugins, but they have to go the extra step to write out their metadata. Together is also quite adept at dealing with filetypes it doesn't necessarily understand, letting the system handle default applications and Quick Look handle the previews. And lastly, all of my files are easily accessible outside of Together and not locked into a proprietary database. Together 2.1 is a free upgrade for current users. A new license will run you $39 and there's a demo available. And if you're thinking of switching from Yojimbo, there's an importer just for you on the downloads page.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Quick Look Folder and Zip plugins
Filed under: OS, Freeware, LeopardQuick Look is a beautiful thing, and in my view practically itself worth the cost of admission to Leopard. Unfortunately, the more you get used to it, the more annoying it is when you get to a file format that Quick Look doesn't support. Fortunately, Apple was smart enough to design Quick Look with an open architecture that allows developers to write their own plugins and support more file formats, which Japanese developer Taiyo used to write two excellent plugins.The first addresses a serious annoyance with the default Quick Look implementation on folders. If you invoke Quick Look with a folder selected in the Finder you'll get...a picture of the folder icon. Frankly, that's pretty stupid. Taiyo's Folder Quick Look Plugin fixes this by displaying the folder's contents, which is how it should have been done in the first place. Likewise, Taiyo's Zip Quick Look Plugin displays the contents of zip files.I'm sure we'll be seeing more and more of these expansions of Quick Look in the days ahead, which will make this quintessential Leopard feature that much more useful. Both the Folder Quick Look Plugin and the Zip Quick Look Plugin are free downloads. Place them in your /Library/QuickLook/ or ~/Library/QuickLook/ folders and they should work immediately.[via Digg]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments