Tag Archives: leopard

Mac OS X Snow Leopard Pricing

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It’s been known for a while that the upcoming upgrade of Mac OS X Snow Leopard is $29, for people who already have Leopard. (Five user family pack is $49)

I didn’t know this, but for people who didn’t upgrade to Leopard, there’s a Mac Box Set with Snow Leopard , similar to a Mac Box Set including Leopard, priced at $169.

iLife and iWork separately costs $79 each from Apple. So by some fuzzy math, the person who gets this Mac Box Set ends up with paying $11 for Snow Leopard. Of course, this isn’t completely true, since people might not want iLife or iWork, but it’s interesting to see the repackaging that Apple has done here.

Note: I actually didn’t know of the existence of the Mac Box Set with Leopard until today. I wonder when this packaging happened… I did a search for a Mac Box Set with Tiger, but there doesn’t seem to be any information on it.

Oh, and if you still haven’t gotten your Snow Leopard yet…

Why Somebody (Me?) Needs To Write A Better Twitterific

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It’s been an OK application: A free application with a bit of ads strewn about. I can handle that… but there comes a time when one has to turn to the Pipes and start shouting complaints.

Welcome to my blog.

I do think that the $15 is a bit steep for an application like this, and since there was a free version, I was okay with it. But I’m fed up with it. I feel like writing my own Twitter client and undercut Iconfactory. Too bad I have very little knowledge in the ways of the Objective-C/Cocoa-fu. I guess it’s a good project to do while messing with the language/framework.

Anyway, I haven’t seen a Twitterific update in ages (Looks like it’s going to be about nine months), for one thing, which makes me feel like the people at Icon Factory aren’t really looking to beef this up (although they did release an iPhone version recently).

A few things I still don’t like about Twitterific:

  • Growl issues: I have the Twitterific window selected, and yet it still growls at me. Why? This seems like a very easy issue to fix… and we’re inching into month NINE without an update to this bug. I’m certain this isn’t just me, because I’ve seen it on… at least 4 Macs. (The 4 macs I’m talking about are the one’s that I’ve owned this year… My name is Josh Kim, and I’m an Apple-holic. But that’s a whole other blog post.)

  • Copying URLs and shortening them. I think we’re at the point where we assume that the feature for shortening URLs is built into the Twitter client of choice. I’ve used a couple in the past (Twhirl and TweetDeck come to mind…). There has to be a better UI for this type of action… maybe when I copy and paste a link, don’t count that as a part of the character limit, but have a second stage where you confirm your post.

  • Actually, that second stage would be awesome in reducing spelling errors and silly things that happen with a trigger happy Twitterer like myself. Not only that and the url shortening, we’d be able to input data on location and images that we’d want to associate with the Tweet.

Okay, Mr. Idea-but-no-action-man… get to it. Sigh.

TextMate: Desktop Blogging Software for the Mac (vs Ecto and MarsEdit)

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In an effort to streamline the blogging process, I’ve been looking at some alternatives to my current usage of TextMate. I hope by doing this that it’ll save a lot of time and reduce the friction required to get a post up here.

Instead of using the web interface provided by WordPress, I’ve been using TextMate as my main blog editor (blogged about it here). I’m pretty sure a whole lot of you developer kinds have heard about TextMate and the ridiculous extensibility of the bundles, but it seems as though the Blogging bundle has been gone largely unmaintained for some time. (Maybe a year or so, but I may not be looking hard enough. I even looked through the public list archives, but couldn’t find anything… If anyone knows of the status of this project, let me know.)

Previous Workflow

When I get the desire to write, this is normally how it goes:

  • Open up a new blog page using shortcut I crafted (ctrl + opt + cmd + n)
  • Fill out the text for “Title: “
  • Write the post
  • Create keyword field (“keyw” + tab), fill out keywords
  • Create category field (“cat” + tab), wait for server, select which blog I want, select the blog AGAIN in a second dialog box(for some reason, this never got fixed)

Then I’d fill out the title, and start writing. After I was done, I would type “keyw” + tab for the keyword field, then type my keywords, cmd + opt + ctrl + p for preview, and post using ctrl + cmd + p to post online.

Problems With This Workflow

  • Timezone Bug: Talked about this before. I don’t know if this is ever going to be fixed, where if you reupdate an old post, you will continuously subtract or add the difference from your time zone and the GMT. For example, if I fetched this post and reposted it, it would be 5 hours behind. I didn’t realize this for a long while until I started posting in intervals faster than 5 hours when I noticed that certain posts were written earlier than I had thought.
  • Double Dialog Boxes: There’s also a strange bug requiring a blog to be selected twice on the drop down menu before looking up categories or posting to the blog. If you’ve got multiple blogs, this is just a little annoying.
  • No live preview
  • Image Handling: It’s cool that you can tell it to upload to your blog, but there’s no image manipulation… nor is there a way to get some Flickr integration.
  • File Creation And Saves: The file that you create while posting should have the filename of the post title. If there is no title, then ask them with a dialog box. (I love this feature in MarsEdit and Ecto. I don’t have to worry about making up crazy permutations of “asdf” and numbers.)

Features That I Hope To Keep

  • Linking: Creating links from the clipboard (ctrl + shift + L) and from the top Google search (ctrl + cmd + shift + L) is a feature I don’t want to let go.
  • Snippets: There’s something to be said about TextMate’s ability to do so much with so little. The ability to type a few characters and hit tab to create a data field is ridiculously handy.

And so, I have started to look at Ecto and MarsEdit, to see if I can become a little faster. But of course, I don’t think I’ll be able to let go of TextMate for everything else. So many lovely shortcut keys… the delicious snippets… everything, but for this specific domain of blogging.

Another Thing I Can't Stand on a Mac: Lag on Dictionary.app Lookup

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Before Leopard, everything was fine. I was able to open up dictionary, look up a word, be happy that I learned a new word, and close the window. Done.

Is it just me, or does the Leopard Dictionary.app SUCK in the lookup time? I’m talking about the time from when you find the word you want and opening up the definition. With respect to Tiger, this is unacceptable. Back in those days, it was actually fun (yes, I’m a nerd, figure it out) searching through the dictionary.

Let me know if this is just me, because I’ve tried this on both my macs, as well as a Tiger machine just to see the search lag difference.

I also should go to the Apple forums to see if this issue has been reported.

EDIT: Looks like 10.5.3 update fixed this. I am delighted.

Reinstalling Leopard on the MacBook Air

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If you do a Google search for anything related to leopard macbook air installation or reinstallation, you get all these blog posts about how the included DVDs will only work on a MacBook Air. This is obviously not news… Apple has been including system specific discs for some time… But really, that’s beside the point. This post is for those that are really truly looking to “(re)install leopard on a macbook air”.

This is in the users manual, by the way, on page 46. It looks like that there is an included application to do just this called: “Remote Install Mac OS X”. Thank you, Quicksilver, for making my search for this application that much quicker.

Very Important (and the mistake I made twice): DO NOT try to run the Mac OS X Install Disc 1 through Remote Disc. This is not the right way to reinstall Leopard on your MacBook Air. You’ll just keep putting in your password and restarting your computer wondering why nothing is happening.

It’s taking a ridiculously long time for my MacBook Pro at the “Waiting for MacBook Air to start up…” dialog box, which is highly discouraging. I even bought the Ethernet dongle so that this process would be made at least fast as if I had a USB external DVD drive (Gigabit ethernet isn’t the bottleneck (1 Gbps), it’s the USB 2.0 (480 Mbps)).

Oh. It’s done. Time to go nuts and reformat the thing.

And yes, I’ll start blogging again soon. That’s one of the many reasons why I bought this thing to begin with. Now… if it’ll work as it should, I’ll be very very very happy.

Prism vs Fluid: Local Web Application Management on Mac OS X

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Basically it boils down to: Don’t use Prism. Yet. It crashes quite often, and not in the way you’d probably want it to crash: It just eats away at your processor until you realize that while you were listening to music on your headphones that the fans were going insane and the processor was running at 81 degrees. Celsius.

The OMFG screenshot came into being while I was testing out some Fluid Applications (The last three applications were Fluid Applications). It’s been a while since I used it, but it looks like it’s getting better and better. A lot of great things in the horizon… but it’s too bad it isn’t open sourced (See Post Here). I’d love to start messing around with the guts…

More about Fluid

But anyway, it looks great, and feels even better. I love being able to command+tab into a web application. Not only that, I can even see some statuses on the desktop icon itself.

Fluidapp Desktop Icon Notifcation

But of course, the nerdy neat freak in me decided to figure things out over lunch and see if there was a way to change the icons to look a bit better. I don’t really thing a 16×16 pixel icon would do in an Apple environment… After poking at flickr a bit, I found these two lovely icons.

Gmail Icon

Gmail Icon at Flickr: Direct Link

Facebook Icon

Facebook Icon at Flickr: Direct Link

These are actual .icns files, rather than just images. Thanks to autodafe0728, I was able to make two of my most accessed Fluid app’s icon amazing.

How do you actually use these .icns files? Well, you have to pick an icon when you create your Fluid app, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to change it after you’ve created it. So if you already have one, delete it, and just remake this new one after setting the “Icon: ” field to the .icns file rather than the default “Use Website Favicon”.

Enjoy. More on this web application vs. desktop application business later.

Apple's Taking a Beating on the Markets…

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Apple released a statement on the 12th (and in a few weeks, this is going to be the wrong link), with my commentary, as much as I can remember having on that day:

iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is.

Yes, Mr. Jobs. We want to give you money! We knew June. Of course, a nice rebate would be good.

[Sidenote: By the way, I'm most likely not going to get one. Why? Two reasons: Programmability and Power.]

However,

I don’t likes the looks of thissss.

iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned.

“We screwed up. But you still love us, right?”

Of course, Mr. Jobs. We love you. Here, have some more money. When’s Leopard coming out so I know to save up my $150?

While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October.

October? Wasn’t the original date Spring 2007? What, is Apple pulling a Vista?

We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones. [Apr 12, 2007]

But of course, had I known this announcement would be made the day after I started my IRA Roth… if I knew about Leopard missing the already pushed back deadline… if I knew the market would look like this for the week to follow:

APPL

Blah.

This post made by an ex-Apple employee definitely sums up the possible reason as to why… things are becoming shaky, just a tiny bit.

Back It UP!

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After finding out the new release of Carbon Copy Cloner (donation-ware FTW! I don’t need no Super Duper… but it probably does have some nice features. Someone do a comparison, please!), I’m finally getting around to backing up my hard drive. The beta still looks like it’ll pass for what I need. It keeps track of files that were backed up and only updates the ones that have been changed since the last backup, which will save me oodles of time. Also, the ability to automate backups is awesome, as well.

This is… until Time Machine comes out. Tee hee.

I have a 160GB external, so what I’m going to do is have a 75GB Mirror of my hard drive, while use the extra space for extra media (movies, tv shows, you know… all the kinda legal stuff I have… and eventually my music, photos, videos if I start to run out of room on the 75 GB mirror).

This means… I’m going to spend a lot of time restructuring my folders. I’ll share my method of keeping sane what large amount of files I have, and maybe it’ll help you to organize your stuff.

As with all things Apple, they try to simplify your folder structure by giving you some folders to work with.

Folder Structure

This is the folder structure of my users (~/jk) folder. This is pretty much the standard folder structure for all macs (except for that vmware folder for VMWare).

  • Applications: Since this is under the Users directory, all it has is the CrossOver Internet Explorer Installed. This is no longer necessary because I have a computer that I can remotely connect to for all my IE testing from IE 4, 5, 5.5, 6, and 7… and so this folder will be empty.
  • Desktop: Should be empty. Always. It’s kinda like my own version of a temp folder, with the added benefit of the folder’s content being in your face at all times, shouting “PUT THIS CRAP AWAY”.
  • Documents: This is where we really see the JK organization shine. I have these folders:
    • blog: Folder for all my possible blog entries
    • bookshelf: PDF’s and other texts I’ve collected over the years, ranging in topics from programming to Korean cinema to entrepreneurship
    • desktopdev: Probably the least accessed folder… where all of my desktop development code exists. Needless to say… it hasn’t been touched for months.
    • etc: Personal files, Sermon notes, Sheet music, High School files… just lots of “et cetera” things
    • financial: All of my Financial documents; FAFSA, Income Tax…; categorized by years
    • job: Resumes, Cover Letters, Previous Job Informations; categorized by years
    • note: Notes I take during lectures, readings… just stuff I write down that I wouldn’t blog
    • restore: iCal backup database, Address book backups, Some application installers (you know… the kind that doesn’t come as a pretty single icon…), local MySQL backups
  • Movies: Empty.
  • Music: Not Empty. I spent some time fixing some more metadata of my songs today, and I feel like it’s pretty clean enough to make a backup with it. No need for making DVDs of it… cuz it would take… 8 DVDs or so to back it up properly.
  • Pictures: There were two photos that were corrupt (I bet you, from the corrupt memory days…), which I fixed since I had a previous backup on a DVD. Thank goodness for backups…
  • Sites: All of my website projects are kept locally here
    • iteration: Actual files from previous web projects
    • …project name…: Different client projects get their own folders, and are highlighted by color for ease of use
    • joshkim: For joshkim.org; css/html files for design and such
    • portfolio: The cleaner version of iteration, still need to make it prettier
    • source: Code I didn’t write, but will be referring to for guidance or pure copyage

This directory structure has been pretty good so far… but I have a feeling it’s going to change again the next time I do a planned back up. From now on, I’ll be doing backups every week; just not sure at what time and day, but I’ll be sure to set that sucker on automatic.

Next thing I have to do is start moving from OmniOutliner files to straight up text files. And to also solve the issue with saving extensionless “Document” type files that aren’t having the nice little purple TextMate logo (which show up in “More Info” as “Plain Text Document”).

I know, I’m OCD about these things… I found out a quick fix for this “issue” (more like… an annoyance) by just setting the extension of the file to be .txt.

I think this pretty much makes me ready for a backup. Time to go home and just let CCC do its job.

But first, more posts? It is indeed… March 1st… and I got nothing done today except get ready for this backup…