Mumbling Again

Top 10 Mac Shareware/Freeware Apps

The new Mac geek meme going around. Om Malik writes, "why not take it a step further, and ask Mac Lovers - their ten most favorite apps." So here goes:

1. Desktop Manager – More desktop space is more productivity. Desktop Manager lets you create virtual desktops just like Gnome or KDE does under Linux. Its still a tiny bit buggy still but once you try it, you'll never go back. By buggy I mean its never crashed on me just confused the frontmost window occasionally.

2. TextWrangler – I paid for the bigger sibling, BBEdit which I've been using since 1995. TextWrangler does almost as much and the price is right—free. Even if you want to buy BBEdit, you should download TextWrangler and register it first for a discounted "crossgrade."

3. Saft – A Safari enhancer extraordinaire. Block ads, launch sites and search queries, and more.

4. Flip4Mac – I used to hate sites with Windows Media embedded in them, now it works transparently through QuickTime. Launch WMV files in QuickTime player too.

5. NetNewsWire Lite – RSS/Atom newsreader with a familiar interface.

6. Quicksilver – Theres a whole Way of Life™ behind this one. Its a launcher on steroids and much, much more.

7. Fink / Fink Commander – Stop bashing your head against the terminal window trying to compile binaries from the source. Begone missing libraries and make errors! Fink will download and install pre-compiled apps for you. There's a whole world of FOSS out there, go get it.

8. Firefox – Unfortunately some sites don't work in Safari even though it's the most standards compliant browser to date. When Safari fails its Firefox to the rescue.

9. GamePad Companion – Not just for gaming, this great creation lets me program the other 6 buttons on my Logitec MX900 mouse.

10. MacTheRipper – Not quite legal but you should back up your DVDs anyway. This wont burn but it will let you rip protected (store bought) DVDs so you can guard your investment from scratches, loss or theft.

Official iSync Support for PEBL with OS X

Just as I predicted in my original PEBL review, Apple has updated iSync to add support for the Motorola PEBL and a slew of other phones. You'll need to be running OS X Tiger with the 10.4.6 update that came out on April 3rd. This can be downloaded through the built-in Software Update program.

Using the Motorola PEBL with a Mac

This is not a generic review of the PEBL but rather one that is geared towards using it with a Mac. Check out Mobile Review if you want the full details, I don't want to be redundant.

This is the most beautiful phone I've ever held and it feels great in your hand. The rubberized metal shell is rugged but warm and somehow soft. The keypad is a little awkward at first but I easily adjusted to it and the subtle textures and raised divisions make it easy to operate without looking. Unfortunately the directional rocker with select button in the middle is very uncomfortable for me to use with my large hands. I've started holding the phone so that the bottom when flipped open is above my ring finger. This is slightly more ergonomic for me and doesn't hurt my thumb as much while using the rocker/select area. However this area is still very small and slippery compared to the other buttons and its easy to hit the wrong function.

Saft Shortcuts

Since my switch back to Safari and adoption of Saft, I've added a number of useful shortcuts to my Saft configuration. This feature of Saft allows you to quickly return search results from a site just by typing a shortcut and search phrase into the address bar. For example you could type "wiki web browser" to return this page. Continued with examples...

Safari vs. Firefox

I've been teeter-tottering back and forth between Safari and Firefox. I'm recently back to Safari since I broke down and bought Saft for the ad blocking ability. By the way, the Panther version doesn't block ads—I already made that mistake. Over all I love Saft now and it was worth every penny. Plus I like to support small Mac developers who fill a much needed niche.

Now that I have the same capabilities of the Firefox Ad Block plugin inside Safari, I realize that there are so many shortcomings in the OS X version of Firefox. My biggest complaints are a lack of Cocoa functionality like built in spell check and GUI inconsistencies in the form buttons and inputs. Having the Cocoa spell checking in textarea fields is really helpful especially when editing webmail or creating blog posts. Plus its great to have an operating system level spell check because your user dictionary spans across multiple applications. Now only if Bare Bones would re-write BBEdit in Cocoa instead of Carbon.

Also Brad Rice is right about the sheer speed of Safari. It launches much faster than Firefox. This hardly seems like a fair fight though when you consider that the Apple Web Kit framework is probably already running in OS X and Firefox has to load all the libraries to render a website from a standstill.

However, there is one area of performance where Safari falls painfully short of Firefox. When rendering a large (100k+) page of complex table structure, Safari really chokes. Unfortunately, there are some really poorly designed web applications that cause this exact problem which I'm required to use in my daily workflow. I guess I'll stick to Firefox for these few cases.

The good news is that rumor has it Firefox 2.0 will support more OS X native functions like native form GUI elements. I'll keep my fingers crossed for Cocoa spelling too.

Comment Spam and Installing MT-Scode on OS X

Recently I've been getting a lot of comment spam. It ironic because I haven't even written anything lately. The truth is I've been distracting myself with installing Debian Sarge on my old Dell and I recently decided to pick up Objective-C and Cocoa programming. Needless to say, its frustrating that the only time I've been spending with my blog is removing comments about onl1ne gam6ling and pr0n. Porting the blogs hosted on my box to another platform was something that I didn't want to consider and my choices for solving this problem while keeping movable type 2.x.x were limited. I found mt-scode and now that its running I think it will solve the problem better then banning IPs or using mt-blacklist. However getting it to work on OS X 10.3.9 was a challenge.

Download a Web Gallery with wget

Ok, let's skip the obvious jokes about downloading pr0n. People look at galleries of photos that their friends upload on the web too. If you want to download the entire gallery it can be tedious and time consuming. Enter wget—a great and free application that will allow you to download files off the web in an automated process. Give it a list of things to download and it will return a directory full of the files you wanted. The following tutorial covers two parts: Using a perl filter to extract the image paths from a web gallery and downloading the images with wget.

Laptop Maintenence Script

Quick Scripts and CLI Enhancements

cpan talks

cpan> install Mac::Files

Share Your EyeTV Archive

If you have an Elgato EyeTV PRV for your Mac and you want to share the recorded programs on a local network you've got a problem. I love the interface but you're pretty much forced to use it if you want to access your content. EyeTV stores your programs in a directory on your hard drive but its far from as user friendly as the system iTunes uses.