So, what’s it about? Some of you (probably the majority of Apple customers) might have heard about “Things”, an “Getting Things Done” (GTD) application suite contained of an Mac App, an iPhone App and an iPad App that let’s you organize tasks and projects for yourself. Several years ago, the developing company CulturedCode won the Apple Design Award with their pretty neat desktop application. Thanks to my buddy Andreas, who bought me my Things for Mac license in 2009 as a birthday present, I started using the software from it’s quite early 1.x phase. I really loved the application, especially because of its clean and simple design and its ease of use. After quite a while my needs started to change, though. I wanted to have both of my Macs in sync, for example. I played around with Dropbox and found a way to do that, although it didn’t allow me to have Things on both machines open at the same time. Soon, more and more people started writing about how they’d love synchronization features for things, especially OTA (“Over the Air”) sync. And CulturedCode reacted. In mid 2009 they already published a roadmap that was “not a roadmap” and wrote about them having worked since the beginning of that year on a “really sweet” OTA solution that should be better than the competitors’ products.

This means, they actually announced their work on an OTA feature in mid 2009 with the additional info, that they’ve been working already for around 8 months on it. The people who read that and don’t really know about usual timelines for such big IT projects might expect a solution to finally be there in a couple of weeks or maybe months, especially after reading a sentence like this:

Okay, those fanboys and Mac addicts who can’t wait for such kind of delicious features now got pretty aroused and everyone else (especially the people who haven’t spent around 40 bucks on a Things license plus another eight bucks on Things for iPhone so far) really started considering Things as serious solution for their task-planning needs.

Then, till April 2010, CulturedCode didn’t blog about anything related to sync at all. From August 2009 till April 2010, that’s nearly one year without letting users actually know what happened to OTA sync. Meanwhile, many people spent their money on Things, mostly because they trusted in CulturedCode and it’s blog post announcing their work on OTA sync in 2009. And yeah, they haven’t heard about the sync feature for quite a while, but still they saw that progress was made in other areas, so there was not much of a reason to think of CulturedCode being dead or something. Especially, after reading their follow ups about the team growth, people thought, “Eh, it can’t take that long anymore!”.

In the meantime, I became responsible for handling the Mac infrastructure at my employer. For me, it was pretty clear what solution I would be deploying on people’s MacBooks when they’ve been asking me for some GTD application. I thought of Things as a solid and reliable application and the fact that CulturedCode was a Stuttgart-based company made it even more attractive for me to order a volume-license for Things.

People were getting hungry about the OTA sync feature and I guess CulturedCode really saw a need to act, so in December 2010 (8 months later) they released it. Oh, no, not the OTA sync feature, I’m sorry. They released the first chapter of a set of blog posts regarding the OTA sync feature: State of Sync, Part 1. Instead of providing a first beta, what would be appropriate after theoretically 2 years of work, they provided information about general problems on OTA/Cloud synchronization and some nicely drawn wallpapers for your Mac, your iPhone and even your iPad. Hurray to the design department. But people didn’t yell at CulturedCode, not even after 2 years of waiting. Instead, comments like those were written:

This is what I’d call loyal customers.

However, in January, the second post about the “State of Sync” was published. It looked like there was at least some thinking and progressing on the OTA sync feature. Even if it’s not really what customers expected after over two years of development. In March, CulturedCode released part 3 of their blog odyssey, introducing a sign-up for for Cloud sync beta. Hurray, people could sign up and had to wait for the Beta to start. So they did and nearly two months later the first couple of users got approved as beta users and received the testing instructions. Unfortunately, Cloud sync was only available for Things for Mac at that time. It took the CulturedCode people nearly one year to introduce Cloud sync (beta) on iOS! By that time, other products like Wunderlist, that already provided OTA sync attracted more and more former Things users. For new users it was super-attractive too, since they didn’t charge 40 bucks for their desktop client. Actually they didn’t charge for anything. It has just been there. Free to use.

Existing CulturedCode customers became pretty sad or angry or let’s just call it pissed. Pissed about the fact that they still don’t have a fully working cloud sync solution. Pissed about the fact that they spent 40 bucks on a Mac software, maybe 8 bucks on an iPhone App and maybe even 15 bucks on an iPad App. For what? Yeah sure, you’re not buying software for what it might become, you’re buying software for what it is, I know. But let’s be honest, even Andy Potion, who’s pretty much a one-man-show, did a quicker job with The Hit List, in comparison to CulturedCode’s timeline. And not to mention that not too long ago, the creators of Wunderlist – 6Wunderkinder – just launched their new, web based Wunderkit service, that introduces collaboration. And by “collaboration”, I don’t mean the “I’m creating sidebar entries ouf of my Address Book information and drag Tasks onto them to remind myself who’s in charge, without any functionality of actually really letting the people know that they’re in charge”-CulturedCode-collaboration. I mean real collaboration, where you get notified about tasks that have been assigned to you. And it’s web based, too. And there are Apps for it. And it’s even free of charge. And all that it probably half the time CulturedCode had. So, let’s be serious: You do not buy software, for what it might become, but in consideration of such heavy-armed competition, you’d expect the developer to hurry the flock up!

Suddenly, people began to realize all that and the five-star ratings on the App Store became one-star ratings:

People got fed up and CulturedCode became quiet. Not much response on people’s angry tweets to calm them down, no more information about the actual progress, nothing. One possible response could have been to slash the prices on their software for a limited time, to allow existing customers to extend their suite. Another would have been spreading coupon codes for Things for iPhone or Things for iPad. They could have teamed up with several reviewing sites to get media attention on their existing products and their existing features. I mean, after all it still is a beautiful product. It might be over-priced, it might be slow in development and it might not support features that should be mandatory for a 2012 GTD application suite, but still it’s a good piece of software and the jobs it can do, it does extremely well. Unfortunately, CulturedCode has let the users put the focus too much on features they were clearly unable to deliver in an realistic amount of time. There was progress on Things, even if it wasn’t that much, but there was and still is – unfortunately this progress drowned in the OTA-sync-well created by the users. On one hand, CulturedCode had to respond somehow, on the other, they probably wanted to get themselves a bit more time, just a bit more time. In my opinion, their response was influenced too much by their user’s pressure and I got the feeling, that they did not respond because they felt the urge to provide information about what’s going on. The blog posts were nicely written and had some very cool drawings, still it’s not what the users actually wanted. They didn’t want to read philosophical posts about Cloud synchronization or comparisons between MobileMe and Dropbox. And I believe, that, if CulturedCode would have provided more information about OTA (and their other internal project / development progress) without users permanently requesting it via Twitter, E-Mail or even App Store reviews, the whole situation would look way more relaxed these days. I think in general it’s pretty simple to say: Either you try to make your internal development process more transparent to your customers, so they can get a feeling for what to expect and when, or you do it the Apple-way and shut the f*ck up until it’s ready. You don’t get people excited about a feature and let them wait three years for a first beta.

However, in February of this year CulturedCode started their public beta of Things Cloud, so now everyone can at least get a taste for what is probably going to be released someday. Still, people are mad, because rudimentary features like task-notifications don’t work so far – IT guys understand, that it’s pretty hard to notify the user about content you might not even have available on the specific device, regular people instead just get the impression that Things now stars getting OTA sync, but loses existing features for that, what’s a bit unsatisfying.

I had a testdrive account for their private beta and used (and sometimes still use) it – and I liked what I saw, to be honest. Still, I moved over to another solution, just because from my current point of view it integrates better with what’s important to me and costs less, due to the fact that the desktop client is built into OS X (Calendar) and the iPhone/iPad client is one universal binary, priced at something around three bucks. The app developer answers pretty quickly to questions, even via Twitter and customers are being involved right into the development progress, by asking about their preferences regarding certain, to-be-implemented features via Facebook and other modern social media. I mean, come on, it’s not that hard: If you follow some simple rules and strategies, customers will stay loyal at any time, no matter how delayed a long-awaited feature might be. I think, that one of CulturedCode’s biggest problems was and has always been the direct communication. I personally see them like people have probably seen Microsoft several years a ago: A big and massive brick where customers can’t really reach someone that has an open ear for their thoughts and their wishes. A machinery that produces software the way it thinks its best for the customer, without involving him in that progress. But we’re not talking about huge corporations with a super-huge user-base here!

Well, anyway, at last but not least, I would like to lose some words about direct communication to the customer. I’m not the person that posts Steve Jobs’ emails on my blog – not that I would have ever gotten any – and therefor I’m not going to post the details about my email conversation with Jürgen Schweizer, one of the CEOs of CulturedCode, here. Instead, I just want to talk about the feeling I had during that conversation. It started with a tweet from a guy I actually don’t know, complaining about – you might guess it – Things’ missing OTA feature. He had a short conversation with CulturedCode on Twitter about that and I got into it to confirm the points he made, since I found them totally true and understandable. I ended up writing a mail to Jürgen Schweizer, to answer some direct messages he sent me via Twitter. In my opinion, the mail was polite and reflecting the way I (and many other customers) felt at that time. No bitching, no screaming, just some honest feedback from one of their users. What I got back instead was a mail, that truly made me feel a bit stupid and uncomfortable. I was a bit disappointed, about the way a CEO writes to one of his paying customers and intentionally makes him feel, like he has been writing something he should feel bad about. This is not the feeling you’d expect from a representing person of a company, regardless of how rude the customer might have been. You don’t indirectly tell the customer, that he (and/or other users) are disrespectful. Never. It’s a paying customer who actually supports your product through buying it – and even if this customer should get sad, angry or really mad and no matter how upset or uncomfortable you are with the things he’s been writing you, it’s in your responsibility to always keep the conversation at a level where you can point out your view without indirectly making the customer feel insulted or whatever. It’s useless to try to argue, who’s wrong or right with a customer – in the end, the only thing that matters is, that people get the feeling, that this company cares about its customers and really wants their products to make them happy. It’s always bad, when a company’s way of leading conversation makes their customers get a negative feeling.
For example: Some while ago, I’ve downloaded a movie via iTunes on my MacBook. Later, I wanted to watch it on my iMac, so I transferred it to to my iPhone (because that’s the only way I knew) and from there I tried to transfer it to my iMac. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out and I lost the movie, literally. The file was gone somehow and I could not re-download it at that time. I called the Apple Support and told them, what I tried to do and that I found it pretty meh anyway, that there was no other possibility to get a movie from my MacBook to my iMac. Now, the Apple Support could have told me, that I was trying to do something that was not intended by Apple to be done and made me feel really stupid by that and leave me alone with my transfer problem. Or they could have provided me a way, to download the movie again on my iMac, so I could watch it there. Or they could have just hung up. But instead, the support guy on the other side added a credit for watching two movies of any kind from the iTunes Store for free, just because of the inconvenience caused. And see there, the customer was happy. I bitched about the fact that there was no possibility to simply transfer the movie from one Mac to another, but in the end, Apple just made up for that by allowing me to download the movie again plus watch another movie – for free! This is, what I call customer relationship. The customer is not an enemy threatening you with feature-requests, he’s the nice guy from vis-à-vis who loves your product that much, that he agreed on giving you a part – even if it’s just a small part – of the money he has been working for so hard, just to give you the opportunity to continue developing such a great product. So please, companies of this world, treat him like this.

Just my two cents. Thank you for reading.

First of all: Hell, yeah! iTunes Cloud finally removed the pain and anger brought by Apple’s policy of having an iPod Touch/iPhone only linked with one iTunes Library. For me, it has always been a pain to synchronize my music in a smooth way all over my devices (iMac, MacBook, iPhone), especially when it came to MP3s. The fact that iTunes didn’t consider MP3s when using “transfer purchases” took any chance (except of using “Home Sharing”) to get MP3s synchronized all over. With iTunes content I permanently had to go that way: Buy them on my iPhone, connect the phone to my iMac when I was at home, “transfer purchases”, reconnect the iPhone to my MacBook when I was at work, “transfer purchases”, all done. But with MP3s this didn’t work.

Now thanks to iTunes Match and iTunes Cloud, MP3s are being matched to actual iTunes Store content and, if nothing could be found, the MP3s are being uploaded to the cloud, from where they can be streamed/downloaded to all registered devices. Sounds awesome, huh?

Well, actually, it really is awesome. There are some downsides, for example the *very* slow iTunes Match servers for uploading data. I’m not sure if that’s only because of the instant heavy load that recently hit the servers or if Apple just didn’t spend enough money for the server’s to be the dog’s balls. Anyhow, besides of that everything runs just fine so far. Streaming/downloading works with good speed (no endless seconds of buffering, nor interrupts while playing), artwork yet seems to be a little problem since here it doesn’t seem to get synchronized instantly all over my devices and the iTunes Match recognition works okay (only have/had to upload around 1k songs of nearly 5k).

The only thing that really bothers me is the fact that my iPhone actually gets flooded with music and the only way I found to remove recently “streamed” (or “streamed and automatically downloaded) music is by scrolling through my list with nearly 5k rows and swipe-to-remove each song I’d like not to have on my iPhone anymore, so I can use the 16GB for more than just audio.

It would be really nice if someone could point me a better solution to fix that issue or, if there is none, if Apple could please implement a feature that allows me to “clear the least played songs”.

Oh well.

iTunes Match

I’ve always used my blog as platform to share useful information with others, get feedback from comments that were posted and mails I’ve received. I’ve slowly built it up step by step from the 20th of March 2005 with a pretty rudimentary and early version of WordPress at that time. Due to my interest and work within the open-source area around Linux and the GNOME Desktop at that time, I had pretty much content I loved to share with other people interested in those topics.

By the time passing, the content of my blog also changed. I slowly moved away from Linux as an desktop operating system, towards using Mac OS X and its tools. Meanwhile, I took my own know-how about the Linux operating system on a higher level by starting to use it heavily as server-side operating system. My blog posts became from “Hey, check out this desktop notifications daemon I’ve written! There wasn’t anything like that on the GNOME desktop, now there is!” and “Oh look, this would be a great idea for a Sync-Application on the GNOME Desktop” to information sources for setting up a Linux instance on Amazon’s EC2 service, stripping down Ubuntu Servers to several hundreds Megabytes and setting up a Debian server that provides SSL-secured WebDAV with LDAP as authentication back-end. So instead of sharing useful information for Linux desktop users, I transited to share information about my experiences and creations on the Mac.

Through the years, my blog grew bigger and bigger, with more and more content. I was pretty happy with how it worked out, except of one part: The design. “devilx.net” never really had an unique identity shaped by its own design. I switched the look & feel several times, using freely available WordPress themes with smaller changes hacked by myself. For the pure sake of information sharing it worked out, but due to that my blog never really got its “own face”. I wanted to change this fact for like ever already, unfortunately I never really had the time and – what’s even more important – the muse for doing so. Now, after all those years – and especially after the last few months, in which the majority of returning visitors probably thought of my blog being another victim by the Twitter, Facebook and other Web 2.0 platforms’ distraction-hype – I decided to take the time, search for at least some creative inspiration and replace my yet-another-downloaded-WordPress-theme with something made with my own hands, giving my blog its own shape and style.

My abilities in the matter of creativity and design clearly aren’t the best, but I thought like… “Man, 2011 is coming, you just have to!”. So I turned on Pixelmator in full-screen mode and started drawing. I kinda had like dozens of concepts, drafts and even several PXM-to-XHTML implementations, but none really was something I’d like to have running on the internet, with my name on it. Meanwhile, I was testing Posterous, one of those Web 2.0-“we can streamline your blog with your Twitter account, your Facebook profile and the two-hundred-forty-nine other platforms you might be using”-services, which should have been the second update for today actually. I really liked it and I liked their theme-templating. I gave it a first shot, by exporting my WordPress’ database and importing it into Posterous.

The result unfortunately was… well… pure fail. It stopped at twenty-one out of several hundreds and didn’t advance for a couple of hours. After contacting the Posterous support, I got the advice to first clean up my WordPress’ spam-queue, re-export the database and try it again. So I did and finally the import ran through pretty quick. Curiously I checked out how the imported Posterous site looked, since I didn’t thought of for example comments being also imported. For my surprise, they were. Unfortunately, the import was incomplete. Some why three-fourth of my WordPress blog posts were missing. Again, I contacted the support which answered after two days, telling me that they’re on the problem and can’t provide me any help yet.

While I was waiting for a solution to my problem, I already translated one of my drafts into Posterous’ templating format – but soon I kind of realized, that Posterous isn’t pretty much what I needed. It works for many people and it surely is a very cool service, free of charge! But for me, as someone that’s pretty much into technology it’s just way too inflexible and closed. For example, I have found a way to import my WordPress’ data, but none to export the Posterous data. I guess, hacking through the API is probably the only way to do so. Also, Posterous’ content delivery isn’t performing really well, at least when requested from Germany. I built in some Base64-encoded images and a @font-face (because Posterous does not provide you any space for actually uploading pictures, which is why you would need to pay for some webspace or at least an Amazon S3 account anyway) and as soon as they were live, the page’s loading-speed decreased to a quite ugly value. Also I was unsatisfied with the template-editor/-previewer Posterous provides – it is really slow and for me (as web developer et al.) a pure pain to use.

Please don’t get me wrong – as I’ve said before, Posterous (as well as Tumblr and all those other services) really is something great, especially when you’re into writing quick shouts most of the time. But for me, as a person who likes the ability to extend the platform for sharing information to fit my (growing) needs, Posterous and others simply are too limited.

However, after realizing that I won’t give up my WordPress from one day to another (and by that actually had no second update to share with you today while I’m still sticking with the plural “updates” in this article’s first few lines), I’ve re-started concept-creation, drafting, mocking and all that stuff professional designers probably do the whole day. In the end, I came up with a pretty neat design that fits my taste pretty good and isn’t too exaggerated or improper to be used on a blog: It’s the design you’ve been staring at for the last, well, I would say fifteen minutes, if I haven’t already talked you into sleep.

“Okay, so your blog isn’t dead yet, huh?” – Yepp, that’s right (and that is the second update, hah!). I’m really looking forward to the next years of blogging, sharing and communicating with others. In the past several years digital life changed a lot and blogs became more and more irrelevant thanks to the possibility of fast and instant exchange with each other through Twitter for example. Unfortunately people sometimes tend to forget, that all those tweets would be nothing without the information behind them, that contains more than only 140 characters.

Having said this, I wish everyone a nice evening (CET UTC+1) and furthermore a great year in 2011. Have fun!

However, since (at least for me) there’s nothing comparable to Things, I’m trying to benefit from using it the best I can. One possibility to do so is the automation of task-creation. Wouldn’t it be cool to have Things automatically pack specific e-mails together as tasks you would only need to get done – without actually having the trouble of importing the information from Mail.app manually into Things first? I solved this problem for myself by using a feature that Things, Mail.app and Mac OS X provide me by default: AppleScript.

Now, how would this automated task-creation look like. First, a piece of code is needed, which gets the specific information out of an e-mail and tells Things to add those information to its library. The CulturedCode Wiki already provides us such a script and first I’ve tried to use that. Unfortunately, the script seems to be something hacked together with Apple’s Automator and interferes with the UI, what causes the process of task-creation to be visible to the end-user. I didn’t want that – so I just hacked together my own AppleScript using the AppleScript Edior:

on perform_mail_action(info)
	tell application "Mail"
		set selectedMessages to |SelectedMessages| of info
		set theRule to |Rule| of info
		repeat with eachMessage in selectedMessages
			set theSubject to subject of eachMessage
			set theContent to content of eachMessage
			tell application "Things"
				set newToDo to make new to do with properties {name:theSubject, due date:current date, notes:theContent} at beginning of list "Inbox"
			end tell
			set the (read status) of eachMessage to true
		end repeat
	end tell
end perform_mail_action

You can simply copy & paste this code into your AppleScript Editor and save it somewhere in your filesystem as AppleScript.

Next, we need this script to be called as soon as a new mail arrives. Let’s use Mail.app’s “Rules” for doing that!

Mail.app Rule for Mail to Things

As “Run AppleScript” the script you’ve saved before needs to be specified. What rule you use for yourself actually depends on your incoming mails. In this example, I’m checking the mail’s subject to contain the string [ToDo]: for the script to act on that e-mail. Of course, you can also add another action *after* the “Run AppleScript” for Mail.app to delete the mail afterwards. The only thing my script does is to mark the mails that matched as read.

Now try it out on your own. Write yourself an e-mail containing your match-criteria and you’ll see that the script will automatically add a new task within your Things’ Inbox, containing all details from within the mail itself. Of course, this script can be enhanced for example by leaving away the match-criteria from the subject (s/matchpattern//g), by cutting off everything after “– ” (signature) or maybe even delegating the task to a co-worker or an area of responsibility by parsing the mail’s body. Feel free to extend it the way you need it.

PS: You can make the Inbox entries not being due by today by simply removing the “due date:current date” parameter from the script.

//UPDATE:

Because this whole automation topic is so much fun, I’ve just written an AppleScript that automatically adds every conversation-line you receive that starts with the pattern “task: ” to your Things Inbox.

Here’s the AppleScript:

using terms from application "iChat"
	on message received theMessage from theBuddy for textChat
		set theBuddy to full name of theBuddy

		if theMessage starts with "task: " then
			tell application "Things"
				set newToDo to make new to do with properties {name:theBuddy & ": " & my LeetReplacer((get theMessage), "task: ", "")} at beginning of list "Inbox"
			end tell
		end if
	end message received
end using terms from

on LeetReplacer(strng, srch, replc)
	tell (a reference to my text item delimiters)
		set {old, contents} to {contents, srch}
		set {strng, contents} to {strng's text items, replc}
		set {strng, contents} to {strng as Unicode text, old}
	end tell
	return strng
end LeetReplacer

And here’s how you can include it into iChat:

iChat to Things

Enjoy!

Fast forward to today and the Smartphones we’re using in our everyday life – Blackberries, Pres and Pixies, iPhones and N900s. What’s the biggest part in that whole cellular phone market that changed since the mid/end 90s? Of course, it’s the phone’s technology and the features they provide nowadays. But what’s more important, the whole accessories-ecosystem around those phones actually changed. Today, you see people buying additional battery-packs for their Blackberries, since the phones are already that “Smart” that you’d actually need a constant power-source to make them last for more than a couple of hours of heavy usage. When people buy a mobile phone, they also typically throw some on-the-go charger into the bucket. And maybe also some docking-station for the desk, or even equipment for attaching it to their car’s windshields.

Now the whole accessory-ecosystem goes that far, that people even buy overpriced socks or pieces of silicon formed as protection-sleeve for their Smartphones. Especially within the iPhone user-groups you can see such protection-cases being very popular. But let us look from another perspective at especially those accessories.

When someone buys an iPhone, of course, he’s interested in the phone’s features and probably likes the way the phone integrates with the rest of his personal infrastructure, like laptops, computers/Macs, etc. But of course, only a few people really go for the features-pack only. Probably 90% of the iPhone customers look forward to have a phone that’s so exclusive and so beautiful that you’d hardly like to take it out of the showcase. And exactly at that point, all third-party manufacturers of iPhone accessories come in handy. So, people go and get their iPhones, take them out of the packing and lock them right into some ugly silicon, acrylic, plastic or whatever kind of case to protect their beauty against scratches, dirt and other natural enemies of the glossy piano paint. Sure, I mean, they paid and ass full of money for a brick that blinds you by its glint, so why should these people not try the best to protect it the best they can?

Well, sure they can do that – but where’s the point? I think I can talk for everyone that has ever searched for an iPhone case when I say that 99% of them are ugly as hell and not worth the package they’re shipped in. So, why do people then actually buy an iPhone for its cool look, when they “protect” it most of the time with such a case where the phone’s actual look does not matter anymore? For what? So they can slide it out when they’re feeling lucky and show it to everybody for one blink of an eye and then pack it back into its sleeve?

Of course, you can’t blame the people for that. I mean, why can’t accessory-manufacturers produce electro-magnetic protection shields that build an own atmosphere around the iPhone that does not allow anything else to come through than the owner’s washed hands to touch the touchscreen? I mean come on, that’s what people are waiting for! F*ck invisibleSHIELD, f*ck the pseudo translucent plastic shields that doesn’t absorb hits that could cause the iPhone’s screen to break into million small pieces. The people want cases that doesn’t even allow the iPhone to fall down the stairs or into water!

Yeah, right. Now I can definitely remember those days when I got my first Bosch 509 and protected it with one of the dozen plastic-sleeves against the cruel reality.

Think different, people.

First of all, re-install the MacPorts.dmg. After that, check what packages you’ve got installed and activated:

$ port installed | grep -i active

You can save this list by redirecting it’s output via > to any file. Next, clean up the ports:

$ sudo su -
Password:
# port clean all

Next, uninstall *all* installed (even not activated) ports:

# sudo port -f uninstall installed

And last but not least, look at your list, check what software you still need and re-install it:

# port install

You could try to automate the re-installation by something like:

# port install $(cat ./file_containing_list.txt | awk ‘{ print $1 }’ | while read line; do echo -n “$line “; done)

Although I would not recommend it, since you’d like to install different variants on some ports.

Enjoy.

Hi,

I’m having a bit of a trouble while trying to move my CandyBar’s Library from the regular Application Support directory into my Dropbox directory. I did that move on my iMac and everything worked out pretty good. I’m now having the Library running on my Dropbox, so it’s always being synced up to the cloud.

When I open my MacBook now and change the Library path to the Dropbox directory there (since those two Macs are being kept in sync via Dropbox) I can see all libraries contents, but instead of the actual icons or docks, I only see CandyBar-file-icons in the preview. I can even double-click some item from my list to view it in detail, still, no actual icon-image, only the white paper with CandyBar logo on it.

Could you please help me on this/tell me, what’s left to be done so that my sync works? I’m not expecting both CandyBars to work simultaneously, since it would probably break the Library, but at least when I run one after another (what’s the actual use-case here) I expect everything to be in sync.

Thanks in advance,
Marius.
–
Sent from my iMac.

On Nov 17, 2009, at 3:47 AM, candybar@panic.com wrote:

Hi Marius,

It’s currently not possible with Dropbox because whichever protocol Dropbox uses does not support resource forks, which is the part of the icon file where CandyBar stores icon data.

You’ll have to compress the whole library before putting it on Dropbox to make this work.

–
Les
Panic Inc.

Hm…

Update:

On 11/17/2009 97:22AM, devilx@devilx.net wrote:

Hi,

I’m having trouble in using Dropbox in combination with a popular Mac OS X application named “CandyBar” (http://www.panic.com/candybar/). The application itself provides a way to move its existing Library into a custom location, for example right into Dropbox’s folder, unfortunately the sync over two Macs fails. Please read the appended conversation I’ve already had with one of Panic’s support guys for more information.

I would really appreciate if you could provide a bugfix for this issue, to make Dropbox even more usable than it already is.

Thanks in advance and best regards,
Marius.

On Nov 18, 2009, at 11:51 AM, support@getdropbox.com wrote:

Hi Marius,

Yup, their support person is correct.

You can work around this problem by making an archive ZIP file of the file(s) and putting the archive in the Dropbox folder. Just right-click on the file (or a whole folder of files) and select “Create Archive.” The resulting .zip file is safe to put into the Dropbox folder. You can double click on the .zip file to open it and recreate the file(s).

Are are working on this. Add your voice:

https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/4/mac-resource-fork-support#votebox:0

Best,
Kevin Chu

This means: Vote people! Vote!

CandyBar makes OS X appear even more lickable than it already is. It allows to simply change each application’s icon and provides a cool management of all the available icon-sets. Besides, also the Dock appearance can be tweaked and managed. It would be really nice, if CandyBar would provide a way to sync the collection from one Mac to another, since now, I need to keep my collections on my iMac and my MacBook manually in sync, what’s pretty meh. However,  although it’s pretty pricy, it’s worth to have it.

Colloquy is the most advanced, free IRC client I’ve found yet. Its feature-list is pretty good and there’s a similar iPhone client available, too. I used this client already in 2006, when I still had my PowerBook and have to say, that it’s pretty bloated and slow on older hardware. But on the current generation of MacBooks, iMacs and MacPros it should be running like a charm.

Width Dropbox you can easily keep your files in sync over two or more different devices, regardless if it’s a PC, a Mac, a Linux or even an iPhone – all your data is always up-to-date. Besides, you can share files with friends and receive shared folder invitations yourself. 2GB of space is being provided for free, more is affordable for some cash. Though, I’d never put sensitive data “into the cloud”.

Echofon is probably the best Twitter-suite available on the Mac and the iPhone. Thanks to their Sync- and Push-Notification-Service it’s a pleasure to use Twitter, even with multiple accounts and on multiple devices. Thanks to the intelligent Sync-Service, Echofon notices when you’re not on your desktop anymore, and starts pushing notifications to your iPhone client when you get mentioned by someone else – very cool! Yet, the notifications will be pushed only every 15 minutes, but from what I’ve heard, the Echofon guys are already working on shrinking this interval. If you haven’t tried out yet – be sure to do soon!

Is there much to say about iPhoto? I think you can call it the image-management application on OS X. Since ’09 it also supports Faces & Places, what makes everything even more sexy. In combination with the photos shot on a GPS-able camera (like the iPhone) it even detects automatically, what place you’ve taken the photo. Although, yet the face-recognition doesn’t work as I would expect it to. You need high quality pictures with much contrast to get iPhoto recognize the people.

I used to be registered on Last.fm since I was using Linux with its Media-Players with Audioscrobbler plugin, so I’ve just continued using this pretty cool service. It let’s me tag the music I listen and discover new tracks I might like. I never tried out Pandora or similar services, so I can’t say whether Last.fm is better or not – I’m just used to it.

After discovering and trying out LaunchBar there was no way around it anymore – not even by using QuickSilver, what I did quite some time. LaunchBar is extremely fast, supports a ton of different Applications and even provides an easy way to write and include your own plugins. I wouldn’t want to miss it again in my daily work.

LittleSnapper in combination with its web-service (former QuickSnapper, now Ember) is a very nice enhancement to the OS X desktop, since it provides a very quick and easy way to share screenshots with others, without having to use “Grab” and manually upload the images to some service like ImageShack. In addition to the Desktop client, I also use the iPhone app to share camera-snapshots with others.

With Money managing finances became as easy as a finger-snip. I bought my license on a MacUpdate Promo for 20% less and have to say that it’s worth every penny, especially when there’s such a friendly and helpful company like Jumsoft behind. Money supports backing up the whole database to MobileMe and by that even synchronization of two Macs with each other. The iPhone client yet only supports sync over WiFi from what I’ve seen, but hopefully there will be MobileMe support in future, too.

Let me just call it “Poor man’s Photoshop” – in an excellent way! Pixelmator is, what GIMP is to the GNOME Desktop. It let’s me create/edit images in an easy and smooth way, without much knowledge of the actual application itself. Pixelmator provides me a light and intuitive application with a feature-list that fits my needs perfectly without being over-bloated.

As the name already says, Quiet Read provides you a way to temporary bookmark for example web-pages and read it later, when there’s more time for it. It’s actually the similar concept Instapaper follows, although it doesn’t really extract your site’s content for any mobile platform, nor does it have any web-service in the background to which you can sync multiple installations. MobileMe support would be a great feature, maybe Bamboo Apps will implement it some day.

Shovebox is a great companion for Things and Quiet Read which also provides a pretty cool iPhone client that’s for free. I got the App itself from within a MacHeist Bundle, where I didn’t need to pay anything for it – and maybe that’s the reason I’m actually using it. Yet, I would not really pay money on this App, since its yet pretty “small” (regarding its features) and I have most things already managed by Things and Quiet Read/Instapaper (free).

Yes, it’s Telephone! And yes! It’s OpenSource! This application allows you to use your VoIP account provided by your ISP directly on your Mac. At the moment, several ISP are supported and the list gets longer and longer. Telephone makes it easy to dial and receive calls on a VoIP account without much hassle.

TextMate – THE Editor. I think, there’s nothing better for writing any kind of code under OS X. This editor is light, fast and provides hell of a feature-set you’ll probably never finish to explore. MacroMates did an excellent job with this application and I know of many tries (especially on Linux) to re-create something similar, but yet no other (GUI-)editor reached TextMate.

Things is probably one of the most amazing task management applications for OS X available today. It provides all you need for successfully managing all your ToDos and even syncs them up to your iPhone client. Two big cons of Things are the yet still not available MobileMe sync (today, it does sync only over WiFi, without even using an encrypted connection) and the pricing on both, the desktop and the iPhone app. Still, the App is just lo-ve-ly and a must of everyone who’s really into task management.

A very nice newsfeed reader with excellent graphical user interface. Times provides you all basic-features you would expect form an RSS-reader plus the possibility to read the whole articles within the application itself. Very nice idea, and pretty cool implementation, though I’d wish it to be faster and not that bloated.

Versions – and you’ll never need to look up svn –help again. Since the last version of Version (ough, what a sentence) it even supports the latest SVN 1.6.x and provides you to work with several different SVN repositories at a time without much practice. Although, with $39 it this application is very pricy.

Viscosity is yet the best user interface for OpenVPN available on OS X, in my opinion. It lets you import your OpenVPN config-files and edit them within a very nice preference-window. Also, it shows you statistics about your running connections and makes OpenVPN easier than it already is – and with $9 it’s quite a fair deal.

Storing passwords, credit-card information and other sensitive data. Wallet allows me to manage all my logins and other passwords in a very nice and fast way, it provides me an add-on for Safari and Firefox and it allows me to sync my Wallet-database via MobileMe and even browse it on my iPhone with its iPhone app – although it took years until the iPhone pendant was available here in germany.

I think, that’s it so far. Besides those application, of course I use the regular tools like Mail.app, iCal, the Address Book, iTunes, the Terminal and all the other not-worth-mentioning programs that come with OS X.

On the one hand, VMware seems to me, especially when running Windows as Guest OS way slower than Parallels. At least from what I’ve tested it seems to be having way more disk I/O and by that produce a heavier load to the Mac. Parallels on the other hand seems to be better performing, but yet it still looks like it’s mostly just “hacked together”. It doesn’t integrate that smooth with my Mac and permanently keeps my Firewall asking me whether to allow its daemons to receive connections. VMware’s look-and-feel is just way better than Parallels’.

On the other hand again, VMware’s Fusion doesn’t provide an iPhone App, what’s definitely a Plus for Parallels. But VMware then again provides me with kind of a virtual appliance store, where I can find pre-installed VMs – many even for free.

Update: So, I’ve just installed Windows 7 on both virtualization-solutions now. The average time for installation was approximately the same and even the performance is not such a big difference. What I’ve noticed: VMware is slower in rendering the Aero-effects while Parallels is slower in disk I/O-related things. I can’t really proof this, it’s just a feeling I get when using the VMs.

Huh, I don’t know. Any comments? I would like to see some in-detail 1:1-comparizon between Fusion 3 and Parallels Desktop 5 Mac, although I don’t think I’ll find something like that…

Update #2: Now, I’ve also installed the latest openSuSE 11.2 on both and was astonished by Parallels’ speed for copying, unpacking and installing 2.8GB of RPMs within around 11 Minutes. I guess the I/O argument isn’t valid any longer now. Hm…

Update #3: Parallels somehow still totally disrupts my workflow. I’ve just booted a Windows Vista VM (pure pain, yes) and Parallels Desktop 5 Mac immediately started to ask me to install its tools. I clicked later and right after the dialog disappeared a new one popped up, that told me something about the VM/Mac profile-synchronization. I clicked on the red X, since I just wanted to test something quick within Vista. Regardless of my intend to dismiss the procedure, Parallels logged me out of my Windows Vista session, so I had to log in again. Again, the profile-sync dialog appeared – I didn’t touch it anymore. Some seconds later a new dialog appeared, that was telling me that Parallels placed some Windows folder right within my Dock – and I was like “WTF?!”. Ouff…

The scene generation works like this: You implement your this.controller.pushScene(“Main”);-statement, select the scene’s name (Main, without the quotes!) and select the scene-generation command from the bundle’s menu. The command will immediately generate you a new scene named just the way you chose to name it.

The other three commands can be ran by pressing the keys Fn+Ctrl+F5/F6/F7. Attention: The bundle only works with TextMate Projects! Generate your Palm Pre project like you always do, by using the following command:

palm-generate -p “{ title:’ProjectName’, id:com.my.ProjectName, version:’1.0.0′ }” ProjectName

Then, create a new TextMate Project and drag&drop the folder palm-generate created for you (“ProjectName”) into the Project’s drawer. Save the project within your Project-directory (“ProjectName”) and then run the commands.

This is the very first version of this bundle and I’ll keep constantly improving it with other features that help me and hopefully others on the development of Palm Pre Web-Apps.

Enjoy!

Download: PalmPre-Bundle-0.1

UPDATE: There’s a newer version available now! Get it here.

However, after I bought Money, I exported my whole transaction info from my ING-DiBa account as CSV (since they do not provide me anything else) and tried to import it into Money – and it failed. I was using the latest version (3.4.4 v1938) and had quite a few problems with the CSV import. First of all, the columns haven’t been recognized automatically. Also, I didn’t really knew how to import the transaction-value, since I only had one column containing a positive (income) or a negative (outgoing) number, where Money expected “Withdrawal” and “Deposit”. Also, Money seemed to have problems with the punctuation of the numbers, what cause 1000€ to become 100€. And in general, the software didn’t work well with the CSV my bank provided me. I had to manually cut out the first few lines (which were just some additional information but not party of the transactions) and stuff line that. I was wondering, why this is so, since Squirrel automatically recognized the CSV and imported it just perfectly into my virtual account.

I wrote an e-mail to Jumsoft and explained the problems I have with my freshly purchased Money and of course asked for help. After some more mailing, I got a patched version of Money one day later. I tried it out and: Bam! It worked! The CSV imports work just as they should now, even if there’s still no automatic column recognition. Still, I’m very happy that Jumsoft helped my out that fast and in such an uncomplicated way – I’m not used to this from Apple-related companies anymore.

After I had all my data imported into Money and got everything categorized, synced the info up to my iPhone, what also worked out as smooth as I’d expect it.

The one thing I did not check yet are the possibilities to sync Money over two different Macs. I’m sure it’s possible by using the Dropbox-way, although I would not like to upload such sensitive information to my Dropbox. Maybe it’s possible to sync via W-LAN, dunno.

It seems to be possible to sync different Macs via MobileMe! Hurray! I’ll test it out and give some feedback as soon as possible.

Well, what else can we do then? Oh wait, haven’t we just set-up our Dropbox account recently? So why not use it for poor-man’s-sync?

First of all, move the subfolder of ~/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code/ named “Things” into your Dropbox folder and let it sync up to the cloud. After that, start Things for Mac while pressing the Option (Alt) key and select “Choose Library…” – and choose the Things directory from within your Dropbox-folder.

Then, install Dropbox on your other Mac and again navigate to the Cultured Code directory named above. Now, you just delete the Things subfolder and yet again you start Things while keeping the Option key pressed – and select “Choose Library…“. Then, you select the Things directory from within your Dropbox-folder and you’re done!

CAUTION: This solution allows you the synchronization of Things between two (or more) Macs, but not the simultaneous running! Your Things database might break if you try to run it on both Macs at the same time!

This is a pretty good solution until Cultured Code implements something better.

First of all, the App Store is great. From its theory to its practice, everything is implemented just the way it has to be. Sure, sometimes it’s a little slow and not that responsible as one would expect, but altogether the browsing experience is really great. Why? Because it has to be. Nobody likes to spend money somewhere he doesn’t enjoy browsing for things – regardless whether we’re talking about the #real-life or in virtual. It’s just fun to look through the Apps, find new ones, share them with your friends and of course buy them. And it’s so easy as well. One click, that’s all! Isn’t that just great?

Oh well, yeah, it would be – if. If Apple would have kept the essential concept of their App Store the way they actually planned and intended it to. I mean, let’s think back, to the time before the Apple App Store was launched (what’s only little over a year ago) – what was the general appearance of existing application stores (of e.g. Nokia or for the Windows Mobile Platform)? Exactly. Ugly, slow, confusing, a lot of useless tra…ehrrr… stuff. And then came Apple – BAM! Brand new App Store for mobile applications. Everything was clean, everything was very well working and simple for the end-user to access. Then ago, the App Store provided a few essential and yet well known applications by third-parties. Great apps, with great functionality that even looked amazingly cool.

But then, after a while, it seems like the whole BAM just BAM-MED even more. And more. And more. Of course, Apple was lucky about this fact – more Apps for sale, more cut-offs for themselves. Why not? And do you know what’s the best? Big numbers. What? Yeah! Just as I said it. Big numbers. From the moment on, from which Apple started literally raping the potential of the App store within every Keynote they presented people could see all those big numbers. Thousands of of Apps. Millions of downloads. Et cetera.

But did this really improve the Store? I’m looking around at this very same moment within the App Store and have to say: No. It didn’t. All it improved was Apple’s pockets and the big numbers on their Keynote presentations. I stumble through the App Store and see hundreds and hundreds of Apps, one more useless than the other – Bikini Babes, Gym Babes, Simple To-Do and of course a huge amount of games. Yeah, games. I’m not saying, that games are “useless” in that way. Sometimes, when waiting for the Bus or for your Girl getting changed you appreciate those little time-consumptions. But come on? I mean, spending more than $2 for a game that won’t last any longer than one hour to be played, thanks to Apple’s gorgeous batteries? Who should play those games? Shall I constantly keep my iPhone attached to the power-cord, so I can play two hours of Need For Speed? Isn’t the whole game stuff, that Apple’s trying to sell as “PSP/NintendoDS Killer” just plain dumb and totally impracticable? I’m not saying, that games on mobile phones are no fun in general, but are you re-charging your iPhone every three hours, just to be able to play some games? I mean, I still don’t understand what market Apple really tries to reach with that. My impression is, that people indeed spend money on games like NFS or Sims 3, but only to be able to show-off at parties or other occasions. I don’t believe anybody really playing (and by playing I mean the very same behavior you hear from 15-years old, Norwegian guys with a World of Warcraft account!) the games on the iPhone. At least not till their end. Also I believe, that 70% of the people buying games use in iPod Touch instead, in addition to their iPhone.

Eh, however. Back to the topic. So, the Apple App Store started providing more and more sh… apps, over the past year. Some, useless ones and also some totally useless ones. Of course, in between of all those crap, you’ll sometimes find a pearl, like for example Shazam, Daylite Touch, Things, LittleSnapper, Colloquy, eBay, Ego, Wallet, Squirrel, Shopper, Deliveries, Weightbot, iStat, Beats, Last.fm, RadAlert and many many more. Apps that really have a use and pay-back for the price you spent on them. Unfortunately, those apps aren’t the majority anymore – and it seems to become worse by each day passing by. So what to do?

Of course Apple could stop selling all those other crappy apps. Just reject when developers submit them – and instead include apps that would be worth including. *cough*GoogleVoice*cough* But to be honest, by that, Apple would shoot into their own feet. Why stop selling crappy apps, when there are enough users to buy them? Why rejecting the cut-off, even if it’s just some pennies per app?

So let’s see, what could be Plan B? Uh yeah. Plan B. Sounds always good. How about.. err.. an “Exclusive App Store”? An App Store exclusively for high-rated and (therefor) pricy apps. Yeah, that sounds good, doesn’t it? But wait… who decides what’s “exclusive”? The developers? The users? Or maybe the price? I don’t know how you think, but I’d probably go with the third option. As long as the price is high enough, I don’t believe Apple caring about the actual application’s quality – not esthetically nor functionally. So, what sense would an exclusive App Store have then? Well, I guess no more than just gather more and more money.

I’m really happy that at least there are Blogs and Sites on the web, which take the enormous job of searching through the App Store, filtering the whole crap away and bringing you the best and most beautiful applications available for your iPhone. Without them, I guess I’d have a hard time to fine *anything* that would fit my needs within the actual App Store – and maybe just switch to Android.

So far.

Simplifique

Yay! Yet another excitingly fresh Theme for the best, free Twitter-Client available for Mac OS X: Bluebird.

“Simplifique” is a very aquaish theme that makes use of WebKit’s features to draw CSS gradients and reflections. Also, Simplifique includes the JavaScript-library written by Na Wong, to convert TwitPic and YouTube URLs to thumbnails.

I hope you like this brand-new theme for Bluebird!

Enjoy.

Download simplifique.bbtheme.zip

The last time I check out the project, there was no such daemon for Unix(-like) platforms but Mac OS X itself. I decided to take a quick look at the independend istatd Project on Google Code and give it a shot. I fetched the sources, built them on a Debian Lenny and ran the daemon with a slighly modified configuration – and it worked!

I found it pretty cool. Actually, I found it so cool that it was the reason for me to buy the actual iPhone App. I have no Mac OS X Servers I’d like to monitor, but I could think of plenty of Linux machines which I’d like to keep an eye on – not as an replacement for Nagios, just as a solution for quick-live-monitoring.

However, I decided to build a Debian package, to make it easier to deploy the istatd on a couple of machines. I attached the Debian package to this post, so you can just download and install it on your Lenny machines. Warning: It’s not a clean and tidy built, lintian conform packge! I just hacked it together to have something that “just works”. And that’s what it actually should. Besides, be warned that the daemon takes quite long to shut-down, due to the fact that I’ve just used the regular /etc/init.d/skeleton to create an own /etc/init.d/istatd script, without going into deep workflow-checks. Here, the script takes something around half a minute to kill the istatd.

Anyway, now I’m going to take a look at the sources and see, if I could probably commit some enhancements to the projects. The last time I was doing C++ is *quite* a time ago, but it shouldn’t be too hard from what I’ve seen so far. On the project’s site it says that there’s no support for fans and temperature measuring, yet. I will check whether it’s possible to use lmsensors for getting those information and maybe hack it in – or even rewrite the daemon in C, what would be the best to do anyway.

Oh well, however. Enjoy the package.

Download: istatd_0.5.4-1_i386.deb

Refresh Bluebird Theme

A fresh theme a day. My latest creation for the Bluebird Twitter-client is called “Refresh” – a refreshingly new theme!

This time it’s no modification or port of another app’s theme to Bluebird. Instead, it’s a new theme from scratch. The theme is held in a dark mood combined with orange and sky-blue colorized elements. For the background picture I made use of zygat3r’s Dark Wood wallpaper, which I’ve modified a bit in order to still look good if the window would ever get too big and the image’s borders would be visible.

The icons for the individual tweets are the very same icons from Mark Jardine’s “Mars Metallic” theme, with the difference that I’ve inverted their colors to make them fit better into my theme.

The tweets use rounded corners and all kind of transition effects provided by the WebKit CSS-properties. I actually also inserted a property for making the avatar images have rounded corners, but as it seems either Bluebird or WebKit itself doesn’t honor this at that point.

However, the theme is written using Bluebird’s new theme-definitions and should be compatible with Bluebird 1.0 Beta 1.1 and (hopefully) later.

Enjoy!

Download refresh.bbtheme

Minimalistic Tickets Bluebird Theme

Yet, another Bluebird theme.

“Minimalistic Tickets”, like the name already says, is a minimal theme where each tweet is being displayed as a “ticket”. The idea came me, when stumbling through the currently existing themes and noticing that each one has something in common: They all go from the top to the bottom. There was none, where the tweets are right next to each other, side by side.

The theme is pretty much just a demonstration of how new themes could look like. “Breaking the ice”. Trying out something new.

Whatever. I hope you enjoy!

Download minimalistictickets.bbtheme

Modification of Flarup's "Glow"

Today I’ve just played around a bit with Bluebird and its theme-ability to make it fit more into my actual desktop. First of all, I took a look at what theme I could use best for my first tries. I decided to choose Michael Flarup‘s “Glow”-theme. The theme itself looks very neat and tidy and provides cool effects like avatar-reflections and a menu for each tweet.

First of all, I took some new picks on the colors of each tweet (regular tweet, reply, direct message, own tweet) and turned the gradient around, so that it doesn’t “pop-out” but looks more like “punched-in”. Then, I’ve changed the fonts used by the theme. The CSS definition for the fonts now look this way:


...
font: 12px/16px "Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk BE", "Lucida Grande", "Verdana", "Helvetica Neue", "Arial", Sans-Serif;
...
font: 13px "DIN Medium", "Verdana", "Helvetica Neue", "Arial", Sans-serif;
...


Unfortunately the first fonts to be used (Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk and DIN Medium) are commercial fonts which I can’t just pack-in and distribute. Though, it doesn’t look that bad using the Lucida Grande/Verdana fonts.

However, after that I’ve fixed a bug the theme had at least on my Mac (Safari 4), where the background-height was too small so that a small white line always remained at its list’s bottom.

If you like the theme, feel free to download it here and comment on it.

Enjoy!

Anyway, after that, I wanted to take a look at the Reader Zinio provides for the Mac desktop, so I just downloaded and installed it. Before the installation finished, I had to enter my account info (e-mail, password) and so I did. Unfortunately, the Zinio Reader tried to connect but failed, because of my e-mail address seemed not to be existing. I tried it a few times and checked it for typos, but everything was correctly entered.

I decided to write an e-mail to Zinio’s support. I mentioned the problems I’ve been having with the Reader and also the odd, spanish confirmation e-mail I got. Yet (after over one day), they did not answer my mail and I’m wondering whether they’re going to. I’ll just be patient.

However, does anyone know any other sites that provide the same service Zinio does? And maybe allow me to download the stuff I buy as PDF to save it on my Mac?

WebKit Development Tools

In the past few weeks, I was involved into heavy JavaScript web-development at work and had to work with tools that allow me to debug dynamic web-content in an effortless way. Most people would now say “Use Firefox with FireBug addition!” and I would even agree with them, if I would be using some Windows operating-system instead of my lovely Mac. Everyone who has ever used Firefox on a Linux or a Mac OS X will know, that it’s a pain in the arse. Due to the way Mozilla-developers have taken to make Firefox available on multiple platforms, it lacks of any speed and integration within most implementations.

So what to do on a Mac, where Firefox trying to render a full-blown AJAX-site needs more space and CPU-power than a VMware or Parallels instance of Windows XP, running the IE? Most people don’t really know, that the Mac’s integrated browser already provides a very good toolset for web-development which just got even better with the version 4 (yet, still Beta) of Safari.

The toolset is hidden, on a regular OS X, but it can be unlocked pretty easy. The only thing you gotta do, is quit your Safari, open a Terminal and enter this command:

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true


It should quit without any output. After that, you can quit the Terminal and re-start Safari. You might not see any difference to Safari’s appearance before spawning the command, but now just try to do a right-click / command-click within a web-site. You will see, that your popup-menu has just been extended by one new item at its bottom, called “Inspect Element“. By clicking this entrie, Safari either opens a new window or separates your current one with an additional view, depending on what Safari version you’re using. This command works on 3 and 4.

Within that window, you will see a lot of useful information about the page. You can see time and size measurements, script-warnings and -errors and many many more. This extensions to Safari’s WebKit provides you nearly everything you might know from FireFox Add-Ons like FireBug. And besides of that, it allows you to profile your page in a sleek and easy, graphical way.

I’m now working quite some time with those tools, exactly because of all the problems I had with Firefox on my Mac, and I must say that I love them. I love the integration and the way it allows me to debug my sites. The only thing I liked more in FireBug was the precision of its GET/POST/PUT/…-output, but most of the time I don’t need that anyway.

Enjoy!

The current service-site describes the services mainly as synchronization option for your Ubuntu workstations, so that everything is kept up to date. My first thought on this was, that they’re using webdav (just like Apple does for their iDisk) for accomplishing this task, but as it seems, there’s no webdav involved. Maybe it’s built-up on Amazon’s S3?

I don’t know yet, since up to now I haven’t received my invitation to join and use this service. I was told that invitations are being sent amongst others depending on the service’s usage, so I really hope (since the ubuntuone.com isn’t that popular, yet) to receive mine soon.

Depending of how good this service works already, it could be a really good competitor to Apple’s MobileMe – especially if it should get an own “Exchange for the Rest of Us”, heh. I don’t know what’s planned to be implemented and as it seems there’s not much talking about that, but I’d really welcome it to see a working solution on that area.

As soon as I’ll receive the invitation, I will take Ubuntu One on a test-drive and try to see whether it would be possible to use this service on other distributions as well. I really can’t wait to get my hands on the service’s software, heh…

However, so I thought, that either there just haven’t been many themes released since I’ve last checked (afair over a year ago) or there just haven’t been any good themes that were submitted and accepted at AGO. To verify that, I’ve taken a look at the gnome-look.org themes-section and proved my assumption true: I browsed through the first few pages of the GTK 2.x section and my eyes began to hurt. Then, I sorted the section to start with the highest-rated themes and my eyes hurt even more. One theme was – in the matter of quality and usability – worse than the other. Everywhere you looked only rough-cut pixmaps thrown together, added some really-not-looking-good background images to the menus and the window elements themselves and finished it all up with a foreground-color that either provided an exaggerated or an awfully low value of contrast. Meh.

The bummer is, that the majority of all themes look like that and only a few ones, mostly created by known artists like roberTO, Jakub and others really look tasteful and qualitatively good. In my opinion, this was and still is a major problem of the whole OpenSource community. OpenSource gives you the power to choose, modify and re-distribute, but I guess that exactly this power is being used in a wrong way – not only in the matter of control themes!

In general, especially within the Linux area, there are nearly no standards. Spoken from the designers’ view, there are not enough definitions like the GNOME UI-Design Guideline or the Tango Project, which try to convince and help the developers and/or designers to draw qualitatively better themes while still keeping up the freedom to choose and create. Of course, this won’t stop misbehaving designers to submit themes to un- or sloppy-moderated sites like gnome-look.org, but still it would provide the GNOME folks a “pressurizing medium” to say “You make it the good way, your theme might make it into our official project releases or at least on the cover of the official sites!“.

Though, for a real GNU/FSF-guy this way might sound like to much of “controlling” and “regulating” and by that lead to an operating system like for example Mac OS X (no, not Windows, there you have an even bigger problem regarding applications that look totally different than others) is. Still, most of these guys forget, that without at least a little bit of guide-lining, regulating and separating the wheat from the chaff especially the Linux Desktop will never make it into a higher market-share. There definitely is a reason, why companies like Novell and Red Hat keep up the hard and cost-intense work on their own UI-designs and improvements. If you want the users to be convinced about using a clean and stable operating system, you cannot simply stick with a UI on which the users’ thoughts are “Uh.” from the first click they’re doing. And of course, tastes are different and each user has a different one, but in one point all users will share the same opinion: An UI needs to be tidy and neat. No pixels. No exaggerated anti-aliasing (which should be better called “blur” in 90% of the existing GTK themes). Just a sleek and intuitive interface with clean structures and without distracting or even deranging elements (… like black backgrounds, white foregrounds and pixmaps that remind you of some white-noise-graph).

On software techniques the GNOME community seems to finally has understood what KDE is doing for years now already. There has to be a clean infrastructure (or backbone or whatever you’d like to call it) for solving problems and providing features. GNOME has started the move to GStreamer some years ago and now finally also moved to a backend (PulseAudio) which provides such an infrastructure. Also, introducing D-BUS and the HAL was a big step for the whole Desktop-Project, and the Gnome VFS seems to be trying to really compete with KDE’s now. So, as it seems, developers have finally recognized, that (especially in enterprise use) a desktop with no integration and where each application works different and uses a different infrastructure for providing audio, video or whatever else will never succeed against “the big ones”.

Unfortunately, in the matter of UI design, it still seems to take a while until contributors understand that it’s worthless drawing themes that look like Vista’s interface printed on a dot-matrix printer. By that, users of other desktop systems will always keep looking and thinking of Linux to be an unstable and totally not-integrative desktop-system, hacked together by some crazy, long-bearded freaks. Because for low-brown users, the UI is an essential element that helps them deciding whether a system looks usable to them or not. With an interface where each application looks the same, acts the same and allows the user to get this work done in an undisturbing way – and maybe adds a little bit of pleasure with smooth and clean looking effects (and by that I don’t think of wobbly windows!) – even someone that’s new to the matter will be able to get in touch with it quite fast.

I’m still waiting for the day on which especially GNOME’s interface-nazis finally make the move and decline all applications that do not strictly follow clearly defined designing guidelines for a clean and usable UI – even if it would throw out half of the applications shipped with a regular GNOME desktop (like Pidgin, OpenOffice.org, and so on…). Until then, I guess that Linux itself can be as solid as a rock, as fast as a lightening and free as free beer – it won’t be able to increase its popularity and climb the higher market-shares. Just because of the “look and feel”, which sometimes is just more important then pure functionality. Else, we would still be working on the CLI, wouldn’t we?

// btw: This is my 500th post I’ve been writing within over four years now already. Heh.

I’m using the service for the first time on a Mac, since at work I only tested out their functionality under linux and had quite some problems with S3. Amazon’s Simple Storage Service is pretty cool regarding their pricing and provides a very acceptable up- and download speed – other than for example my Strato FTP does. The only complicated thing for somebody who’s new in that domain might be the “How do I start?“-point. S3 uses a “web-interface” which communicates using a documented REST-API. Unfortunately, under Linux there aren’t many clients which actually can communicate with this interface. Actually, I’ve only found the S3-Firefox-Plugin, which provided a way to maintain the different buckets and their content. Under OS X, there are some more (mostly Java-based) clients, including the native Cyberduck more-than-FTP client, what surprised my pretty much. This was actually the point where I’ve switched from Panic’s “Transmit” to Cyberduck, by the way.

However, I created my own buckets and uploaded some content to use it as web-share and test out a bit more the speed it provides. One con I’ve found up to now is the bucket-naming. Your personal bucket subjects a global namespace, what can lead to period of time needed for finding a name which is not occupied yet. This makes it for example pretty hard to automize bucket creations, for using them in an own Cloud-Service.

Besides, the EC2 is pretty cool, too. It provides a very flexible and (in comparison to S3) very automatable solution for cloud computing in general. It’s very fast to set up a new instance of whatever linux or windows on EC2 and run the stuff needed on it. The only con is the pricing, I guess – In my opinion it’s way too much for a Xen-I-think-it-is machine. For the price you would pay within one frequent month you could get a real root server at some hosting provider. Of course, you would lose the flexibility, but surely it depends on what you’re looking for.

In total, I’m really stunned of the infrastructure Amazon provides with their EC2/S3/etc. Services and I like the smooth way everything works out on them. I could really think of some cool projects to realize on top of these services… hm.