Sam’s random musings

PagePacker Open-Sourced: “

I am celebrating the arrival of Mac OS X 10.5 by making the source code to PagePacker available. Here is the compiled application.

Don’t know what PagePacker is? Check this posting.

This is cool app to use to make paper GTD and calendars and stuff, but the nice thing is the source is a great little learning tool for Cocoa

(Via Big Nerd Ranch Weblog.)

My first few days with Leopard… (so I have been working with the seed but only for dev testing) What follows are the things in Leopard that are an issue for me now, I do anticipate some of them clearing up in the next few weeks/ months but…

• GPGMail - Ok I know I should of anticipated that a ‘mail’ plugin would stop working with a whole new ‘Mail.app’ but man this is a drag, my workaround for now is ThunderBird and Enigmail (Note I did have some issues with downloading enigmail for some reason but at some point it just downloaded and installation was perfect). Word on the GPGMail site is that a new beta for Leopard is underway, but hey GPG mail is a pia to begin with now this.
• Time Machine - now for some reason it doesn’t want to set up the first back up, keeps reporting that it failed. Now fine but what part is failing in this, is it the source drive that has a problem, the destination drive. A little more information would be nice!
• NetInfo Manager - kind of a bummer I did like managing my dev machine addresses this way, oh well back to hosts file editing…

Design Review Tips:

(Via Bug Bash.)

So there is a post floating around with some totally disjointed reasons why he can’t handle his new Mac. You can read the article if you want, but believe me the responses from around the way are much better reading

Flame: My birthday present to me:

A fellow named “Larry Bodine”, who is apparently on the advisory board of “Law Technology News” (eg, he’s a technology advisor) and is also a law firm marketing consultant, has written a piece where describes, using no small amount of factual errors, fallacies, and other bad writing techniques, why he doesn’t like the Mac.

Good luck! And good riddance! I’d buy it myself but I’m afraid you might have smeared some stupid on it!

(Via Call Me Fishmeal..)

Can an operating system sue for libel?:

Well that’s your first mistake. Boat anchors will not run Mac OS X, nor Word. It will run NetBSD, however.

(Via tales of being tj..)

Larry doesn’t like his Mac:

Law marketing consultant Larry Bodine had some problems with his new Mac. Now, some of his complaints sound pretty serious and I don’t blame him for wanting to deal with them. But Larry, there’s a few things you mention that I thought maybe I could help you with.

(Via Giles Turnbull @ MacDevCenter.com Blog.)

A consultant who lies? Well shut my mouth.:

The article, dated … um … tomorrow is by Chicago-based marketing consultant Larry Bodine. Titled “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” the article describes Larry’s nightmarish experience with a Power Macintosh G5 computer.
Or does it?

(Via The Shape of Days.)

FileBrowse - a media browser companion for Finder:

Romain Guy at The Apple Blog has penned a nice walkthrough of an interesting new app called FileBrowse, which acts as more of a streamlined tool for media file browsing and manipulating tasks, as opposed to a full-fledged Finder replacement (cuz we all know how well that’s going). FileBrowse makes use of subtle display and 3D elements to provide more information when rooting through folders of images, music and video. As you can see, it draws Windows XP-like thumbnails on folders of images, allowing one to peek at what’s inside without actually having to crack it open. It also offers far more information (like metadata) when viewing items individually, and it even renders album artwork on music folders, along with video file previews, a unique visual grouping system, and more.

FileBrowse looks like an interesting app, so check out Romain’s walkthrough if you’ve been feeling the Finder is a bit lacking in these departments lately. At $25 though, it probably won’t be for everyone, but it’s nice to see some new file browsing tools that focus on a few things, and doing them well.

This is one of the nicest ui’s for browsing the filesystem of images and other filetypes) that I have seen in a long time.

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

Mac OS X: What Are All Those Processes?:

A short list of background processes and daemons By Gordon Davisson Copyright (c) 2005, Westwind Computing inc. Mac OS X (like any unixish OS) always has a number of things going on in the background — processes that take care of business behind the scenes. Normally, you won’t even notice them, unless you use something like Activity Monitor (ProcessViewer under 10.2 or before) or the ps or top commands to look at the process list. If you do notice them, you may wonder what on earth they’re all there for. This list is here to answer that question.

(Via .)

So this past two weeks I stopped using LaunchBar and started using QuickSilver, I had always been intrigued with the feature set of quicksilver, but I love and am addicted to LaunchBar. If you use a mac and don’t know these two apps, get out from under your rock and get addicted to them, they will improve the way you use your machine and you will wonder why you do not use them.

So after a week of using QuickSilver I do like it, I can understand why people like it, the extra stuff is wicked cool, but after two weeks I’m going back to LaunchBar. Probably the main reason is speed and learning. LaunchBar is way faster then QuickSilver. For me it is almost always instant, quicksilver is slowing me down (part of this I know is because I am more used to LaunchBar) it takes a while for it to come to the front, it takes a while to list the choices, and it doesn’t seem to learn that ‘int’ is short for interarchy (I know I should move to transmit, but I’m old and get stuck in my ways) and keeps opening the page for intuit.com no matter how many times I seem to down arrow to the right entry and click it. But there is cool stuff, append to text files rocks, creating an email right there is cool, there is neat stuff, but the app is supposed to make me faster and it doesn’t do that…

So if you use QS and you are addicted to it, I know that there are people out there. Tell me how to make it faster and learn better and I’ll give it another go.

Adium to Be a ‘Google Summer of Code’ Project:

This means Google will pay for students to hack on Adium over the summer. (Via Jesper via email.)

Cool it should rock after this…

(Via Daring Fireball Linked List.)