Category: Mac + OSX

New Mac Browser — Shiira

I have been test driving a new browser made by a group of Japanese geeks programmers called “Shiira“. It’s basically Safari with some nice features under its hood. Or… maybe it should be called Safari 2.5.

The best thing about this browser is its sidebar feature. It’s like using Safari with Concierge for free. Another feature I really like (though never actually use) is “Tab Exposé”. The feature basically turns all the open tabs in the browser into little thumbnails, much like what Foxposé does in Firefox. With a faster processor, the browser can even micmic page turning by using animation. It’s a nice but really unnecessary feature though.

Shiira Tab Exposé

Shiira page transition effects

I got used to the browser pretty quickly because the developers made it very easy to adopt this browser by having all the Safari functionalities already there, including access to Safari’s bookmarks! It also feels like Shiira launches and loads pages faster than all the other browsers on the Mac platform. Firefox is a dog compared to this Japanese import. Oh, and this puppy has yet to crash on me yet. Damn, those Japanese know what they are doing!

Unfortunately, Shiira also shares Safari’s downside on poor memory management. I can’t blame them. After all, Shiira shares the same render engine as Safari (and probably a few other things too). A nice full day of work out with this browser hogs almost 300MB of RAM (though its initial RAM occupation is far less than any other browser).

Programming on OSX with Objective-C

Slashdot effect takes center stage again as geeks from all over the world discuss Apple’s Xcode and Objective-C (a variant of C; a quick and dirty how-to here).

It all started with a simple email exchange between one programmer with Steve Jobs:

From: Nitesh Dhanjani
Subject: Re: Will XCode+ObjC ever suck less?
Date: December 25, 2005 5:27:02 PM CST
To: *****@apple.com

I look forward to the improvements! Thanks,

Nitesh.

On Dec 25, 2005, at 5:10 PM, Steve Jobs wrote:

I guess we disagree. First of all, .NET with CLI and managed code runs SLOW, so most serious developers can’t use it because of performance. Second, the libraries in C# are FAR less mature and elegant than those in Cocoa. We are working on a better implementation for garbage collection than we’ve seen out there so far, but in the end its a performance hit and an unpredictable time that is not good for some kinds of apps.

Steve

On Dec 25, 2005, at 2:36 PM, Nitesh Dhanjani wrote:

Objective C is old and clunky. Its almost 2006, and I _still_ have to look out for yucky pointers? I’d love to be able to write native apps with Ruby (or even C#!.) There are open community projects in progress that are trying to bind ruby and C# (mono) with Cocoa, but I’d love for Apple to step in and make this happen faster. Today, Microsoft seems to be _way_ ahead of the development curve – with their .NET implementation, you are allowed to code using a plethora of languages (C#, Python, VB, etc), as long as the interpreter/compiler follows the IL specification – pointers don’t matter, garbage collection is done for you – ah the beautiful world of managed code.

Having said that, most native OSX apps are still beautiful and well designed. Imagine how much better we could do if the developers had a more flexible choice of languages? I can _bet_ you a lot of OSX app developers use Objective C because they have no other choice.

Nitesh.

On Dec 25, 2005, at 3:11 PM, Steve Jobs wrote:

Actually, Objective C is pretty great. Its far nicer than most other ways of writing apps. What don’t you like about it? What do you like better?

Steve

On Dec 25, 2005, at 11:59 AM, Nitesh Dhanjani wrote:

Hi Steve

Will it ever be easy to write native OSX GUI apps? Objective C sucks.

Thanks,
Nitesh.

More geeks talking about it here.

It’s been said that Steve Jobs has a team of secretaries that comb through all his emails on a daily basis. I guess he ain’t taking chances on important messages. But it’s gratifying to see Jobs himself working on Christmas day having replied to this Nitesh guy several times throughout the day. Impressive stuff. Being a geek, a perfectionist and a workaholic at the same time can pay off sometimes.

Name That Tune!

If you are anything like me with the music (who knows very little about), you will appreciate the convenience of being able to know what song is being played on the radio at all times, that is, if you are listening on your Mac or PC.

Name that tune with Tunatic

Tunatic is a tiny software that is capable of identifying pretty much any modern song within seconds of listening to it. It analyzes the music that’s being played, compare the data with a server and fetches the name of the song and the artist. The downside of this software is that it relies on the speaker of the computer (I guess that can be the upside if you are listening to the conventional radio). That means if you speak when it samples the music, it will take your voice into consideration… not good.

All in all, this little app has been able to identify most of the music I threw at it (nothing fancy though; it failed to identify non-English songs as well as Jazz). Another application the company makes is Tunalyzer, which is an app that sits in the background and analyzes everything in your music folder and sends the meta data back to the database that Tunatic uses. The idea is to sample as much music as possible with the right tags that people give to their music.

iTunes Faces Open Source Challenge

iTunes has been dominating the mp3 market in terms of legal music download service. On top of that, I personally also believe that its by far the best music organizing application than most of the software out there. But a new open source challenger just showed up in the scene — SongBird Media Player.

It sports an interface that looks just like iTunes (what isn’t?). But it also includes a few features that’s lacking in iTunes, for good reasons.

SongBird screen shot

Apple Address Book Woes

I have always been a big advocate for Apple’s technologies. But one thing has really annoyed me about Apple’s Address Book. Its import and export utility is simply not well written to import from popular address books used by other companies.

When I was working on PCs, I have always used Yahoo’s Intellisync utility to synchronize contacts between Microsoft Outlook and my address book on Yahoo. The utility works so seamlessly that I’d be happy to pay an annual subscription fee just for that feature. But when I completed dumped Windows and started using my PowerBook full time, I started to experience nightmares trying to keep address books in sync between my cell phone, Yahoo address book and Apple Address Book.

For starters, I’ve always used Yahoo as my master calendar and address book center. Whatever updates I make, I always make it on the master list first. but there are times when I just don’t have access to the web! That’s when things start to get out of sync. To Yahoo’s credit, it exports to several different formats no problem (except when dealing with Chinese characters, which is a complete mess). The problem starts when Apple’s Address Book import utility falls short on its promise.

When importing LDIF files that was exported from Yahoo (which is the most perfect format in that I can finesse the Chinese characters so that they show up correctly), Apple gets it almost right except that it labeled everything as “work” by default. I simply can’t find a way to change that default setting. It’s annoying as hell.

As for importing csv files, first of all, Yahoo messes up the export with garbage Chinese characters. Then upon importing to Address Book, Apple messes up the field mappings, making only a few things match up. I tried once correcting all the mappings, and then Address Book crashed. God damn stupid Apple!

The same goes to Apple’s iCal, its own calendaring software. I so wish it can work seamlessly with Yahoo’s calendar, which has been working just the way I want it to. Apple’s iCal, on the other hand, prints awful, lacks some key features I need (which I use all the time with Yahoo calendar) and doesn’t really sync with anything else.

I guess the point of what Apple’s doing is simple — it wants everyone to use its paid subscription .Mac service. It’s a great service except that I already have a great server that meets all my hosting and emailing needs. Plus at $99 a year (or $179 for a family subscription with up to 4 accounts), I can’t really justify using it simply for calendaring and address book syncing.

I guess I should try using Mozilla Foundation’s ThunderBird and see how that really fares. At least with open source software, everything gets updated much faster. It will take another major OS upgrade for Apple to introduce the next major version of Mail and Address Book. And for me, I am getting increasingly frustrated with both apps. Love live open source!

Reclaim Memory from Firefox

I still keep an eye on the browsers, even though now I have 1GB of RAM installed, for their memory leaks. Firefox and Safari are nortorious for leaking memory when too many tabs are open for too long. But thanks to this blog, there’s now a way to reclaim unused memory space back from Firefox:

If you minimize Firefox, it will (automagically) reclaim memory that it’s no longer using.

IT WORKS! Firefox was using 180+MB of RAM even though only 3 tabs were open at the time. By simply minimizing the window, the memory usage went down to just above 110MB. Nuts.

But seriously, a browser that requires 100+MB of RAM to run is just crazy. When Firefox is first launched, it only takes about 85MB of RAM. It creeps up as more and more tabs are opened/closed… etc. And the longer you run Firefox in one shot straight, the more memory it will take up over time. The same issue applies to Safari. But at least now there’s a work around for Firefox.

Damn you, Apple Safari team.

Memory Upgrade

Finally got those 2 sticks of 512MB RAM I ordered from Small Dog Electronics in Vermont. I have had my PowerBook for over three years and it’s worked flawlessly (can’t say that about a 3-year-old PC running Windows). But ever since the upgrade to Mac OSX Tiger, it’s been a bit sluggish running a few “big” apps simultaneously.

Having more memory is a beautiful thing.

“I” want a memory upgrade.

Google Earthing

Finally got a hold of a beta version of Google Earth for Mac and found where I currently live… It doesn’t seem like much because the stupid tree (big one too) cast a shadow over the one-story house…

Google Earth image of my home

WICKED!

And this is my grandma’s home in Taipei up on the Mt. Yang-ming…
Google Earth image of my grandma's home

This was our last [tiny, dinky] apartment in NYC (where Jason and Alicia were among the few who have visited and actually spent the night at!)
Google Earth image of my grandma's home

One important lesson I learned out of using Google Earth was, it’s fricking tough to find places through the bird’s eye view. It was relatively easy to find places in the U.S. since everything is nicely correlated to addresses. But looking for my grandma’s house in Taiwan was very hard, even though I knew how to get there from various points ON THE GROUND. Literally flying around trying to locate the exact location from a different perspective totally screwed up my orientation. I ended up having to use longitude and latitude coordinates I found from another site to locate her relatively big house.

I have a new found respect for birds, pilots and Superman.

Risk on Google Maps Plus Other Mac Games

Have you ever played the board game Risk? Some dude created one using Google Maps. Slashdot reports that a multi-player version is in the works…

Risk on Google Maps

I remember playing my very first games of Risk on a dinky Macintosh SE (the original all-in-one Mac), running System 4 with only 1MB of RAM.

Mac original OS
Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Later I graduated to playing the first version of Prince of Persia when it became available. And let’s not forget the original Oregon Trail, apparently an educational title for social studies (but what did I care; it was a GAME!).

Prince of Persia
Image courtesy of Prince of Persia Unofficial Website

Oregon Trail
Image courtesy of Answers.com

via [Slashdot]

OSX Spotlight Hogs CPU

For the past couple of weeks, the fan on my PowerBook would just start spinning like crazy out of the blue. Checking the CPU usage didns’t really yield any satisfactory results. But I finally found the culprit — Spotlight.

According to Many Ayromlou, sometimes Spotlight does hog the CPU, most likely when it’s trying to index corrupted metadata. So I applied the fix suggested by the site:

1) Using the mdutil command-line utility in Terminal, turn off indexing for each of your drives. example:

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$ sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/<i>your_hard_drive_name</i>

2) Then use mdutil to remove the indexes from each drive

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$ sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/<i>your_hard_drive_name</i>

3) Physically remove the .Spotlight directories from the root of each drive.

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$ cd /
$ sudo rm -fr .Spotlight-V100

(do the same for your second or third drive) BE CAREFUL WITH THAT RM COMMAND! One typo could ruin your day.

4) Use mdutil again to turn indexing back on for each drive

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$ sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/<i>your_hard_drive_name</i>

5) Spotlight will now re-index all drives and should behave in a normal fashion. (No longer uses 60%-80% of your CPU)

As Spotlight tried to re-index my entire hard drive again, I snapped this shot…
Spotlight indexing

Even though it estimated 10+ hours to index all of 23GB of files on my hard drive, the actual time it took to index everything was more like 2 hours — a far more acceptable time.

All this was done while I was trying to feed Bryan, change his diaper, check my email, read the online forums from SCAD eLearning, browse through the news and send a homework-related mass email.

Safari Transparency

I accidentally found this “hidden” feature in Apple Safari 2.0.1 while messing with the “Debug” menu. For whatever reason, there’s a “Use Transparent Window” option under the Debug menu. In between page loads, the entire window goes transparent — a pretty cool effect.

To get to this feature, you first need to enable the Debug menu, which is hidden by default.

1. Quit Safari.
2. Open a terminal window.
3. Copy and paste

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 % defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

4. Launch Safari. You will find the new “Debug” menu option at the far right side of the menu bar.

You can read more about the Debug menu here.

Safari Transparency 1

Safari Transparency 2