RejectReality

Tonight was the night my Mac Mini and MacBook Pro met up with the new cat on the block.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Leopard has landed.

For the install (and to make my life easier if it went/goes up in flames), I turned my iPod into a bootable copy of the install DVD using Disk Utility. Both Macs were booted off of the iPod and Leopard was installed over USB.

Both boxes received the Archive and Install treatment which was decidedly uneventful; it Just Worked(tm). Each took around 1/2 an hour to complete using this method.

First impressions:

• Yeah, it’s pretty.
• Screen Sharing works great.
• Spaces work well. Give or take some strange focus issues, it seems to be less quirky than the last release of Virtue Desktop that I was using. At least Spaces hasn’t lost windows.
• I don’t know what all the fuss is about with the translucent menu bar - it looks fine to me, although that’s likely due to my background image.
• Stacks. Meh.
• Reflective Dock. Again, meh.
• Quick Look is a neat idea. Dunno how much I’ll use it.
• Tabbed Terminal is great - especially considering how many of the things I usually have flying around
• iPhoto still works with no apparent weirdness. I’m still glad I made (multiple) backups of my 40 gig library.

Quikry stuff:

• Spotlight decided it was time to do a full re-index on my MacBook, but not on my Mac Mini. A near-hour of thrashing later and it was happy again, although I’ve got no idea why it was necessary. Even more amusingly, it only on one box and not the other - they were both fully indexed and happy before the upgrade.
• Mail found and re-added two (really) old email accounts that I deleted months back.

  Good thing: it left my other three alone.

  Bad thing: it decided to suck down all my mail again for my primary account. 1.5 gig of mail coming from the other side of the world via IMAP when my home DSL connection has been shaped to modem speed ain’t fun to watch.

• MarsEdit’s post preview seems to refresh the page in it’s entirety *really* frequently, including sucking down header images from my remote server, rather than use a cached copy.

  I suspect WebKit’s changed it’s behaviour for the Leopard release; shame it’s new behaviour is crappier than before. I can say that it certainly didn’t have this behaviour under Tiger with the Safari 3 beta installed (v3.0.3), or at least, it wasn’t anywhere near so visible.

  Unfortunately, preview’s off until that is sorted.

• X11 is supposedly fundamentally broken. I’m not even going to bother trying this until the it receives a patch.

New stuff to play with:

• Time Machine’s going to get set up on the weekend when the parts for my new drive array rock up. Yay for completely automated backups (although I’ll still keep up with my Unison ones)
• Since I’ll have a couple of spindles spare, I’m going to break out the ZFS beta and see if I can work out how to kill it. For my workload, ZFS is going to rock — as long as it doesn’t hose my data in the process. Again, yay for automated backups

Overall, it’s not a bad release. Eye candy is always good, but I’ll take a solid platform over that any day. Once the (numerous) initial wrinkles are ironed out, it should be well worth the upgrade.

Apparently, Apple’s already preparing and testing 10.5.1 to address these issues. At least that’ll be a couple of week gap between release and the first “service pack”
I’ll post again when I find more broken stuff.

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I was posed with an interesting problem today; to come up with a way to quickly add and display outstanding iCal to-do items.

An hour later, a little AppleScript was born that grabs all your outstanding to-do items and displays them, separated by which calendar they exist in and displays the due date, if entered. Even better, they disappear from the notification list when you mark an item as completed in iCal.

It requires Growl, a general purpose notification utility, to be installed to display the to-do items. It also works best when invoked by using a global hotkey to execute the script on demand. I use Quicksilver, an application launcher, for the latter part; I’m sure there are alternatives that will function just as well.

Aside from having Growl installed and running, you don’t need any special configuration to use it with this script.

Details for how to set up a Quicksilver keyboard trigger to invoke this script can be found in the Quicksilver documentation.

Pick up a copy of the ready-to-run script here:
growl-todo-items.scpt.

Feel free to open it in Script Editor to have a look (and most likely a giggle if you’re a serious Mac developer ) at the script.

When you run the script, here’s what it looks like:

Pretty neat, eh?

If you use it, like it, hate it, have problems with it have mangled it into something else cool, make sure you drop a comment below or send me an email to let me know!

PS - If you install Quicksilver with the iCal plugin to run this script, you can also use it to quickly add todo’s into iCal too!

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Cindy comments:

/wonders what MarsEdit is all about and why you haven’t told me about it. Does it build a better mousetrap (aka blog?)

Something tells me this is going to be a long one.

I’ll answer the easy bit first, I hadn’t mentioned it because I’m slack
*ahem*

Now we’ve got that out admission of the way…

Put as simply as possible, MarsEdit is a text editor with extra brains installed for how to talk to blogs. That description doesn’t really do it justice, though.

First, permit me a minor tangent.

Think about your typical blog post; it’s got a bit of text, a quote from somewhere else, maybe a couple of images and a few links.

It’s pretty simple stuff.

Now, think how you would compile such a post using your favourite blog software:

For your text, your blog software invariably comes with a web-based form to write your posts and edit existing content.

Quoting stuff is easy - copy’n'paste your quote, then go back to pick up the referring link. You do link to your sources, right?
For your images, you either need to FTP them to your web server or use your blog software’s upload facility. If you’re a Flickr user, you can use their upload facility which will provide you with a nice bit of HTML to copy’n'paste into your blog software’s post composition function.

Links are pretty similar to quotes; a few copy’n'pastes are all you need there.

Of course, all this good stuff is only useful when you have internet access; if you’re offline, you need to use something else to store your post like Notepad, TextEdit, or (heaven forbid) Word.

For something pretty simple, it’s spread all over the joint. Upload here, copy’n'paste half a dozen things between browser windows over there, wrap links in “A” tags if your software doesn’t already do it, find some way of getting your images up to your server.

Finally, and to bring that tangent back to the main point of this post …

What if you didn’t have to do all that? Would that make your posting life any easier?

MarsEdit doesn’t do anything that you couldn’t already do before. It just does it better. It’s simple, it combines multiple other tools’ functionality into one utility and it makes sure I don’t have to think more than I really need to.

Believe me - that last one’s a real valuable point
Here’s the MarsEdit way of doing things:

Say you want to quote a website or respond to one on your own blog. Highlight the bits you want to quote and use a MarsEdit bookmarklet to start a new post, automatically populated with your quote and attribution details already organised.

It links up with your Flickr account; post your image to Flickr, and use MarsEdit’s Media Manager to browse your photostream, pick your image and drop it in a new post.

Don’t use Flickr? No matter - I don’t either. If your blog software supports file upload via XML-RPC, MarsEdit will automate the upload, obtain the link to the final file and drops it into the new post for you. WordPress supports this; check your blog software to see if yours does.

Want to make links? Copy the link from your browser, select “paste link” in MarsEdit and it will automatically wrap your link in the right HTML tags to make it work.

Custom HTML/CSS fragments. I use a small bit of CSS and HTML on each post to place an image at the top which is linked off to either another site or a bigger copy of the image. Every single time I need to grab it out of my notes because I can never remember it. Now I don’t have to; I’ve inserted the custom fragment into MarsEdit as a template so I can paste at will.

It’s got offline support built in. You’re working on a local draft until you’re ready to publish. Hit the magic button and it automates the post upload and publish mechanism for you.

And the coolest thing?

Live preview of your post, including formatting and CSS, in the style of your blog. Go on - click that image to the right; that screenshot was taken before this was published (although don’t worry if you see a different header image — they’re randomised; you’ll get that one eventually).

The live preview feature takes a few minutes to set up, but it’s well worth it. Even better, the preview template is stored for offline use.

Pretty neat, eh?

So, here’s the rub.

Does it build a better mousetrap? In and of itself, I’d have to answer that with a “probably not”; improving your writing and content will take care of polishing up that mousetrap for you.

The better question would be, if you already have the plans for a better mousetrap, does it make it easier to assemble it?

The short answer is “yes, absolutely”.

The slightly longer answer will involve me stealing a quote from the guy behind MarsEdit, Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater:

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. MarsEdit will make you a more prolific blogger. I’ve seen it time and time again.

MarsEdit makes it quicker and easier to throw a new post together and put it out to see what the world thinks.

To continue that quote from above:

… it reduces the psychological burden of blogging.

By reducing the burden, you post more. You post more, you get better. You get better, more people read. The more people read, the more warm and fuzzies you get. The more warm and fuzzies you get, the more you post.

It’s a (vicious) circle
Although I’m just (re-)starting out, I’m already seeing that this is helping me post more, and hopefully keeping more than the spam bots entertained.

Go check it out for yourself; you’ll get to play for 30 days for free. It supports all the usual culprits; Blogger, Drupal, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Wordpress, TypePad, plus others.

If you like it, throw a few bucks Daniel’s way and make sure to tell him I sent you in the comments for your order. You (and I) won’t get anything out of it, but I’m sure it’ll make him feel good.

And, honestly, who doesn’t like an ego stroke at the end of the day?

3 comments

I’ve officially joined the ranks of Switchers.

My new Macbook (finally) turned up yesterday. I’ll be posting some more down the track after I learn how it all hangs together, however my initial impression is it’s a damn nice piece of kit.

The hardware itself is well designed, well put together (much more solid than my Toshiba), and (most importantly) it’s fast. The only issue I have with it is a slight buzz when running on battery power and the CPU’s are idle, which (unfortunately) is well documented - hopefully this won’t take too long to fix.

Software wise, I’ve already found a bunch of cool apps and utilities to play with; Quicksilver, NetNewsWire, Connect360, AdiumX, Google Earth, GimpShop, OmniOutliner and Apple’s recently released Boot Camp are currently on the top of the list.

More to come when I find some interesting stuff.

Technorati Tags: macbook, quicksilver, netnewswire, connect360, adiumx, google earth, gimpshop, omnioutliner, boot camp

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As I’ve mentioned previously, my laptop is getting a bit long in the tooth. Given the success of my Mac Mini experiment and the recent release of new Apple hardware, I’ve decided to give the Mac platform a go for my primary machine.

To this end, a couple of weeks ago, an order for a shiny MacBook Pro was submitted.

During this time, I’ve been reading up on the hardware, the OS and some applications I would like to try out like Coverflow and NetNewsWire (and I found a place to find more)!

It’s amazing how quickly the internet community has moved on this. I’ve already witnessed the unboxing and the disassembly of one of these things - they’ve only been shipping for around a week.

Now all I have to do is wait for mine to turn up so I can finish the Switch. Any pointers to interesting software, stuff or tips are welcomed

PS - I wonder if this will be me in a couple of weeks….

[via Engadget and Dan]

Technorati Tags: netnewswire, coverflow, apple, osx, mac, macbook

Update: Looks like a better MacBook disassembly guide has been published. I can’t believe how small the motherboard is!

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