Apple / OS X

WriteRoom

Simon Willison — 2006-11-15T07:52:07-00:00

I had a look at WriteRoom a few months ago and wasn't impressed, but Leonard just convinced me to give it another look and I'm completely sold. It's a free text editor for OS X with two killer features:

A full screen mode (toggle with ESC) that hides the rest of your screen, letting you type in glorious green-on-black courier with absolutely no distractions.
Autosave. You never have to save a document, even when you quit WriteRoom. It maintains a list of your WriteRooms in the file menu, keying each on the first few words. If you want to move text to an actual file you need to either export it or use copy and paste.

I've lost count of the number of times I've lost some notes to a crash having scrawled them in TextMate or SubEthaEdit without saving to a file. Auto-save / auto-recovery should be built in to every application.

Giving away the index

Simon Willison — 2005-05-04T01:16:45-00:00

My final year project is due in two weeks, and I'm going to be running on silent for most of them. I have, however, upgraded to Tiger and playing with Spotlight has given me plenty to think about.

Giving away the index

The great benefit of having an electronic version of a book you own in dead-tree format to hand is that you can search it. Publishers generally don't hand out free digital copies because, well, they want you to buy the books, not freely distribute electronic copies.

The thing is, you don't need a digital copy of a book to be able to search it; you just need a full-text index of it (if you don't understand what this means, go and read Tim Bray's series On Search). An index isn't enough to reconstruct the book, but it is enough to answer questions like "on what pages of Eric Meyer on CSS are float layouts discussed?"

Imagine if technical publishers made binary full-text index files of their titles available for download, for free in some kind of open standard format. Readers could query them using Spotlight or similar technologies, and gain the ability to search the titles they own all without needing to rely on centralised, artificially limited services such as Amazon's Search Inside the Book.

O'Reilly, I'm looking at you.

Full-text phishing

On a darker note, one thing about Spotlight that has given me pause is the immense ease with which it can uncover passwords saved amongst my email. Lost password reminders, new account details, invitations to sign up for services - they're all hidden away in my mail archive. Spotlight makes it trivial to dig them back up again, and offers the APIs for applications to do so as well. Combine this with a piece of spyware / some trojan horse and you've got the ultimate vector for phishing attacks.

This problem isn't limited to Macs either; Google and MSN's Desktop Search engines could be used for much the same purpose, and full-text search is bound to end up built in to Windows sooner or later. For the moment, the safest thing to do is either delete those pesky emails or move them to a folder that is excluded from Spotlight's index. Somehow I doubt many people will think to take such precautions.

And with that off my chest, it's time to get back to my dissertation.

Safari 1.3 has a JavaScript Console

Simon Willison — 2005-04-16T17:06:20-00:00

My single biggest complaint about Safari in the past has been its terrible support for JavaScript debugging. Safari 1.3 has just been released, and tucked away in the Debug menu is a brand new JavaScript console option. It's not as good as the Firefox equivalent (it throws up far too many "Undefined value, line: 0" errors for my liking) but it's a big step in the right direction.

Early adoption, and Airport Express cut-outs

Simon Willison — 2004-08-03T05:02:38-00:00

I don't know quite how I did it, but in the past 48 hours I've become an Apple early adopter. I spent the weekend in Minnesota, where a visit to the Mall of America (aka Unholy Temple to Consumerism) resulted in a visit to the Apple store, and a visit to the Apple store resulted in a shiny new fourth generation 20 GB iPod. Of course, the seven and a half hour journey back south would go so much faster with an iTrip to play with, so I picked one of those up as well.

The Apple store also provided me with the most intensely Apple moment of my life, when I overheard a store employee in a blue t-shirt, with blue hair, holding a blue mini iPod, telling a customer: "Oh, and of course there's the 'cool' factor".

The iPod is a lot of fun, especially now that I've enabled it as a hard drive (through an option hidden in iTunes for some reason) and started messing around with it at the command line. Here's an iPod tip: if you want to access the music files stored on the device, open up a terminal and cd to /Volumes/iPod/iPod_Control/Music. The Finder won't display the files (presumably as a nod to the music industry's legal eagles) but you can still get at them using good old fashioned Unix commands. The next step is to set up some kind of automated backup script for all my other important files.

Another iPod trick for the thrifty: if 20+ dollars seems too much for a case, a sock makes an excellent low budget alternative.

Gadget number two was ordered nearly a month ago, but arrived this morning: an Airport Express. If Gartner thought that the iPod was a corporate security risk they're going to have a field day with this thing: it's the size of a power brick, and setting up wireless access to a network is as easy as plugging in an ethernet cable and hooking it up to a power socket. It's an instant network hole in the palm of your hand.

Mine's now doing service as a wireless speaker cable (to a set of JBL Creature Speakers), and have actually just started randomly cutting out. Here's hoping it's just a temporary glitch. I'm also crossing my fingers for Apple to release a software update that lets me channel all of the sound output from my laptop through the Airport Express, rather than just music from iTunes.

Actually, the random cut outs are getting really irritating now. Any other early adopters experienced this problem?

Update: Turning off the "Use Inteference Robustness" option for my AirPort card seems to have fixed the cut outs. Update a few minutes later: nope, they're back with a vengeance. Not good.

OS X Tip: Remapping keyboard shortcuts

Simon Willison — 2004-06-08T04:31:22-00:00

On my Mac, Apple+W is the shortcut for closing a window (or tab in a tabbed application such as Safari or Firefox) while Apple+Q quits the application completely. These keys are right next to each other on the keyboard. Today, for the final time, I hit the wrong key and accidentally sent a couple of days accumulation of useful browser windows straight in to the abyss. I say for the last time because my intended IRC rant about the stupidity of setting those two keys right next to each other was cut off by Richard Soderberg, who showed me how to remap keyboard shortcuts for any application in OS X.

Bring up the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane.
Hit the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
Click the + icon.
Select Firefox from the Application menu.
In the Menu Title box, enter the exact text "Quit Firefox".
In the Keyboard Shortcut box, enter a new shortcut (crysflame suggested Option-Apple-Q).
Click Add.

You'll need to restart Firefox to see the change, but sure enough the old keyboard shortcut has been replaced - and the menu has even been updated to reflect the change! Magic. I'd be interested to know what happens when you try this in apps that have more than one menu item with the same name. Right now I'm going through all my other multi-window apps (SubEthaEdit, Safari etc.) and remapping their quit keys as well.

Defending against the OS X help: vulnerability

Simon Willison — 2004-05-18T21:02:40-00:00

There's a nasty OS X vulnerability under discussion at the moment which lets a web page execute code on your machine by taking advantage of a flaw in the "help:" protocol. There's a non-malicious demonstration of the exploit on this page, and Jay Allen is hosting a discussion on the exploit and ways to avoid it.

To save you from digging through the discussion, the quickest way to defend yourself is to install the More Internet preference pane (mount the DMG, then copy the More Internet.prefPane file to your /Library/PreferencePanes folder or run the "install prefpane" script). Then go to system preferences, launch the "More Internet" panel, select the "help" protocol and use the Change button to assign it to some non-harmful application such as Chess (simply deleting the protocols will not solve the problem). While you're there it's a good idea to add a new protocol called "disk" and assign it to a non-harmful application as well - this prevents malicious sites from being able to auto-mount networked disk images on your system, something which while not exploitable on its own can be used in conjunction with other exploits (like the help: one) to execute arbitrary code.

For those who are interested, it seems the exploit itself is as simple as this:

<a href="help:runscript=MacHelp.help/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/shrd/OpnApp.scpt string=usr:bin:top">click to run 'top'</a>

Don't make me lie to you

Simon Willison — 2004-05-07T02:18:24-00:00

So what's the deal with this?

I'm sure you've seen it. I get it from QuickTime on Windows, and I get it from QuickTime on my Mac as well. If this was attached to some lousy spyware infested privacy flaunting piece of junk I wouldn't be so surprised, but it's not: it's from Apple, a company who are meant to pride themselves on the usability of their software; software that normally just gets out of the way. So why bug me with this junk? More importantly, why force me to lie about my intentions? I have absolutely no intention of ever upgrading to QuickTime Pro - but every time that blasted window comes up I have to promise to put off my purchasing decision until "Later" in order to proceed.

It annoys me even more because out of all the lousy streaming media formats out there, QuickTime sucks the least. Why spoil the experience with an advert for a product that seems to be made obsolete by Apple's own iMovie anyway?

AntiRSI for OS X

Simon Willison — 2004-04-18T23:58:33-00:00

OK, so I have to admit I gave up on WorkRave after about two weeks - it got on my nerves. Onne Gorter just dropped me an email about his free AntiRSI program for OS X and I've decided to give it a go. It draws a pretty icon in the Dock with a live updated timer for how long until your next rest break, and the source code is freely available. Let's see if this one lasts longer than WorkRave did.

Missed opportunity

Simon Willison — 2004-04-08T00:09:07-00:00

Apple are missing out on a huge opportunity. I've bought 198 songs through the iTunes music store now, and iTunes has access to the other music that I've imported from my own CD collection. I want to discover new music - why doesn't iTunes look at what I listen to, match it against buying habits tracked through the store and give me an Amazon style "people who like the music you listen to also liked...". Privacy concerns could be avoided by having the recommendation feature off by default - I'd turn it on in a heart-beat.

Conferences with Macs

Simon Willison — 2004-03-26T03:55:04-00:00

Three reasons Macs make excellent companions to geek-centric conferences:

iChat and Rendezvous. iChat uses Rendezvous (aka zero configuration networking) to automatically display a list of all other iChat users on the same network as you. In a conference setting this can be a great way of seeing who's around - I met a couple of people at SxSW who I'd been hoping to run in to by co-ordinating a metting via iChat. A few panelists even used iChat to take questions during their panels. Here's a screenshot of iChat Rendezvous taken during SxSW.
SubEthaEdit, which really has to be seen to be believed. I made a half hearted attempt to get a SubEthaEdit session going at SxSW but failed to achieve critical mass. Ted Leung at PyCon seems to have got it sussed.
EtherPEG. This isn't as essential as the other two but can be a lot of fun - it's an ethical (as in it doesn't steal anything important) network sniffer which displays a selection of images currently being transferred across the network. It provides an often surreal insight in to the browsing habits of other conference goers.

I remember hearing Mac owners complain of being treated like second-class citizens. I haven't felt like that once in nearly three months of owning a Mac.

Abusing the command line

Simon Willison — 2004-03-26T01:28:43-00:00

If you're running OS X, try this:

Your computer should read out to you my Technorati inbound blogs and inbound links, extracted from the Technorati web API. Parsing XML using sed is a nasty trick I picked up from this O'Reilly article; speaking the output of a command using the 'say' and the backtick shell operator was my moment of inspiration for the day.

Quicksilver

Simon Willison — 2004-03-26T00:13:15-00:00

I found out about Quicksilver via Ted Leung a couple of days ago, and it's already become an indispensable part of my OS X desktop. On the surface, Quicksilver is very similar to LaunchBar which I'd tried and liked but not enough to justify the price tag. LaunchBar lets you launch any application on your system by hitting CMD+space and typing enough of the name to highlight the application you want. Quicksilver takes the same idea but expands it to cover address book entries, iTunes playlists, documents, bookmarks and more. It's incredibly slick, highly configurable and doesn't cost a penny.

It's also being blogged to death at the moment, but it's so good it really deserves the attention. See also Todd Dominey, Jon Hicks, Dan Dickinson's useful tutorial and the cast of Technorati and Feedster.

Doing more with the iSight

Simon Willison — 2004-01-13T01:15:10-00:00

The iSight came close to being the biggest disappointments of my new Mac experience. It looks gorgeous and appears to integrate seamlessly with iChat AV, although as I don't currently have any contacts with an iSight I haven't been able to try video conferencing yet. The dissapointment is that there was no clear way of using it to capture video directly - a feature that I reasonably expected from iMovie. Apple's knowledge base knocks the point home pretty clearly:

iSight is intended for use as a video conferencing camera, and does not output the DV format necessary for capturing video with iMovie.

Well that sucks. Thanksfully before writing the thing off completely I did some Googling and turned up this excellent O'Reilly article: Making Movies with the Apple iSight, which shows how Apple's free QuickTime Broadcaster software can be used to capture footage straight from the iSight to disk.

Surprisingly for Apple the procedure is far from transparent, but at least it's possible.

Oh, and the biggest disappointment? The fabled backlit keyboard, which tends to be drowned out by the light from the laptop screen making it more of a gimmick than a useful feature.

Mac-tastic

Simon Willison — 2004-01-10T06:01:35-00:00

Sorry for the radio silence; I've been playing with my new Mac. It's been an almost entirely positive experience - it's certainly the most enjoyable computer I've ever owned. I've also only crashed an application once so far - bizarrely it was the Terminal while accidentally pasting in a whole bunch of junk. Other than that the system stability and performance is excellent - and it's only running on 256 MB of RAM while I try and find one of those tiny screwdrivers to install the upgrade.

The biggest irritation at the moment is the 'delete' key. I'm not sure if it's meant to be in-place delete or backspace, and it seems to do either one depending on the application I'm running. This sucks, and any tips on making it more predictable would be more than welcome (my biggest problems with it have been in vi). Also, does the Mac have an equivalent to the thing on Windows where holding ctrl+shift+arrow key selects the previous or next word?

The other thing that sucks is only having one mouse/trackpad button. It's not like the context menu doesn't exist - you're expected to hit ctrl+mouse button to access it. My Mac experience became instantly more pleasant when I plugged in a traditional mouse with two buttons and a scroll wheel. I wish Apple would admit that the days of single button mice are long gone and give me two buttons on my trackpad.

Oh, and it almost goes without saying but DVD region encoding is the single most irritating and fundamentally stupid thing the entertainment industry has ever pulled. It's like they want me to abandon legal purchases and get all my movies via BitTorrent. See also "protected" CDs. As Cory points out, there's never been any market demand for any form of DRM. Bypassing the region check on my PowerBook using a firmware upgrade would void the warranty, so since I shelled out for AppleCare it isn't an option. I guess the DVDs I brought with from England (some of which are unavailable in the US anyway) will have to stay in my suit case.

Irritations out of the way, here's a list of things that have made me go "ooh":

The whole thing is just ridiculously good looking, from the PowerBook itself to the operating system. I have not had an ugly moment since I first booted it up.
The default screensaver is also gorgeous.
I plugged an external monitor in to it and it instantly shared my desktop across the laptop and monitor screen flawlessly. In fact, everything I've plugged in to it so far (digital camera, iSight, USB mouse) has Just Worked.
I wanted to copy files across from my work Windows machine, but I only had one network cable. I plugged one end in to the Mac and the other in to the PC and the Mac worked out what I was trying to do and pretended the cable was a crossover cable. Then I turned on Windows Sharing (aka Samba) and copied the files across in a couple of minutes.
Like everything else, networking Just Works - plug a cable in or turn on the AirPort and surf away.
The Unix side of things is just excellent. Thanks to Fink and this tutorial it took all of five minutes to get a PostgreSQL server up and running.
Exposé is pure unadulterated magic. It makes up for the Dock being B.A.D. It's also really, really pretty to watch. I'm such a whore for cheap visual effects.
My Mac can talk to me! And I can talk back to it! Admittedly my English accent means it only responds to "Computer - start screensaver" and there doesn't appear to be a training option anywhere but it was still pretty cool that it had voice + speak recognition abilities built in.
Software installation on Macs is a breeze. Most software comes as a downloadable drive image - you click it in Safari, it downloads and auto-mounts and lets you drag the application to where-ever you want it to live (normally the Applications directory). I just love the way all of the supporting files for an app are hidden away in its package so you can drag the whole lot around without worrying about where the extra bits and pieces are.

I'll try not to turn this in to another obsessive Mac fan blog, but let's just say that I'm beginning to realise what I've been missing. I'm not going back.

A hacker's introduction to OS X

Simon Willison — 2004-01-08T03:55:04-00:00

What is Max OS X by Amit Singh is hands down the best introduction to that operating system I've ever come across. It's aimed at a technical audience, does a very good job of keeping a fair balance balanced when comparing OS X with other operating systems and has taught me a whole bunch of interesting things about the system.

Some highlights:

A Brief History of Mac OS X
Interesting tricks to play on the bootloader, which is apparently based on Forth
What actually happens on startup
Fun command-line tools that come with the system

The rest of the author's site (which bares a striking resemblance to Eric Meyer's classic stylesheet) is worth exploring as well - he has some fascinating notes on advanced Mac programming, a description of his environment of 55 operating systems on one PowerBook and for the hard core programming geeks, 108 solutions to the Towers of Hanoi problem. And if that's not enough, he even has a genuine Donald Knuth reward cheque as well!

As for my own PowerBook, it was due to arrive today but my bank killed the card transaction because it didn't fit my normal buying habits (I'd like to know who's buying habits it would fit). After a series of transatlantic phone calls and the classic statement from HSBC that "you're not supposed to have credit on a credit card" all is well in the world, and the system should arrive tomorrow or Friday. I await its arrival with sticky palms.