Macs Are Great!

It has been nearly nine months now since I abandoned using Dreamweaver and adopted Coda as my HTML/PHP editor and site manager. I never look back. Coda does have a few minor oddities about it, cases where I wonder why they did it that way, but I'm able to use it to do everything I need to with all of my blogs, associate stores, plain HTML sites and forums. My swearing while web editing has been reduced at least 90%.

One oddity I've noticed has to do with adding new files to your site. Assuming that you are creating, editing or otherwise manipulating these files on your Mac first, let's assume you add a new folder to a subfolder of document root, for example you might add a folder named "tiny" to an existing folder /images. If you select this new folder with the intention of uploading it to your site Coda will offer to upload it to the document root folder. I would have expected it to offer to upload it to the same folder on the server as it is in the local copy of the site. The simple fix for this unexpected behavior is to access the remote site in Coda, navigate to the folder that will contain your new upload, images in this case, then return to the local view of your site layout. Coda will now offer to upload the new folder to the desired location.
One of my websites is intended to provide support for people with celiac disease. On that site I'm using a number of different pieces of software plus some static and a few dynamic PHP pages of my own design. I'm using SMF in the forum, Associate-O-Matic in the store, Video Niche script to display YouTube videos, and Carp to show the content of RSS feeds. I wanted them all to look the same. I settled on an SMF theme that I really liked, then used Coda to force feed the layout into all of the other pieces of software. I'm rather pleased with the results, see what you think. The CSS editor built in to Coda was immensely helpful in this project.

When editing files Coda behaves exactly as I would want it to, it is a well designed, stable, well supported program and I'm abundantly pleased with it. No more Dreamwrecker swearing at this house. Coda gets 5 stars!

written by Steve Rider

If you happen to own both an Amazon Kindle (1 or 2) and either an iPhone or an iPod Touch, there is a really cool new free app in the iTunes store that you absolutely ought to grab. With Kindle for iPhone you can login to your Amazon account and see a list of every Kindle document you have ever bought.

Select a document and it is sent to your iPod/iPhone, and this is where it gets really clever. When you open a document that you have not finished you will be right where you were when you last read it on your Kindle.

Just as you might expect, the usual gestures work to turn the page and navigate through the list of your Kindle books.

This is an ideal use of technology, it seamlessly does the right thing without any interaction by the user. You don't have to click a "Where Was I" button, it just works. I love it!

Five Stars for the new Amazon Kindle App!

written by Steve Rider

For the last ten years of my career in corporate America I used Adobe nee Macromedia Dreamweaver for a living. It sucked. There is not a webserver with enough storage capacity for me to list all of the things I hate about Dreamweaver, but I knew how to use it, and the support it offered for maintaining local and remote copies of a website had me addicted like a crack junkie. Once I retired and became a web hobbyist I kept using it out of habit, but it is a bad habit like smoking.

My frustration with the program I had begun calling Dreamwrecker was so bad that my husband had learned how to recognize a particular sigh of exasperation I made only when running Dreamwrecker.

With the advent of Leopard and Pages Dreamweaver was driving me insane with its extremely amateurish handling of focus, foreground, and active windows. It just sucks so badly I had to either find something else or give up web hosting. Thankfully I found Coda by Panic Software. Panic is well known for their widely used FTP and SFTP client Transmit.

One thing Coda has going for it is a well thought out minimalist approach. When you tell Coda to push a file up to your server (using SFTP because you are not an idiot) it does not pop a modal dialog box saying "Oh My God, Really?" it just does what it has been told to do. Instead of popping a dialog box and conveniently hiding it behind another window, Coda shows a small circle next to the file name which becomes filled by a rotating decoration as your file is uploaded. And it does not mess around writing teeny tiny empty directories named _notes all over your freaking hard drive either. If there was a God, I'd tell her how much I hate Dreamwrecker.

In some ways Coda is a bit lightweight, it seems impossible to get a file from the server and have it land anywhere except in the site root, that's stupid, but I still have my delicious SFTP champion Yummy to use when I want files I transfer to land in the relevant target directory. Coda is OK doing uploads, it is just downloading files from the server where it currently falls short.

Editing files in Coda defaults righteously to code view, you can configure a local HTTP server on your Mac to preview files, but for PHP/MySQL based websites like blogs this quickly becomes a bad joke.

I looked at a few other HTML editors too, but I absolutely require SFTP support because real men don't use FTP, and I also require a program that is conscious of sites and relative file structures between local and remote.

If you like to use slow and highly unreliable web services, Coda understands iDisks.

Another absolutely delicious feature in Coda is that you can SSH right into the domain you are working on as that user, and it even sweetly does a cd to your web root folder. All this with one mouse click on an SSH icon, and no idiotic dialog boxes to piss you off

Still, with just a dash of eye candy and window/focus handling that is 100% consistent with other well-designed Mac applications, Coda has already reduced my stress level enormously. And it does not cost $500 like certain pieces of crap software that I have not used in over a week. What a glorious, wonderful week. I don't think I have yelled Jesus H. Christ once all week!

If you already own Transmit you can get $10 off on Coda. It will do wonders for your blood pressure, honest.

Just say NO to industry leading crapware!

Technorati Tags: Coda, Dreamweaver, Panic Software, Transmit, Yummy FTP, escape, modal dialog, Adobe, Macromedia, crapware, Dreamwrecker

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: Adobe, Coda, crapware, Dreamweaver, Dreamwrecker, escape, HTML Editors, Macromedia, modal dialog, Panic Software, Transmit, Web Hosting, Yummy FTP

Last year we expanded our web operations and invested in a 3.0GHz 8-core Mac Pro. The machine has performed flawlessly and met all of my expectations up until it was upgraded to Leopard. Apparently Leopard places higher demands on the video card, and as a result the fan on the original ATI X1900 graphics card began making more and more noise until it became intolerable.

It had gotten so bad that the tiniest task given to the video card, such as switching between Spaces, would cause the fan to start whining even louder for 10 or 15 minutes.

We found references to this happening as a result of dust buildup on the poorly designed intake area of the video card fan, but on inspection found ours not so clogged at all. We do open our computers for cleaning every 6 months or so, as we live and work in an area subject to powerful sand storms (Macs Are Great comes to you from the Sonoran Desert).

So in an effort to resolve this issue we ordered the new NVIDIA GEFORCE 8800 GT KIT from Apple. Installing this new card as a breeze, and of course it was not necessary to install any drivers or dismiss 5 annoying dialog boxes about unsigned drivers. It just worked.

Once everything was all done, put back together, and working great I discovered another thread on Apple Support that suggested this noise might be caused by the air intake on the card being clogged by dust. Of course I knew that was not the case on my Mac Pro, as I had tried cleaning it to resolve the noise. Then I saw a photo one guy had taken of the dust clogging up his card, and I realized I had failed to see that spot when cleaning mine.

So just now I took the old card out of it's static bag and examined it more closely.

Ooops! It was so thoroughly clogged with dust that you can't see the heat sink at all. So maybe it is a perfectly good expensive 512MB video card. My bad. Maybe I'll be more thorough in the future while cleaning inside my Mac Pro. I think I paid enough for the new card to learn a lesson from this experience

Technorati Tags: Mac Pro, fan noise, video card fan noise, ATI X1900, NVIDIA GEFORCE 8800 GT KIT, Apple, dust buildup, cleaning Mac Pro

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: Apple, ATI X1900, cleaning Mac Pro, dust buildup, fan noise, Mac Pro, NVIDIA GEFORCE 8800 GT KIT, video card fan noise

Macs Are Great! has tested the Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card, a truly unique concept that brings 2012 technology to the 2007 holiday shopping season. This ordinary sized SD memory card contains a wi-fi chipset. After using your Mac or PC to configure it with the details of your open, WEP, or WPA protected wireless network, you simply put the card in your digital camera, and when you take a photo it is automatically uploaded to your computer, a selected online photo service, or both.

We took a few screenshots of the OS X installer as we were setting up the card. It works well sending files via Wi-Fi on a Macbook Pro using an 802.11g WAP with WPA2 password protection. We also setup a free Google Picasa photo hosting account, and uploaded some photos there directly from the camera. This might make a great gift for a geek of the Mac or PC variety.

The manufacturer lists many brands of digital cameras as being compatible, we used a Canon SD950IS. Of course you should expect the added energy required to transmit your photos to have some impact on battery life. You can even buy the card in the Macs Are Great Store.

Technorati Tags: Eye-Fi, Wireless SD card, Wi Fi in Digital Cameras, Review, OS X, MacBook Pro

written by Steve Rider

Recently we created a new website for people with celiac disease, All About Celiac, using a content management system, and designed to act as a news aggregator for information about celiac disease, gluten-free recipes, and gluten free food shopping information. Today Apple has posted our latest widget designed to pull any of 6 RSS feeds from the site.


download

We used Dashcode, as supplied in the Leopard developer tools, to create this widget and it was really quite easy. If you've been thinking of trying some lightweight programming, perhaps as a way of getting into more serious stuff later on, Dashcode might be a good place to start. To install Dashcode run the Developer Tools installation package from your Leopard DVD, the devtools are not installed by default.

Technorati Tags: OS X, widgets, Leopard, Dashcode, celiac disease, Apple, downloads, gluten free recipes, gluten free diet, RSS, feeds

written by Steve Rider

Recently I received one of the new aluminum Apple keyboards. It is the full size version with the cluster and it connects via USB. I've never used a keyboard in my entire life that I liked more than I like this one. It is fantastic.

I find that I'm able to type faster and with fewer errors, it is amazingly quiet, the spacing of the keys seems almost perfect, and in addition to all of that it has the typical Apple stylish good looks.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Keyboard, aluminum keyboard, review, hardware, low profile, anodized aluminum, numeric keypad

written by Steve Rider

One of the most successful of my various websites is one for people with celiac disease, the Sensible Celiac. In case you did not know, celiac disease is an inherited autoimmune disorder that causes the immune system to attack the small intestine when a person eats wheat, rye or barley. I've got it. Celiac disease requires a gluten-free diet. I also sell gluten free food here.

When I installed Leopard I also installed the Dev Tools and Dashcode, and was very pleased and surprised to see how easy it is to make a widget. So I created one for my Sensible Celiac site that pulls the RSS feed from the discussion forum and shows the 10 most recent messages. It's nothing fancy to look at, and offers only very basic and typical functionality, but Apple has posted it in their downloads section.

If you have ever wanted to create a widget, check out Dashcode, it's drop dead easy. And if you want to learn more about celiac disease, visit the Sensible Celiac. Check out our over 600 Gluten-Free recipes.

Technorati Tags: Leopard, widgets, dashcode, RSS, celiac disease, gluten free diet, Sensible Celiac, Apple, Downloads

written by Steve Rider

For years we have been using SuperDuper to create bootable clone backups of all of our Macs. Each Mac has its own external hard drive reserved for backups, and in the event of a massive failure we can be back up and running quickly. The author of SuperDuper is hard at work on a Leopard compatible version, but I did backup each of my Macs under Tiger before doing any upgrades.

As I have been working on this blog entry I've been doing my first Time Machine backup on my Mac Pro. It does use a fair amount of CPU, but with 8 cores to play with, no worries.

The new Time Machine feature in Leopard has a different intended use. While SuperDuper does a fantastic job of creating a bootable emergency recovery system, Time Machine is intended to give you a way of falling back to earlier versions of a document, or recovering files deleted unintentionally. I'm using both methods right now. I bought a Fantom G-Force MegaDisk Triple Interface (1tb model linked, I bought the 1.5tb at NewEgg) and I'm currently backing up my internal RAID array to it using Time Machine.

Time Machine is designed for use with an external hard drive, so it is best suited for use with desktop Macs, but you certainly could devote an external drive to a Macbook or Macbook Pro and simply connect it when you are at home or the office, wherever the external drive is kept.

The real advantage of Time Machine is its informal version control capability. With the source for over 70 websites, and over 30,000 digital photos on my system, I have lots and lots of files that change frequently. While this web server always has the most current version of my web content there are times when I wish to refer to an older version. Time Machine checks your entire hard drive once every hour and backs up every file that has changed in that hour. Files from previous days are preserved for a month, and files from previous weeks are preserved until the backup drive becomes full. At this point Time Machine will prompt you to choose to delete some old backup sets or switch to a new backup drive. Since you just enable the feature and the backups take place automatically thereafter, your butt is pretty well covered.

Once SuperDuper has been updated to work with Leopard, I will certainly still make periodic bootable backups of my system in order to be able to get back up and running ASAP. I've also learned in the past the hard lesson that it is best not to rely completely on just one backup strategy.

(buy Leopard now)

Technorati Tags: Leopard, Time Machine, SuperDuper, backup strategy, Apple Mac, Mac Pro, G-Force Megadisk, external hard drives, OS X, new features, CPU utilization

written by Steve Rider

I've been anxiously awaiting Leopard, and over the weekend I upgraded 3 of my computers, a 20" CoreDuo iMac, a 2.2GHz Macbook Pro, and my super mega 8-core Mac Pro. Each upgrade went very smoothly, and so far I have not found any installed applications that no longer work. I was looking forward to using Spaces as a replacement for YouControl Desktop and it is fantastic. Mail is clearly faster, Safari is very much faster, Safari no longer seems to leak memory.

I've got a 1.5 terabyte external drive coming that will be used with Time Machine to backup my Mac Pro. In the meantime I setup my iMac to use Time Machine to an external 250gb drive.

The changes in Finder are welcome, I especially like the way it lists other machines on the local network, making it easy to move files from one machine to another.

Pleasant Surprises

There was so much buzz about big changes that a few of the really nice refinements almost escaped my attention. Preview has really come of age. You can now resize images and use a whole bunch of image correction tools that were previously only available in programs like iPhoto. It's fantastic and still extremely fast and lightweight, programming at its best IMHO.

And in the new Safari when you use Command-F to search the current page the found text is highlighted in a brilliant yellow color, no more staring at the page for 2 minutes trying to find the highlighted item, this jumps right out at you. As you can see in the sample image, I was searching for the word Intel.

The new Dock has really got the eye candy thing going as widely reported, it's very nice.

I'm seeing no downside at all to this upgrade, if you are sitting on the fence and waiting to hear real world reports before you decide, put me down in the plus column. Using my Macs is now even more pleasant than it ever was before.

I also installed the developer tools, including Dashcode. With it I was able to create a widget for the forum at my site about celiac disease, the Sensible Celiac, it was trivial. See my widget described and grab a copy here if you are interested.

Technorati Tags: OS X, Apple, Leopard, operating system, upgrade, Safari, Preview, applications, compatibility, Mac Pro, Macbook Pro, iMac, dev tools, Dashcode, widget, celiac disease

written by Steve Rider