Macs Are Great!

There are quite a few innovative and useful features in OS X Lion, the new Apple Mac OS, but the newest version of Apple Mail is not one of them. We’ve never liked the dumbed down interface in the iPad mail client, and when Apple chose to make Mail just as simple it left my heart cold and sad.

I do not wish to be protected from useful information, for example the email address in the To: field. I have multiple email accounts on multiple providers and quite often I’ll receive a terse message sent by a person who has no grasp of context. For cases like that I want to know which of my email addresses the message was sent to in order to figure out what they are going on about.

If you find the new Mail interface as dreadful as I did you might get some relief by selecting Classic view in Mail preferences, but that still left a product that was dumbed down, with ugly, too large fonts in the sidebar, and otherwise a source of constant frustration.

After a few hours of trying this and that I have now settled on a commercial email application called MailMate which is going to save me the hassle of reverting my system back to Snow Leopard.

If you have not installed Lion yet *please* make a bootable total system backup first on an external hard drive using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner (I like SuperDuper) because if there is something you do not like about Lion it will make going back to the way things were just a matter of a few clicks and then a bit of waiting.

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: Apple Mail, Lion, Mail, MailMate, OS X, OS X Lion

Today Time Warner released an iPad App that allows customers to watch certain cable TV channels at no extra charge if they are customers for both Cable TV and Internet access. Since I meet those requirements I grabbed this free app as soon as I heard about it. Once I provided my user name and password for their online billing system I was surprised and very pleased to see that it just works immediately.

Many of the channels I prefer to watch are included, among these the Comedy Channel, CNN and MSNBC. Local channels are not offered at this time, but I can watch those using EyeTV via an IP tuner and my Mac Pro anyway.

It seems to me that my DirecTV account is in jeopardy of being cancelled now that Time Warner has this very welcome new FREE feature for their customers.

I’m giving the Time Warner Cable TV iPad App a very enthusiastic five star rating!

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: apps, cable TV, iPad, iPad TV, Time Warner, TV

I’m dictating this review using the software that I am reviewing. It’s called MacSpeech Dictate and it was a birthday gift I received this week. Having grown up in the 1950s and 1960s I was never taught to type in fact that was women’s work when I was growing up. Maybe that’s just an excuse, but for whatever reason, I’m probably the worst typist I know. I pretty much always know what I do want to say, but when I have to type it it takes me a really long time because I’m constantly correcting typos. I never learned to touch type and even when I look at the keyboard my hand eye coordination is so poor that I often hit a key next to the one I intended to press. The bottom line is I hate typing, but I love using computers.

Years ago when I was still using another operating system that I need not mention I tried a different dictation software package. The state-of-the-art has changed dramatically since then. Apart from occasionally saying the words scratch and that together to correct the word it did not understand I’m finding this dictation software is far more accurate than what I can accomplish using my fingers. It’s fun as well.

Last night I was using it in an online chat session and the performance was fantastic. People used to wonder if I’d gone away in chat sessions because it took me so long to type, now they can hardly keep up with me.

If you have been considering using dictation software I honestly can recommend MacSpeech Dictate as having exceeded my expectations by far.

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: audio transcription, Dictate, Dictation, MacSpeech

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

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!

[tags]Coda, Dreamweaver, Panic Software, Transmit, Yummy FTP, escape, modal dialog, Adobe, Macromedia, crapware, Dreamwrecker [/tags]

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

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.

[tags]Leopard, Time Machine, SuperDuper, backup strategy, Apple Mac, Mac Pro, G-Force Megadisk, external hard drives, OS X, new features, CPU utilization[/tags]

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.
[tags]OS X, Apple, Leopard, operating system, upgrade, Safari, Preview, applications, compatibility, Mac Pro, Macbook Pro, iMac, dev tools, Dashcode, widget, celiac disease[/tags]

written by Steve Rider

In response to user feedback received in email, we have designed and programmed a pair of simple Automator scripts into a package we call JPEG Consolidator. There are two versions, one will copy all of the files it finds, and the other will move files.

By default these scripts will search a specified path recursively for files with names ending in .jpg, and depending on which script you run either copy or move them all to one place. I’m releasing these at no charge under the terms of the GPL (included), with a ReadMe and a How To file inside the package that provide complete details. You can download a Zip containing an installer here. The installer will place a new folder named JPEG Consolidator in your applications folder. Source code is included, modify it at will. Please remember, it’s not my fault.

You could use these to move files of any type, they are designed for maximum flexibility. Enjoy!

If you Digg, would you Digg this, or Stumbleupon, or something? Thanks.

Questions, comments, complaints, thanks? Leave a comment!
[tags]free software, OS X, find JPGs, consolidate JPEGS, copy JPEG files, Move JPEG files, freeware, GPL, Steve Rider, Macs Are Great![/tags]

written by Steve Rider

Sling Media produces a line of Slingbox products that accept video input to a proprietary codec with a UDP video server you can access across your home LAN, or with reduced quality from anywhere, using their Slingplayer client program. Of course you need to open a port in your firewall to access Slingbox remotely. The client programs for Windows, and now Mac too, rely on uPNP to find each new Slingbox.

For our review we went directly to the top of the line model, the Slingbox Pro, along with the optional Sling Media HD Connect Cable to allow connection of HD input. We used a Dish Networks ViP622 DVR as the source for our signal, we also connected our local CATV service to the NTSC tuner for SD TV (no screenshots of standard TV).

We installed the client on a Dual 2.0GHz G5 Power Mac and on a Core Duo 20″ iMac. Screenshots were taken on the Power Mac with a 24″ Dell 1920 by 1200 monitor connected. We used SnapNDrag for the screenshots and Galerie to create the screenshot gallery.

Installation of the SlingBox Pro hardware was a breeze. The provided component video cables let us connect our satellite PVR, while the cable TV connection was done by inserting the SlingBox Pro in front of the TV tuner using a provided coaxial cable with F connectors. (enlarge rear connectors)

The software installation was also easy. A guided installer found the unit and displayed a thumbnail of its video during the installation. The SlingBox and Power Mac were connected to the same gigabit Ethernet LAN, although the SlingBox uses only a Fast Ethernet interface, plenty fast for its maximum data rate. Performance across a Wi Fi connection may be diminished by bandwidth, but like streaming content players used on websites the SlingPlayer and Slingbox adjust throughput, and therefore quality, as needed.

Given our nearly ideal test case, the performance was quite good. Some moire is seen in shots with certain types of clothing or buildings. The audio performs well, and not much of our dual CPU power is consumed by the client.

We intended to use Slingbox only on our home LAN, those planning to use it remotely should keep in mind that bandwidth limitations of your home Internet uplink will most likely reduce the picture quality when you access the system remotely.

The SlingPlayer seemed to already know about the remote control for our Dish Network DVR, and once I configured my input sources and activated the hardware online it was all ready to go.

I’m very pleased with the attention to design in the player software. Cursor up and down keys control the psuedo-remote, and thus the satellite receiver. Spacebar is mapped to OK or Select. It’s well done.

The images are not Hi Def, but they are a lot better than you’ll ever see on a standard TV. The codec they are using has been well tuned. Have a look at some of the screenshots.

We’re favorably impressed with the Slingobox and will give it 4 stars. We could get that up to 5 with just a slightly higher resolution, like 720p.

[tags]Slingbox, Sling Media, Slingplayer for Mac, TV on Mac, Reviews, HDTV, HDTV PC, OS X, Power Mac[/tags]

written by Steve Rider

Although I’ve never regretted switching from MS Wormware to OS X a few years ago, there are a few things that bother me about life in the Mac world. One of them is the reliability and speed of the Apple default web browser, Safari. I keep about 6 or 7 browser windows open all of the time on various virtual desktops. Several are used to administer this webserver, one to lookup IP address to track activity from my various logs, and of course there are windows I’m using to surf the web.

I find that Safari leaks memory over time, I’ve seen it get up to using 1.5gb of actual RAM on my Power Mac at times. It also has a habit of just ceasing to function sometimes.

So I started trying other browsers, and recently settled on Camino as a second choice. But today there is a new version of Camino that includes, among other things, spellchecker support uising the very good OS X method.

The biggest advantage that Camino has over Safari is rendering speed. It draws web pages much faster than Safari. I suggest you give it a try if you have never done so, it is a very pleasant browser to use, and it is a real OS X application that is based on the Gecko code used by Firefox. Camino uses your OS X keychain, and you can easily import your Safari bookmarks.

[tags]Camino, Safari, Firefox, web broswers, review, upgrades[/tags]

written by Steve Rider