Mac Geeks

Today Apple released the beta version of its Safari Browser to the public. The new, 4th generation of Safari has some nice feature you already know from Finder or iTunes – Coverflow like overview.

You can view your browsing history or your bookmarks in the CoverFlow view.
Another major change is the position of the TAB bar. The tabs are now positioned on the top of the window. This is disturbing as most other browsers have the tabs below the address bar or direct on top of the websites.I didn’t found a property where this could be changed by now. Maybe Apple developers make up their minds on this to the final release.

The beta version is fast and slick. I will test it the next few days and will report on any further issues.

I just installed MacOS X 10.5 Leopard on an 15″ Powerbook G4 to test the overall performance.

The installation itself went on without problems. Only the time settings where not done automatically so the date and time was set to sometime back in octobre 2007. This prevented some programs from functioning normally. For instance Adobe AIR was not able to install applications due to network errors. And Google BrowserSync for Firefox was also not able to initialize due to network erros. After setting date and time correct everything went well.

After some evening of testing I have to admin that my 12″ Powerbook G4 feels faster then this 15″ Powerbook. Although the little one has only 1.25 GB RAM instead of 2 GB in the 15″ model.

But overall  it’s ok for normal work. I tested with Mail, Browser, Code, thwirl and the usual web stuff. iStatsMenu is showing that the CPU goes up to 100% several times. But one has to admin that the Intel MacBooks (Pro) have in fact two CPUs to drive.

I finally got the evidence that Apples Mail.app from Leopard is causing the exceeding traffic I see on my root server. I mentioned this before in the podcast that there is something strange since the upgrade to MacOS X 10.5.
Since the update I got more traffic warnings from my provider. I didn’t believe this was due to increasing popularity of this blog and Google Analytics proofed that (unfortunatly). I then installed ntop traffic monitoring on my server to further track down the source of the exceeding traffic.
I had Apple Mail under suspicion because the problems started when some people around me and myself upgraded to Leopard.

Now I got the proof that this is caused by Mail.app. The new Mail.app in Leopard isn’t that stable and so it hangs from time to time. Then I can’t even quit it with forcing it to quit. So was this morning. Some of the Mail.app plugins stopped working and I decided to quit and restart Mail.app. But Mail.app hang during shutdown and wasn’t responding for more than 10 minutes. So I force quitted it and restartet Mail.app.

Everythings seems fine after restart. All my mailboxes where there, messages too and all the plugins where working properly.
But a few minutes after the restart I got another traffic warning from my provider stating that something had transfered 1 GB of data. I checked ntop and saw that this was IMAP traffic from my server to our office. So it was clear that this was caused by my cold started Mail.app

I also checked the system log of Leopard but didn’t found any usefull information on this behaviour of Mail.app. It seems that Mail.app had rescanned or even retransfered my whole IMAP mailbox due to this hard restart. But I can explain why that must happen.

Technorati Tags: Leopard, Mail, MacOS X

With the updated Safari Browser in Version 3.1 it’s now possible to prevent links to open new browser windows. This settings is available in Firefox browser for a long time. But it’s still not easily available for Safari. Although you can explicitly open a link in a new tab, you can’t prevent opening a new window and instead send it to a tab by default.

But with a little help from the Terminal you can achieve this goal easily:

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

found this a few days ago at fscklog

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Safari

This podcast is about the applications I use the most on my Mac. It starts with browsers like Firefox, OmniWeb and Safari, the goes to gtd applications like OmniFocus and Things, drawing with OmniGraffle, chattings with AdiumX and Skype, mailing with Mail.app and Thunderbird and finally menu extensions like Jumpcut, iStatMenu, LittleSnitch, Shimo and Launchbar.

You can subscribe to the podcast from this url:

http://www.mac-geeks.de/wp-content/podcasts/podcast.xml

Simply subscribe to this URL in your iTunes and you’ll get the new episodes automatically.

Technorati Tags: Apple, eMail, MacGeeks, MacOS X, Podcast, Software

Yesterday evening Apple introduced the iPhone SDK in a special event. Now everybody is enabled to develop custom applications for the iPhone platform (iPhone and iPod touch). This includes an Apple design guide for the iPhone user interfaces.

I think this SDK has a lot of potential to beat all the other mobile platforms. As a developer of WindowsMobile, Symbian or Java mobile applications you never now on what hardware your app will run. You don’t know if it’s a wide screen or a small display. You don’t know if there is a keyboard or only a touchscreen. You don’t know if there is a camera, music player etc. So you better reduce your requirements to the absolute minimum or risk that your application wont be usable on many devices.
You don’t have to worrie about all that on the iPhone. You now exactly what you can expect and even get design suggestions from the one and only manufacturer. This is a huge advantage of the iPhone platform and I predict a very fast growing market of iPhone apps. As you can also expect that a lot of these will work on the iPod Touch as it’s almost the same hardware platform.

Another interesting announcement was the integration of Microsofts ActiveSync technology so that iPhone can be wireless synced with MS-Exchange email, calendar and contacts. This is very interesting for business users who had to rely on Blackberry or WindowsMobile before.
Although this leaves a bad taste as Apple is selling it’s soul to Microsoft on this. John Gruber always was complaining about this proprietary technology stuff and hoped that Apple wont give in. But that seems to be the fact right now. Anyhow this will open a wider market for the iPhone.

In this company at least 10 people already use an iPhone and asking me to open the MS-Exchange to the internet for them. But surely deny to put an MS-Server directly into the internet or buy another one just to support iPhone. We already have Blackberrys and these are at least useable.

For downloading the new applications to iPhones Apple also introduced the AppStore for iPhone. This is portal site you can access from your iPhone to buy or just download iPhone applications. This is similar to the iTunes Music Store for audio and video content but independent from that and from iTunes. The license model grants 70% of the revenue to the application developer and 30% to Apple. But there will be also free applications.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, SDK, eMail, Apple

Some of you asked how to easily copy the location of a selected file in finder to the clipboard. This is a feature of PathFinder but can be setup very easy with Finder + Automator in Leopard (may even work on Tiger).

You simply concatenate three simple items in Automator. First you get the currently selected file from the finder. As you probably don’t want the file location in Apple HFS style (with colons) you have to convert the output. I use the a shell command with sed ( sed ‘s/:/\//g’ )on that and finally put the output to the clipboard. Simply save this workflow as Finder Plug-In in Automator and you have a new context menu entry in Finder to copy the location to your clipboard.

If you messed up your Plugins for Finder you can find them in you home directory under /Users/<username>/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder/
Simply delete the workflows you don’t need anymore.

[Update:] here’s an archive of the automator workflow. You can unzip it and open in in Automator or copy to the location I mentioned above.

Copy Path to Clipboard.zip

Technorati Tags: Automator, Clipboard, Finder, Leopard

Most of the mac users probably have mobile macs and tend to change the working environment quite often. This also involves switching the networking environment in most cases.
Let’s say you have a wireless lan at home with automatic address assignment. At the office you have wireless lan with fixed addresses and wired lan with fixed addresses too. You probably don’t want to go to SystemPreferences and Network Settings every morning and evening to adopt your network configuration to your current location. An easy mechanism to switch between different sets of network settings is built-in to MacOS X. It’s called “Locations” (“Umgebung” in german) and is located directly in the Apple menu item. A location profile combines specific settings for every networking device enabled for this profile.

If you doesn’t have configured any profiles by now you have one standard profile by default called “Automatic”. This profile contains automatic settings for every networking device and should enable you to connect to any network which offers automatic configuration informations.

If you like to create a new location profile you can open the system preferences right from the locations menu.

In the top of the preferences window you can also choose between different location profiles. On the left side you can see all available network devices for the current location profile.

To create a new profile click in the drawer for the locations and choose “edit locations”.

In the new window you can add, substract or clone location profiles. These are just the names of the profiles. The device settings are made in the normal network preferences window.

Make sure the desired location profile is selected in the top of the network preferences window before changing any device settings. You can change settings in the default profile as well. But you shouldn’t do that so you have a profile you can default to when you come to new and unknown networking locations.

You can now edit the settings for every device in the current profile. Mostly you will only change the device you like to have specific settings in the current location.

After applying the settings they are instantly available without rebooting. From now on you can switch to this new profile by just 2 clicks.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Networking, MacOS X

Yesterday evening (GMT) Steve Jobs unveiled some cool new products on his opening keynote at the annual MacWorld keynote.
I don’t want to bore you with many details as almost every blog currently has articles about the new MacBook Air, TimeCapsule and the Software-Updates.

I like to point you to a nice summary of the news at Mac-Essentials (german) and a short review and comparison on the MacBook Air from Jon Gruber of Daring Fireball.

My personal thoughts about the MacBook Air:

• nice
• very leight-weighted
• to expensive for private users
• to low performance for pro users
• no wired network port
• non-replacable battery

Technorati Tags: MacBook Air, MacWorld, Hardware, Apple

Der Macoholic hat wohl zu Weihnachten Speed genommen. Jedenfalls ist er superproduktiv drauf und schmeisst einen guten Artikel nach dem anderen raus. Er macht eine Serie über den neuen Star am GTD-Himmel Things und heute habe ich einen sehr guten Beitrag über Tagging im Filesystem gelesen. Also unbedingt mal da vorbeischauen. Wird man nicht dümmer von.