I am following the keynote via IRC and MacRumoursLive. Why am I like so many others totally intrigued by this? I suppose a lot of people would say that it is the gadget freak in me who wants to own everything coming out of Cupertino. But to me, this is not about the gadgets per se. It is about seeing progress being made, Others make progress as well, but nobody packages it as well as Apple does.
Archive for the ‘Mac’ Category
Watching the keynote
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008NetNewsWire for free
Thursday, January 10th, 2008Acorn
Friday, December 21st, 2007Theocacao: A Look at the Acorn Image Editor: “Acorn is first working example of what I would consider a programmer’s image editor. It has a very ‘objecty’ feel to it — sort of what might happen if Interface Builder was reincarnated as a bitmap tool. If you feel more at home in an IDE than Photoshop, I think you will probably like Acorn.”
Cool, I purchased Acorn a couple of months ago and now I know why.
iChat Video Only For LAN Internal Use?
Monday, December 17th, 2007Me and Peter Krantz just tried to get an iChat video chat going, just to test it out. We never got it going.
We forwarded a gazillion ports on our routers, turned off the firewalls on our laptops but to no avail.
The thing is, had we managed to get it working it would still have been way too hard to set up for any sort of reqular use. And how often do you have access to the router anyway?
This tells me that iChat is primarily made for internal, LAN based use. Am I wrong? Too bad if I am not.
Building Vim with Ruby on Leopard
Monday, November 12th, 2007I have had problems compiling Vim on Leopard, and it turns out that the culprit is the built in Mac Ruby. No clue why, but when after port installing Ruby, Vim installs cleanly.
I guess I’ll have to go with MacPorts Ruby – having a working Vim beats DTrace, however cool it is.
VimPress
Thursday, August 23rd, 2007Trying out the VimPress plugin, posting directly from Vim. Seems really sweet.
The correct Telenor Mac downloads
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007I signed up for a two year plan for mobile 3G internet from Telenor, which also happens to be my current cellular carrier. Their current offer is really good, SEK 200 a month, fixed price.
However, the link they provide to download drivers for Mac points to an old version which does not install on my machine. To get the latest and greatest. go to Option: wireless technology
Update: Never mind. Globetrotter Connect is truly useless. I gave up and purchased Launch2Net, very expensive but it just works.
RubyOSA
Wednesday, June 27th, 2007This tutorial on RubyOSA is great. I have never got around to learn AppleScript, and now it seems like I never will.
When It Just Doesn’t Work
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007When everyone else is writing songs about their love for GMail, I am reverting to old school mutt. It is simply the fastest way to read and manage large amounts of mail (The Rails mailing list comes to mind).
However, the default install did not work out for me, it mishandled international characters and formatting which made it unusable. After trying a bunch of options it finally came down to this:
port install mutt-devel -ncurses -pop -imap
Now, of course pop and imap had nothing to do with it, but I am using the most excellent offlineimap so I do not need them.
Parallels – Crap International Version and Customer Support
Thursday, December 14th, 2006Once I got my hands on my new MacBook Pro, I did what mostly everybody else does – I bought a copy of Parallels Workstation for Mac. I need it mainly for running local servers so I can do demos of server environments etc.
For various reasons, we (Valtech) bought the license from the local retailer at the same time as the laptop. Big mistake. You see, if you buy Parallels from a local retailer in a non-english speaking country, you get a special, international, version. This version is not downloadable from the site, and has it’s own line of activation keys, so you cannot use the regular downloads from the site.
Now, that should not be a problem, should it? Well, it is. To make a long story short, I could not get the fine feature of NAT networking going. I did all the huffs and puffs of uninstalling, restarting etc, but to no avail. At the same time, the regular version worked swimmingly, apart from the fact that it would not accept my activation key.
So, I figured it was time to contact Parallels support. My idea was that due to the reasons above I could trade my malfunctioning international activation key for a working regular one. I mean, I had paid for their product and could prove it by sending the key I had.
Enter the Kafka world of Parallels customer support. I have to date sent them eight emails with an ever increasing level of anger. The first replies misunderstood my request, thought that I had lost my key and offered me tips on how to get that back. When I finally got my point across Parallels stopped replying. I had to send two more emails to get an answer. They now understood the nature of my request but there was nothing they could do about it. Instead I should take my product back to the local retailer for a refund, and then buy a new license from Parallels directly.
The local retailer Macoteket referred to the swedish importer who will not return calls or emails. And Parallels still won’t give me a new key.
The moral of the story is: if you are about to buy Parallels Workstation for Mac, make damn sure that you buy the standard version. The international one is crap, much like their customer support.
There should still be hope for VMWare on the Mac.
Update: Macoteket eventually refunded our purchase and I rebought the standard version. Too bad it took so much effort.
Mail.app and Exchange
Monday, November 27th, 2006If I could ask for one thing in Leopard, it would be the ability to answer Exchange invitations directly from Mail.app. As it is now, I either have to use the heavily dysfunctional non-IE Outlook web interface or fire up Entourage for the sole purpose of clicking ‘Accept’.
MBP Core 2 Duo Sweetness
Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006This is written on a spanking new MacBook Pro, the 2.33 GHz, 2GB version. Company issued, mind you. Now if that is not a good reason to work for Valtech, I do not know what is.
The main reason I upgraded from my trusty 1.67 GHz G4 PowerBook was not speed, it was the possibilities of Parallels. I do quite a bit of evaluating and demoing of server configurations, and having it all available locally is a complete killer.
The first virtual install was Buildix to convince a customer that Subversion and Trac is a viable platform.
But of course it is wroooom-fast. Extremely responsive, and not hot. I currently have it in my lap – no problems what so ever.
My local browser war
Monday, September 25th, 2006I switch browsers like others switch … something they switch very often. Why does it have to be so hard? All I want is a browser that:
- Is small and nimble
- Feels like a Mac application
- Has good ad blocking support
- Handles Flash on demand
Safari locks up too often, and a number of sites do not work with it. Shiira is small and nice, but has no decent ad blocking. Firefox has lousy Mac integration and eats memory like there is no tomorrow. Flock just does not feel ready yet. OmniWeb has clunky ad blocking and is not worth the money.
My current choice is Camino. It is lightweight and Macish but has terrible, CSS-based, out-of-the-box adblocking. But with the help of CamiTools that can be fixed and you also get the flash handled.
Who knows, I might even be using next week.
Early Extreme Programming: The Original Mac Team
Tuesday, August 15th, 2006From Revolution in The Valley:
Instead of arguing about new software ideas, we actually tried them out by writing quick prototypes, keeping the ideas that worked best and discarding the others. We always had something running that represented our best thinking at the time.