Archive for category System
Windows Live Sync on Mac
So I’d heard that Windows Live Sync was out for Mac. I’d tried an early version of this and it never really worked terribly well. This is still technically a beta but I thought I’d give it an other chance. I’m glad I did. This is definitely the choice for syncing services. Further if you are backing up smaller files Microsoft gives you 2 G of free storage. That’s really nice as it more than handles most people’s various documents. Yes it’s insufficient for multimedia but most business files will more than fit in 2G.
Thus far all my files have synced flawless across networks and at a pretty high speed. I have quite a few “boilerplate” type documents that I’m forever printing out. However keeping the files that are in the office synced with the latest versions on my laptop had me pulling my hair out. No more.
Complaining about Snow Leopard
The Apple Blog is complaining about Snow Leopard. I’ve noticed a few people just hate Snow Leopard. To me it’s been my absolute favorite upgrade since 10.3. And that’s saying something. They finally fixed the Finder. (Honestly, while there are new features I’d like I don’t have anything to complain about anymore) The upgrade to Automator and Services is amazingly useful in a small business. It also just feels more solid to me. Yes I had a few quirks upgrading due to 64 bit issues with Python and a few other command line tools. But given how significant the under the hood upgrades were I’m surprised how great things went.
I honestly wonder how many people having trouble with SL did a regular upgrade but had weird kernel extensions and drivers on their machines. Nearly everyone I’ve known with SL problems always ended up being due to some incompatible piece of software causing the problems. Initially, for instance, I had some huge issues with Parallels. Once I upgraded the problems disappeared. Of course I was also technical enough so as to be able to find all the drivers, kernel extensions, and so forth and remove them. (USB Overdrive was a problem for me for a while too until a new version arrived, not to mention some headaches with the Logitech drivers and Safari)
Built in Wireless Scanner
A cool tip I picked up from Ars. Apparently there is a command line wireless scanner built into Snow Leopard (and I suspect with Leopard although I’ve not tested that)
Try
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport -s
Type it without the -s flag to see options. If you use it a lot create a symlink to ~/bin.
Copy Email Address Only
Posted by clark in SalesForce, System on 2010/02/04
OK, I’d mentioned this one in the sidebar several months ago. But I hadn’t actually done it myself. Now that I’m running SalesForce I find myself copying and pasting email addresses a lot. However under Snow Leopard the default for copying an email address is to include the name followed by the email address in braces. SalesForce really doesn’t like that format though. So what we want is just the email address to copy.
It’s easy enough to do.
Sending Data to Windows
Posted by clark in Applescript, Automation, System on 2010/01/22
For reasons I won’t go into I had to get some data imported into a popular Window app. Sadly the app doesn’t have good import abilities. Were I a com hacker I might have been able to do something on Windows. However I’m primarily a Mac guy and all my data was in an Excel spreadsheet. Enter the hack of Python, GUI scripting and appscript. I had my Windows program open in Parallels.
Here’s a nice little template I used for this. Some of it might have been handled better using cut and paste. But for reasons I won’t go into I wanted it to appear to the Windows app as if I were typing all the data from my Excel spreadsheet into the Windows app.
I suspect this may come in handy for a few of you who run OSX and Windows simultaneously and need to be able to have some level of scripting in Windows. What’s nice about Windows (and sometimes frustrating about Macs) is that you can do almost all things via the keyboard. This means utilizing Applescript/Appscript you can script a lot in Windows from the Mac.
Bing
There’s some buzz about Apple replacing Google with Bing in the default search for Safari. I’m pretty skeptical about this. But it seemed like a good time to give my thoughts on Bing.
I tried switching to Bing full time several times. For casual stuff from popular sites I think it is quite superior to Google. Most significantly the UI is vastly superior. For blogging or quick clip art I used to use Google Image quite a bit. But I’ve converted over to Bing for the most part there.
Paths and ManPaths in Leopard
Cool bit of info I picked up at Ars. We all know the standard way of modifying paths. In your .bash_profile you probably have a line like this:
export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$HOME/bin:$PATH:/usr/local/bin:/ export MANPATH=`/usr/bin/manpath` export MANPATH=/opt/local/share/man:$MANPATH
Well apparently starting with Leopard and continuing with Snow Leopard there are two directories where you can put text files with paths in them and they’ll automatically be added to your PATH or MANPATH respectively.
Metadata II
Posted by clark in Commentary, System on 2009/09/24
A bit of an expansion to my post this morning commenting on Siracusa on metadata. The issue was the Finder ceasing to pay attention to the old MacOS type/creator codes that had been around since 1984 with the Mac 128K. (These were more or less Apple’s alternative to the 3 character DOS file extension) In his Ars article Siracusa suggests
Apple should add an official storage location for file creator information stored as a bundle identifier, plus APIs to get and set this value. All Apple frameworks and applications should set this value appropriately when creating or modifying a file.
I should note that this metadata is actually already part of OSX and has been for a while. If you go into Get Info and select an application to open the file it sets this metadata.
Upgrading to Snow Leopard Part 6: 64bit vs. 32bit
OK, probably my last post on upgrading as everything has actually gone surprisingly smooth. I may actually start upgrading some of my other machines now. I honestly think this upgrade has been my smoothest upgrade of an OS. (Which considering how big the under the hood changes were is quite surprising)
What I want to discuss today is moving between 32 bit and 64 bit versions.
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Upgrading to Snow Leopard Part 7: One Month Later
Posted by clark in Commentary, System on 2009/09/25
OK, it’s nearly been a month now since I upgraded to Snow Leopard. My posts about upgrading have, by far, been the most popular. I noted a few blogs (like The Apple Blog) are doing one month reviews. I like these as your initial impressions and your final impressions are often different.
First the negatives.
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