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Spotlight November 20, 2007

Posted by Björn in : software , add a comment

Spotlight comes with Mac OS X and is a local search engine for your system. It’s similar to Launchy and Google desktop search on Windows. Search results include documents, applications, e-mail and much more. This makes it really easy to launch applications. Use Command-Space to open the search box, type (part of) the application name and press enter.

It takes a while to build the index the first time but once that’s done I find it’s lightning fast. Since Leopard it also supports complex queries. Trying to find a mail you received yesterday from someone in Apple Mail? Try this query: kind:mail date:yesterday from:someone. Good stuff.

Upgrading to Leopard November 19, 2007

Posted by Björn in : software , add a comment

Shortly after my Leopard DVD arrived the first patch was released. I hope that fixes most of the early serious bugs. There are always a couple of those.  Or a lot.

This weekend I had some free time and decided to do the upgrade. I put the disc in and wondered how well it would go. First the installer performed an integrity check on the DVD. Which is good idea even if it takes a while. I don’t want the upgrade to crash because of a faulty disc and end up with an unusable system.  I can’t remember other operating systems doing that.

Once the DVD was approved the actual upgrade began. Everything went very well although I whould have liked a bit more information. Progress was indicated by a simple progress bar and an estimated time remaining. With no idea what was happening, seeing it would last 3 hours, then 2, then 3 again wasn’t much fun.  I guess I could have let it run unattended but I was curious how system upgrades of Mac OS X work.

After rebooting almost everything worked. The new Dock is nice although I was getting used to the one in Tiger. A cool detail is that you can see the reflection of windows that are close to the dock.

Since I don’t know much about Tiger I don’t really know what’s new and what not. A few abvious things I have noticed are the virtual desktops (spaces) and folders in the right part of the dock. I like those.

The upgrade broke one thing though: Irssi. Actually it broke Fink and that in turn broke the IRC client. It was more my own fault than a glitch in the upgrade. I neglected to check if Fink would work in Leopard. As it turns out there is no binary distribution available yet so I had to resort to the source distribution. For me this was relatively easy but still a minor annoyance.

All in all I’m quite satisfied with the upgrade.  I have heard and read about people who have had very bad luck and others who didn’t encounter any problems.  I’m glad to be part of the latter group.

A brief overview of Mac IRC clients November 18, 2007

Posted by Björn in : irc, software , add a comment

Finding an IRC client was still on my to do list. The first thing I noticed is that there aren’t many clients. OK, maybe I’m spoiled because there are a lot of clients to choose from on Linux.

To be honest, after using Irssi for so long I have tweaked my setup to perfection for myself. Any client worth doing that again would have to be very impressive right away from the first time I use it. Now you may wonder why I even bother if I’m so heavily biased. For one thing, there’s no installer for Irssi. I also want to have an idea what kind of applications are available in the Mac universe. It’s all still very new to me.

This is by no means a comprehensive review of IRC clients. Like a lot of people I’m simply downloading the latest releases of a few of programs I can find and deciding if I like it after a couple of minutes.

Snak

Snak is very user friendly by running a setup wizard the first time you start it. It sets up your nickname and favorite servers. This works fine. Unfortunately there was a problem connecting to the IRC network and I couldn’t find the error message. All it said was Not connected. I think he folks who made Snak want to shield regular users from cryptic error messages. After a couple of retries it worked. I still don’t know if what the problem was. Joining channels and other networks all worked fine. However, I don’t like the way those buttons at the top of the screen are arranged. Contacts, profiles, actions, … what’s up with that? Considering that Snak costs $29 it has to be very good before I make the switch. I decided to call it quits and move on to the next one.

Linkinus

Just like Snak, Linkinus is shareware and costs $20. When reading about the features on the site I was quite eager to try it. After a 10 minute trial I prefer this over Snak. The interface is less confusing to me and it has an icon in the menu bar that allows you to jump to new messages in inactive channels or private conversations. The general look and feel is more pleasing to me. It can be extended with plugins written in Objective C. I may have to rewrite the few scripts I really want. Apart from that Linkinus could be the client I’m looking for. I still have some other clients to try.

Ircle

I’ll keep it short. I removed Ircle after 10 seconds. It took forever to start, but maybe that’s just the first time. What annoyed me immensely was the way it took over my screen. Four separate windows, 2 in the corners on the left and 2 near the top right corner. Because of this messy GUI it wasn’t immediately obvious how to proceed. That was the end of my Ircle experience. Not worth my time and certainly not worth the registration fee. Someone told me Ircle is good and very popular. I wonder what he’s been smoking.

Babbel

Babbel isn’t too bad. Its interface resembles Linkinus a bit, but it’s a lot less polished. Keeping track of private messages is harder because they don’t go to new window. Perhaps this can be changed in the configuration but I couldn’t find it right away. It works, it’s free but it’s a little too rough around the edges for my taste. It’s not as bad as Ircle but if I’m going to switch to another client I want an intuitive and smooth experience.

Colloquy

This is probably a pretty good client but I didn’t test it very long. Colloquy’s interface is not my kind of thing. I don’t like the way servers, channels and private conversations are organized. Others may love this. Under the hood it appears to be quite solid. It also supports other protocols, such as Jabber. I removed it quickly but if you’re looking for an IRC client give this one a shot.

Conclusion

In the end I still decided to stick to Irssi. At first I didn’t feel like compiling it myself and solve whatever issues came up due to dependencies on libraries. That was until I found the Fink project. It’s a package management system similar to what Debian has. They even use the same tools. Combined with Fink Commander installing Irssi was a piece of cake. Once it was installed I could copy the configuration files from my old machine. Instant IRC.

If it weren’t for my Irssi history and Fink I would probably have bought a copy of Linkinus. It’s the only client that has an interface I actually like and that has enough bells and whistles to make me feel in control.

iTunes, part two November 18, 2007

Posted by Björn in : music, software , add a comment

After my previous failed attempt to use iTunes I discovered that it’s possible to solve those issues. To prevent copying files to the local drives I unchecked the options under System preferences > Advanced > General. Ogg support is possible as well I found out. Thanks to Wikibooks pointed me to a plugin from Xiph.org.  Importing everything took a while but it seems I can finally listen to music now.

I also installed the Last.fm Mac client.  It starts up together with iTunes and automatically scrobbles my songs.

iTunes disappointment November 17, 2007

Posted by Björn in : music, software , 1 comment so far

Among other things, I store my music collection on a NAS. On all my other machines, I can simply point the media player to the (mounted) network drive and build the collection. That didn’t go so well when I tried it with iTunes. Finding and mounting the directory wasn’t a problem but for some reason iTunes wanted to copy everything to the local drive. Which is exactly what I don’t want. Perhaps Add to library wasn’t the right way to do it but I didn’t see any other menu option that might help. I could probably get around this by setting up links on the filesystem myself but I don’t want to resort to such hacks until there is no other option.

That wasn’t the worst though. The killer blow was the lack of support for Ogg. Because of potential legal issues with the MP3 format I switched to Ogg when ripping new additions to my CD collection. I also prefer to buy from online stores that offer Ogg, like Magnatune.

There is hope though. The ReadyNAS has a built-in streaming server, based on Firefly. It looks like it supports Ogg. I’ll give that a try and see how well it works.