Drinkable Chicken

It’s good to know that I’m not the only one who has a problem with Mac design going to from colorful and friendly to cold and boring.

“I’ve spent the day eyeing Leopard warily from my chair and web-surfing for skins, icons, and suchlike. There’s a *whole* lotta grey goin’ on there, and I’m trying my designer-y best to neutralize its depressing effects by altering what I can in the options allowed, but I cannot help but wail and gnash my teeth and remember the good old days of Kaleidoscope.”

“Now it seems to be all about conformity. What happened? Toolbars? Any color you want as long as it’s dark grey with a really dark grey but not quite black tiny little font (Hello? Readability? Not. And don’t get me started on the light grey on white documentation and website.)”

“I mean, c’mon… flat grey folders? Screaming blue menu highlights? What happened to that happy, glossy, candy-colored interface that made things look happy and fun instead of like the inside of a cube farm asylum?”

Tja. I’ve been wondering the same thing myself. I actually loved the looks of OS X when it first came out. This was in the time of the original iMac and iBook, which came in a variety of colors, and were curvy rather than blocky… very different from the beige boxes that were all too common back then. The design of OS X mirrored that: colorful blobs of goo for buttons and scrollbars, translucency, pinstripes…

Then at some point they [*] decided that everything had to be be flat, grey (or maybe black or white in the case of laptop cases), minimalistic, and (IMHO) boring. Maybe in an attempt to look more “professional”, I don’t know. Some people I spoke to seem to equate professional with unexciting and colorless, so yeah. (One exception is the iPod Nano which, in the latest wave, comes in a number of bright colors. Maybe because an iPod doesn’t need to look “professional”… :-)

Unfortunately new releases of OS X mimicked the hardware as well, and it shows. Apparently even the little apple and Spotlight icon in the menu bar had to get the black-and-white treatment.

Whaddya think? What is the reason that Apple design ideas have changed so much? And will they change back someday?

[*] Assuming that designer Jonathan Ive was responsible for both the iMac/iBook design and the current flat/metallic design, maybe there’s hope that Apple will get a taste again for non-boring designs someday.

Not a very original subject, but these links might be vaguely interesting:

• Schola: A social network for Latin speakers.

• The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk @25C3: Commodore 64 in a nutshell. (Well, a sizable nut…)

• How to create custom icons for your Mac: Useful.

• Functional programming languages (lectures): Heavy stuff.

• G3 icons for Adium: How cool is that? :-)

Now that I have used Mac OS X professionally (and on a modern machine :-) for over a year, let’s take a look at the applications I use on a daily basis (or almost).

☯ Carbon Emacs: The OS X version of Emacs that gives me the least hassle. (Your mileage may vary; there are those who like Aquamacs, for example… maybe someday I’ll give it another try and see what’s new.)

☯ MacVim: I use this rather than the newer version, mostly because it has a “drawer” which I like better than tabs.

☯ TextMate is useful as well.

(So yeah, I use these three editors and more… no Emacs-vs-Vim wars here. Emacs is my editor of choice for Scheme (and hopefully it supports Clojure as well). OCaml, on the other hand, seems to like Vim more. For Python editing, I tend to use all three, depending on my mood and the type of project. :-)

☯ Adium seems to be the best for instant messaging. I have MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, AIM, Google Talk, and Facebook accounts, and it supports them all, so I don’t have to juggle multiple messenger clients.

☯ Skype: The Mac client is a bit lacking, but it’s the only game in town, as far as I’m aware.

☯ Thunderbird: Not spectacular, but it does the job. (But if you know of a newsreader (Usenet news, not RSS) that supports easy extraction of yEnc files and the like, please drop me a note.)

☯ Firefox: Runs on OS X with few problems nowadays. In some cases, I found that Safari is faster, which is especially noticeable on slower machines. (Like a G3… ^_^’)

☯ Tomato: BitTorrent client. Maybe not the one with the most features, but it works for me.

☯ Corel Painter IX: Great to use with my new Bamboo Fun. ^_^

☯ aMule: eMule/eDonkey client that has a Mac version as well. Doesn’t look great on the Mac, but it serves its purpose.

☯ Chmox: CHM file reader. I have quite a few e-books in this format, and it’s nice to be able to read them on the Mac.

☯ Colloquy: Decent IRC client. Great for lurking in #clojure. ;-)

☯ Google Notifier: No more overlooked emails.

☯ Nocturne: Useful for hacking in the dark. :-)

☯ UnRarX: Extract RAR files. This compression format is not as common on the Mac as it is (was?) in the Windows world, but it *is* used, and also helps to extract old DOS games and such (to run them in DOSBox, perhaps).

☯ ViewIt: Picture viewer, useful if you have truckloads of manga and comics stored on CD.

☯ VLC: Video and MP3 player… still flaky, but often better than iTunes or QuickTime. Supports a fairly large number of formats.

Honorable mention:

☯ Shiira: Interesting new browser concept. At this point, there’s no real reason to use it over e.g. Safari or Firefox, but if you want something different, this may be worth checking out. Personally, I like the “tab” bar that shows little thumbnails of open pages.

Anyway, these are just the apps that see a lot of play at the moment. Feel free to post your recommendations or suggestions in the comments. :-)

Today I finally decided to upgrade to Mac OS X Leopard. I know, I’m late to the party as usual, but in this case I wanted to wait until most of the wrinkles were ironed out.

My first impressions are… mixed.

I like the fact that I could upgrade from Tiger without much hassle. Everything still seems to work, including QuickSilver, Adium, Chicken, and Postgres. Most of my settings (like e.g. for Terminal) are preserved as well.

There were, however, a few changes that immediately stood out, and that I didn’t like at all.

The new look of the dock is one of them. Fortunately, I knew this beforehand, and it’s easily fixed.

I don’t like the translucent menu bar either, but again, nothing a bit of poking around can’t fix. :-)

X11 still doesn’t work (I normally would not use this at all, except that there’s a C64 emulator that depends on it). There are some articles that deal with this problem, I will have to look into that.

Something I haven’t found a fix for (so far), and which bugs the hell out of me, is the new behavior of the little “view” icons in Finder windows. There are four of them now, and you can change a window’s setting to use icon view, list view, columns, or Cover Flow. Great, except changing a view for one window means changing it *for all windows*.

In other words, let’s say my default view is icons. I go to folder A, which has a lot of documents, so I want to change it to list view. I click on the icon, then open folder B. Surprise! It’s in list view now too, and so are all other windows on your system.

Now, it’s not completely impossible to change this and set views on a per-window basis, but it’s so clumsy that you might as well forget it. In order to use icon view as the default, but use list view for folder A, I have to do the following:

1. Open folder A.
2. Press ⌘J to open the “Show View Options” dialog.
3. In the window for folder A, click the “list view” icon.
4. In the “Show View Options” dialog, now check the “Always open in list view” option. (Notice that this will initially show whichever view is the default, so it starts out as “Always open in icon view”.)
5. Open folder B (this can be any folder that does not have custom settings associated with it). You’ll notice it’s in list view too now.
6. In the window for folder B, click the “icon view” icon.

This is pretty lame, IMHO… unless I’m misunderstanding things, it was *much* easier to do this in Tiger and its precursors. So far, from what I’ve read online, this indeed seems to be the new behavior: “Leopard also has new logic for views. Unless you’ve ticked the option to open in icon view, all windows will show whatever view you have just selected in whatever window. Like it or not, that’s the way it is.” [link]

(Strangely enough, other options like colored backgrounds, seem to be automatically on a per-window basis.)

More impressions will follow as I continue to work with the system. I haven’t checked out the shiny new features yet (Time Machine, Spaces, etc). More about that later…

As it happens, I have a few (*cough*) manga scanlations laying around on CD-ROMs. These are usually in the form of a directory with a bunch of JPG files in it.  In order to read these volumes comfortably, an image viewer with certain capabilities is necessary.  On Windows, I used ACDSee, which allows me to view images full-screen, then press PgUp or PgDn to go to the previous/next image.

For the Mac, I have now finally found a program that has most of the features I need. It’s called ViewIt (and it’s shareware).  Some of the features I find very useful are:

• Drag a folder to the ViewIt window to make the program “aware” of the folder; it will display the first image found.
• Use ⌘1 to display the image at its original size (100%).  This is important because fitting the image to the screen width often renders the smaller text unreadable.
• Use ⌘F to display the image full-screen (rather than in a window).  I’ve found that quite a few image viewers don’t support this feature and the previous one *at the same time*. That is, you can view the image at 100% in a window, or cropped full-size.  Fortunately, ViewIt supports both.
• The above means that most images will be larger than the screen, so the ability to scroll (especially up and down) is crucial.  In ViewIt, this is done with Ctrl+cursor.
• Cursor left and right goes to the next/previous image.

All these features sound simple, but they’re almost mandatory for reading scanlations in a pleasant manner, yet rarely do image viewer support all of them. At least, that is my experience. A while ago, I tested quite a few, and found all of them lacking in one way or another. :-(

(Of course, if you happen to know about another image viewer for OS X that does all the above, I’d like to hear about it. ^_^)

It appears my Windows box has given up the ghost. Now all I have to work with is three Mac machines:

• key lime iBook clamshell, G3, 366 MHz, 576 Mb memory (~2001)
• indigo iMac desktop, G3, 400 (?) MHz, 384 Mb memory (~2001)
• MacBook, Intel Dual Core 2.0 GHz, 2 Gb memory (2007)

Funny, how things change.

(Well. I also have a small park of older computers, like my SGI O2, Commodore 64, Commodore Plus/4, etc… but those don’t count. (Although the idea of running Spiffy on the C64 and then talking to it using Firefox on the O2 sounds… wicked. :-)))

I’ve been experiencing this bug every once in a while with my MacBook (running Tiger). Basically, when you use fast user switching, there’s a chance that the color profile changes to “Generic RGB”, which makes colors look bright and washed-out. (Changing the color profile back in the usual way has no effect.) This puzzled me greatly at first, but now I know that I’m not crazy. :-)

While a reboot resets the original color scheme, there’s an easier way: run the DMProxy script and everything returns back to normal. (More details in the link above.)

For work, I often have to connect to servers using ssh, using separate Terminal windows for each session. It’s sometimes hard to tell the windows apart though, as they all look the same at first glance, opening the door to mistakes like recreating the test database on the production server. :-) (No, I haven’t actually done that yet. *knocks on wood*)

I often found myself wishing for a more obvious cue as to which windows are “local” and which ones are ssh connections. Maybe by using a different background color?

Luckily, I found a tool that does just that: TerminalDecorator. (A serendipitous find — I was actually looking for a Scheme language module for TextWrangler, which can be downloaded on the same page.)

It’s fairly easy to set up:

1. Copy the TerminalDecorator script to e.g. ~/Library/Scripts
2. In your .profile, alias ssh to /Users/name/Library/Scripts/TerminalDecorator
3. Edit TerminalDecorator (it’s a Python script) and associate domain names with colors in the scheme_map dictionary

And voila, now my ssh sessions have different colors, hopefully putting an extra barrier between me and catastrophic failure. ;-) OK, so it’s not spectacular, but I find it *very* useful.