Archive for the ‘osx’ Category
Thursday, January 17th, 2008 |
I have been moaning about the missing support for OSX from Garmin. I as everyone else have been forced to use either a PC running Windows, or run Windows in a virtual machine to do anything with our GPS. MapSource is a great piece of software, but it is fortunately Windows only.
During MacWorld 2008 Garmin announced project Bobcat which more or less does what MapSource does, but on OSX.
I can only say; “thank you very much Garmin, sad that it had to take 2 years for you to get this far”.
Update
I just found out that Garmin also have a OSX specfic page here
technorati tags: Garmin, MapSource, Project Bobcat
Posted in gps, osx | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 |
Almost a year ago I wrote about MacFuse, which is a great way of incorporating 3rd party filesystems into Apple OSX. One of the things iis to be able to have SpotLight as a filesystem.
But the new thing (relatively) is iTunesFS, which allows you to use finder to look at your iTunes Library. You might say that, that is possible with iTunes, but this also recognizes your iPod(COOL!!!), which means that it’s possible to copy files off your iPod if you by accident delete it on your Mac.
I don’t know about AppleTV, but it’s worth a try.
technorati tags: MacFuse, Apple OSX, SpotLight
Posted in apple, osx, technology | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 |
Just after Leopard was released I wrote about my findings with PHP5 on Leopard here – which had the conclusion that PHP on Leopard is more or less useless due to the fact that there are so many missing modules.
I used to use Entropy PHP on Tiger but I could not get it to work, well I am quite happy to say that with a bit of reading on the forums at www.entropy.ch I have been able to get Entropy PHP to work on Leopard.
In short which have to happen to get it working:
– snip –
cd /usr/sbin
mv httpd httpd.ub
lipo -info httpd.ub
lipo -thin i386 httpd.ub -output httpd.i386
lipo -info httpd.i386
ln -s httpd.i386 httpd
cd /etc/apache2/other
ln -s /usr/local/php5/entropy-php.conf .
locate libexpat
# in my case I found a libexpat in /opt/local/lib, from macports. Your mileage may vary. I also did a symlink from php ib to apache2 so everything would be in the same place
ln -s /usr/local/php5 /usr/local/apache2
cd /usr/local/apache2/lib
ln -s /opt/local/lib/libexpat.1.5.2.dylib .
ln -s /opt/local/lib/libexpat.0.dylib .
– snip –
And as far as I understand it will not work on 64bit Macs, which means that if you have a G5 or a Core 2 Duo then you will have to forget about until Johan from Entropy builds a PHP5 which will work on 64bit. Right now I’m happy that I actually did not have the money to go out and get a new Mac with a Core 2 Duo….
technorati tags: Leopard, PHP, Entropy PHP
Posted in apple, osx | 1 Comment »
Sunday, November 11th, 2007 |
I just wrote and entry about how to get nice scrollbars in Finder.
Well there is a way to do the same in other Applications which does not get the resources from OSX. In for example Firefox, copy the Extras2.rsrc to /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/Resources, restart Firefox and the scrollbar looks like it does in iTunes.
Only thing is that I now need to find a Theme which makes it look nice, as, as it is not it does look a bit odd….
technorati tags: Apple OSX, Firefox
Posted in apple, howto, osx | No Comments »
Sunday, November 11th, 2007 |
Even though Applehave said that they have made the Leopard GUI unified, there are still a few things which are lacking. For example the scrollbars in Finder are not as nice as in iTunes.
I stumbled over this Italian blog which describes how to change the look of the scrollbars in Finder.
It’s in Italian which I do not understand but the Extras.zip which is for download on the website, have a readme.rtf which also have the instructions in English.
But the easy way of doing it is;
1) download file
2) extract the file
3) copy Extras.rsrc (PowerPC) or Extras2.rsrc (MacIntel) to /System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/
Frameworks/HIToolbox.framework/Versions/A/Resources
4) make sure that root:wheels is the owner of the file (#sudo chown root:wheel Extras2.rsrc)
5) restart Finder (#sudo killall Finder)
And then the Finder windows will have a nice scrollbar.
Now, next step is to figure out how to do that for all Applications….
technorati tags: Apple, Finder, iTunes
Posted in apple, howto, osx | 1 Comment »
Sunday, November 11th, 2007 |
So we finally got a build in backup tool in OSX – that is in Leopard. Well get your hands down again (well there have been a lot of talk about this since Leopard was released). The tool is Time Machine, and it kind of does not really do much…. except for having a nice interface for restoring files.
My annoyances with Time Machine are:
a) It is really really slow, using ‘rsync’ is faster…..
b) When it does a backup iTunes stutters once in a while which is annoying, especially as Time Machine runs every hour (in automatic mode).
c) If one runs Time Machine from the command line, it will go into restore mode (crap!)
d) You have to have Time Machine in the Dock if you want to run it in manual mode (crap!)
e) Per default it does not work with network drives (there is a hack for that).
f) It not possible to limit the amount of disk space it uses, you will have to create a partition for Time Machine only (crap!)
g) …
For e) there is a solution here and here, problem is that if it does not work when you actually need that backup you cannot call Apple for help:-(
Time Machine is great for what it is, but it is a very simple tool, and a power user will just get annoyed with it. Go get something else if you need something which you can customize…..
Thank you Apple for giving us something which almost works…..
Update – 2007.11.12
Looks like there is a way. According to MacOSXHints, in this hint , it is mentions that right clicking on the TimeMachine disk allows one to do a manual backup.
technorati tags: backup tool, Time Machine, Apple OSX
Posted in apple, osx | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 |
One of the things I was looking forward for Apple to add of the “new” things in Leopard was proper sorting of folders in Finder.
I’ve always used the following sort order 1) Folders, 2) everything else in alphabetic order by type, and it seams like Apple do know how to do this, and it really anoyes me as it makes finding what I’m looking for a time consuming thing – especially when one have a few hundred files in a folder.
At least there is a way to make sure that folders always are first (or last), if one modify the /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/
InfoPlist.string by following this howto.
But it still only sort on one column.
How can it be that iTunes can sort on multiple columns when Finder can’t?
Maybe Mr. Jobs only have one kind of content in his folders……
Also it looks like the sorting by name is broken in Leopard; in Tiger one could choose to sort by Kind, and then the rest would be sorted by Name (or that is my assumption), but in Leopard it looks like if one choose to sort by Kind the non Folder items will be sorted randomly. Just have a look at your Applications Folder, choose to sort by Kind and the first items will be more or less random.
Just have a look at this
This is my Applications folder Arrange By Kind, humm…..
technorati tags: Apple, Finder
Posted in apple, osx | 2 Comments »