NeoOffice 2.1 is out, their servers are melting and no torrent file is in sight – unfortunately I wasn’t able to create a NeoOffice torrent file by myself, my torrent client only gave me error messages.
Here is a NeoOffice download mirror that still works. Be quick!
My first impression 5 minutes after installation:
I never thought I would license a text editor for 39 Euros. After reading quite fantastic reviews of TextMate I decided to give this supposedly divine editor a try. Turned out to be a terrible mistake as I know now.
The first impression was like “OK, it’s a good editor, but 39 Euros while TextWrangler is still free, no way!”.
10 days later I already was knee-deep in TextMate projects, accustomed to its keyboard short-cuts, had the blog-editor configured, let alone all the the bundle-features (discovered the secrets behind FIXME, CHANGED and TODO!!) and was overall very impressed by TextMate’s slick and fast usability. To make a long story short, I couldn’t imagine switching back to another text editor again.
However, TextMate was very helpful today when I changed my blog-theme from my badly hacked and messed up Unsleepable to a clean K2 setup, doing search&replace orgies in my database dumps and WordPress files. K2 is surely one of the best available WordPress themes. It offers an excellent reading experience and nifty features like archive pages sliders or sidebar modules.
Main reason for my clean-up was the migration from UTW to the Simple Tagging Plugin, which I couldn’t get to work very well on my former theme. On K2 it basically works, but for full support (e.g. archive pages) some of the K2 files have to be edited too, not a big problem though. I put the changed files in a zip-file, so if you didn’t modify your K2 installation, just download it and overwrite your existing K2 files.
Simple Tagging Plugin performs better than UTW, comes with built-in features like type-ahead tagging, tag suggestions, related posts and is, unlike UTW, still under ongoing development.
Update
Changed files for K2 v0.9.6 are available here.
Hmm, I’m missing an icon here. The Sharing icon in my System Preferences has disappeared. Instead of the icon I see this half-switch-picture:
So, first I thought some images were messed up and checked the Sharing-package. Strangely enough, everything looks fine there. The image file (SharingPref.tiff 
) is where it should be and contains the right icon. Frankly, I have no idea why the application won’t show me the correct picture. Anyhow, it’s not a big problem since it didn’t affect any functionality yet (crossed fingers!!), but it’s annoying and I’d like to fix it. Any hints resolving this issue will be highly appreciated!
Btw, what would be the reason for placing QuickTime-preferences in between Network- and Sharing-preferences? Considering another than a random system preferences arrangement…
Yet another proof to read support documents more carefully:
This week I received an invitation for The Venice Project™ and tried to install the client software under Parallels on my MacBook. Vainly, as it turned out…
Does The Venice Project™ work on the Mac or Linux?
We’re working hard on a native Macintosh Intel version and expect it to be available in the next few months. Currently the application works fine under Bootcamp but not under Parallels; it needs to access the graphics processing unit (GPU) for some of its operations, and Parallels does not support that at the moment.
A Linux version is also in the works.
BeatnikPad offers now optimized Firefox 2 builds for Macs again, which bring an overall better performance on Mac OS X. If you’re unhappy with the icon and name “BonEcho” you can simply change and rename them in the finder and info-window. To get the browser labeled as Firefox in the menu bar too, you’ll want to edit Firefox.app -> right-click “Show Package Contents” -> Contents -> Resources -> en.lproj -> InfoPlist.strings and rename “BonEcho” there to “Firefox” too.
At the same site I came over a nice Firefox extension: Fission, puts the page loading progress into the address bar as known from Safari. From a usability point of view I think it’s much better than in the status bar. The eye can stay at the upper screen area and don’t has to jump around to see whether a page is completely loaded or not.
I’ve never seen the small animated arrows on Google Maps before when you zoom in or out using a scroll wheel. A good method to ease orientation while fast zooming on maps.
An updated Skype for Mac video preview is available. It’s worth downloading only for this single change log entry:
improvement: CPU Usage in Video calls is reduced.
In the prior version I disabled video after the first few video chats. The system started to behave sluggish and slow once Skype video was started. Skype was taking almost everything the CPU had to offer. In this version it seems to be pretty much better. Well, at least I can continue working while Skype video is running (or I don’t have the excuse any longer that Skype is blocking my system and I have to take a break…).
Maybe I’m completely wrong but is it possible that after upgrading to Mac OS 10.4.7 my Wi-Fi (Airport) is not working properly anymore?
Last week I ran into problems while uploading some picture to Flickr. Once the process was completed all of my uploaded images were full of weird distortions like colored stripes, shifted image parts or just where half grey. Nothing helped: I tried to reduce image size, changed the image format and uploaded them with different tools (iPhoto plugin, browser and uploadr), no luck.
Finally I emailed the Flickr support team (which is very responsive!) and they told me that it seems to be a connection issue where the end of my uploaded image is being truncated due to slow connections.
So I did 2 more tests, hoping that I’m able to track down the problem:
and a final 3rd one:
Conclusio
I’m no network specialist nor do I know too many details about how Mac OS X works inside. But I do know that after I upgraded to Mac OS 10.4.7 I wasn’t any longer able to successfully upload my images up to Flickr.
It’s annoying, that’s all. It’s not a crucial issue as long as it only affects image upload to Flickr (even if it bothers me a lot that I’m not able to upload and participate easily on Flickr… hmm… maybe I should talk to someone professional why some Flickr-abstinence makes me nervous, but that’s probably another story…).
MacFixIt has already a collection of workarounds for many (!) issues caused by 10.4.7, but apparently not for my little Airport problem. Basically is my MacBook’s Airport working, except this annoying truncated image upload problem (and I’m not thinking of reseting all my favorite/recent networks because of that bug!).
Update #1
I was wrong, this bug isn’t the result of 10.4.7. A MacBook running 10.4.6 had the same problem with the picture upload to Flickr. It must be a malfuntion of my router (Netgear WGT624 v3). I doubt it’s an Airport problem because I was able to successfully upload images logged into other Wi-Fi’s…
Some might go out and play Minigolf on their free weekends, I stay at home and fiddle around with some geo things on my new MacBook.
As result of this afternoon I got ESRI’s ArcGIS up and running on Mac OS X. Of course with a little help of a virtual Windows installation in the background.
What needs to be done?
Well, first I had to decide which virtualization software I want to use. Basically I had a closer look at Apple’s Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop (aff link). Whereas Boot Camp doesn’t count as virtualization tool, it just enables booting and running Windows on any Intel Mac. That was mainly the reason why I didn’t go with Boot Camp. Every time you need Windows-only software you’ll have to restart your machine. In the case of ArcGIS I’m not planning to use it on a 10 hrs/day basis on the laptop, it’s just an “emergency” installation, to edit and modify some minor things on the way or to use it for presentation and demo purposes. So in the end I downloaded and installed Parallels Desktop.
There are of course some other tools available, like Virtual PC for instance, but after a quick research on some reviews I decided to focus on Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop for my purposes.
What about perfomance?
Actually I was positively surprised by ArcGIS’s performance in Parallels Desktop. I expected it to be sluggish and painfully slow, but it wasn’t at all. To complete basic tasks and do some map editing it’s quite ok and usable. The main limitations are RAM and video card. On Parallels Desktop you allocate a certain amount of RAM to your Windows installation, 512MB in my case. I think you can only allocate the half of your built-in RAM as maximum.
The video card is another major drawback: Windows sees a virtual graphic card with only 8MB of VRAM available. Not too much if you’re planning to do some 3D visualization (which I won’t). However, I’m wondering how ArcGIS Explorer (3D!) is performing under this conditions since there won’t be a Mac version.
A Windows installation enabled by Boot Camp accesses all of your RAM, makes use of your video card instead of emulating its own and the processor isn’t occupied with Mac OS X tasks while you are working in Windows. There are good chances that ArcGIS will act somewhat faster too.
Something else?
No luck with GPS so far. The Garmin GPSmap 60C is recognized by Windows but not by MapSource. I wish Garmin would fix their USB issue and come up with some Mac support. It can’t be that hard, other devices seem to work just fine.
Along with Apple’s switch to Intel it’s now easier than ever before to use Windows-only applications (like most GIS and GPS software) on Mac OS X. There are various virtualization products available which deliver good Windows perfomances. Using Boot Camp even gives you the full perfomance of your machine, considering some missing hardware drivers (Boot Camp is still beta). Let’s see in August what comes with Mac OS 10.5 out of the pipe.
Strange thing I noticed after the update to Camino 1.0.1: to load and view some sites correctly I had to clear the browser’s cache, otherwise some CSS appeared completely messed up.
I just found probably one of the most useful commands in iPhoto (which was hiding from me ever since I started using iPhoto): Photos > Revert to Original. How could this have been overlooked by me for such a long time?