Category: Software

Today I’m not going to mention how my G5 has crashed about 10 times in the last week, or how frustrating that it is that Mac’s are so picky about their RAM that if it doesn’t come from the mothership it’s almost guaranteed to cause kernel panics and everything else to go wrong.

I’m not going to mention how I have to reinstall OS X because I can’t boot into the operating system (after trying every tip, trick and hack possible) and how AppleCare couldn’t do anything but tell me to plugin my other Mac (what other Mac?) to back everything up in Firewire drive mode then start from a clean slate.

Today I’m going to talk about the Finder, and where I feel it could be improved.

1. Copying Folders over Folders – There should be a way to drop a folder on another folder with the same name and have it add new files and give you the option to replace old files with newer versions. Currently the Finder simply blows the first folder away and replaces it with the folder you are moving.
2. Copying large numbers of files – When copying large numbers of files, if the Finder encounters a file it can’t copy it usually just stops copying altogether. This has happened several times after several hours of copying to make backups of fried OS X install today. It wouldn’t be so bad if you could just drag the folder over and pick up where you left off, but you can’t. See number 1.
3. Downloading Files – If you don’t have OS X auto-arrange the icons on your desktop, when files complete downloading they move. It doesn’t matter where you put the partially downloaded file icon, it jumps to somewhere else when it’s done.
4. Resource Forks – If you’re on an all Mac network you may never notice these, if you use your Mac with Windows or Linux you’ll notice how every folder your Mac touches gets a couple worthless files dropped in it. There has to be a better way to accomplish what resource forks do.

If you’ve been happily using Office X for OS X and are thinking about upgrading, I have one suggestion. Don’t. I did and I’ve had problems with every program.

Word 11: For some reason even though the new document compatibility panel was introduced, Word 11 is less compatible with some documents than its predecessor. This is the same document opened in Office 11 vs Office 10. It’s a simple RTF document that even the built in TextEdit handled fine. The image pretty small, but you can tell that in Office 11 numbers are scattered all over the page while in Office 10 everything is laid out nicely in tables.



This isn’t the only document this has happened with either.

Entourage 11: Entourage 11 has some nice new features, the project center and a nicer layout for reading mail. Entourage also crashes all. the. time. At least for me. I know what the problem is, for some reason I keep getting a large message and Entourage can’t handle it, so it crashes. I have to open Mail.app, get the message, delete it and re-open Entourage. In this case I can’t vouch for Entourage X. I haven’t tested it to see if it works fine there.

One way Entourage 10 is better than Entourage 11 is in it’s Exchange server capabilities, at least with older versions of Exchange. In Entourage 10 I can connect to the Exchange server and get mail (I can’t send for some reason) but with the newer Entourage 11 I can’t even connect to receive mail. The support got worse instead of better. To send and receive I have to go all the way back to Outlook 2001 for Mac.

Powerpoint 11: At work we use Powerpoint for storyboarding. It’s important that graphics and images stay exactly where they are placed. Up until I upgraded to Office 11 I never had a problem getting storyboards from designers working in Office 2000 for Windows, since the upgrade I often find that images and shapes have shifted from their original position. Usually the shift is a move between 5 and 20 pixels on the Y axis. It’s enough of a problem that I’ve switched back to Powerpoint 10.

Excel 11: I haven’t found much wrong with Excel, other than a few new “features” that I have to find a way to turn off. For example, (this is across all Office 11 apps) whose idea was it to make the formatting palette become translucent after a few seconds? What does this improve? I find it plain annoying, and even more annoying how it snaps back to 100% rather than fading nicely in. I disabled that “feature.” I also have found that Excel 11 has a bad habit of pointing out every possible problem, even when they’re not problems. If you have a list that is summed up at the end and there are blank cells (like for rows you plan to fill in at some point in the future) you get a little warning sign that just sits there until all empty cells are full. It’s not a big deal, but as far as I’m concerned, I’ll just stick with Excel 10 and avoid having the program correct my non-mistakes.

From my experience, I’d say save your pennies and stick with Office X for Mac. The upgrade has caused nothing but problems for me.

As mentioned previously, I finally decided to learn more about and choose a Wiki. It didn’t take long to figure out that C2 was the best site for comparisons. After reading that site and narrowing it down a bit, it came down to three.

1. Twiki
2. MediaWiki
3. PmWiki

The features I needed for my purposes were;

• The ability to password protect pages and groups of pages easily.
• File uploads
• User registration
• RSS feeds
• Open Source

Aside from that, I really only needed the standard Wiki features, everything editable, simple markup etc. etc.

The first Wiki I installed was (as I’ve mentioned before) MediaWiki. The install was simple, and it’s pretty obvious it can handle large sites. It doesn’t come with RSS feeds and I just wasn’t impressed with the way it handles uploads and user registration. Before you write MediaWiki off, I have to say I probably didn’t give this Wiki a full fair shot. I didn’t like the default template and I couldn’t find an online user community with plugins and support and that turned me off from it.

Next was Twiki. This is far and away the Wiki with the most features. It supports uploads (better than any of the others), advanced plugins, it has a great community built around it and is used by some huge companies (Disney for example). It’s also hard to install. I got it up and running in one evening, but getting it running right was much more difficult. Even after I got it running right, password protecting a section of my site was a challenge and getting sessions to work was yet another challenge. I could tell that theming the site was going to be another challenge. I’m not one to run away from a challenge, but after having my share of them and spending a week and a half setting the thing up, it was just too much.

The decision: PmWiki. PmWiki was the easiest to install. I never had to switch to root or create a database or even touch the command line. It supports uploads (not the best support, but support), it’s easily themable, it’s super fast, easy to understand, easy to password protect portions of the site, yet at the same time powerful. It comes with RSS support, a good community, good plugins and add ons and it feels very stable and solid.

My recommendation for a general purpose, intranet or group Wiki is PmWiki. My recommendation to PmWiki is to revamp your website. it’s way too plain and boring (I’m not against simple but this is too much…) and was the reason I tried PmWiki last.

Also…

A Wiki I may use for quick, personal sites is the great looking Instiki. I’m looking forward to file attachments for this one.

Where’s the wiki? It’s here.

Last night, after several months of not having a Linux box, I decided to get one back up and running. I’ve been following some of the new developments with Gnome and Mono and have been impressed with how clean and usable some of the apps that have come out recently are looking. I’ve also read quite a bit about Ubuntu, a Debian (my favorite flavor of Linux) based distro that is designed for usability and runs Gnome 2.8.

I downloaded Ubuntu last night (in 17 minutes at 502 Kbps!, thank you Cox) and installed it fairly painlessly on my old Pentium II 450mhz Gateway computer. It installed quickly and ran well, even fast on such an old machine. It also looks great. The default theme is very earthy, which fits nicely with the Ubuntu philosophy.

That’s about where the pleasant experience ended. Like I mentioned before, I wanted to install some applications I’ve read about, specifically:

• Muine – simple music player
• Tomboy – desktop wiki
• Beagle – powerful search tool
• Blam! – simple rss feed reader

I started and almost immediately found myself stuck. The nice thing about Debian is that you can use apt-get (or aptitude, as I prefer) to download and automatically install many applications. I started with Blam!. Perfect, it installed great, ran great and is an impressive application.

I moved on to Beagle. It wasn’t in the apt repository so I decided to build it from source. Oh… wait, Ubuntu doesn’t come with a C compiler. I installed one. Hmm. It doesn’t come with Mono. I installed it. It doesn’t come with Evolution-sharp 0.3. Not in apt either. I got it from source and tried to configure it. It was missing a bunch of *-sharp applications. Most were not in apt. Forget it.

Next was Tomboy. Not in apt. Again, I downloaded it and started to install it from source. It needed a Perl module, XML::Parse. I tried to install it using CPAN, but it turned out CPAN needed updating. I let that go for about 20 minutes and came back to it. Tried to install it again, it kept failing. I searched and found it needed some other application (I can’t remember the name) that was in apt, I installed it, XML::Parse installed fine and went back to configure Tomboy. No dice. Missing more packages, again, not in apt and when I started compiling them from source I fell into the same dependency nightmares.

Muine was a similar story, I didn’t spend as much time on it, but was not able to get it running.

I know this is nothing new, but it really is indicative of the difference between Linux and OS X. If people are going to adopt Linux and use it successfully, installing applications really needs to be much simpler, even if that means including libraries and increasing the size of the binaries, whatever it takes, it has to be done.

[update]

When I wrote this, I didn’t realized I wrote about a similar Linux experience just a couple entries ago. It’s been a few days. Just to clarify, when I said I haven’t had a Linux box for a few months, I meant at home. I’ve had a dedicated Linux server for a couple years now.

Also: I have decided on a Wiki. More to come on that soon…

First I need to say that I’m writing this all for the second time. Ecto (which I generally love) crashed after I tried to insert a link and I lost about 500 words. Nice.

In continuing with my previously mentioned desire to research wiki’s I came across and started to install Twiki, the Wiki I found to be the best tool for my needs and in my opinion, the most powerful wiki currently available. The install took two evenings–much longer than the MediaWiki install took, but that’s pretty typical for perl applications, they’re often more powerful and almost always more difficult than their PHP counterparts to install.

Everything went fairly well with the install and I was happy with it until I tried to edit an entry. I discovered that anything over about 500 characters was truncated when I saved the entry. After much searching, I found this page which suggests it’s a mod_perl problem. “Fine, I’ll just upgrade mod_perl” I said to myself. After a quick search I found an RPM for mod_perl-1.99_11-0. Attempting to install it returned three dependency errors. Not totally unexpected, but in order to lessen the amount of dependencies, I looked for and found an older version (mod_perl-1.99_09-10) which pleasantly surprised me by only returning one dependency error:

error: Failed dependencies:

httpd-mmn = 20020903 is needed by mod_perl-1.99_09-10

httpd-mmn didn’t look or sound familiar to me. A bit of Googling revealed that it has something to do with the version of Apache that’s installed. Great. I checked my version and found I’m using Apache 2.0.40. Upgrading Apache isn’t simple, especially running Plesk which requires a Plesk friendly Apache RPM. Usually that’s not a problem since they can be found on AtomicRocketTurtle’s site. I tried to do a YUM upgrade using his repository only to find he’s blocked EV1servers because he doesn’t like the way they handled the SCO / Linux issues. Great, another minor setback, but I decided to just download his RPM’s directly using wget (even though he recommends against this) and go from there. So, 20 minutes later I had downloaded enough RPM’s to upgrade Plesk and hopefully Apache with it. All went well, the usually less-than-simple task of upgrading Plesk succeeded with only minor hitches. I went back to the folder with the mod_perl rpm and tried it. It failed. Same dependency. Sigh. From here I really don’t know what to do.

This is why Linux is sometimes very frustrating to me. I’ve spent two evenings trying to install Twiki and another trying to make it work. Now I’m up at 1 in the morning at a dead end.

I’ve heard the word “Wiki” enough times to make me wonder… Now, the research has begun. I’ve started by exploring what’s out there. Here is my del.icio.us bookmark page with Wiki links. Oddly enough, there isn’t much on del.icio.us about Wiki’s yet. In fact, the links I added tonight more than doubled the links available.

I also took a few minutes tonight to install a Wiki for the first time to give me somewhere to experiment. I used the same software that powers Wikipedia. I was surprised at how easy it was to set up it took me five minutes … unlike some other software that powers a certain other huge website.

More to come on Wiki’s.

Why I stick with Firefox over Safari:

Tonight I spent a few minutes creating an IceRocket Firefox Search Plug-in. Four of them actually, for searching the web, images, moblogs (photos taken on cell phones) and blogs. If you haven’t seen IceRocket yet, it’s a search engine worth checking out. I mentioned it here previously.

To install the plugins, use these links:

IceRocket Web Search

IceRocket Blogs Search

IceRocket Moblogs Search

IceRocket Images Search

Once you have it working, it will look like this:

I found a few useful links while I was working on it:

Creating Search Plugins

Search Plugin Directory (includes documentation on creating them as well)

Google Preview – add thumbnails to normal Google searches.

A blog entry by a guy who works for IceRocket

Enjoy the plugins.

I’ve been searching for a good invoicing application for OS X. There are programs out there but I’ve had a hard time finding one with a native (preferably Cocoa) interface that is simple, intuitive and nice looking. Here are the results of my search.

First, what to avoid

CG Invoicer – I’m sure this is a powerful program but the interface isn’t simple, isn’t native Mac though it tries to be–which is almost worse than not trying at all if you ask me.

TimeNet – This one comes close, but the interface is still not simple enough and it takes 3 small windows to accomplish basically one task. I prefer one main window and maybe one editing window.

Blue Box Invoices – Again, this is probably powerful software, but I just can’t bring myself to use something created entirely in FileMaker Pro. I’m not against FileMaker, but I just don’t think it’s the best tool for the job in this case.

Activity and Expense Tracker – Ahhh… big blue buttons. Enough said.

Acro Invoice – Another not-quite-native OS X invoice program. It just doesn’t look professional to me. Again, I’m not knocking the functionality of any of these programs, but I want good looks along with my smarts.

Invoice Biz – Woah. This looks like it could be the interface to a sweet early 90’s game.

SoftBooks – This is another close call, and would probably be fine for my needs. My only complaints here are that it’s pretty boring (I guess this is invoicing we’re talking about here) and I just have a gut feeling that it could be done better.

StudioEase – Again, strange custom interface.

TimeEqualsMoney – Appears to have a native OS X interface but way too crowded and the functionality seems limited.

Workbook – Decent looking, but it’s aimed squarely at the software developer. Too specific for my needs.

Studioboss – More to come on this. I’m still not ruling it out.

Second, what I created

So… after much searching I finally decided I’d have to design it myself (and have someone else program it of course). I spent a bit of time doing just that, and I think I came up with some decent Ideas – here are my sketches (click to enlarge):

After sketching on paper, I even made it as far as to open Interface Builder and dabble a bit with creating the interface. This didn’t last long, but here are the results (click to enlarge):

Finally, the fruits of my labor



After searching, designing and playing with Interface Builder, I finally came back to a program I’d seen quite awhile back but completely forgotten about. Studiometry. Basically it fits the bill. It looks great, is simple and effective and appears to be in active development. It also even looks a bit like what I was trying to get at in my designs, in a roundabout way.

After learning more about what’s available for invoicing on the Mac than I ever thought possible, I’m sold on Studiometry.