OS X

Conflict of the ants

March 11, 2006

Earlier today I worked on setting up an Open Source Portfolio (OSP) on Mac OS X. It seemed pretty simple and the instructions said it would be. But each time it kept saying there was an improper flag "-cp". The problem turns out to be a conflict in configuration between the installation of Ant that comes with Mac OS X developer tools and the Ant included with OSP.

Confession

March 1, 2006

First off a bit of a confession. When I wrote that I'd given up on SOHO Organizer I didn't entirely mean it. I continued (and continue for that matter) to hold on to the sliver of hope that some day the company that produces it would see the error in their ways and would come out of the funk. However today, just before making a purchase of a different calendar product to replace Group Organizer I thought I'd check once more. And sure enough, the message that says they really care about getting a converter for old data is still there. Amazingly I still believe it just as much three months later as I did the first time I read it - which is to say not at all.

Maybe Google will soon be releasing a calendar or somebody will point out a great AJAX calendar that also syncs with the Treo650. maybe....

Contact management software for OS X

January 30, 2006

I wrote sometime back about the really sad situation that has become of SOHO Organizer. The message that a converter for previous data will be available "some time soon" is still on the website. Apparently instead of doing anything about really getting the hundreds of bugs fixed they're "focused" on universal binary. There also seems to be time available to delete posts if people raise too many concerns.

Bottom line is the end user gets buggy software that will not run properly on either architecture.

Can Yojimbo do what I'm trying to do?

January 24, 2006

I wrote yesterday about my overall favorable first impressions of Yojimbo. Tonight a project came up that seemed the perfect test. The project included tracking down property records from the Clark County website. These records all come from a website where the display are all pages created by submitting web-forms.

Unfortunately I can't find a way to get Yojombo to capture these pages. Even with a copy and paste from the results page it seems to be "smart" enough to go back and reload the original page - now a blank form - instead of the results I'm trying to paste. It can be done by taking a screen picture and putting that in, but it lacks the ability to select the text and copy-paste later on.

Yojimbo - a 30 second review

January 23, 2006

Bare Bones software released Yojimbo today. As I'm in the market for some better ways of keeping track of information I thought I'd jump in for a test drive.

Upon opening the disk image containing the application the elegance of Bare Bones simple design jumps out at the user. Instead of just having text telling the user to drag the application to the Applications folder the disk image contains an alias pointing to the main Applications folder.

From there it's time to test out the product's web page claim "It's so simple, there is no learning curve." It seems to be true. A quick gander at the preferences let's one know that F8 will bring up a quick add window and F7 shows the tab that can be positioned around the screen to allow quick access to add information to different folders. All and all quite slick.

The ability to color-code and label things will be quite handy. It would be nice to have an additional field on each item so any item can be marked "completed". This is possible to handle with the labels, but requires one to setup an archive label for filing completed items. Also the choice of using .Mac sync services unfortunately leaves those of use dependent upon DirecWAY for internet connections out in the cold. However it must be judged to be a small portion of the potential audience.

Immediately out of the box Yojimbo feels much snappier and more intuitive than SOHO Notes or Sticky Brain that generally fit into the same niche. Yojimbo is a great program and has lots of potential looking ahead.

Giving up on SOHO Organizer

January 18, 2006

So what is to be done when you get around to releasing an incredibly buggy piece of software much later than promised just to get it out the door? Evidently if you're Chronos you close up shop and head out to the industry trade show. As if that weren't insulting enough when people post about it in the discussion area evidently there is time request people take posts down but not to address the concerns.

Chronos produced a great set of tools Group Organizer and Personal Organizer for several years. As all around personal information managers they ruled the Mac platform with little competition. Personal Organizer suffered some competition from Apple's iCal and Address Book but had enough features to make it valuable. The interfaces of both programs suffered from never making the jump to the new Aqua design of OS X.

The problem with photocasting

January 17, 2006

Lots of hay has been made this week over the Mac only nature of photocasting. Apple is being bashed from all sides for using photocasting as a marketing ploy for Safari. It seems, however, that a few relevant facts may be left out. Here's what I've been able to determine.

In addition to working with the Safari and iPhoto duo, photocasting also works well with Thunderbird on Windows and on both platforms Bloglines has no problem reading the feed and showing it.

Apple is checking for an RSS capable browser and if you don't have one you'll see a message suggesting Safari works well. What are they supposed to suggest instead? A competitor's product? Safari has some of the best river of news style RSS display of any browser on the market. Sure you can do the same thing with NetNewsWire but it eats CPU cycles and spits them out to get warmed up.

What is being overlooked is an interesting new setup. If you come to visit a feed with a non-feed reader why should I not set my web server to show you the content you will be able to see? Browser detection has been in use for years to accommodate mobile users with their WAP browsers. Why not do the same with web feeds on the desktop. Something to take a look at once the Drupal 4.7 release hits the streets.

Slowdowns using IRM on Safari

January 15, 2006

For the past few months we've been working with Information Resource Manager at work. It seems to be one of the best open source/freeware database managers for tracking assets and help desk functions for small teams. The lingering annoyance had been slow performance. The more I experimented it turned out the slow performance was only when using Safari/OS X. A quick trip to the /Applications/Utilites/Java/J2SE 5.0/ folder and opening up the Java Preferences allowed me to change the Java settings from 1.4.2 to J2SE 5.0 and all is well.

The latest release of IRM (Yesterday) adds some great functionality for moving printers and other non-computer assets into their own categories.

Mail Act-On a boon to getting organized

January 2, 2006

Without a doubt one of the greatest changes in the last decade has been the migration of e-mail from the realm of a small portion of the population to the pervasive force it is in our life today. Users of Apple's Mail application have a great tool available to help turn the mass flood of email into a manageable stream of information. Mail Act-On is a plugin that makes it possible to do any number of things to an email box with the press of a key (well two keys really).

In addition to the obvious things like highlighting email and doing things when email arrives in the inbox, Mail Act-On makes it easy to perform rule actions at a later time. I generally find two pairs of rules are quite useful. One pair files email in the archive - depending on which account it was sent to, and the other files them in an action folder, again depending upon which account they are in. This makes it easy to have a single inbox and to whip through the email while deciding whether something is to be replied to immediately and then archived, simply archived, or put into an action file for later follow-up.

Mail Act-On is a great tool for having an email box that is empty at the end of the day and being more productive while doing it.

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