Messages Beta for OSX

I just downloaded the new Messages beta for OSX and gave it a shot. I haven’t used it all that much but I thought I’d share some of my initial impressions.

Pros

  • iMessage support. This was inevitable. Now you can send iMessages to iPhones, iPods, iPads and Macs!
  • Interface. Looks just like Messages for iPad. An improvement over iChat.
  • Simple. The iMessage stuff (mostly) just works as expected.

Cons

  • Buddy list is kind of hidden. Clicking the application icon in the dock brings up the window for all your open messages. You have to either right click and select Buddies or turn on the menu icon and select Buddy List from there.
  • Hitting the red X to close the messages window removes all “open” texts. It would be nice if things worked more like the iPad and iPhone, where your messages are eternally open unless you close/delete them individually. I feel like this is an oversight and will probably change when it gets out of beta. It makes the search box over your open messages kind of unnecessary. (You can get around this by keeping the app open. I’ll probably end up keeping it as a full screen app)
  • No iMessage status. You can’t see what users are available for chat via iMessage. I’m actually not sure this is really a con. iMessage’s are more made for an always-available type of interaction so this isn’t really something I care about but I have read others would enjoy it.

Overall, I’m happy with the app and will give it a shot for a while (over by current IM application, Adium). Download it here!

Safari Single Window Mode! (And the Secrets prefPane)

I just found the hidden preference for Safari 3.1 that enables Single Window Mode!! This is the first step Apple has taken to actually making Safari my main browser. Before 3.1, there was no way to make links that opened up in new windows open up in a new tab instead (Firefox has had this type of option for a loooonnnggg time). Apple has added a hidden option to Safari as of version 3.1 that lets you do away with the 100 windows you’d normally have open while browsing with Safari and keep it all in nice and clean tabs. Try this in your terminal…

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

After that, you should notice all links that would normally pop a new window up, now open in a new tab instead. I actually found this while I was bored and going through the Secrets preference pane. If you haven’t tried this out yet and are a little ballsy (i.e. know what your doing) give it a go. It gives you a VERY long list of hidden features in various Apple and 3rd party apps on your system. Sometimes you even find a gem you weren’t expecting. x=)

Firefox in MacOSX : Tabstop all controls in a web form

I (almost) exclusively use Firefox on my Mac and I think I’ve been pretty much using the 3.0 beta for almost the whole time I’ve had my macbook. What I found odd, is when in a web form, tab always skipped over things like check boxes and dropdowns. I had always thought this was a problem with Firefox 3 but could never find a solution until now. So anyone else who uses a Mac and has been confused about why your tab key only stops at text boxes and buttons in a form, do this. Go to your System Preferences and select Keyboard and Mouse. In the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, switch the option on the bottom to All Controls and you should have ‘normal’ functionality out of your tab key again. I’m not exactly sure why this is defaulted like this in OSX. shrug Seems kind of silly.

Capturing video on a Mac. (Xbox 360)

I was kind of bored tonight so I was searching my good friend Google for some good ways to transfer video from my Xbox360 (or any component video output) to my trusty macbook pro for editing and publishing. Just for fun. Halo 3 lets me ‘record’ my matches and clips, but it’s rather limited when it comes to putting together a decent ‘movie’. That and with the imminent release of Grand Theft Auto IV, I figure I’ll have plenty of stuff to piece together and have fun with. I’ll admit that my search wasn’t extensive, but what I found was that there were not a whole lot of good suggestions being thrown around. It was either video capture devices that only seemed to have composite inputs or things that cost an arm and a leg. That was until I came across BlackMagic Design’s BlackMagic Video Recorder. This seems to have just been announced a week or so ago and isn’t coming out until July, but for $120 it gives you component, composite and s-video inputs and automatic conversion to h.264 format for iTunes. The software sounds like it’s going to make it all really easy to do too. After the craptastic things I’ve read about other’s software, I’m looking forward to this and may have a review for you all come July. For those of you who might stumble over here looking for ways to convert video from your xbox or playstation to your mac, keep an eye on that one.

Firefox 3 beta 5

I love firefox. I’ve known about it and have used it even before it was close to version 1.0. Of course, this was back in my windows days and sadly, pre-1.0 firefox left a bit to be desired and I wasn’t able to use firefox exclusively back then. But post-1.0 firefox is great! I’ve dabbled with other browsers like safari and camino and WebKit and Opera, but I’m always drawn back to Firefox. With that said, my thoughts on the new Firefox 3 betas. I’ve been testing Firefox 3 on and off since the alphas started rolling out. When beta 1 came out, I started using Firefox 3 exclusively and things were great. Firefox 3 is much faster than Firefox 2 and just ‘feels’ better. I’m not going to go into great depth about what advantages Firefox 3 has over 2 since you’ll find a few dozen articles covering that with a quick google search. What I’m here to talk about is the constant crashes with the newest betas. beta 3 crashed every once and a while, then beta 4 started getting really bad. These crashes are usually when quitting the browser, but still they’re quite annoying and happen durring other activities as well. Beta 5 has prompted me to start using the nightly Camino builds again. When I tried to ‘digg’ something and Firefox crashed on me twice, I feel like I need to wait until another beta or 2 comes out. I’m not sure if these are just macosx related bugs or maybe some extensions I have installed (even though non of my extensions besides the newest firebug actually work w/ beta 5) but something is wrong and it’s getting worse. Anyone else having these problems with the newest beta of Firefox 3 on their mac? Another annoying thing (but I’ve overlooked this since I started using Firefox 3) is that some controls aren’t tab stopped. Dropdown’s are the most common thing that tab skips right over. I love the fact that Firefox is using MacOSX controls now but can we get tab to work like it always has?

MacOSX 10.5 Leopard

It’s 1am on the release day of MacOSX Leopard.. Anyone wanna buy it for me? x=) I won’t have the funds to pick it up for a month or so. x=\ Looks awesome though. While your at it, throw in a copy of iLife ’08 too. x=P

MacBook Pro Airport Problems

As dumb as I feel for this, I had trouble finding a lot of information about this online so I thought I’d post here for anyone who is also having this kind of issue. If you don’t feel like listening to me ramble, just skip to the next paragraph. I recently discovered a problem with my wireless network. I had always had an issue with networking at my girlfriend’s place but I always blamed it on her AT&T DSL. I noticed the problem pretty big time last night because I had to do some work on my server so I needed an ssh connection. This was the slowest and most painful thing I’ve ever had to do, so I eventually just gave up and figured I’d try again at home on a better network. When I noticed the same problem here, I started looking everywhere on the network for what could be causing it. Could have been the router? A bad ethernet cable? After realizing everything else in this house works fine except for this macbook, I knew the problem existed on my end and was affraid for a moment that I might have to get her serviced. Let’s cut this story shorter..

Here’s the problem I was having. It was most noticeable when I pinged another host. a ping command would result in output like this…

macbook-pro:~ swemoney$ ping swemoney.com
PING.swemoney.com (72.32.231.8): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 72.32.231.8: icmp_seq=4 ttl=46 time=42.403 ms
64 bytes from 72.32.231.8: icmp_seq=5 ttl=46 time=41.906 ms
64 bytes from 72.32.231.8: icmp_seq=6 ttl=46 time=1830.279 ms
64 bytes from 72.32.231.8: icmp_seq=7 ttl=46 time=600.642 ms
64 bytes from 72.32.231.8: icmp_seq=8 ttl=46 time=56.242 ms
64 bytes from 72.32.231.8: icmp_seq=9 ttl=46 time=42.090 ms
64 bytes from 72.32.231.8: icmp_seq=10 ttl=46 time=49.821 ms
64 bytes from 72.32.231.8: icmp_seq=11 ttl=46 time=1204.137 ms
64 bytes from 72.32.231.8: icmp_seq=12 ttl=46 time=380.502 ms

As you can see, pings would be fine for a second, then they would spike at 1 or 2 seconds every few pings. If you are having a problem like this, check your dashboard for any widgets that might be scanning for nearby wireless signals. I was running one and removing it cleared up all my problems. If your having bigger problems than this, I’m sorry, I can’t help you. But I spent a few hours trying to figure out something so stupid, so I hope this helps save someone some time.

TextMate and your environment variables

I liked the cool looking RSpec results that I kept seeing in the peepcode RSpec screencasts so I set out to try and get them to work for me. It wasn’t long before I ran into a hurdle.. I started getting an error about a file not being found. It was a file called spec_mate.rb that was located in /Users/username/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Pristine\ Copy/Bundles/RSpec.tmbundle/Support/lib/. I’m still new to MacOSX so I wasn’t sure what could be going on and quite a few google searches for the exact error message I was getting and variations of the sort weren’t helping very much at all. I then found out that when you load an application (like TextMate) from the MacOSX GUI, the PATH variable isn’t set like it is if you load something from a terminal window. So here’s the quick and easy way that I got my TextMate and RSpec to work nice together. I’d assume this method will continue to work for various applications that require the PATH variable.

Load up your terminal.. We need to create the path where the environment will reside.

mkdir ~/.MacOSX

Now we need to create the environment file. Since this all started with TextMate for me, I’m going to use that, but you can use whatever text editor you like that also lets you save files in a hidden directory.

mate ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist

Now we just need to fill it with the PATH. This method will work with any type of environment variable. If you require something different from the PATH, just replace whatever you need in the key tag and whatever value you require in the string tag. Just copy this into your new environment.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
    <dict>
        <key>PATH</key>
        <string>/usr/local/bin:/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin</string>
    </dict>
<plist>

That’s all there is to it! You’ll need to log out and log back in (no need to reboot, just log out) for the changes to take place because these settings are only read when you log in. Now you should be able to load up TextMate from the GUI without worrying about your PATH variable. Hope this helps someone out!