Category: os x

The switch went well today. I got a lot done and by the end of the day, I was using Apple+Left instead of Home to get to the beginning of a line and having a wonderful time. I see now I do need to go get BBEdit 7. BBEdit Lite is good, but it’s not everything I need it to be. I need macros, dangit!

Why am I making the switch, you may ask? I hate Microsoft is the easy answer. They’re predatory and unethical. They’ve pirated the greatest innovations of the last twenty years and made them barely usable crap. Through an unmatched marketing machine, they’ve foisted utter garbage on the world, and now the whole world uses it. Ok, that’s a little strong. But, underneath it all, you know it’s true.

Apple has their problems, like overpriced hardware, a sometimes lax update schedule (which hasn’t really been true with OS X, but was pretty bad with OS 9 and before), and some weird positions on things, like not admitting that some of us need more than one mouse button and some of us who do are left handed and WANT TO SWITCH THE DAMN BUTTONS AROUND. But, overall, my Mac is more innovative, offers me more and is just more fun than my Windows machine. I know all the games come out for Windows, but I have a PS2 now, and haven’t played a game on my Windows machine in months.

I’ll still use my Windows box for testing and maybe to play UT on, but I’m a Mac (and Linux) guy now.

For those of you using OS X, and who upgraded to Jaguar, boy do I have good news for you!! Fink has been released!! It now supports 10.2! You can use all your favorite Unix programs like ncftp, emacs, etc from the comfort of OS X.

I’m bored waiting to get sleepy enough to crawl into my empty bed in a house that’s too quiet. I went to blo.gs and checking out all the recently updated sites, and stumbled across Daring Fireball. Interesting Mac-related stuff. The guy’s on a crusade against the Mac OS X Finder, and he makes some excellent points. I have noticed some real problems with it in 10.2 that I hadn’t noticed before. It’s fine for “simple” tasks like finding and opening single files. It’s OK for moving single, or a few files between two windows. It breaks down when trying to move large numbers of files from a single directory to another. Recently, I’ve been moving hundreds of pictures around. If you highlight more than twenty (I’m guessing, it’s usually more than fifty that I run into this) and go to the File menu (like to see the combined size of the selected files), if you move the mouse over Open, Finder likes to freeze, crash and bounce itself, making the system very unstable.

The troubles I’ve had recently with the Finder remind me of something I either came up with or heard when I started using Linux. I started a looo-oooong time ago with RedHat 5.2. I didn’t actually use the system for anything… it was too hard. After moving out here, I got a copy of RedHat 6.2 and went to town. I quickly realized though that using the file manager was a pain and I could do things faster in terminal. When typing your commands into terminal is a more efficient and painless way to get things done, there’s something seriously wrong with the application. Terminal should be a last resort, especially in OS X. The thing I love about OS X in general is that it doesn’t create work for you. It lets you think about what you want to do, not the gymnastics you have to do to accomplish it. I spent so many years wrestling with Windows, and all its poor usability and learned work-arounds (that just make you THINK Windows is easier…), that when I started using OS X (with 10.1, 10.0 and 10.0.4 were… unpleasant) it was a revelation. Things just work. Installing Movable Type? Drop it in /Library/WebServer, run chown and chmod (in Terminal, but I can make exceptions, it was MUCH easier than trying to install it in Windows) and voila – DONE. Managing photos? Plug in camera, turn on camera, iPhoto starts up, click import – DONE. And now iTunes has even caught up (they fixed my biggest problem with it, not putting track number at the beginning of the filename) and is extremely easy to use. There are some things missing from OS X, but for the most part (I don’t like some of the keystrokes, and I miss having a backspace and delete key), I can do everything I want with it without worrying about it working.

I feel the need for a redesign. Yes, I’ve said it before, but this time I mean it. I put Movable Type back on the Powerbook, and started last night while watching Big Brother. I’m not starting with the main site this time, but with the Geekery, and a new section that will move all the pics linked to from Max’s page to a family photo album. I never update Max’s blog, which is still hosted at Blogger, and heck, I haven’t uploaded any new pics in a while. So, I’m going to try to re-organize what’s up there now into “albums” (really just Movable Type categories), with each picture as a separate entry in the “album”. That way, it’ll be easier to add descriptions and keep them all organized. And now that I have PhotoShop 7 on the Powerbook along with iPhoto (which doesn’t even try to compress jpg’s on export… grrr), it’ll make all this organizing, exporting, uploading, etc a little easier. It took me two weeks of after-work-tv-viewing to complete my first Movable Type design for this page… hopefully it won’t take that long for this.

Which brings me to my next topic, OS X. Yes, I’ve talked about it before too, but I just want to talk about it some more. I upgraded to Jaguar a little while ago (which is how my first Movable Type installation got nuked), and am having a lot of fun with it. I forget sometimes about the Unix underpinnings of OS X. But, last night while installing Movable Type, I was going to create an alias in my Documents folder to the Apache Documents and CGI-Executables folders. I was already in Terminal, so I decided to try symlinking to them. What do you know! The aliases in OS X are actually symlinks. They worked beautifully and well, it’s just cool. It took me all of five minutes once I had everything unzipped to install everything, chmod it, and get started. Now, I could have installed AOLserver, Perl and Movable Type on my old Dell laptop running Windows 2000, but that would have taken a good long time, and I still wouldn’t be able to properly symlink anything or use the terminal to do my normal *nix type stuff. With OS X, I have tar, chmod, vi, etc all right there installed on the system with a beautiful user-friendly system on top of it. I can use my new copy of AOL, Mozilla and PhotoShop and still use vi, ls, ln, etc. Heck, once fink has a stable version for 10.2, I’ll have ncftp, xemacs and a host of my other favorite *nix tools.

OS X has, for good or bad, slightly weaned me from Linux. I was in love with my RedHat Uber-Box until I got OS X. Now, I log into the Linux box from OS X and do what I need to do and then get off. It’s servicable, does what it’s supposed to and I don’t have to worry about it crashing, which is really what I need Linux for. I don’t feel the need for the perfect Linux desktop now. Am I going to hell for that?

I love OS X. I just installed Jaguar, and I was desperately hoping they would provide a utility to switch the mouse buttons. You see, I’m left-handed. I use the mouse with my left hand. In Windows (which I’m trying to wean myself off of) and Linux, I can easily flip the mouse buttons so the right button does the clicking and the left button does the context menu. In OS X, that is impossible. I’ve combed Google for answers. I’ve combed Apple’s help site. No luck. Nothing. Nada. No one’s done it. I even searched the filesystem for mouse-ish files, to come up completely empty handed. I would love to use OS X full-time, but the fact that I have to use the wrong mouse button in OS X is driving me NUTS!!

I like OS X. Why? I like my bad news anti-aliased.

Do you have OS X? Do you still love Unix? Oh, brother, then do I have something for you! Go check out Fink. It’s a easy way to get Unix packages installed and running in OS X. Sweet, sweet ingenuity.

I wish this was a joke. Apparently, it’s not. To save you the trouble of actually reading the article, “Doctor” Paley asserts that Macintosh OS X is of the devil because the codename for the software was Darwin, which is based on FreeBSD.

He also asserts that Open Source is the same as Communism. What Mr. Uninformed probably didn’t realize is that the webserver running to serve out his rant is Apache, an Open Source project. I keep forgetting that people like this exist in the world. They give Christianity a bad name, and make me ill.

If I didn’t feel so crappy, I’d go on. But, I feel crappy (which I know I just said), so I’m going to try to do my work, not think about “Doctor” Paley and his lunacy, and keep using my Godless Communist software.

I’m here at work on a Saturday afternoon. No, I’m not working. I’m transferring video from my camera to my new Mac so I can eventually burn everything to DVD. Won’t that be fun?

I tried it before, when it was new. It wasn’t ready, and neither was my poor little Powerbook. I couldn’t logon to my ISP, watch DVD’s or do much of anything. Then, I got my new machine, and the update and now, I am a OS X convert. I hate to admit it. I got the machine to have a machine to run YellowDog on. Now, I spend my time in the bubble gum world of OS X, drinking in the stoplight icons, the warm fuzziness of the first daunting but now comfortable UI. Next thing you know, I’ll be using it more than my PC and then I’ll become a designer and wear turtlenecks, small glasses and tight jeans. I’ll drink small coffees and complain about how those stupid production people ruin my designs.

I admit it, that’s a longshot, but I do like OS X, which I NEVER thought would happen. See, Alice, people CAN change.