The Author – Bart Busschots
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Aug
23
My Detailed Review of ScreenSteps
Filed Under Computers & Tech on August 23, 2009 | 13 Comments
If you follow me on Twitter you’ll have seen me vent my frustrations with ScreenSteps earlier this week. I held off on writing this review for a few days to get a bit more experience with the app, and to give myself some time to decide how best to phrase my issues so they don’t come across as being overly negatively. The short version is that I’m very conflicted about this app. Without a shadow of a doubt their idea is sound, as is their basic architecture. However, I found a few aspects of the interface exceptionally frustrating. Some parts of the app suffer from poor usability in my opinion, and another lacks what I consider to be very basic features. Ultimately, what’s missing is some fit and polish. However, it can’t be denied that the app works, which is obviously very important. I hope you can see why I’m so conflicted about this app. I want to love it, but I can’t – at least not this version.
Aug
3
NetNewsWire – From Hero to Zero in one ‘update’
Filed Under Computers & Tech on August 3, 2009 | 6 Comments
I have been a huge fan of NetNewsWire for many years and have recommended it every chance I got on podcasts, blogs, and in person. Before NNW was free I was a happy paying customer, and, to be honest, I worried a little when it went free. Without charging for it, would the developers keep adding to it? Keep driving it forward? The answer to that was a resounding ‘no’, it stagnated. However, it was still every bit as good as before it became free, so the stagnation didn’t really bother me. It did what I needed it to do, and it did it well, so I was happy.
What did I need it to do? Firstly, it let me organise my feeds into folders nested as deeply as I wanted, and it allowed me to read a folder as if it was a single feed generated as a combination of all the feeds in that folder or sub-folder. I had literally hundreds of feeds, and had them perfectly organised in folders often three or even four levels deep. It also allowed me to sync read and unread statuses between my many copies of NNW on the three Macs I use and on my iPhone. Finally, it allowed me to keep “clippings” which were also synchronised between all my clients.
This all lead to a fantastic workflow. I would read my news feeds on what ever computer I was at, and, when ever I came across a potential story to include in the IMP Live podcast, I’d just drag and drop it to my clippings folder. On Fridays when it was time to assemble the show notes for IMP Live, I’d just go through my clippings folder on my Mac at home and remove stories from the clippings folder as I added them to the IMP Shownotes. Then, the next week, I’d start the process over again. It was the perfect news reading and gathering experience for me.
Then came last week’s ‘update’ to NNW. I use the term very very loosely, because all this ‘update’ did was strip out features, and hence destroy my news reading experience, and my IMP Live work flow. To paraphrase Churchill, NNW have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory!
Jul
4
A Quick Review of Syrinx – A Native OS X Twitter Client
Filed Under Computers & Tech on July 4, 2009 | Leave a Comment
I recently moved to a new machine (a hand-me-down G5 20″ iMac), and when it came to installing my new apps I decided I’d had enough of Adobe AIR and the whole idea of web apps pretending (poorly) to be native apps. I like OS X, and I want the full power of OS X in my apps. I also like how OS X apps all look and work similarly to each other. You just don’t get that with AIR apps like Twhirl (which had been my Twitter client up to that point). Not long before I got my new Mac listener Scott had contributed a short review of Syrinx to the NosillaCast, so I decided to give it a go.
I took and instant liking to the app because it’s a proper OS X app, because it uses the OS X keychain to securely save my password, and because it has Growl support. The fact that it’s free also helps of course! I’ve been using it for a month or so at this stage, and I’m still happy enough with it to keep it as my current client on all three of my Macs. It’s also under very active development at the moment with updates coming out regularly, so I have high hopes for this app’s future.
May
5
Installing mod_jk for Apache 2.2 on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech on May 5, 2009 | 17 Comments
Note: these instructions also work on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and OS X 10.7 Lion
A few years ago I did a similar tutorial for installing mod_jk on OS X 10.4 Tiger, but yesterday I discovered that those instructions do not work for Leopard. It took my quite a bit of googling and trial an error, but I’ve found a solution that works, which I’m going to share here. This solution is, in my opinion, a best practices solution, and does not involve any changes to your core apache configuration file (httpd.conf). These instructions are for the default install of Apache 2.2 that comes pre-installed on OS X 10.5 Leopard. I can verify that these instructions work for Tomcat 5.0.30, but I would be 99% sure they should also work un-changed for Tomcat 5.5.X and Tomcat 6.0.X.
Feb
14
First Impressions of the Postbox Beta
Filed Under Computers & Tech on February 14, 2009 | 2 Comments
As some of you probably know, I’m a long-time Thunderbird user, from back when it still had the cool blue Phoenix logo, and when what we now call FireFox had only just changed from being called Phoenix to FireBird. In other words, from when Mozilla still looked at BOTH their browser AND their mail client as being important products. Since those days I’ve watched in horror as Mozilla first neglected Thunderbird, and then abandoned it. While FireFox has gone from strength-to-strenght, Thunderbird has languished. The project was effectively thrown out of Mozilla and left to fend for itself. It also lost its lead author, and has stagnated. It’s a good mail client, but it’s behind the times. It’s missing simple features like a tabbed interface, and FireFox 3’s new, non-retarded, way of dealing with problem security certs. For all these reasons I was very excited to see the announcement of a beta version of Postbox this week. It’s a fork of Thunderbird being led by Thunderbird’s old lead, so in many ways, it’s a glimpse of where Thunderbird could have been, had it not been neglected by Mozilla. It definitely is a beta, but it’s a glimmer of hope at long-long-last!
Jan
18
DeskLickr – Flickrize Your Desktop on OS X
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Photography on January 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment
This week I went hunting for a piece of software to automatically change my desktop wallpaper using Flickr as the source. In particular I wanted it to use my set of desktop wallpapers on Flickr. There are solutions to do this kind of thing on Linux and Windows, but since I use OS X I had to go find one I could actually use. In the end I found just one solution that worked well, the donation-ware app DeskLickr.
DeskLickr is definitely one of those apps that does just one thing, but seems to do it well. I’ve only been using it for a few days but so far I’m very happy with it. I set it up, then forgot about it and watched my background change to a new photo every 30 minutes. It could be argued that the Flickr configuration could be a bit clearer to understand, and it could definitely be argued that it would be nice to have more options for choosing photos from Flickr, but, it works, and that’s the important thing.
Nov
29
Photomatix Pro – First Impressions
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Photography on November 29, 2008 | 4 Comments
Anyone who’s been following this blog for a while will know that I’ve been experimenting with HDR for most of this year. I started off with the cheapest solution I could find so that I could be sure I really wanted to go down this road before spending a lot of money on more professional software. It can’t be denied that I got some good results with the process I’ve been using until now, but I was never completely happy with the results. In particular the level of haloing was really starting to annoy me. Today I bit the bullet and spent $99 (about €80) on the stand-alone version of Photomatix Pro from HDR Soft. The reason I went for the standalone version is that I don’t have photoshop and am not planning to buy it any time soon (probably never as long as it costs extortionate amounts of money). I haven’t had much time to play with it yet but I though I’d share some of my initial thoughts and results.
Jul
30
OS X Users Vulnerable – Apple Still Don’t Get Security
Filed Under Security, Computers & Tech on July 30, 2008 | 26 Comments
One of the things I really love about OS X is its Unix underpinnings. Under the hood we get all the *nix tools and utilities I’ve come to know and love. Printing with CUPS, remote shell with OpenSSH, Windows sharing with SAMBA, web publishing with Apache, and so on and so forth. This gives OS X great power, but it also places a great responsibility on Apple. Just like with any other software, vulnerabilities surface in open source programs. In general the open source community is very responsive to security issues, and patches are released quickly. Those patches protect those who update, but they leave those who don’t even more vulnerable. The reason for this is that the patches can generally be reverse engineered, making it easy for the bad guys to attack un-patched machines. In order to keep OS X secure Apple need to push out patches in the open source components in OS X to users as quickly as possible. This is where Apple fall down, they are notoriously slow at getting patches out.
[tags]Security, OS X, Apple, DNS, open source, BIND[/tags]
Jun
25
OS X Trojan in the Wild – The Time For Smugness is Over
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Security on June 25, 2008 | 5 Comments
Note: This article was written for, and first published on, the International Mac Podcast blog.
It’s being reported this week that there is a Trojan Horse in the wild that’s targeted at Mac OS X (both Tiger and Leopard). This is quite a nasty beast which basically gives the attacker total control of your computer. This gives them access to all your files and allows for them to snoop on everything you do and hence collect sensitive data like banking details and credit card numbers. If you run Mac OS X this should concern you. However, there is no need to panic and lose sight of the realities of the situation. This is not a virus or a worm, it’s a Trojan. What’s the difference? Viruses and Worms spread from machine to machine, often without any need for any interaction on the user’s part, Trojans on the other hand have to be installed by the user. They work by pretending to be a legitimate program which an un-suspecting user then installs. They get their name because in many ways they are the digital equivalent of the wooden horse of Troy.
[tags]security, Trojan, OS X, Apple[/tags]
Jun
21
FireFox 3 – Greatly Improved but Not Perfect
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 21, 2008 | 2 Comments
I’ve been recommending FireFox for years now. In fact, I’ve been using it as my primary browser since it was called FireBird. It has been a more secure and a more feature-rich choice for years. (If you’re interested in the security aspects then you might enjoy reading a recent article I wrote for the International Mac Podcast blog comparing Safari and FireFox from a security point of view.) What got me hooked on FireBird was it’s plugin architecture. The idea of being able to customise my browser really appealed to me and as FireBird has grown into FireFox the list of available plugins has grown too. No other browser is as expandable as FireFox. If you can think of it, the chances are someone’s written a plugin for it!
However, FireFox has long suffered from two major shortcomings, memory leaks you could pilot a large ship through, and a non-native look. FireFox has been chewing up insane amounts of RAM for years, and has always looked like a fish out of water, particularly on OS X. These two problems are both fixed in FireFox 3 and if that was all they’d done I’d be recommending it highly, but they’ve done much more.
[tags]internet, browser, FireFox, FireFox 3[/tags]