eFax gets better

Version 1.1 of Cocoa eFax gets better and better. I discovered this little application last year when my fax machine broke down and I was scheduled to receive an important fax ..

Well, it wasn't long before I paid the registration fee and eFax added to the login items of my B&W Mac OS X Server. This application is a model of its kind. Simple yet powerful. Makes (good) use of the operating system's features, and works like a charm.

The latest version adds print-to-fax in Mac OS X 10.2.4, a spam blocker, an option to email a received fax, and other changes and bug fixes. Cocoa eFax is $10 for Mac OS X 10.1 and up.

Bunch of new releases

Well, a whole bunch of new releases of my favourite applications appeared throught my VersionTracker myRSS feed:

• Kung-Log 1.3.7
  The author has found a workaround to the Apple's WebServicesCore's problems. (Thanks heaps Adriaan!) Requires MovableType 2.6.3
• FruitMenu 3.0
  Application specific settings, implemented "Click and Hold Mouse Button to Access Contextual Menu In Finder", Added "Disable Animated Menu Fadeouts" option to speed up system response time, and more..
• USB Overdrive X 10.2.2
  bug fixes, and adds several new handy commands including Eject, sound volume control, brightness control and more
• IOXperts USB WebCam Driver 1.0.2
  Bug fixes, new cams
• Canto Cumulus X 5.5.2
  Requires 4/5 S/N to download update. Improves Classic compatibility - still NOT native! (Check out iView Media Pro or Extensis PortFolio)

More on them after lunch..

Sony Ericsson Clicker

Okay, this is a really geeky one to start the week with.. but I love it (you know me). Imagine using your Sony Ericssoncell phone to drive a Keynote presentation, remote control iTunes, DVD Player or any scriptable application on your Mac via Bluetooth..

Maybe the coolest touch is the ability to setup the proximity sensor: choose an action to execute when you leave or reenter the Bluetooth radius. iTunes or DVD Player pauses, your Mac welcomes you back, locks your screen, etc.

Beta version functional until March 1st. Available through VersionTracker (it wasn't available from the developer's website as yet).

2003-02-25 update: here's the Slashdot thread and a soon to come AppleScript section on the product's website.

Toggle HTML parsing in Mail.app

This is a cool tip found on MacOSXHint that enables HTML viewing of trusted mail. It turn on HTML download for 2 seconds, and turns it off again.

  tell application "Mail"
    set download html attachments to true
    delay 2
    set download html attachments to false      
  end tell

Just add the above script to your script menu.

Kung-Log adds a service

I just noticed that the latest release of Kung-Log (1.3.5) adds the service "New entry with selection" in the Services menu,

Pretty cool. A Keywords input field is also available now. Kung-Log really rocks.

Perversion Tracker

You're going to love this one. Perversion Tracker is a weblog that locates the very worst of Mac software. "We search the web for 15 minutes a day — so you don’t have to!"

Now we won't only know what software is new, but newly bad!

Javascript in Mac Browsers

How well do Mac browser handle Javascript? A recent ADC article examines this question in details.

The article presents seven scripts that test crucial bits of Javascript functionality, ranging from form field manipulation to advanced W3C DOM scripting. The main Mac browsers are tested, Safari included.

Tests include manipulation of form field values, opening and communicate with pop-up windows, register event handlers to links, moving DHTML layers, change the display style of an element, generating form fields using the W3C DOM, and importing XML documents and showing their contents.

Mozilla executed every script with a minor bug in the DHTML test. Its unique in its ability to import XML files. Safari didn't support XML import, but succeeded in all the other tests, and appears as a strong contender.

This should be of interest to any web designer.

Power Supply Exchange for Mirrored Drive Doors Power Macs

Apple (finally) posted a power supply exchange program for owners of mirrored drive doors Power Macs. The new ones are apparently much much more quieter.. This should bring to an end the numerous threads on Apple Discussions and on other forums.

Offer start tomorrow, and end on June 30, 2003. The shipping and handling fees is USD 19.95, or equivalent local currency.

Microsoft acquires Virtual PC

Microsoft is now responsible for Connectix's Virtual PC line of products. According to an interview accorded to MacCentral, Microsoft is now "responsible for supporting and shipping all current versions of Virtual PC and development for all future versions of the product".

Hum. Microsoft will now support the Virtual PC application, the operating system that runs in Virtual PC and any Windows-based Microsoft applications that run in Virtual PC.

"We think this is a great thing for the future of Virtual PC," said McDonough. There is probably nobody better than the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft to bring Windows onto the Mac."

Q: What has Connectix left now it has sold Virtual Game Station and Virtual PC ?

2003-02-20 update: HP and Dell seem satisfied too .. [ full press release ]

BBEdit 7.0.2 released

BareBones have released an update to my favourite text editor BBEdit. This version sports a bunch of new features and bug fixes (12.6 Mb download).

Access .Mac from your cell phone

Wap Mac offer a wap based solution to access your Mac.com e-mail:

Simply point your wap capable browser to http://wapmac.com/mac/ and login with your .Mac e-mail address/password.

Mail.app group filtering

This is an interesting tip for those of us using Mail.app: use Address Book groups to filter your incoming mail. When you add someone to your Address Book and make them a member of a group, suddenly they have been added to a rule that sorts your email in real time!

Chimera to be Camino ?

Looks like Chimera is getting a new name: Camino 0.7 will be released later this week.

Mail.app HotMail plugin

This might be useful for those of you out there using Hotmail: HttpMail Pluginby Daniel Parnell is a Mail.app plugin to retrieve your e-mail from your HotMail account (InBox only). Requires Mac OS 10.2.3.

Konfabulator

You're not going to believe this. While checking my main RSS feeds to get updated on the worldwide rallies against the war in Irak, I stumbled on an incredible little gem called Konfabulator,

Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to.

Give it a try. The application was launched on Monday with a dozen widgets. Six days later, the Gallery offers about 50 different widgets that check your network bandwidth usage, display the latest VersionTracker headline, pings your website or watch your auctions on eBay.

The graphics are amazing as they take full advantage or Quartz. The widgets blend fluidly into your desktop with sliding and fading effects - stunning.

Next step: brush my JavaScript up and start writing my own..

PDF Workflow

Mac OS 10.2.4 introduces the notion of PDF workflow accessible through the print dialog. You now have the option to process the saved PDF file with AppleScript scripts that can perform a variety of tasks such as adding the saved file to a compressed archive, or including the PDF in an outgoing email message.

More info on <http://www.apple.com/applescript/print/> and on developer.apple.com

Access advanced Unix features

I happened to fall on this nifty little utility this morning while roaming through Apple's Mac OS X downloads: Cocktail 1.0b3

It enables you to do all sorts of interesting things like

• update prebinding information
• run cron scripts
• repair permissions
• delete locked or unaccessible items
• enable and disable journaling
• delete archived log files
• create symbolic links
• view log files
• change network card setting
• request new lease from DHCP server
• force empty trash
• recreate alias to Mac OS 9 desktop
• remove cache files
• customize look and features of Finder and Dock
• easily opitimize your system using Auto Pilot

Mac OS 10.2.4, Movable Type 2.6 and Kung-Log 1.3

Happy Valentine's! Woke up to discover that SW offered Mac OS 10.2.4 update, and that Movable Type 2.6 had been released together with Kung-Log 1.3 (requires MT 2.6).

15h20 CET update: well, all went smoothly. I was actually updating MT while the SW Update was downloading and optimising 10.2.4 in the background.
I haven't dived into all the new features of MT 2.6 yet, because Kung-Log 1.3 withheld all my attention. This program is really a gem. I believe I can do over 95% of my weblogging directly from Mac OS X now.

The image upload function and the ping box are really cool.

The e-mail notification puzzled me for a while as the outgoing mail was sent through .Mac's smtp server, but not with my .Mac address - so it failed each time. Adriaan shed some light on the outgoing server setting: it is simply taken from the Internet -> e-mail pane (mine was still set to my .Mac account). Nevertheless, the From address is the first account setup in Mail.app. If you take a look at Kung-Log's preferences (~/Library/Preferences/kungfoo.tv.kung-log.plist) you'll notice that the first section "Mail Account" contains all the mail accounts you've setup. Apparently, the OS inserts that info. IMHO. the glitch is that (1) you can't choose you outgoing personnality (my weblogs have different ones), (2) the SMTP server global setting is taken into account, but not the e-mail address.
Nothing to really worry about.

After iCommune, here's Earphoria

Here's another iTunes remote controller, Earphoria

Using rendezvous hocus-pocus, Earphoria automagically locates all Earphoria enabled Macs on your network. The instant you connect to one, Earphoria is beamed the available music library. You can now play, pause, skip and search your music in one unobtrusive interface. With a single keystroke you can pop open your music anytime, anywhere on your network!

Apparently, there's 2 applications: One on the server side, and one for the client. Looks cool, but I haven't tried it for real..

Mighty Mouse

The guys over at Unsanity have just released Mighty Mouse, a new haxie to customize your cursor with style.

I'm not a great fan of custom cursors, but I am a great fan of Unsanity, so I thought I'd let you know..

Safari 1.0b60

A new beta was released yesterday (1.0 v60), available both online and through SW Update.

Apparently, there are bug fixes, XML support and more speed.

Safari Update 2-12-03 improves compatibility with popular web sites, displays web pages and Flash content more quickly, adds XML support, increases standards conformance and improves stability. The update also works with self-signed security certificates.

My first impressions are,

• You can run the w3c.org CSS1 tests now. Try running Meyer's css/edge, it almost passes!
• Cmd-right arrow and cmd-left arrow are mapped to forward and back now
• Drag&Drop text works for me now
• Ctrl-click text and you have the option to copy or Google search
• Site icons (FAVICON.ICO) added to the back button drop-down menu

Reuters forgets Apple

You won't believe this, or they know something we don't: according to an article in Reuters,

Microsoft [..] is the biggest seller of software for the Macintosh with its Office for "Mac OS X", Apple's operating system for the Macintosh.

Err.. Remember Microsoft complaining at the last MWNY about the few copies of Office X sold ? Well unless Microsoft sold bags of copies of Office since, I can't see they could be bigger than .. Apple itself!?!

Jobs reported at MWSF that 5M Mac OS X users existed, and remember those 100'000 copies of Jaguar alone were sold in the first weekend of sales?

Why did Reuters forget Apple ?

Google voted "Brand of the Year"

.. beating Apple to the post. According to a Reuters report published on CNN.com, Google was voted "Brand of the Year" in an online survey conducted by Interbrand. Individuals from 72 countries were asked which brand had made the most impact on their lives in 2002. Google received 15% of the 1,315 votes. Apple finished in second place with 14% of the vote, followed by Coca-Cola, Starbucks and Ikea.

[quote] Perhaps the fact that Interbrand's survey was hosted on the Internet had something to do with the results. Certainly, Apple Computer Inc (AAPL :Research ,Estimates )., whose brand placed second, has more than its fair share of avid surfers.

Apple has a global market share in PCs, and consequently in operating systems, of less than 3 percent worldwide, but it remains a strong player in the creative industries as well as advertising and media.

"[Apple's] steady array of new product releases and cheeky David-to-Goliath positioning makes it hard not to notice and perhaps explains why our readers tend to favor it," Rusch said.

Apple polled 14 percent of the vote and, surprisingly perhaps, beat what is unquestionably the world's biggest and most successful brand -- the mighty Coca-Cola (KO :Research ,Estimates ) -- into third place at 12 percent. Ubiquitous coffee shop chain Starbucks (SBUX :Research ,Estimates ) and Swedish furnishings store Ikea came in at fourth and fifth place respectively.
[/quote]

This reminds me of a serie of interesting article on Apple branding by Simon Spence published in TidBITS last year:

• The Branding of Apple: Brands Embody Values
• The Branding of Apple: Apple's Intangible Asset
• The Branding of Apple: The Retail Bridge

Mac OS X maintenance

The latest relase of MacJanitor gave me the incentive to write this entry.

Many people don't, won't or can't, leave their Mac turned on all the time, simply because they own a portable or a laptop, or because they have the habit of turning it off after they've finished using it.

All this was okay before Mac OS X arrived. Unix subsystems were originally designed to never be turned off. Hence, a number of system related maintenance tasks take place in the middle of the night between 3 and 5am when the workload is supposed to be minimal. These tasks are are scheduled to run on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

Chances are that a majority of users have never let these tasks complete simply because they were unaware of them. Macjanitor addresses this problem be letting you launch the maintenance task when it suits you.

Let's take a closer look at what they involve.

Daily tasks

• Clear out old files and directories
• Remove system messages older than 21 days
• If system accounting is on, process the accounting files and gather daily statistics
• Backup the NetInfo database
• Output the disk capacities and storage available
• Show which filesystems haven't had 'dump' performed on them in a while (archaic)
• Show accumulated network statistics and network uptime (ruptime)
• Rotate the system.log file and restart the syslog process
• Clear out the webserver log files older than a week
• Run a /etc/security check script if it exists

Weekly tasks

• If the /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb database exists, update the 'locate' database
• If the /usr/libexec/makewhatis.local file exists, rebuilt the 'whatis' database
• Rotate the following log files: ftp.log, lookupd.log, lpr.log, mail.log, netinfo.log
• Restart the syslog process

Monthly tasks

• Run the login accounting process
• Rotate the wtmp log files
• Restart the syslog daemon

If these maintenance tasks are never run (such as on a laptop that is always shut off at night), many log files and system databases will grow extremely large or fail to get backed up. The NetInfo database contains critical user information, and should be backed up now and then.

A solution would be to change the hours at which these tasks are scheduled to run to more civilized timeframe, say 11:00 or 12:00am. This involves launching the Terminal.app and editing the system crontab located in /etc/crontab

[jaya:/etc] root# more crontab 
# /etc/crontab
SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/etc:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
HOME=/var/log
#
#minute hour    mday    month   wday    who     command
#
#*/5    *       *       *       *       root    /usr/libexec/atrun
#
# Run daily/weekly/monthly jobs.
15      3       *       *       *       root    periodic daily
30      4       *       *       6       root    periodic weekly
30      5       1       *       *       root    periodic monthly
[jaya:/etc] root# 

Here you see that the daily tasks are set to run at 3:15am. Change it to

15     11       *       *       *       root    periodic daily

and they'll run at 11:15am. Or just use MacJanitor to launch them when you think of it. Note that running the scripts too often won't hurt your system, and running it for the forst time might take some time..

Editable Share {i}Calendar

How about a shared calendar that iCal can subscribe to, and all users whatever their operating system can add items to from a Web interface ?

Sounds groovy, no ? Okay, iCal can only view it, but it can come in handy.

The actual calendar is stored in a MySQL database, and the actual iCal is dynamically generated on the fly. This solution requires access to a web server, PHP and MySQL.

Check out Joel Rennich's article on afp548 for full instruction details. I'll let you know later how I got on..

Browse all your PDFs in Safari

Here's a good tip found on MacOSXhints.com: How to browse local PDFs with Safari.

Drag a PDF over Safari, or open one from the File menu, and it opens instanly ..
:)

Note: the PDF browser plugin from schubert-it.com is required.

Post your Safari GUI wishes

Dave Hyatt, co-author of Safari and author of the weblog Surfin' Safari, has launched a thread "Your Thoughts Go Here" on what you'd like to see implemented in Safari's next graphic user interface (GUI).

Go ahead, and just let him know. There were 220+ comments when I posted mine..

Update 030208: I removed the direct link to Dave's weblog entry which was closed down due to bandwidth limitations. You can't post comments directly on his weblog anymore, but he'll carry on reading the various trackbacks.

Virex 7.2 available

I just happenend to notice that Virex 7.2 is available to .Mac members. Virex automatically checks for the most recent updates now (eUpdate), but still doesn't offer any active protection..

Funnily enough, Virex 7.2 comes bundled with November 13th, 2002 DAT files, eventhough I had the latest weekly definitions installed for Virex 7.1. At first launch, it prompts you for your admin password and downloads the latest definitions (Jan 29, 2003).

It doesn't seem to take into account your previous settings. "Automatically scan at login" was checked. The eUpdate function is set to launch when you open Virex 7.2. I don't believe that checks for definitions on a regular basis (cron job) or at login.

So I guess that those of us who installed Bruno Courbage's Virex 7 shell scripts or Beri Rinaldo's Get DAT Updates can keep using them.

A word on Virex's active protection
I found the following posts on Virex's .Mac Forum

Topic: Is Virex always active?
<http://discuss.mac.com/webx?14@254.432iaZebbPe.20@.3bb98fbf/0>

Topic: Does Virex Have AutoProtect Feature?
<http://discuss.mac.com/webx?128@254.432iaZebbPe.26@.3bb96876>

In both thread, the answer is,

Virex does not have any automatic scanning capabilities. You have to launch it for it to run, and you have to pre-select whatever you want it to scan.

Hope this answers your question.

Thank you,
Sahana
.Mac Support

(note: the links might work)

Apple Stores coming to Europe

According to MacWorld UK report, Apple is planning to open retail stores in Europe 'in 6 to 18 months'.

Apple plans to develop a retail chain in western European cities including London and Paris.

Note: apparently the iPod has a 40% marketshare in Europe..

Mail.app smart views

What if Mail.app had "smart views" in a similar fashion iTune has "smart lists" ?

Wouldn't you like to be able to display "All e-mails received today", "Flagged e-mails", or e-mails in relation a specific address, sent out on a specific date/date range, etc. A little bit like Entourage, but much nicer.

They could appear in a tabbed view of the mailbox drawer.

What do you think of that ?

(cross posted on Apple Discussions)

Safari's default FTP

Safari uses the Finder as default FTP client. A cool feature.

Thanks enrique

iPods around the world

iPodLounge has an incredible collection of iPod photos around the world!

Check these out:

• Sierra Leone
• ipod Loundge, Greece
• The Great Wall, China

Encrypt your mailto:

You're going to love this. Hiveware have just come out with Enkoder, a free Mac OS X app to encrypt your mailto: tag and wrap it up in JavaScript to prevent robots from harvesting it..

[quote]

Instead of merely breaking up and printing out a standard mailto: tag, The Enkoder generates a unique and random key and ties that to an ecrypted array containing your address for even better protection.

[/quote]

A web form version and command-line versions for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X are also available.

iBook case mod

Found this thread on iBook case mod on apple.slashdot.org this eve,

• Helmet paint job
• furbook

;)

2003-02-25 update: found this nice HOW-TO on TheMacMind if you wish to redecorate your iBook yourself

Bigger is better uglier

If you thought Apple's 23" was big .. checkout this one.
;)

Between you and me, I can't really imagine what you can do with such a ugly monster, except play games and waste space.. Moreover, 2 million pixels is ridiculous for such a size (Apple's 23" displays 2.3 million pixels!).

.. and the beast costs USD 20K++

(orig. zérotom.net