Mon - August 1, 2005

iBuy iMac  Yeah, I know, I'm hilarious. But nevertheless, I am writing this on my spiffy new iMac G5. My iBook, by the way, is currently in for another logic board repair.  Posted by Colleen at 09:28 PM  *   *

Sat - June 11, 2005

What To Buy? Since Apple announced its decision to switch to Intel processors, the talk online has focused on how they're bound to lose business in the intervening year as people who were planning to upgrade put off buying a machine they know will be not only obsoleted by speed and feature increases but by a whole new infrastructure. I've read a few blog entries already in which people declare their intention to wait, Apple's claims of legacy processor support be damned. I must point out that <i>any</i> hardware you buy will be obsolete soon after you take it out of the box. Many hardware purchases are obsolete <i>before</i> they come out of the box, let alone the factory -- look at the Windows world, where Dell can offer crummy PCs for $400 and have them sell like hotcakes. Considering the popularity of low-cost hardware, I doubt that most consumers realize the they'd get a better computing experience by laying out more funds for a speedy P4 system; likely they believe all computers are as bad as theirs and so keep making a deal with the devil every time they upgrade. If Apple knocks a hundred bucks or two off the price of its low-end systems for the next year, I'm sure there's plenty of people who'll bite. As it is, bloggers who are declaring their newborn scorn of PowerPC hardware are much more technologically savvy than the average computer buyer. If any sales will suffer greatly, it'll be of chiefly the high-end Power Mac line, which they've had problems moving out the door anyway. It's a calculated decision they made, and had they gone the other way -- not announcing the move to Intel until a machine was ready to ship -- they probably would have garnered a lot more ill will when no applications beside the OS were ready for the shiny new machines and developers had either to scramble or to abandon ship. But anyway, to my personal dilemma -- I know that once the Intel machines are released, they'll be loads faster than what the PowerPC can offer. I know I'll want to upgrade soon after the switch. Yet right now, I'm writing this on a G3 iBook that's more than two years old. It's slow, the hard drive is too small for my needs, the screen hinge or logic board may give out again at any time, and did I mention it was slow? They don't even offer G3s anymore. I (and I'm sure there are others like me) really need an upgrade, and waiting a year (probably more than a year for a consumer-level Mac) is not an attractive option. I had been planning to upgrade to a G5 iMac this fall when my salary kicks in, but considering what I know of the future, it's started to occur to me that maybe I ought to be downgrading my purchase to save money. An 1.8 GHz iMac with 512 MB RAM, 160 GB hard drive and included Bluetooth and wireless networking, with educational pricing, would run me $1,199. An eMac, with 1.42 GHz G4, 256 MB RAM and 80 GB hard drive costs $749. A Mac mini with the same stats runs at $579 with no monitor, mouse or keyboard. These last two would absolutely require a memory upgrade at an additional cost. The choices aren't too great, all things considered, but I have to choose one. Posted by Colleen at 09:59 AM  *   *

Mon - June 6, 2005

Poised to Pounce? After a week of the most knowledgeable pundits dismissing the rumors of Intel chips making their way into Macs, the world has been turned upside down. I wonder if Intel will require Apple to put those "Intel Inside" stickers on their pristine cases? It's understandable that they'd make this move. The PowerPC processor has seemed stalled for a long time now. Two years ago, Steve Jobs had promised 3 GHz chips in Macs by this time last year; it still hasn't happened. The PowerBook line lacks a significant power edge over the low-end iBooks since the G5 processor is still too hot for notebooks. The frustration finally must have boiled over. Also, from Steve Jobs' comments at WWDC, it's clear that Apple has had this switch in the works for five years now. Every Mac OS X release for the last five years has had a counterpart that could run on Intel processors. Wow, what a secret. There are people who would have killed for a copy of that, I'm sure. I suppose that those years were devoted to developing methods for running PowerPC software on Intel processors (they're calling that technology Rosetta -- like the Rosetta Stone of Egypt, which had a message written in hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek, allowing for the first true translation of Ancient Egyptian -- get it?). It seems that the transition to Intel will be a lot more seamless than the jump to PowerPC or the wild dive to Mac OS X, thank goodness. I'm going to have to get a new computer soon, so I'm glad to hear that the PowerPC platform won't have to be abandoned entirely by software developers once Intel machines start arriving. I have to wonder what this means as regards other Intel-based machines. Jobs demonstrated Mac OS X running on a P4 at the conference today. The machine wasn't shown, so there's no knowing whether it was a custom-built Intel-based Mac or if it was an off-the-shelf HP or Dell. The big question is, will the new Mac OS X for Intel processors be able to run on off-the-shelf or slightly modified PCs? Now that's something I really can't imagine, considering the profit margin on Mac hardware; it's hard to believe Apple would allow its monopoly on hardware to end after it blitzed the old Mac clone makers. On the other hand, with the heavy software lifting already done by Apple, it's also hard to believe there won't be geeks out there getting it to work on their self-built Intel machines. In other news, Apple announced that the next version of its OS will be called Leopard and will be released at the end of 2006 or in early 2007 -- the target ship date for Microsoft's Longhorn. Come then, there will be a legitimate basis for comparison between the two OSes, unlike all the Tiger-Vaporhorn comparisons. Posted by Colleen at 12:26 PM  *   *

Wed - May 25, 2005

Hello, World For the past several weeks, my computer slowly has gone insane. I don't know what was wrong, exactly, although I suspect that OS update 10.3.9 conflicted with one of the many little utilities I always have running. It's hard to know for sure, though. At first, the problem was more frequent program crashes. Then I started having one program stop responding, which then would kick off a domino run of programs stalling, leading to a forced reboot before bed. After that happened for a few nights in succession, I suspected some sort of application memory leak. Using Activity Monitor, I found the rather benign-looking culprit (a new weather menu I was trying, Meteorologist) and terminated it. Problem solved, right? Instead, the program crashes became more frequent after my troubleshooting effort. The stalls were gone, but now I was sending crash reports every half hour or so to Apple. An iSync component called Scheduler was the most frequent to crash, but others did, too. The problem escalated steadily. Soon, I was unable to launch any programs after using my computer for a while; they all crashed right away. Next, I couldn't even launch anything beyond what opened automatically when I started my computer. At this point, I decided drastic action was necessary. I may have been influenced by having spent the previous day reformatting and reinstalling Windows two of our PCs (are computer problems contagious?), but I concluded I needed to reinstall Panther. It took all day and night to get my computer back to normal, especially since I have so little hard disk space open (and thus had to waste a great deal of time erasing and compressing files to make room). But now my computer has a squeaky clean OS and I haven't had a crash yet. Thank goodness. Posted by Colleen at 08:50 AM  *   *

Mon - February 28, 2005

Spam-A-Lot Unfortunately, this doesn't concern the Monty Python musical. Again I've been hit with hundreds of bounced e-mails because of someone using my address in the fake "From" line of their junk mail. Probably this is because someone with my e-mail address saved somewhere on their computer has a virus on their hard drive. Unluckily for me, I can only beg the people that I know who run Windows to do virus scans; there are scads of people who go to or once went to Northwestern who may have received e-mail from me in my capacities as PARC webmaster and RCB vice president or maybe through working on class projects. It wouldn't be someone living in a dorm or using an office computer on the NU network, either, because of NUIT's draconian virus blocking policies. You know, this is yet another reason why you shouldn't use Windows. Even people who choose not to put up with the viruses and malware and all that other crap exclusive to the Windows platform still get punished in some way by those who do. Think about it -- if no one used Windows, there'd be no infected zombie computers spewing out spam 24/7. Well, I will stop grousing and get to the point here. I've long been toying with the idea of ditching my NU e-mail account when I graduate because of all the spam I get from it (maybe 15 or 20 a day, compared with one over the life of my .Mac account). What with my e-mail address getting bombarded now with bounced spam, I'm suddenly getting 50 to 100 worthless messages a day, which is irritating. The upshot is, if you want to make sure any e-mail you send to me gets through, e-mail me at one of my other accounts. My Northwestern address will be nothing more than a forwarding address for my Gmail account in the near future anyway. This web site has an e-mail address (it's over on the right, at the bottom of the sidebar) you can use if you want. However, my two main addresses are my Gmail one and my .Mac one. To help stave off the spam deluge, I won't link them here (programs called spiders do crawl web sites looking for addresses to add to spammer lists), but they're pretty simple: just my full name, no middle initial, all run together with no dashes or dots, either at mac.com or gmail.com. And for goodness' sake, if you don't have a Mac, run your virus blocker. Posted by Colleen at 08:29 PM  *   *

Mon - February 14, 2005

If You Use Windows Why, why, why??? Anyway, if you have Symantec's Norman AntiVirus on your PC (that's the one NU gives us for free), run LiveUpdate now to download the program update that won't execute a certain virus when it scans it. Then, once you've installed all the updates, run a scan to see if you have this (or any) virus. I'm getting a ton of bounced and autoresponse messages right now from a spammer using my e-mail address, and we all know the usual way this happens is when someone running Windows has your e-mail address stored somewhere on their hard drive and then gets infected with a virus that turns the machine into a spam-spewing zombie. You might not realize it's happened to you until you run a virus scan. To be on the safe side, I'm running an AntiVirus scan myself right now, but let's be realistic: It's far, far less likely that my Mac is infected than your PC. Posted by Colleen at 05:19 PM  *   *

Sat - February 12, 2005

Technology Kicks My Butt I've been fuming at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, for a few days now because I assumed it was shoddy web site programming that kept me from getting my all-numbers password to my application mailed to me. Turns out my .Mac account has built-in spam filtering, and poor spam filtering at that. Whereas Apple Mail has killer instincts when it comes to spam (after it's been trained), .Mac mail seems to pick up my newsletters and registrations. I've discovered all sorts of messages I'd wondered why I never received in there. Of all the messages in the Junk box, only one was spam (and it was sent to my colleen.emails alias, which means that one of the sites I've registered for broke its "solemn" promise not to sell my e-mail address). There doesn't appear to be a way to train the online filter, so I've just added the mailing lists to my address book. But I send out karmic apologies to all the sites I've been hating for the past two months. Posted by Colleen at 12:33 AM  *   *

Sun - February 6, 2005

Gmail Invites Galore Good grief, I have 50 Gmail invites now. Is there anyone out there who hasn't received one yet? Now's the time, for sure. If you haven't tried Gmail yet, I definitely recommend it. It blows the pants off of Yahoo Mail and Hotmail as far as interface and storage amount goes, and, most important to me, you can access it (for free!) with your regular desktop e-mail client. That's right -- POP/SMTP access for nothing. I have it coming into Entourage along with my Northwestern and .Mac accounts. If, like me, you'll soon be departing Northwestern, this is an easy and free to maintain the same sort of e-mail service (POP/SMTP, as in sending and receiving mail in Outlook, Mail or Eudora; well-crafted, simultaneous web-mail access for when you're on another computer; not having to go through a change of e-mail address when you move to a different ISP). If you want an account, e-mail me. You can use the "Feedback" link below. Posted by Colleen at 02:07 PM  *   *

Thu - November 11, 2004

Extensions If you're interested in taking the Firefox plunge (see "The Best Browser II," above), you might want to check out this review of several extensions that I found on mozillaZine: Ten Extensions Enhance Firefox. As you saw in my own review, I also recommend bugmenot if you frequent news sites that require registration. Sure, the news sites are right to say that a registration is quick and must only be done once -- but multiply that once times the thousands (millions?) of news sites out there, and you begin to see the problem. Posted by Colleen at 08:08 PM  *   *

Tue - November 9, 2004

The Best Browser, Part II And now for the continuing saga of Mac web browsers, today featuring the major products based on Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine. Netscape In a sense, it would have been logical to start with Mozilla, since it's now the organization that makes all the updates to Gecko. But Netscape (recently turned 10 years old) was the first of the Gecko browsers to appear, even if today it's something of an AOL afterthought. Netscape is currently at version 7.2. It doesn't make much sense when you consider there was, as far as I know, no publicly available version 5 -- it skipped from 4.8 to the notoriously bad 6. I write "notoriously bad" because I was always told it was so by those who stuck stubbornly to 4.x in the days before the version 7 browsers arrived. I never thought it was worse than 4.x myself, but I also never had the major issues with Windows Me that seemed to bug everyone, too. I have to think, actually, that the version 4 browsers were really where Netscape went awry. (Technically, Netscape wasn't Gecko-based until 6, but Gecko was certainly an evolution of what Netscape had. So let's press on.) It was then that someone decided it would be a good idea to integrate a news reader, e-mail client and WYSIWYG web page editor into the browser, which then morphed from "Netscape Navigator" to "Netscape Communicator." However, this made Netscape a perpetually slow program, and none of the extra components were really of the same quality as the browser, or of several other competing standalone, free products. It was a couple of years before Netscape produced version 6, and in the meantime, they open-sourced the browser, creating Mozilla, and they stuck in Gecko as the new layout engine. Version 6 had snazzy new interface (well, I liked it better on Windows than the previous version, which looked outdated by then). But I guess it was unstable. Netscape eventually lost a great deal of market share, got bought by AOL, starting releasing its browser as just "Netscape," discontinued development, spun off Mozilla as a foundation, restarted development when Mozilla turned the tide against IE and just recently released version 7.2. This browser is a great improvement over 7.1 because it's based on Mozilla 1.7 rather than 1.4. Stuff looks better -- in fact, the same as it does in Mozilla 1.7.x, Firefox 1.0 and Camino 0.8.x. Imagine that. My opinion is that Gecko is the best rendering engine available on the Mac. It's well-developed and has strong standards support. It also is increasingly recognized as worth taking into account by web developers because of Firefox's growing popularity. However, this feature is not unique to Netscape, so don't choose it for this reason. Netscape has immensely complex preferences -- way, way too many choices for my patience level these days, but great for power users. Certainly, some of these features are nifty or useful. Netscape has a built-in AIM client that runs in the browser's sidebar, which is pretty cool. No switching back and forth between applications. It's a pretty stripped-down client, though, so you wouldn't want to use it as your main IM app. Besides, you're using a Mac. You have iChat and Adium available. Netscape's main advantage over the faster-developing Mozilla is its name recognition. For many people who started using the web a little back when Netscape equaled "the web" often feel more comfortable with it. Northwestern for years has been distributing 4.7 to everyone on campus. Thus, professors here are especially entrenched Netscape users, which is why I choose Netscape rather than Mozilla to set up as their web site editor. However, if you don't need a free site editing tool, Firefox is starting to gain on Netscape in recognition. Lots of people seem willing to try it now. Netscape's biggest problem is that on the Mac, it looks like a Windows application. As you'll see, this is a common problem for Gecko browsers. They generally have a cross-platform interface, and it takes some hackery to get them to look decently Mac-like. The form widgets, the menus and the scrollbars are all going to look out of place. So why bother at all with Netscape on the Mac? Beats me. Netscape has tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, a sidebar and most other features you'd expect. It has integrated Internet radio, which is unique for Mac browsers, I think. It's e-mail client also has statistical spam filtering . . . since it's based on Mozilla's, which also does. Mozilla Mozilla is essentially Netscape with all the AOL junk removed. No built-in AIM or Netscape e-mail address, true, but also no AOL links scattered all over your browser. Mozilla also has lots of extensions and themes available for downloading, much like its little brother browser, Firefox. New versions of Mozilla are available with good frequency, so the browser stays on top of the changing web well. Mozilla suffers from many of the same problems as Netscape, though. It looks decidedly like a Windows browser. If we Mac users wanted ugly, we wouldn't have paid so much for pretty. It's also loaded down with too many features (few of you probably use IRC chat regularly) and too many preferences (there's three options for what should happen when you click a download link). Mozilla does have useful features for web developers, such as debugging tools, and it is expandable via extensions (hard to think how much else could be added!). You can also theme it, and there are a couple of Mac-style themes. The Pinstripe themes actually give the interface, including the scrollbar and the preferences dialog, a very native look. However, it doesn't fix the form widgets (though there are some workarounds, see the Firefox section) or the bookmark bar's drop-down menus. And this may just be my experience, but the icons were MIA on my copy. Not sure how that happened. Also, the toolbar is still not fully customizable like other Mac applications. If you are interested in web design, and you aren't scared of the idea of losing out on the comforts of AOL advertising, I do recommend giving Mozilla a try for its Composer feature. It's the same as Netscape's, but you'll feel better knowing you're going fully open-source. Firefox Firefox is the current media darling, thanks to the valiant efforts of the Mozilla Foundation and its online community, which has been whipped into a frenzy by today's 1.0 release. If you are on Windows, Firefox is definitely the way to go. It's a great browsing experience. It's fast, it has powerful features within a simple interface, it renders pages well and it's a whole kettle of fish more secure than IE 6. True, the increased scrutiny given to the browser since the federal government went so far as to recommend it has uncovered some holes, but they've been patched quickly. Plus, Firefox is inherently more secure since it's not integrated into Windows the way IE is. However, we need to talk about Mac Firefox. Mac Firefox is nowhere near done. It has the same features as the Windows version, true, and it's very fast, but the interface is lagging. Although the look has improved with the lovely Pinstripe as the default theme, again, it doesn't improve the form text boxes and buttons. For that, you have to use a number of imperfect CSS interface hacks available online, which at least make the look more tolerable. In fact, they make Firefox's buttons look a lot like IE for Mac's. The problem, though, is that the average Mac user isn't going to want to get their hands dirty messing with code. Besides that, not all of Firefox's many extensions work on the Mac version. It's probably true for Mozilla as well, but I admit, I've never tried extensions on Mozilla. On the other hand, Firefox offers enough features that, except maybe for BugMeNot and AdBlock -- both Mac-compatible -- you'll not miss extensions. Anyway, it's shakes out the same way most software does on the Mac -- if it's a really worthwhile extension, odds are it does work on your Mac. And let's not sell Firefox short. One cool feature only it boasts is Live Bookmarks. This feature uses the RSS feeds available at many blog and news sites to display headlines in your bookmarks menu. When Firefox detects a feed available on a site, an orange button with radiating arcs on it appears in the status bar. Click it, and you'll bookmark the feed. It will look like a folder labeled with the site's name, and when you look in the folder, you'll see links to stories recently posted to the site. Firefox also has an elegant find feature. It and the other Gecko browsers support Find as You Type, which will search the page for the any letter combos you type after hitting a forward-slash. But whereas Camino just shows what you're typing in the status bar, in Firefox, a Find toolbar slides up from the bottom of the window when you start a search (it also pops up when you hit Command-F or choose "Find" from the menu bar). This makes it easier to move around the page and narrow your search than in the other implementations. If you're a Safari-based browser or Camino post-0.7 user, you might find it annoying that the tabs do not have close buttons. Instead, there's a universal close button on the far right of the tab bar. It's useful if you want to close a series of tabs without much movement, but it does require you make a tab active in order to close it -- no closing of background tabs. Firefox has an integrated Google search bar along with the Mozilla-standard pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing. Firefox is also capable of single-window mode, meaning that it will open links that call for new windows in a new tab. But you can't manage your bookmarks in a tab -- that still brings up a separate window. I do like Firefox. For a while, when I was sick of Safari but Camino was stagnant, it was my primary browser. But right now, as much as I'd like to take the new version 1.0 for a spin, I can't bring myself to use Firefox all the time. It's biggest downfall for me (which it shares with Netscape and Mozilla) is that it doesn't support the Services menu. Now that I have MacGourmet, I use its text-clipping service all the time to save recipes. While you could argue that I really shouldn't have access to that feature until I import the backlog of 200-250 recipe clippings in my program, I can't deal with having it taken from me now. This browser is certainly a savior for the Windows market, and I think it has a lot of potential on the Mac platform, too. It'll be especially helpful to anyone who moves from Windows to Mac now that IE is a goner. But while I suggest you go give it a try now to see what it has to offer, I'd wait until version 1.1 to make it your default. On the latest roadmap, that's the point at which Firefox is supposed to come more in line with the human interface guidelines for both the Mac and the GNOME desktop for Linux. Camino Initial disclosure: This is my current default browser. I've used Camino more than any other browser on the Mac market. When I came to OS X from my Windows Me laptop, I naturally sought out a Mozilla browser since that's what I'd used on Windows. I believe I learned about the buzz surrounding what was then called Chimera from the Mac media. At the time, Safari wasn't a player and Internet Explorer was the default Mac browser. Chimera was the fastest browser on the platform and had the features I liked from Mozilla on Windows -- pop-up blocking and tabs. I hated the blue toolbar icons, but there just weren't many alternative browsers that were free or worked well at the time. Once Safari's beta became usable, I switched to it for a while. It was exciting and I was still fond of brushed metal at the time. But we know how that worked out. However, going back Camino 0.7.x at that time wasn't a viable option. It was based on Mozilla 1.0, and its age was really starting to show. It got worse when Panther was released because Camino used the Mac's built-in tab interface for rendering its tabs; Panther ditched tabs in favor of thin buttons that looked highly out of place in the browser. Camino development was stagnant for a long time, too, since Netscape spun off Mozilla and dumped the Camino project, and the chief developer felt hesitant to introduce changes to the code since 0.7 turned out to be a stable release. But development has picked up, and Camino is now up to 0.8.x. It'll probably be a while before 0.9 (and especially 1.0) makes it out the door, but if you're willing to put up with a few odd bugs on occasion, new builds are available every night (like with the other Gecko browsers). Camino 0.8 is great if you're still on Jaguar, but if you're not, the latest nightly build is the way to go. They are surprisingly stable. Since 0.8, the developers have introduced new tabs, which is the main reason to upgrade. With the new system, you can open unlimited tabs in one window and close buttons are on the tabs, like in Safari. Camino has pop-up blocking and a Google search bar. You can use Find as You Type, but it's less easy to use than in Firefox. Bookmark organization works like in Safari, although the editing screen takes over your whole browser window. Cookie management, if you're into that, is better than on Safari. Camino is integrated into the OS X Keychain, although its password memory is more uneven than Safari's. In the latest builds, it sports Safari's reset-browser menu item, too. Porn lovers, rejoice. The chief advantage for Camino among the Gecko crowd is that it has a native OS X interface. It uses native buttons and menus. It supports the Services menu. It's speedy and simple to use. It's streamlined, as the browser trend seems to be these days. Subjectively, Camino just feels better to use than the other Gecko browsers. It's more intuitive. Camino gets criticized often for jettisoning its sidebar drawer and for having poor history management (it's not fully accessible in the menu bar). For some reason, Camino doesn't support some web features that Firefox, based on the same code, does, such as Blogger's interface (but then, Safari doesn't support it, either). The slow pace of releases also bothers people who only download milestones. It's true that 0.9 won't see the light of day for a while yet, depending on when the small development team finishes creating new features such as Auto-Fill. With the release of Safari just torpedoing Camino's audience, its continued development is a real labor of love. Though it has its faults, Camino is easily my favorite browser. It's interface is full of Mac goodness but it doesn't have any of the intrusive, show-off elements of OmniWeb. It does its job well and pleasantly without getting in your way. Until Firefox catches up interface-wise, Camino really stands alone as the best compromise between the good page display of Gecko and the Mac OS X interface. Posted by Colleen at 12:39 AM  *   *

Mon - October 25, 2004

The Best Browser Mac OS X has scads of available web browsers. Of course, only a few are both one, intended for use as a browser; and two, not made to run in kiosk or kiddie mode. The main competitors are Safari, Shiira, OmniWeb, Camino, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, iCab, Opera and Internet Explorer. Some really shouldn't be considered competitors anymore (Internet Explorer, for example, is no longer under development), but some people apparently use them all or otherwise they wouldn't be around. So let's consider: Which one is best? Well, the answer is obvious: None of them. They're all so different that certain people are going to fall in love with certain browsers and be unable to understand what you see in that frumpy little red-haired girl anyway. The best thing to do is to consider the advantages and disadvantages of each. Safari (Jaguar | Panther) Heaven forbid we mock Safari. We might bring its legions of supporters down on us. Macworld is always tooting Safari's horn (much like it does with Apple products in general). Of course, you can't fault Macworld for talking only about Apple computers (it is, after all, Macworld), but it would be nice if more frequent attention were given to Apple's competitors in web cams, music software, MP3 players and of course, browsers. The only areas that get competitor coverage really are e-mail clients and office software -- and wouldn't you know it, these are made by Microsoft. True, you could say these products have critical mass and deserve coverage, but I think one of the goals of a computer magazine should be to introduce you to software and hardware you might not otherwise find (see my entry today on Cyberduck). But enough of this. We're supposed to talk about Safari. Safari is certainly fast. It's also highly simplified. That doesn't mean that there's no features, but rather, that most good features are on by default and you just can't turn them off. It also means Safari doesn't include an e-mail client, HTML editor or newsgroup reader -- but unless you already use Netscape or Mozilla, are you really looking for these things in your browser? Safari also fits in with the look of just about every application Apple has created for OS X (save, notably, Mail and the Finder pre-Panther). Since Steve Jobs is apparently a fan of the look, it seems we're stuck with it. It's up to you whether you think a lack of colorful, pretty icons is a bad thing. Safari's tabs are also "upside-down," which is a bit disconcerting at first. However, it makes about as much sense as regular tabs do, interface-wise. And I have to admit, the status indicator -- the blue that fills up your address bar as a page loads -- is wicked cool. Plus, using upside-down triangles instead of folder icons to indicate bookmark bar menus makes more sense. I used to be enamored of Safari's SnapBack feature. It's like the back button, only faster because it skips some of the intervening pages. For example, say you do a search in the integrated Google bar. You click a link to check it out. You look through the page for a while, but it turns out not to have the info you want. Instead of click-and-holding the back button to find Google again in the drop-down menu, in Safari, you just click the little orange arrow in the search bar. Boom, you're back at the results page. Safari can do something similar with other pages you navigate to in the address bar, but it's a little more unpredictable here. Sometimes it requires digging through a menu to set a page as the SnapBack page. Plus, I find it's easier to just open search links in tabs behind the results page. But I imagine some people like it and use it more. Some people may like that you can reset Safari. This deletes your cache and history, basically erasing all traces of your browsing session. It's useful if you're using a public computer and were just entering your bank info, I suppose. But for personal use, it seems . . . useless. Unless, of course, you spend a lot of time looking at porn. Naughty, naughty! Another mixed bag is AutoFill. It sounds good -- it automatically fills in your personal information, such as your address, when it recognizes a form. The Google Toolbar on Windows can do the same thing. However, at least when I used Safari (which wasn't so long ago), it was a real pain. Sometimes, it wouldn't quite recognize what the form wanted. That's not so bad, I guess -- some is better than none. The really painful part was phone numbers. Often, sites ask for phone numbers by providing three separate boxes (area code, exchange and number). Safari would fill in all three boxes with my full number. When I would attempt to delete this and type in the correct portion, it filled in the whole thing again. This would cause errors when submitting forms, and eventually, I turned the feature off except for user names and passwords. Finally, everyone's always marveling over Safari's bookmark management. All I can say is it took me a while to figure out why all the folders I'd created in the left column wouldn't show up in my bookmarks menu. It's not as "intuitive" as they'd like you to think, but once you get the hang of it . . . well, it functions. What more can you say about bookmark management? A big issue I have with Safari (and it's derivatives) is the web rendering. Sure, it supports some CSS-3 (ooh, text shadows, they say), but I think more sites not designed specifically for Safari appear wrong in it than in a Gecko browser. Safari also does not support some advanced features, like the stuff powering Blogger's new advanced entry editor. Also, and I found this particularly annoying when I used Safari, the program won't import bookmarks save once -- when you first launch it, it'll automatically import all Internet Explorer bookmarks. The problem? Well, I sure didn't come from using Mozilla all the time on my Compaq to go back to IE on my iBook. I liked tabs and pop-up blocking too much. So until I tried Safari, I'd been using Camino/Chimera. I had to find a freeware program to make up for this Safari shortfall. You'll also have to download a separate program if you want to make Safari block banner and Flash ads (trust me, it vastly improves your browsing experience to not have stuff flashing everywhere). And lastly -- and this is an issue with all the WebCore browsers -- Safari is built into the system. You can throw out Safari (though if you're running Panther, you may be at a loss then when you want to change your default browser -- make sure you download RCDefaultApp), but you can't get rid of the rendering engine that way. It has uncomfortable associations with IE for Windows. In fact, this is the reason Microsoft gave for discontinuing IE for Mac -- they said they couldn't compete when Apple had access to the system. At least WebCore doesn't power the Finder the way IE is Windows, but Dashboard, which is part of the upcoming upgrade to the OS, is in fact Safari-powered. So who knows what's coming. All in all, I'd say if you're a big Apple fan, you'll probably like Safari too. But you have to be that sort of Apple fan who's fallen in love with brushed metal the way the company has. If you want something a little less depressing and with more options and features, go elsewhere. Shiira Bet you thought we'd never get here. That was a long Safari rant. I can't help it, what can I say. It just rubs me the wrong way. Shiira was originally a Japanese browser, but it's been translated into English (among other languages). It's open-source (like Safari's progeniter, KHTML, is), and it uses Apple's Web Core. The developer says, "The goal of the Shiira Project is to create a browser that is better and more useful than Safari." Thus, you can see that Shiira is for people who wish Safari wasn't so annoying. I don't know a great deal about Shiira. Honestly, I've just downloaded it for reference. But I've certainly read a great deal about it because many Mac browser geeks (surely not I!) get awfully excited about Shiira. Here's what I know: First -- the program and toolbar icons are all fish. Is that what "Shiira" means? I don't know. Anyway. Shiira, as you can imagine, is much like Safari, down to the upside-down tabs. It's tailored to Safari exiles, too. Several preference settings allow you to choose to do things "like Safari," and it even integrates your Safari bookmarks live (though apparently you can't edit them). As far as I can tell, you can't import bookmarks otherwise. Maybe there's a way around this I don't see. But it ought to be more obvious if there is. Also, there's no button or even contextual menu within the bookmark-management screen to add new bookmarks. You can add new ones through the Bookmarks menu or the browser toolbar, of course, but it's just a little odd. The bookmarks manager, along with the downloads manager and the browser history, are in a sidebar drawer. Drawer lovers, unite! I'm afraid I'm not one of you, but I know some people are passionately fond of them. To each her own. Shiira has a button right in the tab bar to add new tabs, rather than on the toolbar like in most other browsers. It's not obvious what it does at first, but one click and you get it. It's a pretty logical place for it. Shiira's search bar allows you to search many more sites than Safari's Google bar, including several dictionaries and thesauri (fancy word there). Another feature that makes people so devoted to Shiira is single-window mode. It will open all "new windows" that some sites request in tabs. Shiira is also themeable, like the Mozilla browsers. You can choose an icon theme right in the preferences, but it only comes with one by default. You'll have to search for others. Strangely enough, you can choose to give Shiira the same brushed-metal appearance as Safari. I ask, why? (Don't answer that.) In conclusion, Shiira is for those who kind of like Safari but wished it did more (and are fond of fish). It has the same rendering issues as Safari, of course, but if they don't bother you in Safari, they won't bother you here, obviously. It's free, so you might as well try it if you're a Safari user. The pace of development on it is very quick, too, so I imagine some of my comments will be outdated soon. OmniWeb OmniWeb is a beautiful browser. It had better be, since it costs $30. But you can download it for a full-featured 30-day trial, so it might seem worth it to you by the end of that month. Don't believe a browser could be worth paying for? The people at Mac360 beg to differ. Others do, too. It's just that nice. This is the sort of program that makes people say "Mac-like." I know it sounds odd that a competing browser could be more "Mac-like" than Apple's own browser, but I suppose it depends on your perception of what the Mac is. For many of us, let's face it, the Mac is eye candy. OmniWeb will give your eyes cavities. True, its toolbar icons suck. But otherwise, it's oh so pretty. Icons slide in and out of the status bar. Mousing over a tab brings up a translucent gray box with shadowed white type and rounded corners Rounded corners equal elegance, naturally. They're everywhere on Macs and in OmniWeb. All of its tabs have four rounded corners. Four, you say? Oh yes, because OmniWeb's "tabs" are actually thumbnails of each open page in a drawer. How cute is that? You can see at a glance whether a background page has loaded and what is on it. It's much quicker for figuring out which tab you want to switch to. And they even anticipated people who open a tremendous number of tabs by giving you the option to turn the thumbnails off, and a vertical list of tabs allows you to see more of the page's name when you have a crowded tab bar than a horizontal list. Finally, having the tabs in a side drawer makes more sense interface-wise because it indicates that the whole window changes when you switch tabs -- not just the address bar (like Safari and Shiira imply) or the page window (like everyone else implies). It's simply the loveliest, most logical tab setup I've ever seen. OmniWeb also has built-in the ability to block both pop-ups and inline ads. Having this feature built-in is convenient for when the filter catches an image it shouldn't. Instead of mucking around with CSS files to fix the problem, you can do it point-and-click style within the browser. OmniWeb also has both global preferences and site preferences. If, for example, you'd like pop-ups to appear on a certain page but no others, you can allow pop-ups in that site's own preferences. Another nice feature is the ability to save workspaces. If you need to close your browser (maybe you've just run Software Update) but you have a bunch of tabs open, you can save your workspace and reopen your browser so it looks just as you left it before you restarted. OmniWeb can also handle RSS and HTML editing, though these aren't really necessary features. I prefer a separate, dedicated RSS reader. Like other OS X-native browsers, it can also check your spelling in text boxes. OmniWeb sometimes can be a little too pretty for its own good. The AutoFill icon in the status bar is always sliding in and out, which I found irritating after a while. I wished it would stay put and simply gray-out when it couldn't be used. And like I said, you'll need to hack in a new icon theme if you buy it, because the navigation icons are startlingly plain compared to the rest of the interface. But on the whole, this is my favorite of the Safari-based browsers. It's chock full of browsing features, and it's a looker. It earns its keep. Alas, I do not have $30 to spend on it myself, especially when I still feel like the fact that it uses the same rendering engine as Safari is a drawback. Well, this entry is quite long enough. I will break up the reviews by posting the rest in other entries. Next time, I will cover the Mozilla-based browsers, and I'll wrap up with a look and the remaining three contenders. We'll try then to explain the continuing pull of the defunct IE. It should be fun. Come back soon, y'all. Posted by Colleen at 09:00 PM  *   *

Fabulous FTP I was so excited to discover this program that I just had to share. I downloaded Cyberduck when I saw it in the last issue of Macworld. The magazine said it was a free FTP program with uploading capabilities, something I had never found in my searches for free Mac OS X FTP programs. It had been frustrating, since there were several good FTP programs available for free on Windows, but the Mac developers all seemed to charge for theirs. Maybe I'd feel this was more justified if not for the fact that FTP is built into OS X, albeit not enabled for uploading. But not only is Cyberduck free and capable of all it's advertised to do, it is actually the best FTP program I've ever tried. Up until now, my favorite was WS_FTP on Windows (which, alas, is no longer free), but Cyberduck is actually more intuitive. It's much less intimidating than the other programs. There's no need to be especially familiar with how FTP works. Sure, you still have to type in your server address. But it guides you through this, and it has a nice, visual bookmarks drawer so you only have to do that once. It also doesn't have tiny, unlabeled icons and multiple windows like AbsoluteFTP, NU's preferred Windows program, does, which confuses newbies a lot. Also, unlike Fetch, NU's preferred Mac program, the one that I've been using and that's not free, it doesn't require you to know that to go back up in the directory tree you double-click the folder with the two periods for its name. Yeah, I know -- what the heck? You can use a menu to go back in Fetch, but it's not nearly so simple and browser-like as Cyberduck's back button. Also, Cyberduck dispenses with the "Get" button, which I for one click almost every time when I'm ready to upload in Fetch instead of the proper "Put Files..." button. Cyberduck's buttons are named "Upload" and "Download" -- no mystery there. Another nice feature is that Cyberduck can upload (and delete) whole folders. It's rough trying to explain to a professor that they have to create the whole directory structure on the server and then upload all their files into the proper folders -- and that they have to make sure updated files always go to the proper folders in order not to break their links. Directory structures are just a mystery to most people at first. But with Cyberduck you can upload your whole folder of files in one swoop, without the potential for messing up links. Being able to delete full folders is great, too, because in many programs, you have to go through the folders and delete every file within them before the program will let you delete the folder itself. What a waste of time. This is going to make my life so much easier when I help poli sci profs upload their web sites on Macs. Anyway, if you're looking for an FTP program, and you would like something both easy and very Mac-like, go get Cyberduck. It's absolutely fabulous. Posted by Colleen at 03:34 PM  *   *

Fri - October 15, 2004

I'm a Believer I've installed some nice new programs on my computer recently, and in order to share the joy, I'll share the names: 1. WeatherPop: I don't know about you, but I find temperature-controlled environments a little disturbing. My Register internship and now my room in Plex are the first two instances in my life when I've lived with air conditioning for longer than a week. As much as air conditioning seems like it would be the savior of the world during summer months in Erie, I've found that it feels highly unnatural to go from 70 degrees to 100 degrees just by stepping out the door. I'm used to being able to judge what to wear based on the temperature inside the house. I started to long for the hot, humid days I once knew. Of course, most people aren't weird like me. Still, it's nice to know how to dress for the weather every day -- how heavy a coat to put on, whether to bring an umbrella. WeatherPop is great because it puts that information right in your menu bar -- both the temperature and a cute little icon depicting the current conditions (my favorite so far -- and since there have only been two conditions in Evanston, rainy and damp, since I installed it, my choices are limited -- is the little lighthouse for "foggy"). WeatherPop also will let you pick other cities in the United States to track. You can switch which city is shown via the menu. And, best of all naturally, it's totally free. 2. Entourage 2004: Northwestern has cut a deal with Microsoft to allow its students to buy a copy of Office 2004 for about $60. Now, since the regular price for the student edition is $150, clearly, this is a steal. As you can likely tell by now, I bit, and now I have the whole smorgasbord on my computer. I haven't had a chance to test out Word, Excel or PowerPoint yet, but Entourage I fired up as soon as it was ready. Entourage is like Outlook for Mac. They have different names I suppose because they have slightly different feature sets, but don't get the idea that Entourage is more like the Mac version of Outlook Express. It offers a robust e-mail client plus a calendar module, to-do lists, notes, an address book and something called Project Center, which organizes all of your correspondence, contacts, events and Office documents related to a project. Entourage, along with the other Office programs, also sports a Scrapbook now. For those who don't remember this Mac OS 9 desk accessory, it's a space for storing clippings of items you use frequently. If you're always typing a certain phrase over and over, or you need to have a picture show up in multiple places, it's a convenient place to store the items. It's like your computer's clipboard on steroids. Of course, I'm plenty satisfied with using iCal and Apple's Address Book. They have special features that integrate with .Mac (as does Safari, but I find Safari to be a bit too irritating to use). So I'm really only using Entourage for the e-mail features. I used to use Entourage X for my e-mail (and everything else, before iCal and Address Book were updated), but I stopped when I dabbled with IMAP and found it to be a poor option for handling that (at least as compared to Mail). But now Entourage does a fine job handling my .Mac mail, and it has other nice e-mail features. Entourage has much better options for its filters. My eternal favorite is the option not to notify you if your new mail is sorted as junk. Mail can't seem to handle this. Speaking of junk mail, the spam filter is vastly improved over the last version. This time, it actually works. It doesn't even need training when you start the program, either. Another nifty feature is one you might be familiar with if you've ever used Microsoft's MSN Messenger. When Entourage receives a new message, a small box slides up from the dock on the bottom right side of the screen. The box shows you the subject and sender of the new e-mail, and it gives you the option to delete the message without reading it. (Make sure you install MSN Messenger to enable this Entourage function. However, you don't have to actually run Messenger to take advantage of it.) One feature that's caused a lot of excitement is the new three-column view. You can opt to have all your folders in one column, your message listing in a second column, and your message preview in another, separate column to the right. This allows you to see more of the message in the preview pane without scrolling. Mozilla Thunderbird has this layout option as well, but Entourage takes it a step further by allowing it to be used even on smaller monitors like mine. Each message in the message list uses two lines instead of one to display the sender info, so you can actually see the sender's e-mail address and message in a slim column. Entourage also has one of the more intelligent approaches to the problem of pictures in e-mail. In case you don't know, spammers (and others on occasion) determine whether you've read their messages by using special pictures in their e-mails. These aren't attached images, like when your mom sends you a picture from home, but are inserted using HTML that calls back to the sender's server to pull an image from it like a web site does. That means that if you don't have pictures disabled in your e-mail client, every time you open or preview a message from someone nefarious, they'll know you've read it and that your address is valid. This leads to more spam for you. The latest release of just about any e-mail client now gives you the option not to load these images in order to protect your privacy. However, some legitimate mailing lists (such as the New York Times' Circuits newsletter) also use this method to display graphics in their e-mails. I dislike not being able to see them right when I open the message. With Mail, the only options for picture-loading were to block them in messages marked as Junk or all messages. But when a message slipped through my Junk filter, I'd have to open it to mark it as Junk in Mail (something important to do since Mail's filter has to be trained). So I turned to turning off all pictures, which meant I had to click a button every time I opened a message in order to load the legitimate pictures. And if I accidentally moved to another message before I'd finished reading (which happened a lot with Mail), I'd have to reload the pictures again. Entourage, on the other hand, refuses to load pictures by default. It doesn't even offer an option to show photos by default (in order to save people from themselves, presumably). However, you can choose to show pictures for messages from anyone in your address book, on a safe domains list you can create, or any mailing list you subscribe to yourself. There's other features that I haven't described or discovered yet here, but these were enough for me. I certainly recommend giving it a try. 3. AddressBookToCSV: In Apple's quest to make its applications "simple," it often leaves out important features (important to me, at least). Apple's Address Book doesn't support exporting its data into CSV (comma-separated values) files. This makes it hard to import Address Book entries into other programs sometimes. It didn't bother me too much until Google's Gmail service started offering the ability to import your address book. However, it would only accept CSV files, which can be produced by Outlook and Yahoo Address Book, among others. This little program does nothing more than export your Address Book as a CSV file that you can upload to Google. That's my kind of "simple." And it's free. 4. GmailStatus: Speaking of Gmail, this utility adds another menu icon to your menu bar that shows you how many messages are waiting for you in your inbox. It's free, too. New programs just make me happy. Posted by Colleen at 12:54 PM  *   *

Thu - September 23, 2004

Closed Windows Code to exploit Windows graphics flaw now public | CNET News.com: "Code to exploit Windows graphics flaw now public A sample program hit the Internet on Wednesday, showing by example how malicious coders could compromise Windows computers by using a flaw in the handling of a widespread graphics format by Microsoft's software. Security professionals expect the release of the program to herald a new round of attacks by viruses and Trojan horses incorporating the code to circumvent security on Windows computers that have not been updated. The flaw, in the way Microsoft's software processes JPEG graphics, could allow a program to take control of a victim's computer when the user opens a JPEG file." Also, note this: "Microsoft: To secure IE, upgrade to XP If you're one of about 200 million people using older versions of Windows and you want the latest security enhancements to Internet Explorer, get your credit card ready. Microsoft this week reiterated that it would keep the new version of Microsoft's IE Web browser available only as part of the recently released Windows XP operating system, Service Pack 2. The upgrade to XP from any previous Windows versions is $99 when ordered from Microsoft. Starting from scratch, the operating system costs $199." That means if you're using Internet Explorer on Windows 98, Windows Me or Windows 2000, no more browser updates for you. No more patches against the many exploits that can take control of your computer or just make pests of themselves through IE; no more updates to keep pace with the development of Web standards (i.e., pages are going to start looking funny to you after a while). So if you don't have Windows XP or a Mac, now would be an especially good time to download the Mozilla Firefox browser. Posted by Colleen at 01:52 PM  *   *

Thu - September 16, 2004

Firefox Test Drive Firefox 0.10 (that's "point ten," believe it or not) is quite nice. I just tested it out, and it has a lovely new bookmark bar gradient. It gives me high hopes for what they might accomplish in the final Mac release (which will come after the final Windows release because after they finish the guts of the browser, they're planning to work on Mac-version cosmetic issues). Also, the Live Bookmarks are nifty. If you've never investigated RSS, Atom or site feeds (there's a link to mine on the sidebar), Live Bookmarks are a way Firefox puts this headline service to use. Basically, if you were to create a "live bookmark" to my site in Firefox, it would look like a folder, and if you looked inside the folder menu, you'd see links to all my latest diary entries. You could see if I'd updated without having to actually visit my page. It works for a lot of sites. Pretty neat, no? Posted by Colleen at 09:22 PM  *   *