CS and the City

Without having to use Saft either! (Though I think this will only work on Safari 3.1)

Here’s the magic, just pump this into your terminal, restart Safari and you’ll be ready to go:
defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

I recently had to rebuild my iTunes library to solve some weird situation that was preventing my iPhone from syncing with iTunes after a reformat and upgrade. In the process I managed to add about 25 albums to the library twice. Instead of Apple noticing that the action is simply going to result in byte-for-byte duplicates of entire albums, it decides to continue with the addition and just append ” 1.mp3″ to all of the filenames. Why the genius coders over at Apple decided this was a reasonable outcome I’ll never know, but it frustrates a music library neat freak like myself to no end.

After trying to convince various AppleScripts to make iTunes clean itself up, I stumbled across these instructions on the blog of Todd George on how to find and remove byte-for-byte duplicates from iTunes. It saved my sanity. Note that this simply removes the files from the filesystem, and not the entries from the iTunes library itself. Thankfully, Todd provides a link to a great method of finding the now dead entries in your library and removing them WITHOUT any additional scripts or programs.

iTunes is happy again!

Well, to be fair, it’s pretty slow, and some other people have ran into some instability, but the iPhone SDK works just fine on my old iBook G4 allowing me to put off that inevitable new hardware purchase just a little bit longer.  Thanks to Gordon Turner for the tip. Looks like this WWDC ticket just paid for itself!

How-tos are located here and here (do both, the second is a little bit of clean up detail omitted from the first).

Transmission has been a favourite BitTorrent client of mine for a long time. Its compact design, complete feature set and small memory footprint are much preferred over the bulky Azureus. Unfortunately, somewhere after v0.7, it lost its high-performance ways and I had to switch back to Azureus just to get my downloads to work. I’m happy to report that it’s back, better than ever post-v1.0 (Now at v1.10).

I recommend any Mac owner check it out for their BitTorrent needs. It’s now also available on Linux/*BSD so I suspect they can experience the same joy

When Apple announced their SDK for the iPhone, I immediately got caught up on Apple’s insistence that all applications must be distributed through their App Store, not only because developers have to pay $99 a year to put any application (free or not) on the store, or that Apple gets a 30% cut of any profits made, but also that they get veto power on any and all application.

Apple says this is for your own good. It allows them to protect you from any malicious applications. Of course, they can also block any SIM unlock programs. They got a little fascist with their “No Porn” declaration, and they left the door open to turn away any “unforeseen” application that doesn’t meet their high standards.

Turns out Music apps fall in that category. iPodNN reports that Music functions are off-limits to iPhone SDK developers. This means that I can’t use anything but iTunes to listen to my tunes, even if I’m not satisfied with the client (I’m not BTW), I can’t use anything but the iTunes Wireless store, even if Amazon wanted to open their store to the platform too, and I can’t use any interesting musical support applications like Last.fm to track my usage. That’s a whole lot of can’ts for something that’s supposed to revolutionize the platform.

I’m looking forward to the day when I can replace my iPhone with something Android-based and not feel like I’m being herded for my own good by Apple.

I’ve found that Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) isn’t always ejecting mounted DMG files in the usual methods (i.e. dragging to trash, right clicking and choosing eject, you know, the way it should work).

I found the following command works until Apple fixes the bug. Next time, I’ll also try using Disk Utility (thanks to the guys on Apple support forums for both tips).

Open up a terminal, cd to /Volumes, get the name of a mounted DMG file, and try like this:

(in my case the volume was /MailTags2.2b4):

maggie:Volumes blloyd$ hdiutil detach MailTags2.2b4
“disk1″ unmounted.
“disk1″ ejected.

Link to specific message

I have more web browsing software in my Applications folder than any sane person should have. The usual suspects of Safari and Firefox, Internet Explorer Mac 5 (just in case…), Flock, Opera, and OmniWeb. Missing for whatever reason was Camino.

Camino is a Mac-only browser implementation on top of the Mozilla core which powers Firefox. Essentially, you get the best of both worlds: The power of the Gecko rendering engine and the tight integration you’d expect from a Mac only app.

I can’t explain its absence. I may have tried an earlier version, who knows. In fact, it wasn’t until I watched Mike Pinkerton’s presentation on the history of Camino that I decided to (re-)give it a go.

And I’m impressed so far. The load times are noticeably faster than Firefox, and the memory footprint seems smaller (though not as much smaller as I expected after dumping all of Firefox’s cross-platform interface stuffing). There are still some stability issues to be ironed out.

I’ve also filed my first feature request. As I wrote before, I am in absolute love with how Safari handles PDFs. Though Camino boasts about harnessing the true power of OSX, they still turn a blind eye to PDFs.

So I filed my first feature request bug with Camino. It promptly got marked as a duplicate. I didn’t think I’d be the first one to miss Safari’s perfect PDF functionality. I hope anyone that stumbles upon this article will do both of us a favor and go “Me too!” the feature.

The reason they haven’t added the feature is that OSX’s PDFKit is a 10.4+ feature only and Camino boasts support for 10.2 and up. Legacy support is a sensitive subject depending on which side you’re on so I understand the Camino devs being hesitant to leave users behind. I just wonder how much of the user base is still that far behind? I don’t want to have to wait till Camino 2.0.

Interesting note: The dictionary that Camino uses for its in-line spell checking says the word “Camino” is incorrect.

Puretracks – Canadian Online Music Retailer goes DRM-less on indie offerings
Moosehead tackles last Canadian holdout: Saskatchewan
How to get iTunes to sort your albums (almost) exactly how you want it
Ariel Atom coming to Canada for a test drive
Dynamic languages hitting home on the desktop

I wonder why it is that Windows apps have brutally straight forward names like MP3 Tagger and Windows Journal and Mac apps have names like Tangerine. Do Mac developers strive to make their names as unrelated as possible? I have to know these things if I’m going to become one

Here’s the money shot: Tangerine does cool stuff with your iTunes library that would have taken you way to long to do yourself. Sort of like SoundFlavor (I guess… my PC owning buddies have been rubbing that one in my face for a few days now). Get on the free beta here or better yet, get yourself a license for blogging about it.

Tangerine is a tool that analyzes the songs in your iTunes music library by beat intensity (amplitude?) and allows you to create playlists by specifying ranges of BPM and intensity and then making arrangements of songs based on your parameters. For example, you can create a playlist that starts with slow tempo music and then builds in the middle, effectively making a perfect (and random) workout soundtrack.

But keep in mind, it’s beta software. It’s hard to tell at first though (I’m really impressed how fast it flew through my music collection).

Things to watch out for:

• Since Apple in their infinite wisdom decided to store album art work outside of files, it appears that any albums you’ve tagged with Artwork using the iTunes get album feature won’t properly display in Tangerine. It’s too bad too, the playlist view is very very cool. It would be even cooler without all the ‘?’. Hey, do Apple one better, want to go populate those BPM fields on my songs for me? I know I’m not going to…
• Tangerine seems to have trouble with some of my songs. Sometimes it evaluates the BPM incorrectly (fast for slow, slow for fast), but worse is that I think it fails on some of my songs. Instead of indicating that, however, it just doesn’t show them in the library. I can only assume that’s why they aren’t here.
• I really wish I could simply drag a song in and then have Tangerine generate a playlist based on that first song. Sort of like Pandora but for iTunes. I don’t really need songs that rise and fall over the course of the playlist, but if it’s raining in the morning. I’d love to be able to tell Tangerine just to give me a bunch of songs based on this one Sufjan Stevens track and throw it on my iPod. Which leads me to…
• Yep it’ll save the playlists back to iTunes, but I wish I could save it directly to the iPod. Technically Tangerine should just be a plug-in to iTunes, but I think they’re quite limited by Apple’s API so I understand why it’s a seperate app. Still, I don’t want to have to switch between them if I can avoid it.

As always, things are bound to change between now and 1.0. I’ll give you an update once it comes out. Definitely give it a sneak peak while you can though. The UI is tres pretty (as Potion Factory apps seem to be). Man, who needs all those Web 2.0 apps anyway?

APC Magazine has brand spanking new deets on the next version of Office for Mac. Sounds like the new version will be adopting some of the new UI features from its windows cousin (which I have used and have been blown away by) as well as the new XML file formats. Check out the full APC article on the upcoming features.

I really like the interview with Mary Starman, group product manager for Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit.

At this early stage the product is known only by its version number as ‘Office 12′. “That won’t be the name it goes to market with — we’ll have something brilliant, like the year it launches, as the name!” laughs Mary Starman

If the product manager is having this good of a time during an interview, working for the team must be quite the experience. Anyone from Microsoft for Mac interested in a co-op student next year?