Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Configuration, Crabapple
Friday May 16, 2008
There are dozens of applications that will place information and/or icons in the top menu bar (many of which are on this list, which is by now a little bit dated - there are many more such apps now). But why, oh why, is there no way to place those icons in a specific order and have them stay there?
You can drag icons around in the dock to your heart’s delight, and even off the dock to watch them go “poof” (which is just a little too appealing to some children - we suspect more than one parent has discovered an empty dock, because one of their offspring was having so much fun dragging the icons and watching them explode! But at least you can put the dock icons in the order you want them). But the top menu bar items can only be moved if they do not produce a drop-down menu when you click on them, and even if they don’t react when you click on them, that doesn’t guarantee that they will be moveable, nor that they will forever stay put at their current location.
For the small percentage of top menu bar icons that can be moved, you can hold down the Command key, then click and drag. But try this on an item that produces a drop-down menu, or otherwise intercepts mouse clicks for its own purposes, and it just isn’t going to work. Thus, we put up with a disorganized top menu bar, with icons in no particular order.
The thing is, if we reboot the system the icons usually reappear in exactly the same spot, so there’s got to be something, somewhere that determines the order in which they appear. But what, exactly? We doubt that Indiana Jones could discover the preference file or other mechanism that controls the order of these little beasties.
You’d think that by now some Mac software author that has an obsessive-compulsive streak (like Monk, the fictional TV detective) would have figured out how to reorder the icons and would have published the details, or even some software to assist in the process. But noooo….. So, we figure this must be something buried deep in the bowels of OS X. Otherwise, how could it possibly be that utilities that will allow you to tweak the dock seem to be a dime a dozen, but there is nothing out there that allows even the most basic reconfiguration of the top menu bar (including the icons that won’t move in response to Command-Click + drag)? If there is, we sure haven’t stumbled across it, and that unordered top menu bar is what’s making us crabby this week.
We haven’t seen too many episodes of Monk, but we suspect he’d hate the Mac, or at least this aspect of it. We know, because we’re a little OCD too, and this drives us right up the wall!
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Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Crabapple, Opinion, Software
Saturday Apr 26, 2008
We almost titled this, "The post you never saw (because the dog editor ate it)." That’s because we tried out a new editor plugin for Wordpress here in the CrabApple Forest, and discovered (too late to do us any good) that it doesn’t autosave our partially written articles, the way the native Wordpress editor does. So if you make a dumb mistake and leave the editing page, as we did, there’s no draft copy to fall back on. Although we are not motivated to rewrite the entire article, we will refer you to some pages that we had referenced in that article, that we had intended to share with you.
photo credit: emsefThe first page describes how you can create Automator actions that will show or hide "hidden" files on the Mac, including the infamous .DS_Store files. This same tip could be used to provide easy access to just about ANY shell script that doesn’t require user input:
Quick Tip: Show/Hide Hidden Files
If you prefer to do this the old, manual way from the terminal, that’s explained here. The second thing we intended to explain was this:
How to prevent .DS_Store file creation over network connections
That article, from Apple’s support site, shows how to keep your computer from leaving "Mac droppings" (those infamous .DS_Store files) on other computers on networks you may be connected to. Normally you don’t even see those files unless you instruct Finder to let you see them, and that was the point of the first tip above.
So if you follow the advice in the second tip, your Windows and Linux using friends will have one less thing to crab about when you connect your Mac to their local network, either physically or over certain types of remote connections. We are sorry that you missed the witty prose and sparkling commentary of the original article, but we have learned that autosave is an invaluable feature in a blog editor and although the built-in Wordpress editor may not be as flashy as the one provided by the plugin, at least it works and doesn’t let our text fall into the great bit-bucket in the sky.
Now please pardon us while we go off and have a crabfest about how well things are (not) working in Wordpress lately…
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Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Crabapple, Hardware, Programming, Review, Software
Friday Apr 25, 2008
photo credit: mac_vegetarianWhen Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) first came out, one of the greatest new features - and, unfortunately, one of the most frustrating for some users - was Time Machine. Time Machine is probably one of the best pieces of backup software ever written, in that it makes it absurdly easy to retrieve previous versions of accidentally (or purposely) erased or damaged files. But the only problem is that for many users, it has only consistently worked well if you were willing to dedicate a hard drive (or at least a partition) to Time Machine.
Some users have other storage sitting out on their local networks (known as Network-Attached Storage, or NAS), and wondered why they couldn’t use that for their time machine backups. The funny part is that shortly after Time Machine first appeared, a company called Xiotios Software came out with a small program called iTimeMachine which had only one purpose - it enabled the use of AirDisks and Network Disks in Time Machine.
And it worked, until Apple came out with an incremental upgrade to Leopard, which promptly broke the ability to use external disks for backups for many users. Another upgrade, and some users have reported that they can use external drives, while other still cannot.
We think that what iTimeMachine does is the equivalent of opening a terminal window and entering this:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
… which is another method that some folks have used to allow Time Machine to access networked drives. But this alone doesn’t seem to be sufficient in some cases. Today, Mac OS X Hints published an article describing a three-step process to create a Time Machine backup on a network-attached storage (NAS) unit. 
photo credit: Kai HendryUnfortunately, it comes a bit too late for us - earlier this week we bit the bullet and dedicated an external drive to Time Machine, rather than making further attempts to save Time Machine backups to a drive connected to our “Unslung” Linksys NSLU2, which would probably have worked had we had the above information available.
Our “Crabapple of the Week” gets tossed at Apple, for not making Time Machine work well with network-attached storage, or even their own AirDisks, in the first place, and for not yet fully supporting them even as I write this. Of course, those hard cider drinkin’ boys will have already run down to the Apple store to buy a Time Capsule, but for those of us not ready to open our wallets every time Apple comes out with some new (and, dare we say, sometimes overpriced) gadget, information on how to make Time Machine use our existing devices is much appreciated. And another Crabapple goes to Apple for giving out questionable information (this is a quote from Wikipedia’s page on Time Machine):
….. According to Apple, it can only be backed up to network drives if they are being hosted by another computer running Leopard (including Leopard Server). Further, the volume needs to be formatted with the HFS Plus file system, with journaling enabled. External hard drives typically are pre-formatted with the FAT32 filesystem. To use Time Machine, the hard drive must first be formatted, which erases all data. The hard drive will not require formatting if it is already using the HFS filesystem.
Except that for a period of time after Leopard was released, we were making successful Time Machine backups to a drive attached to the aforementioned Linksys NSLU2, which runs a version of Linux, not Leopard. Oh, and the drives were formatted using EXT3 (the format used by the NSLU2) and we did not reformat them, and Time Machine did not erase any data on the drive. So, if the above information from Apple (as reported in Wikipedia) is true now (and we do not believe that the above is entirely true), it’s because Apple changed something during a recent Leopard upgrade. Would Apple deliberately try to make users think they have to purchase a Time Capsule, or at least use a dedicated external drive, even if that’s not strictly true? We won’t speculate further on Apple’s possible motives for spreading questionable information, but we do wish they would just go ahead and fix Time Machine to play nicely with whatever external storage the user may have available.
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Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Crabapple, Opinion, Review, Software
Monday Apr 14, 2008
One of the sites we visit fairly regularly is called Cool OSX Apps - we subscribe to their newsfeed, and when we see something interesting, we’ll stop by their site. We’ve never had a bit of trouble with them until today, when suddenly Firefox 3 (beta 5) decided that it wasn’t going to permit us to go to their site. Like some sort of overzealous nanny, it popped up an ominous warning in the middle of a black background:
So, naturally we clicked on "Why was this site blocked?", which took us to a big page of information that told us the following:
One or more StopBadware partners are reporting badware behavior on this site.
Reporting Entities
This site is currently (as of 04/14/2008) being reported to StopBadware by the following partners:
Google: reported bad
And on another part of the page…
What is this page?
This page is StopBadware’s information page about www.coolosxapps.net/.
Google has found that some portion of www.coolosxapps.net/ contains or links to badware or otherwise violates Google’s software guidelines.
Some websites intentionally distribute harmful software, while many others have been compromised without the knowledge or permission of their owners. StopBadware reports information provided by Google about these sites (see ‘Reporting entities’ to the left) and offers a process to assist webmasters in removing their sites from Google’s list (see ‘I am the owner of this site’ below).
For StopBadware’s guide to understanding Google’s warning pages, see our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).
For more information about StopBadware, click here.
Our problem with this is that first of all, this gives us no idea as to whether there really is a threat on this site or not. We doubt the site is any more of a threat than it was yesterday, but sometime in the last day or so, someone at Google or StopBadware decided that we, and anyone else who uses Firefox as our browser, should not be allowed to go to that site. As best we can recall, we never asked for this sort of intervention, so we resent it the way we would resent a busybody neighbor who starts giving unsolicited advice about what we should or should not do "for our own good."
The thing is, had we not been visiting this site semi-regularly for the past few months, we might have been genuinely scared off by this dark red warning on a totally black background. Even the colors were apparently picked to convey a sense of impending danger. This in itself is not a bad thing. There are many inexperienced users on the internet and this color scheme will get a new your attention.
We don’t know about anyone else, but we don’t want either Google or StopBadware denying us the ability to access a site, unless they are willing to tell us precisely what they think is wrong. At our age, we’re not going to accept "Because I said so!" from anybody, even if one of the parties is Google.
So, we dug around in Firefox’s preferences, and on the Security panel we found there is a checkbox you can use to turn off this dubious "assistance":
Uncheck the box, "Tell me if the site I’m visiting is a suspected attack site" and you gag the nanny. Should you do this? That’s up to you. We did, because we’re not going to let some entity with unknown motives (be it Google or StopBadware) decide whether we can get to a web site.
There are at least three things wrong with the way Firefox implements this. First, the warning doesn’t need to be dark blood red on black… that’s just over the top, and needlessly ominous. Second, they need to explain EXACTLY why they are declaring a site bad - for example, if the site happens to have one link on it that will cause us problems if we click on it, then tell us about that link and we’ll be sure to avoid it. But, don’t declare the entire site off limits!
And third, the warning needs a button that allows you to go to the site anyway. Even if it says something like "Okay, you’ve warned me, I’ll take the risk" or something like that, there needs to be a way for a user to bypass the warning on one site without turning off the warning for all sites henceforth.
Right now, the only site we really want to block is StopBadware, until they decide that they should give users enough respect to explain why they are warning about a site. The heavy-handed approach used in Firefox 3 is totally repugnant to us.
As a final comment, we know there are bad people out on the Internet, but we fear that we are all getting too many warnings. For example, every time we download some software program from the Internet, the first time we try to run it we get a warning that this is something we downloaded. No fooling! What a useless warning. It doesn’t tell us anything about whether the software is safe to run, it just acts as though all downloaded software is potentially unsafe, so it had better make us click an extra button before we run it - which by now we do mechanically. If there were ever a real threat, we’d probably click right through and let it run.
Haven’t parents been reading the story of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" to their children lately? Because it looks to us like the makers of browsers and operating systems sure never heard it.
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Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Crabapple, Software
Friday Apr 11, 2008
One of the “myths of Apple” is that Safari is a better web browser. The Apple folks must believe it; they are pushing it out even to Windows users that simply want to upgrade iTunes. Many of those hard cider drinkin’ boys (our name for the Apple fanboys) seem to believe it also. And we have no problem with anyone choosing a favorite browser from among the many choices available, but we think that such choices should be made with good information. In other words, just because you own a Mac, you should should not be pushed toward Apple software unless it’s genuinely better software.
Now, we will be the first to admit that Firefox 2 was not a sterling example of great programming. It had memory leaks, and crashed a bit too frequently for our liking, but we put up with it for one reason only: Extensions (a.k.a. Add-ons). No other browser has such a vast library of extensions, many of which are genuinely useful. The extensions let us tweak the little things about Firefox, things that are either untweakable in Safari, or that can only be tweaked by using a NON-free plugin. Only in the Apple world would people pay for a browser plugin, but we won’t - however, that’s another crab for another time.
For example, we happen to like the Firefox Tab Mix Plus extension. It gives us much more control over the circumstances under which new tabs are opened (basically we like to have almost everything open in a new tab, so that we don’t inadvertently navigate away from a page we aren’t finished with yet. Try getting that functionality in Safari). Another new plugin we like is Taboo, which lets us save thumbnails of pages we aren’t quite finished with yet, but don’t want to add to our permanent bookmarks.
Those of us brave enough to try the beta versions Firefox 3 have been finding that, starting with about beta version 3, Firefox really is giving Safari a run for its money. It is much faster and more stable. Okay, we hate the new Mac theme that is provided in the Mac version of Firefox 3 (”hate” may be a bit too strong a word, but we sure hope we’re not stuck with it for long - it’s just too dark for our liking), and a few of our favorite add-ons haven’t been updated by their authors yet, but overall it is a much better and more stable browser than Firefox 2.
However, the above might be considered just our subjective opinion - and indeed it is to some degree - but now it turns out that the folks at ZDnet used the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark test to run an actual test to see which was faster. Not only did they report that Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 holds a 7% lead over Safari 3.1, but it also leaves Firefox 2.0.0.12 in the dust.
Now, we will grant that 7% isn’t much of a difference, but then again, it means we can get faster performance AND still use the extensions we love (and did we mention that nearly all Firefox extensions are free?). So tell me, where is the advantage to using Safari? To be fair, we’ve found only ONE, and it’s a somewhat dubious advantage - in Safari, if you highlight a portion of a web page and drag it to the mail icon, it opens a new message that includes the formatted text, plus any images included in the selection. Do the same thing in Firefox and you get just plain text and no images. There used to be an easy solution for that, a Firefox extension called Safari View, but so far it’s not been “officially” updated for Firefox 3 beta 5 (though you can still make it work if you know how). Of course, some people would prefer to only send the plain text of an article, so that may actually be an advantage of Firefox in the eyes of some readers.
We know everyone has an opinion about which is the best browser, so feel free to leave a comment. Comments are moderated and we don’t allow comment spam, so if your comment is more self-promotion than actual comment you’ll probably be wasting your time if you try to leave it here. Otherwise, we welcome comments, even if you disagree with us (as long as you’re reasonably polite about it).
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