Tuesday, March 18, 2008

The Apple Blog (20 сообщений)

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The Apple Blog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.
http://theappleblog.com
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  • Call for TAB Writers

    Hello TAB readers. I’m sure you’ve noticed our writing has been, shall we say, less frequent than normal. We’re in need of additional writers to come on board and help us with news coverage, product reviews, walkthroughs, and more.

    We’re looking to bring on quite a few new writers so if you’ve got some previous experience writing tech-related content, we’d love to hear from you.

    TAB does offer compensation for writing.

    If you’ve got experience doing screencasts or other video related content, we’d love to hear from you as well.

    If you’re interested in writing for TAB, please email us and include examples of previous tech or Apple related writing.

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  • Community Activity: March 17, 2008
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  • Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock

    Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock

    Anything rock ‘n roll related makes my ears perk up, so when I heard Guitar Hero was coming to Mac, I was quite stoked.

    Overall the gameplay is just about what you’d expect. You can rock out in freestyle mode and just play for the fun of it, or you can start up your own band and have a full-scale career.

    Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock

    I fired up career mode and sent my band, Weak Sauce, on the road pure rock ‘n roll mayhem. After a couple of days of moderate playing, I was able to beat the game on Easy. Unfortunately there is still Medium, Hard, and Extreme to conquer.

    Guitar Controller

    I had never played any of the previous Guitar Heros so the actual “guitar” controller was new to me. I attempted to just pick the thing up and start playing, but found out quickly I didn’t have a fat clue what I was doing. Going through the tutorials on how to use it was actually quite helpful.

    The guitar that comes with the game is actually the same guitar that comes with the Xbox version…it just includes a USB converter so you can plug it in to your computer. Seems a bit cheap to go that route, but it does the trick.

    Something worth noting here is that the game is still functional even if you don’t have a guitar controller. I actually found it easer to play with the keyboard than with the guitar.

    Game Play

    There are quite a few different “extras” thrown in the game, but the core of it all is just playing songs. The money you earn from playing gigs lets you “upgrade” your guitar, outfit, and other things but there didn’t seem to be any real benefit to doing that.

    On my MacBook Pro (2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo w/ 3GB RAM), the graphics were quite smooth. I did find the video response to be better when I disabled some of the effects in the game and calibrating the guitar to my computer was beneficial.

    Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock

    Overall this really is a fun game and doesn’t require too much time to get the hang of it. Be sure to read up more of the details and system requirements on the Aspyr site. You can purchase the Mac version for $80.

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  • ActiveState Takes Komodo Edit To The Community

    Komodo Edit IconAs I’ve been catching up from an illness backlog, I came across this press release from ActiveState – providers of commercially-supported versions of Perl, Python & TCL – on their decision to take their great editor Komodo Edit open source. This editor has been based on the Mozilla code base, and the open source version incorporates the same licenses as Firefox: Mozilla Public License (MPL), GNU General Public License (GPL), and GNU Lesser Public License (LGPL).

    Komodo Edit has many features features found in other editors (e.g. TextMate, Xcode) such as code-completion, a code-snippets library, virtual project folders, code folding, and language recognition. Like many editors, it can also be extended via plug-ins with the additional benefit of Komodo plug-ins really being XPI extensions, the same type used in Firefox, with support for all standard Mozilla APIs based on XUL, XBL, and XPCOM. There is also support for Python and JavaScript plug-ins.

    Komodo Edit works well on the Mac and is an especially enticing alternative to other editors if you work in a multi-platform shop and would like to use a common tool-set for all developers. Having the full source code available can also be a great learning tool for new developers looking to create large-scale Mac applications or for porting their applications to other platforms.

    Coders looking to grab or contribute to the open source version can find out more via the Open Komodo project.

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  • Should Apple have had a bigger presence at SXSW?

    With the newly released iPhone SDK, Webkit, Safari (now available on Mac & PC) and Apple’s professional audio and video software such as Logic, Final Cut and Shake, I was fully expecting to see a rather prominent Apple booth at the SXSW tradeshow.

    I did see a handful of Apple employees on the list of panelists speaking at SXSW, an interactive, film and music conference and festival hosted annually in Austin, Texas. It appeared they were there more for personal reasons than officially there on behalf of Apple.

    Is Apple so confident in their place in the industry that they can ignore their core user group? Was their absence simply due to other factors, like a busy schedule or timing conflicts? Surely Apple has enough “evangelists” on staff to send a few.

    Apple wasn’t the only big company missing from the floor… There was no Mozilla or Microsoft or Avid. Yahoo, Google, Mapquest and others were represented, as were a slew of smaller companies offering services, products or software.

    Should Apple have had a presence at the conference? Have they ever before? To be honest, this was my first time at SXSW and I was more surprised than anything at Apple’s absence, especially considering the SDK announcement the day before SXSW started.

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  • Invisibility and Metadata

    I normally avoid anything that looks like tech support in my entries here, but this may verge on an exception. Bear with me, and I'll explain.

    ah-ha.png I rebooted my Macbook Pro about four days ago, and lo, to my surprise, the icon for my boot drive had vanished. I was, too say the least, slightly perturbed. (To the right, the culprit.)

    I tried all the quick-fix things - changed what showed in Finder, tried to get it back through Finder - it was gone there too - and finally, I sucked it up and called Apple. Three calls to Apple - and two instances of being hung up on - a clean install of Leopard, and multitudinous Google searches later, I had found two things: a lot of other people were having these issues, all starting about the same time as mine, and, more importantly, a solution.

    So first, the solution, and then the explanation of what it is, what it does, and what that means for all of us Mac users.

    To get your startup drive back, you need to run two Terminal commands. One of them requires that you have an Administrator password. I'd generally try to give you a solution that didn't require Terminal, given some peoples' squishiness about that, but I can't find another frontend to this. (There's an Applescript running around, but it doesn't work, really.)

    First, run xattr -d com.apple.metadata:kMDItemFinderComment /***

    In this case the *** signifies the name of your missing drive, as this command will work for any drive. If you want your startup drive, all you need is the slash.

    Next, run sudo chflags nohidden /*** Same deal with the asterisks, though in this case, another important modification is that it doesn't need to be run as sudo unless you're running it on your root drive.

    Log out and/or restart, and your icon should be back to stay.

    Now, what that all means. As it turns out, the culprit in all this is a simple metadata flag, the hidden flag. This is the same flag that hides the .DS_store files and other things that you'd rather not see floating about your operating system all the time. The problem, in this case, is a change in how Leopard handles that flag, and metadata in general.

    Leopard marks a very interesting shift in how Apple's chosen to deal with the increasing amounts of complicated metadata that we're all generating. In past years, this has been stored in .DS_store files, for the most part. Tiger added the xattr function family and API's to play with some, and some people, namely Marquis Logan and John Siracusa, then wrote up some nice little tools that made this accessible to all of us.

    In Leopard, there is now a native command for this. There are four flags to the xattr command, at least so far as I've been able to tell. (There is no man page for this, but -h works.) They are -l, -p, -w, and -d, and all of them are written out as xattr -flag file [file path]. -L lists the names of all extended attributes on the file. -P, used with -l, prints them. -W is written out as xattr -w attribute_name attribute_value file [file path], and changes the chosen value to whatever you specify. -D, the important one for the above command, simply deletes all extended attributes. The first command, then, deletes all the extended attributes on the given file. The com.apple.metadata.kMDItemFinderComment contains, among other things, the flags for drives in Finder.

    The second command, the chflags command, resets the hidden flag on the given file. Two different methods of getting at two different types of metadata, in essence. The second command is found in a couple of places if you google this, but it by itself doesn't keep the job done. Without the xattr command, the hidden flag resets every time Finder does.

    Now, how this happens? I don't know. I'm working on that - but I suspect that Apple may be too. And in the meantime, I’ve already found some neat things people are doing with it now. Anyone for a way to kill that annoying ‘this program has been downloaded from the internet’ message?

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  • Child's Play - MacKiev Gets It Right

    Cat in the HatWhile primarily due to being ill *yet again* (I’m beginning to think Seattle is the nation’s cold/flu incubator), last week’s blogging was further disrupted by the preparations for and celebration of our last child’s second birthday. As you can imagine, children of geeks tend to get more geeky presents and Ian is now the proud user of his own age-appropriate “Leap” device and the plethora of add-ons that go with it. This is also the age where we have tended to start our kids on interactive computer software (that is, if you don’t count Baby Banger). Besides Winnie-ther-Pooh, one of his favorite stories is The Cat in the Hat by the venerable Dr. Seuss, so I grabbed a copy of MacKiev’s electronic version at the Alderwood Mall Apple Store and had it ready to go on the MBPro for the big day.

    We’ve purchased other versions of this interactive Cat for his brother and sister, but MacKiev did an outstanding job on this version with enough distinctly Mac touches to warrant a post. What did the developers get right?

    A solid installer

    While I am – and other experienced Apple users are – fully comfortable dragging applications around, newer Mac users and switchers tend to like installers. Good installers do the heavy lifting for you, make sure you know what’s going on, possibly do extra work (more on that in a bit) and provide an easy way to un-install the program. MacKiev definitely got this right.

    Keeping up-to-date

    “Registering” children’s software – or any other type of software for that matter – on Windows boxes was usually a task I would avoid since it tended to be little more than a request for spam. The MacKiev installer gave me the option to register and I took a chance since (a) it’s a Mac program and (b) it provided a means to opt-out of spam-like messages. Immediately after registering, I received an e-mail letting me know there was a Leopard update to the program, which I promptly downloaded and installed. While a “check for updates” menu item (*cough* Sparkle *cough*) would have been even better, it was refreshing to get useful mail right from the start.

    • Choices & control

    The Cat in the Hat software has two primary modes, interactive (click on things during the story) or “movie-mode”, which is just an animated reading of the book while words are highlighted. You really don’t need software for the latter, and the book/content publisher finally understood this since the installer asked me if I wanted to upload supplemental content into iTunes. This “supplemental” content was actually the full audio and video of the book, which was copied in DRM-free format into my library where two playlists were also created, ready to sync to my iPhone, iPod or Apple TV (it’s now on all three).

    For quite a while, Ian will just be sitting with me as we watch the story unfold or as I click on images to make them do unexpected tricks, but now he’ll also be able to hunt for it on my iPhone (he already knows how to call his mother on it and can get to music he likes without help from anyone, which is a tribute Apple engineers UI design/implementation) or request it as an option for the infrequent TV time the kids get.

    MacKiev’s great work has guaranteed a purchase of The ABC Book when Ian is a little older and is definitely something other developers & publishers should seek to emulate in their offerings. If you’ve had some good experiences with other children’s software, be sure to drop a note in the comments (hey, it’s for Ian after all!).

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  • Community Activity: March 10, 2008
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  • CNN: "The trouble with Steve Jobs"

    CNN published an interesting story on Steve Jobs on Sunday The trouble with Steve Jobs. It reveals that Apple’s Chairman and CEO nearly didn’t have surgery for his pancreatic cancer in 2004, other family problems, and looks at his leadership style.

    The Steve Jobs adventure: By now it’s one of the most remarkable stories in business. When Jobs returned in 1997 to Apple - then facing its own near-death experience - he arrived with a tarnished legend. He was, of course, the charismatic boy wonder who at age 21 had co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak in his parents’ garage back in 1976. He was worth $200 million by 25, made the cover of Time magazine at 26, and was thrown out of the company at age 30, in 1985.

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  • Community Activity: March 3, 2008
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  • iPhone & The Enterprise

    By now, you’ve seen the announcement of the March 6th iPhone announcement (which better be more than discussing a future announcement since that’s already two pointer de-references we have to manage). While I am – and many other and far more capable developers are also – eagerly awaiting the SDK release, the promise of “exciting new enterprise features” has me a bit more than intrigued. As it stands, the iPhone has quite a long way to go before it can weave it’s way – officially – into corporate IT standards. Adding support for third-party applications is one checkbox ticked, but what are the remaining “must-have” features for enterprise adoption?
    (more…)

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  • Remote Denial of Service For OS X (Leopard)

    Given the large amount of “feedback” I receive from many venues on why I’m crazy for suggesting that OS X users employ some type of client-side security software, I wanted to point out a very recent exploit that I saw over at Joel Esler’s blog. The vulnerability is around the IPv6 networking layer of the underlying BSD operating system. Here’s the code:

    ORIGINAL
    md = m_pulldown(m, off, sizeof(*ipcomp), NULL);
    if (!m) {

    WHAT IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN
    md = m_pulldown(m, off, sizeof(*ipcomp), NULL);
    if (!md) {

    A one character difference in source code in an open source component trickled it’s way up to our shiny new operating system.

    Anti-virus software won’t help you on this one (and I’m sure someone will point that out and continue to defend the lack of need for client security), but it provides a clear example of how coding errors in the operating system can – and will – be exploited, which is a strong enough reason to put up defenses in other areas. Again, it’s completely based on your risk appetite and there is a contingent of OS X users that swear by the notion of not investing in security until there is overt reason to. This example should prod some of those folks to start thinking more about how vulnerable their invulnerable systems really are.

    The problem exists only in the IPv6 networking layer, and – since most folks do not need IPv6 enabled – you can disable IPv6 in each of the network interfaces in your Network System Preferences to give yourself a bit of protection. Here’s an example of that via the Airport configuration panel:

    Disable IPv6 in Aiport configuration

    Apple should be fixing this in the next security update.

    More info on the exploit: Secunia, InformationWeek, digit labs

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  • Unsanity APE & Leopard

    It came to my attention recently - read: I’ve been checking - that Unsanity has, finally bumped at least some of their haxies to Leopard compatible versions. Many people, myself included, have been bemoaning the loss of such tools as WindowShade X, FruitMenu, and most especially ShapeShifter since their upgrades to the latest big cat. All of these hacks require Unsanity’s Application Enhancer, and there, evidently, is where the problems appeared. Without a functioning Application Enhancer, all the other shiny toys vanish.

    Probably more famous, though perhaps more erratic, were those affected by Leopard and Application Enhancer’s incompatibility in a much more severe way - all those with broken 10.5 installs as a result of APE.  This update - to 2.5b, from 2.0.3 - purports to have fixed the issues that originally caused those problems.  The accompanying blog entry, though, takes pains to point out that those same problems had already been fixed as of 2.0.2, released a year before Leopard.

    Said blog entry is also quite interesting in its discussion of what APIs Application Enhancer - and other similar tools - access, and what the changes were in Leopard that broke them.  While interesting in itself, this also really gives a nod to the amount of work that surely still remains to be done on the heavier apps, like ShapeShifter, and the amount of work that’s already been done to get this far.

    And the updates are: Application Enhancer 2.5b, the SDK for the same, SmartCrashReports 1.5b2, FontCard 1.5.1b1, MenuMaster 1.4.3b1, Silk 2.1.4b1, FruitMenu 3.7b1, and WindowShade X 4.2b1.

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  • Quick & Secure Network Filesystem Access With ExpanDrive

    Magnetk ExpanDrive Logo

    Magnetk – makers of SftpDrive for Windows – have brought their secure, remote filesystem magic to OS X with version 1.0 of ExpanDrive.

    If you have a blog/site hosted on any flavor of Linux or BSD (including OS X) or do any amount of cross-platform management or development then you know how useful ssh is for speedy & secure command-line access from the Terminal. The advent of MacFUSE on OS X brought sshfs to the Mac application landscape, though it can be slow and cryptic to setup for the average user.

    ExpanDrive simplifies access to these remote filesystems via an unobtrusive menubar icon and straightforward user interface. Simply open up the ExpanDrive Manager:

    ExpanDrive Manager

    and enter in your connection info. You can leave the password field blank if you already have ssh public/private keys defined and configured your servers appropriately. A simple double-click of the drive in the list view mounts the filesystem and it behaves just like any AFP, SMB or attached disk.

    I’m fairly mobile, moving from AT&T 3G to Wi-Fi to Ethernet throughout the day and I’ve been able to keep ExpanDrive filesystems mounted across all these transitions without the dreaded “spinning death ball” that is usually associated with the Finder and network mounts. While some Mac apps – TextWrangler and ImageWell being two that I use – have native support for SFTP, ExpanDrive provides for universal access across all applications and makes it simple to reliably integrate remote storage operations into your workflow.

    If you poke around the application bundle (you do poke around application bundles, right?), you’ll find that ExpanDrive was developed with Python as a foundation, fully demonstrating that you do not need to be an Objective-C maven to create great Mac software.

    ExpanDrive has an introductory price of $29.00USD, is a Universal application and runs on OS X 10.4.1 (Tiger) or higher.

    If you give it a try, drop a note in the forum or comments, especially if you are using it with any type of high-speed NAS configuration.

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  • Community Activity: February 25, 2008
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  • Are the new MacBook Pros here yet? How about now?

    Nearly every Tuesday in 2008 has seen a software or hardware announcement by Apple, yet each time I’m left feeling disappointed because it’s not the one I’m waiting for: new MacBook Pros.

    Most Apple fans know you should always wait through the Christmas holiday until Macworld arrives in January before buying a new Mac. And with all the rumors regarding a new laptop, I had hopes I wouldn’t have to wait long. Heck, maybe they’d even make all my wishes come true and introduce a replacement for the 12″ PowerBook. I know I’m not the only one who was hoping for something more powerful than a MacBook but less expensive and beastly than the MacBook Pro. Of course, we all know that dream didn’t get fulfilled and instead we were introduced to the MacBook Air — which I tried very hard not to displace my disappointment onto ($1800 and it’s slower than a MacBook!?) (more…)

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  • Apple Store Status Widget

    The guys at Pingdom have a released a fun new widget that you can put on your website that automatically gets updated whenever the Apple Store goes down (presumably to add new products).

    Now you can easily feed your obsession of knowing if the Apple Store is down or not!

    Check out the full details on this as well as snag the code for the widget over on the Pingdom blog.

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  • Hug A Indie Mac Developer Day

    I hereby declare this day as Hug A Indie Mac Developer Day. What sparked this spontaneous outpouring of appreciation for these Wizards of Cocoa? Apart from just the standard good will towards the likes of Daniel Jaikut, Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch, Fraser Speirs, Gus Mueller (and a host of others that would turn this into an Open Directory category listing rather than a TAB post), I received a hand-written (if it was a font, I seriously want that font since none of the similar letters even came close to matching) post card – an actual put-it-in-the-U.S.-Mail post card – from Adam Behringer, author of Bee Docs’ Timeline. I purchased a license after I upgraded to Leopard since I make enough timelines for work to warrant the spend and because it’s a great program for creating & presenting time/date-based information collections (btw: Adam just added AppleScript support in Feb making an already great product even better).

    Have Microsoft developers ever sent me hand written post cards? No. Apple engineers? Nope. Adobe developers? Nada. While no other independent coders have sent me one either, they all have been extremely helpful when it comes to product support and feature requests. For example, Daniel Jaikut responded very appreciatively – and quickly! – and in great detail to a bug submission that he knew wasn’t a MarsEdit problem but wholly an Apple framework issue. Most of these Xcode aficionados have a blog and give you the opportunity to peek into their coding practices & creative thoughts and sometimes even into the murky business of independent software development.

    While I’m a huge proponent of open source software, I also have no problem paying someone for a well-made product (many open source programs lack the polish of even the most mediocre of indie commercial Mac software). I suspect your OS X workstation would not be nearly as useful if it weren’t for some of the products generated by these independent coders.

    If you use “lite” or even – shudder – hacked versions of indie programs, consider sending a virtual hug today by going pro with a full license. The developers will appreciate it and you’ll wind up having more robust software and choices in the long run.

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  • Close But No Remote Disc

    Apple TV Box

    The Apple TV's new found friends may have brought it up to par with several of its competitors, but does it compare to Apple's own standards?

    With a completely redesigned UI and a slew of new features, the Apple TV seems a new breed of set top box. One, oddly enough, in the same packaging we've seen for the past year.
    (more…)

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  • The Apple Horizon

    Can you foresee an Apple horizon, where one day the average Mac consumers out weigh a PC user? How long do you think that'll take to happen?

    The iPod began a new quest for Apple. A company set on innovation has taken our hearts with a simple, compact device for music. Well, it was music at first. Now with the mobility of the browser thanks to the iPhone and iPod Touch, we can love a new device and rely on it much in the same way. The question to me, is where can they go from here?
    (more…)

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