Fresh Apple: The Apple Blog (5 сообщений)

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The Apple Blog
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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ActiveState Takes Komodo Edit To The Community
As 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.
Tags: ActiveState, Commentary, developer, editor, open source, perl, python, Software

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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.
Tags: apple, Commentary, sxsw

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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.

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?
Tags: Commentary, hacks, leopard, metadata, terminal, Tips, vanish

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Child's Play - MacKiev Gets It Right
While 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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Quick & Secure Network Filesystem Access With ExpanDrive

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:

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.
Tags: expandrive, macfuse, python, sftp, Software Reviews, ssh, sshfs

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- ActiveState Takes Komodo Edit To The Community (0)
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