LittleSnapper Touch Is Soon to Hit Realmac Lineup
This looks interesting, a companion iPhone application to LittleSnapper (desktop Mac app) and QuickSnapper (web based snapshot sharing). It’s yet to be released but the new app, dubbed LittleSnapper Touch promises to allow the user to snap photos and webpages (or parts of them) and then post them to QuickSnapper.
Anyone familiar with QuickSnapper will be aware that you will, in turn, be able to pull down those snaps into the desktop version of LittleSnapper with a simple click of the “Send to LittleSnapper” button. It’s not clear yet whether there will be any syncing option that will negate this step. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Enabling Double Arrows in the Scroll Bar
Ohh, ohh, ohh, I can’t forget this one! This is one of those options you forgot you enabled with a utility like Onyx. So when you go and do your clean install of OS X and realize that some things are just not the same as they were, it’s the the little things like having double arrows at the top and bottom (or left and right) of a scroll bar that you miss.
Having vowed to take matters into my own hands with this install and being acutely aware of every system hack I make, I am documenting everything I do (on this blog) and I am making sure it’s something I can control via the terminal. So, instead of using Onyx, here is the terminal hack for enabling double arrows in your scroll bars:
defaults write "Apple Global Domain" AppleScrollBarVariant DoubleBoth
If you ever need to go back you just open the System Preferences (/Applications/System Preferences.app), click on appearance and choose one of the two defaults from “Place scroll arrows:”; “Together” or “At top and bottom”.
Control your processors in Mac OS X 10.5
Remarkably after nearly one month I am still trying to tweak my system just so. I think this is one of the last things though, my processor preference pane. By default, the CPU controls in Mac OS X 10.5 and not enabled and in fact, can’t be enabled unless you have the developer tools installed.
I like to be able to turn off some of my processors when I am just doing day to day web design and theme development. It’s a good way to save some energy (it’s good to be green) and to be totally honest, coding in HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript and XML isn’t all that processor intensive. With the developer tool installed you can do this. There two things you can do, you can run the CPUPalette.app and/or you can install processor preference pane.
The CPUPalette.app can be found in /Library/Application Support/HWPrefs/. It’s a simple app that doesn’t allow much other than turning the processors on or off. If you click the little pill button in the top right-hand corner you can see a couple of basic preferences for window type, sampling rates and information display. It’s a quick and easy way to both monitor how your cores are being taxed and whether or not you can afford to shut a few of them down.
Your other option, if you you are already familiar with your processor usage, is to install the processor preference pane. Go to /Developer/Extras/PreferencePanes and find Processor.prefPane. Double click to install it. Once installed I highly suggest you click the “Show control in menu bar” for quick access. You’ll notice by installing the processor preference pane you get access to the CPUPalette.app without having to dig for it.
Auto mount/unmount your Mac volumes when required
Earlier this month you might recall the solution I gave you for keeping unused volumes unmounted on your mac. The next part of the equation, automatically mounting those volumes when needed to run my backup scheme, took me a little longer to sort out. In fact I wasn’t able to write a solution on my own, try as I might, so I finally went searching for one.
I needed a script of some sort that would mount my unmounted volumes when it was time for ChronoSync to run and then unmount my volumes when ChronoSync was finished. After several IRC queries, forum posts here and there and countless Google searches I finally stumbled upon this post at Mac OS X Hints. This solution was the answer I needed and it works perfectly. I won’t recap the whole thing here, but I will give you the bits that were most important to me.
Copy the following script into Script Editor.app (/Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor.app), changing the diskname and appname to suite your needs:
property diskname : "MyDisk"
property appname : "ChronoSync"
on idle
tell application "System Events"
set x to the name of every process
if appname is not in x then
if (exists the disk diskname) then
do shell script "disktool -l | egrep -i "Mountpoint = '/Volumes/" & diskname & "" | cut -d\' -f2 | xargs -n1 disktool -p"
end if
else
do shell script "disktool -l | egrep -i "Mountpoint = '', fsType = 'hfs', volName = '" & diskname & "" | cut -d\' -f2 | xargs -n1 disktool -m"
end if
end tell
end idle
Next you need to save it as a bundled app and select “Stay Open“, give it a useful name and save it where you will be able to find it. In my case I chose /Library/Scripts/ChronoSync/:
Then you have to make it run in the background. To do this, find your newly created app, right click on it, “Show Package Contents“, find the Info.plist and open that in your favorite plain text editor. Above the key that says CFBundleAllowMixedLocalizations you want to add the following:
<key>LSBackgroundOnly</key>
<string>1</string>
Get out of the package and find your app again and double click on it. It should launch in the background but not show in the dock. You can see that it’s running by opening Activity Monitor.app (/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app):
Now to truly make this process automated, you need this app to be on when your computer is on, so it needs to launch when you login. So open your Accounts preference pane in System Preferences.app (/Applications/System Preferences.app), select the Login Items tab, select the 
button and add your newly created app:
And that’s it! Next time your backup program fires up to do it’s regularly scheduled backups, your disk mounting app will mount your volume, wait for your backup app to finish and then quietly tuck your volume back up for the night.
Other references
I Give Apples New Safari 4 Beta a Spin
Apple announced today the launch of their Safari 4 beta program that claims to lead the way with innovation. I had to test this claim so I immediately downloaded it and gave it a spin. Here are my findings:
- On initial launch you are presented with the “Top Sites” window in which it appears that Safari scours your history for the most frequently visited sites in your recent cache and then throws up their thumbnails in a Core Animation like black gallery for you to pick from. Selecting the edit button allows you to remove items and make others sticky. I presume you can also add others that might actually be more indicative of your “Top Sites”. Again, in true Apple form, Apple seems to be hinging the success of a product on visual wow factor, but admittedly I could see myself making use of this.
- My next reaction was when I created a new tab and found that, a la Google Chrome, the tabs are on top. Why? While I will most certainly get used to it, what is the actual reason for this? I can’t find and difference in their functionality apart from the fact that you can only drag them about from their corner. Aside from that you can still drag them, move them from window to window, create a new window with each tab… there is one option I hadn’t noticed in previous version, “Add bookmark for these X tabs”. Is that new?
- Coverflow in Safari… there have been a few plugins to address this in the past. I guess they are history now. Do I need Cover Flow in Safari? I don’t need it iTunes or Finder so I probably won’t use it here either. But that said, it must be a popular enough technology if they keep throwing it in to their software.
- History search. Now that I like! I have always found searching the the history in the bookmarks folder to be painful and unproductive. This history search is insanely fast and (in Cover Flow form) even shows you screen shots of the sites that match your search terms.
- It claims to be faster, using the Nitro Engine. It could be but browsers and web technology today is getting so fast I would be hard pressed to notice the difference. It does seem to be faster overall but am I reacting to the guts of a finely tuned OS X Cocoa application or the page load? One note I will make about making browsers faster (and Safari 3 is already guilty of this), they cache things… unnaturally so which can make web development a nightmare. Safari 3 already caches it’s javascript and images in ways that cause web developers to have to reset their browsers all too often just to get an accurate response on their new projects. And faster also means pre-load, again which Safari 3 is bad for. Safari 3 will scour your main CSS file in search of things to load (like background images), whether or not that thing is actually needed or even being used. I hope Safari 4 handles this a little better.
- The newish developer tools are nice (if your weren’t already playing with them in webkit), but I don’t know… it’s still not FireBug. You still can’t select code in the element window! How good is debuggin if I can’t edit what’s there or even copy and past it to a text editor? Seriously? As far as developer tools, these will give a glimpse into how your page is working, but they’re not much good for anything else.
- The full page zoom could be useful (hopefully not for a few years for me yet), but wow does it ever slow things down. Zoom in once and try page scrolling… not so fast now.
- I love, love, love the new address bar! If I am going to interface with browser in any way, it’s through the address bar so this improvement is quite welcome. Basically when you start typing in the address bar you are presented with much the same information your were before, but it’s clearly defined in two categories; history and bookmarks. In both cases it presents you with the site title followed by the URL which makes it very easy to get your bearings.
- The search field is now really slick too. It’s along the lines of Inquisitor, offering you suggestions and previous search queries. Very nice!
- CSS Animation, CSS Effects, CSS 3 Web Fonts… just more things to tease us web developers with. Stuff we won’t be able to use in the real world until all other browsers catch up. We can always dream though…
Overall, I think this is two things combined; a promising look at where web browsers should be and a sobering reminder of how much waiting for other browsers to get there will suck.
YourHead launches Stacks 1.0
Fellow RapidWeaver developer, Isaiah of YourHead Software announced today that Stacks, a fluid layout plugin for RapidWeaver, is now official, hitting the big version 1.0. Those of you familiar with YourHead’s previous heavy hitting page layout tool, Blocks, will immediately recognize what this RapidWeaver plugin is all about, but the two are as different as night and day.
Don’t get me wrong, Blocks is a brilliant feat of plugin engineering and is the life blood of literally throngs of RapidWeaver users unable to do such layouts on their own. But it’s not a plugin that ever fit my web design sensibilities. The web is fluid, ever changing, growing, shrinking… for me, Blocks was too rigid.
Enter Stacks; a completely fluid, flexible, drag’n'drop all about layout tool for RapidWeaver that can generate oodles stacked up, blocked up, split up, embedded here and there kind of page layouts that only a pocket full of hand coded snippets could achieve perviously. Just like Blocks, Stacks allows to drop in text, HTML, images and whatnot, but then it allows to stacks onto stacks and those onto more stacks. You can make columns, columns in columns, columns where one column is an image, one is some code, one is some text, etc… drag that under some more columns… before you know it, you’ve got your very own 960 Grid System built into a RapidWeaver plugin.
If you are looking for the ultimate in flexible page layout with RapidWeaver, go check out Stacks. There are some great movies demonstrating the raw power of it and there is also and Stacks API if you’re interested in creating a custom Stacks library or two.
Life As a Theme Developer
Have you ever wondered what a day in the life of a professional RapidWeaver theme developer is like? Wonder no more because I am about to tell you.
02-18-09 07:22 – started writing this which will end up being a blog post on seyDoggy.com
02-18-09 07:23 – opening up Mailplane.app to have a gander at what support has crawled in overnight.
02-18-09 07:28 – popping in the the Realmac Software forum to respond to a thread I was notified about… nothing for me to add.
02-18-09 07:40 – helped potting training daughter go to the potty.
02-18-09 07:52 – responded to an email from the seyDesign Member Group.
02-18-09 07:53 – reacted to a Twitter follow request… followed.
02-18-09 07:56 – Twittering.
02-18-09 08:02 – responding to another Realmac Software forum thread.
02-18-09 08:04 – sifting through a bunch of press releases that I subscribe to.
02-18-09 08:18 – responded to a comment on seyDoggy.com blog.
02-18-09 08:19 – moving over to the support email account now. Checking the spam box since Google seems to deem all of my real support requests as Spam.
02-18-09 08:21 – yup, 7 messages caught in the spam box.
02-18-09 08:22 – opening up Parallels to confirm one users report of an IE bug with one of my themes.
02-18-09 08:24 – realizing that their complaint has more to do with screen size than anything else. It’s not a bug, me thinks. Keep testing.
02-18-09 08:28 – just got a wrong number on the support line. “seyDoggy who? I’m trying to call my sister.”
02-18-09 08:38 – yup, IE6 issue was just the end users window size. I like that kind of support.
02-18-09 08:50 – support taking longer then I hoped. Need some tunes.
02-18-09 08:59 – support is done.
02-18-09 09:00 – opening my calendar (a Fluid.app SSB of Google Calendar) to see what’s on the plate. My calendar is my mental mapping tool.
02-18-09 09:19 – more forum posting.
02-18-09 09:20 – back to calendar, deciding how long it’s been since I invoiced this one client before deciding to do more work for them. Have to be extra cautious in todays economy, not to get into too deep with any one client.
02-18-09 09:21 – going to do some site updates (in TextMate) for said client.
02-18-09 10:27 – just answered someones questions about M Cubed Softwares Code Collector Pro.
02-18-09 10:48 – syncing client changes via Panics Transmit.
02-18-09 10:57 – hmm… forgot to update the sitemap… and all the french <title> tags… ugh
02-18-09 11:06 – sitemap updated, french <title> tags updated, re-syncing.
02-18-09 11:26 – fresh coffee, looking at my calendar… what next…
02-18-09 11:28 – checking my @bugs tags in TaskPaper to see if there are any pressing bugs I should tackle… one in seyDoggy bloop! but it’s going to have to wait until I have the time for some extensive rewriting. It’s only an issue with one plugin so it’s not really a bug as much as it’s a compatibility issue. Moving on…
02-18-09 11:33 – continuing with Med Designs Bubblegum.rwtheme update. Adding some really cool new features to it. Checking my todo list within the theme to pick up where I left off on Monday.
02-18-09 11:54 – force quitting RapidWeaver after I jammed it up with a tricky Theme.plist move.
02-18-09 12:22 – commit current set of changes to the rwtheme package go make lunch.
02-18-09 12:54 – exercise… it’s important to get away from the office chair for a bit so you don’t develop deep vein thrombosis, but getting and walking about is boring. So I exercise; 50 pushups, 25 crunches, 20 lying-on-my-back-leg-lift-thingies, 20 of the same, but lying on my side, and then again, but on my tummy. Not only is it good for preventing DVT, but it helps my core compensate for slouching at my desk for hours at a time.
02-18-09 13:17 – back to Bubblegum.rwtheme update.
02-18-09 16:04 – committed a whole whack of changes to the Bubblegum.rwtheme. Time to wonder about the house for a stretch and maybe splash some cold water on my face.
02-18-09 16:08 – scheduled in two custom jobs, one for Friday and one for Monday… sigh.
02-18-09 16:23 – feeling refreshed. Time to get back at it. But it’s time for 10 minutes of fun; time to read a chapter of jQuery in Action.
02-18-09 16:45 – Well it’s time to call it a day and go embrace the inner chef in me. I hope you’ve enjoyed peering into a day in the life of a professional RapidWeaver theme developer.
Keeping unused hard disks unmounted
The question
How do you prevent Mac OS X Leopard from auto mounting disks, drives and volumes when the computer boots up or a user logs in? (skip to the solution)
The preamble
I have spent days (literally) searching for the answer to this one; I have a Mac Pro running Leopard with (count them) 4 internal hard drives. One is my system disk and the other 3 are backup disks. Two are weekly mirrors of my system while the third is a daily snap shot of my user account. We won’t even get into the external disks I have. Yes I am THAT anal about my data.
So what is the trouble here? When you have this many disks containing duplicate data, Spotlight, QuickSilver, Launchbar, Google QSB, etc… they all want to serve up information found on each disk. That would include duplicate information that you most likely don’t want to inadvertently open and/or edit. But further to this, why spin up a disk, potential shortening it’s life span and wasting precious energy, when it only gets used on occasion?
One way around this is to diligently eject each volume every time you boot up your system. But that is both a pain in the butt and no where near as geeky as it should be. So do a quick search on Google for a solution to “unmount disk on login” or “prevent volumes from mounting at the boot up in Mac OS X Leopard” and you get a great deal of outdated info, inefficient Apple Scripts, overly complex bash commands, apps that wrap bash in an executable app that you launch at login when the moon is at… you get the idea.
So I set forth to put together the best of the best and simplest of the simple and post it here, for my own reference, exactly what I did to prevent my back up volumes from mounting on boot up.
My Solution (proceed at your own risk)
First off, what you are going to find with most solutions out there is the need for a file called fstab in the systems hidden “/etc” folder. The trouble is that later versions of OS X (10.4.x and later) don’t have this file. However, there IS a redundant file called fstab.hd. WE ARE NOT USING THIS FILE. Instead we will create our own fstab file. So with that out of the way, let’s get started:
The short of it
- Start by making a backup of your system. If you bugger up your system you’ll have something to recover from.
- Open terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)
- Do one on the following:
- In Terminal, type the following (with your volume name) and return
*:diskutil info /volumes/DiskName
- Or, you can use Apples Disk Utility app (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app), select the disk in question and choose “info” from the toolbar.
- In Terminal, type the following (with your volume name) and return
- Find the Volume UUID (Universal Unique Identifier). Copy the UUID to your clipboard
**. - In Terminal enter and return
***:sudo pico /etc/fstab - Enter your password and return.
- You’ll enter a window that looks like this:
- Enter the following (with your UUID) and return
****:UUID=87635CC4-B2EF-3114-B854-F64347A39630 none hfs rw,noauto 0 0 - Repeat step for each device you with to hide, each on a new line.
- Exit pico (⌃X) and save (Y).
- Press return when prompted with:
File Name to Write: /etc/fstab
- All that’s left to do is is cross your fingers and reboot your Mac.
The long of it
*substitute “DiskName” for the name of the volume you wish to hide. If your volume name contains a space, like “Macintosh HD” you need to escape the space with a backslash so it looks like “Macintosh\ HD”**We use the “Volume UUID” as the disk identifier since it is not prone to change like “Device Identifier” (i.e. “disk0s2″) which can change with each and every start up.***This will create/edit your “/etc/fstab” file with pico, a simple text editor.****The string you are entering is the device id followed by the mount point, the filesystem, the mount options, the dump and fsck booleans. In this case:- the device is my UUID (UUID=87635CC4-B2EF-3114-B854-F64347A39630)
- the mount point is “none” (because we won’t be mounting it)
- the file system is “hfs” (since it’s formatted for Mac)
- the mount options are “rw” (read-write) and “noauto” (volume will not auto mount)
- the dump option (backup utility) and fsck option (filesystem check utility) booleans are both set to 0 (false, off, nil, nada) since we don’t plan to mount the volume and therefor don’t need to backup or check them
For more on fstab column structures, visit tuxfiles fstab help.
The wrap-up
For whatever reason, Apple decided to nix fstab from it’s own Unix core. Perhaps for security or perhaps they just deemed it unnecessary. If you look in the other file I mentioned, “/etc/fstab.hd” (in terminal, enter and return: sudo pico /etc/fstab.hd), you’ll see the message:
IGNORE THIS FILE. This file does nothing, contains no useful data, and might go away in future releases. Do not depend on this file or its contents.
However, I see no harm in extending the life expectancy of my disks and saving energy at the same time. All while doing away with the annoyance of long indexing times and being inundated with duplicate search results. If you have anything to add, please feel free to leave a comment.
Other references
Rebuilding after all of these years!
Rebuilding after all of these years. Seriously, it’s been years since I have done a clean install… since Mac OS X 10.2 to be exact. I have been pulling all the crud I have collected over the years along with me like barnacles on the bottom of of the ship of life. And like the real thing, those barnacles have been slowing me down.
This became painfully obvious recently when I made a new user account to make some tutorial movies. The new account was fast and responsive in a way I hadn’t experienced in years. If this wasn’t evidence enough, I was having a nagging problem with TaskPaper from Hogbay Software where for no obvious reason, it would quite with every launch. Between Jesse and Apple they were able to nail it down to a webcam component that was not proper GC code but was pretending to be. The point is, I have no idea where I ever picked up that component or when even. It was time to nuke and rebuild.
The reason I haven’t in so many years is because I have come to rely on so many hacks over the years, things that Mac OS X wasn’t either capable of or didn’t do well enough. It was a scary thought to try and get by on a stock system or try and replicate those hacks again. For the last little while I’ve been trying to change my habits, trying to use less 3rd party hackery and find native solutions or terminal commands that accomplish the same thing.
For instance, years ago I used to use USB Overdrive to ramp up my mouse tracking and and assign special functions to various mouse button combinations. When support for it waned I turned to SteerMouse which did almost exactly the same thing. But now-a-days I barely use the mouse and when I do all I really need is a speed boost which is easily achieved in the terminal:
If you have a mouse:
defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling some_numberIf you have a trackpad:
defaults write -g com.apple.trackpad.scaling some_numberThe some_number at the end of each of the above lines must be replaced by, well, an actual number indicating the speed you’d like to use—the higher the number, the faster the tracking will be. As a starting point, the default value for maximum mouse speed is 3.0, and maximum trackpad speed is 1.5. So you might try a starting value of 5.0 for your turbo-charged mouse, and 2.5 or 3.0 for a turbo-charged trackpad.
The easiest way to make your changes take effect is to log out and then log in again (Apple menu: Log Out user name ).
I guess my point is this (wearing my nutMac/productivity hat), if you are going to spend any time as a developer of any sort, keep your system customizations to a minimum, install only those apps you honestly think you’ll need or use, find native solutions to mods you can’t live without, document those mods carefully and alway be prepared to do a clean install from time to time. The less cluttered your system is the better chance you have using a migration assistant so you don’t have to do it all manually like I did.
That’s where I am at now. I have spent nearly two whole days manually moving preferences and folders for the apps I need so that I can be sure not to take all the other crap with me again. Now that I have done my clean install I should have no trouble keeping it clean every six months now.
Realmac Software release LittleSnapper/QuickSnapper one-two punch!
Realmac Software has just made LittleSnapper official, bringing this very powerful screen and web snapping app out of beta and into the general public. I’ve been fortunate to be playing with this app for a week or so, putting it and it’s integrated web service, QuickSnapper through their paces. This isn’t just you normal screen snapping app. It’s a lot more than Skitch (which has never left it’s apparent state of perpetual beta) and has many advantages over it (with one or two slight disadvantages). And the web service, not unlike ScrnShots is a robust and attractive place to be and get inspiration.
LittleSnapper allows you to treat a collection of screen and web snaps more like a library, and iPhoto Library if you will, allowing you to tag them, rate them, make notes and annotations, view the source code for web snaps. This gives you not just a library of images, but a tool box of thumbnails complete with source code for studying, origins, ways to note what you liked about it, etc… There really isn’t many things to compare it to. It is one of those trend setting apps that has more or less made it’s own niche. Certainly a web designers must-have app.
And then there is QuickSnapper… While at first glance, it’s not all together different from what other similar scree/web shot sites are doing and on it’s own it wouldn’t be particularly exciting (except that it looks damn sexy). What set’s it apart though is that it was built to support the LittleSnapper app, and not built the other way around. That’s where these other screen/web snap sharing site have gone wrong in my books. They’ve built the site and now in order for you to get your stuff up there, they’ve made a half baked “utility” that will, if you are lucky, let you upload something… sometimes.
QuickSnapper, on the other hand was built with LittleSnapper integration in mind… exclusively. With the click of a button, LittleSnapper loads up a snap to your account. In turn, with the click of a button on QuickSnapper, you can pull down a shared snap into your own LittleSnapper library… click… that’s it! A complete, happy snapping, bio circle of screen and web snapping goodness. Does it get any better than this? Me thinks not!
Oh, and BTW, the screen grab of LittleSnapper? Yeah that was taken with LittleSnapper and is hosted on QuickSnapper…