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Third Time’s a Charm

Today I ran into this article named Mac OS X 10.5.3 about to hit. It listed all the bug fixes that are going to be included in the soon-to-be released OSX 10.5.3 update. I can tell you that I’ve never been so anxious about an OSX update as this one. The gods at cupertino, however, seem to have heard our pleas, and are fixing a couple of @#$@# annoying bugs that have my user experience with Apple products very frustrating (to put it mildy) ever since I upgraded to a MacBook last January.

The first issue that seems to be resolved is listed as “Joining AirPort network after wake issue resolved”. This is an issue that has been known for months, is incredibly frustrating, and the workaround takes a long time to perform. It turns out that on Santa Rosa based Macs, sometimes when you wake your computer from sleep (or reboot it), it will simply NOT be able to connect to your selected Airport network. You’ll only get a Connection Timeout error message. You cannot even begin to imagine how infuriating this is, specially if you are in a hurry or are expecting an important email. It turns out that the culprit is actually the OSX Keychain (I know… :S), and the workaround involves several steps:

• Turn Airport Off
• Go to the Network Preferences Panel, and DELETE the network you were trying to connect to
• Go to the folder Library:Preferences:System Configuration and DELETE the file com.apple.airport.preferences.plist (enter your password if prompted)
• Open Keychain Access and DELETE the entries for the networks you were trying to connect to. Make sure you delete them in both the login and system keychains.
• Restart your computer
• Try to connect. At this point, it may still fail. If it does, open Safari and try to access any webpage. You’ll get a page with a button to access the Network Diagnostics utility. Use it, and connect to the network from there

So, you can see it takes close to forever to restore your network connectivity. And sometimes you need to do it twice, as you may have missed a step. Hopefully this will be gone after the update. This bug is well documented here and here and here.

The other issue, hopefully, will be solved by the fix “Fix to CoreGraphics and DVD Player” has to do with DVD playback. This is actually worse, and it basically consists in the MacBook CRASHING when you try to play a DVD. This only seems to happen on Santa Rosa-based MacBooks with 4GB of RAM. This one isn’t as frustrating, as you only need to NOT use your MacBook to watch DVDs. Still, it should have been fixed a while back. This is documented in this thread at MacRumors.

At last! A great tutorial for developing OSX applications

Over at Wikibooks I found this gem, called Programming Mac OS X with Cocoa for beginners. So far, it is the best tutorial I’ve found on the web for developing Cocoa-based OSX applications. It takes you step-by-step on the process of writing a small sample app, illustrating the different concepts of both Objective-C and the Cocoa API.

So far, from what I’ve seen,. Objective-C is a nice language to work with. The syntax may throw you off a little bit at the beginning, but once you start playing with it, you’ll learn to appreciate features like having the parameter names as part of the method’s signatures. I also liked (for no particular reason, just personal preference) the syntax for message passing.

I think that more resources like this will increase the amount of applications available for OSX. One of the big advantages of developing for Microsoft or Java platforms is the vast amount of resources available in websites like MSDN or Sun’s and IBM’s websites. Apple’s Developer Connection, on the other hand, is not as neatly organized, and it is my opinion that it is missing more concrete examples and introductory material.

I also think that XCode could improve quite a bit. Now that I understand how Interface Builder integrates with XCode, one of my main isssues with it is gone (GUI-driven development a-la-Visual Studio). Still, it is missing features like a more robust Intellisense-like code completion, and a more intuitive interface. Maybe it is the fact that I am more familiar with tools like Eclipse or Visual Studio .NET – but still, maybe version 3.0 will bring it up to par with more mature development IDEs.

Check out the tutorial at this link: Programming Mac OS X with Cocoa for beginners

On Picasa and working with pictures

Why the hell hasn’t Google released a version of Picasa for the Mac? I know, we have iPhoto, but Picasa leaves iPhoto in the dust in terms of managing pictures, in its performance, and its image enhancement capabilities - 90% of the time a “I’m feeling lucky” will improve my pictures to a level that I could never reach with iPhoto.

Picasa is one of the few apps I have installed on Virtual PC for the Mac (the others are mostly .NET-development related). Today I imported several pictures from a trip to the Tapanti National Park here in Costa Rica. I enhanced my pictures to my liking, and exported them to a web page, as I have done several times before. Well, the @#!@# program created a bunch of thumbnails that look something like this:

Yes, that is the output of the Folder->Export as Web Page command. This is incredibly frustrating, as now I will have to re-import the pictures on a physical (non-virtual) machine, probably redo the changes (I’ll try Export to folder first…), and THEN create the web-pages. All of this could be avoided if I could use Picasa natively (hell, there’s even a linux version out now!), but no, I’m stuck with iPhoto and its stupid iWeb integration.

And you know what the irony is?? This is pretty much the only software from Google that is NOT BETA, and it is the one giving me a big headache today!!

Ecto is pretty good under OSX …

… but doesn’t work that great under Windows.

This is my first post done using ecto. Pretty cool program, I’ll probably start using on the Mac. I’ll stick with Blogjet on the PC, though.

OSX software I use

I just finished updating my Powerbook to OSX 10.4.7, and I decided to make a list of the applications that I can’t live without when using OSX:

Mail.appetizer: Plugin for Mail.app that shows a transparent pane with the details of incoming messages.

Electric Sheep: Awesome screensaver.

Widescreen Plugin for Mail.app: As much as I dislike Outlook’s three-panel view, I have to accept that I enjoy using this recently released plugin on my widescreen Powerbook. Com to think of it, maybe if I didn’t have a 1024×768 screen at work I wouldn’t depise the Outlook layout as much.

Unison / Macpar / Split & Concat: A MUST if you use newsgroups.

Transmit / Cyberduck: Best FTP applications out there. Can’t beat the price on Cyberduck ($0!!).

Viena: I’ve already blogged about this. This is probably the best RSS reader on the Mac. It has an “iTunes-like” UI that I really like.

Azureus: No comments…

Deerpark: For those pages that Safari doesn’t like (demonoid, I’m looking at your Javascript…), it doesn’t get better than Deerpark.

This list will probably grow as I realize applications that I take for granted but use every day. I’ll update it with a new post at a later date.