tewha.net

Thoroughly disguisted by the clutter on my desktop, I decided to delete all of it. I selected everything, deselected a few things I wanted to keep, and hit command-delete (the keyboard shortcut for Move to Trash).

Yes, WxFPP_EN is indeed my Windows XP CD, left over from a failed/aborted attempt at installing Boot Camp. And Mac OS X really is asking me if I want to delete it immediately. Clicking Delete caused this error to appear:

Error -61 looks familiar, so I looked it up: wrPermErr. Yes, that’s right: the Leopard Finder is actually trying to delete files off the CD.

Okay. Bad enough. But at least it didn’t crash, right? I click OK:

After all of that my desktop is still a cluttered mess.

Apple, if Finder stability is one of your goals ur doing it wrong. Hitting command-delete on a volume shouldn’t actually try to delete the files form it. This is laughably bad.

Bruce over on WarpedVisions writes on entering the world of Objective-C and Cocoa development.

I’m barely past square one, but I found this an interesting title. Of course, what Bruce means is the whole Mac OS X development experience, but it’s interesting that he worded it in the title as learning Objective-C. It’s a simple, concise yet technically inaccurate way to label the knowledge.¹

Objective-C just might be the easiest part of Mac OS X development. The hard part is simply knowing what objects are available in Cocoa, where they are, and how to string them together. Basically, the typical framework problem. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still at the very bottom of the learning curve here!

Objective-C itself is very nice; it’s a truly minimal extension to C. I’m amazed at how it’s still a very complete object-oriented language yet so simple and small, with everything done the simple way.

When I first started with Cocoa, I was thinking of compiling notes together so I could write a short book/essay on “Learning Cocoa for C++ developers,” but as I’ve gone I’ve realized the first chapter should be “Forget everything you know about C++. You think need ___ to do ___? You do in C++, but in Objective-C just use the Cocoa class ___.”

1. And I’m not intentionally picking on Bruce here. I have said it this way, and probably will again, and he does get it right in the text, as he noted below. [↩]

I don’t usually like to report anything John Gruber posts, because everyone will have already seen it. But I’ll make an exception: Michael Tsai is right: What Apple delivers in the iPhone is less offensive than the spin as it’s been delivered. (via Daring Fireball.)

I’m not so upset at the iPhone’s lack of openness as I am concerned it could be the start of something on Mac OS X. And the only reason for that is that in spinning all these restrictions as good things on the iPhone, Apple has made me start to worry that they might consider them good on Mac OS X 10.6, too.

Tech talk on launchd by its creator from July 2007.

When an application crashes in Mac OS X, there’s a dialog box that appears to inform you of it. It mentions that no other applications are affected. This irritates me every time I see it. Honestly, I thought they’d remove this before 10.0 went final. It meant for a nice “Oooh, ahhh!” moment at WWDC in 1998 or so, given a crowd of Mac OS developers, but has been meaningless ever since. This is expected behavior in a modern operating system!

(Hi-lighting added.)

This is from Xcode’s Interface Builder. I’ve never seen a more polite assertion failure. It even asks if it’s okay to crash. You don’t see that very often. And keep in mind this is for a tool used by software developers. What’s our excuse when developing software for regular users?

And yes, I’m going to choose Crash. They asked politely enough.

Safari 3.1 still eats cookies, although it seems to do so much less often than 3.0. I just hit it for the first time since updating.

So what do you do when your cookies all disappear? Well, you can actually use Time Machine to restore them. The cookies are stored in ~/Library/Cookies in a single file called Cookies.plist. Trash this file, then use Time Machine to restore one from a couple hours previous.

Mike from Rogue Amoeba on Code Signing and You on Mac OS X.

Audio MIDI Setup is a pretty moldy corner, really. Click to see it in motion:

Even the question and button names at the end are worded in a way that conflicts with generally accepted Mac standards.

So I’m about five days into my free .Mac trial, and I thought I’d write up some thoughts.

I pay about $60 per year for 500 GB of storage and 5 TB of bandwidth from DreamHost. .Mac costs $100 per year. For that much, it should be really, really special. On a strictly numerical level, DreamHost beats .Mac. Now, it’s true that DreamHost’s reputation for reliability has taken a beating the last year or so, but for $6 per month I can accept a few days per month of down time. And it’s nowhere near that bad; it seems to be less than one evening every month or two.

So that leaves a comparison of features. Now, actually there’s very little overlap between the two. .Mac offers a bare minimum of traditional web hosting features, with low bandwidth and storage, and few of the more dynamic features such as SQL and PHP. DreamHost offers huge bandwidth, huge storage, and lots of dynamic features.

As a traditional webhost, DreamHost wins hands down. But .Mac offers a lot that DreamHost doesn’t.

Apple lists the features of .Mac as Web Gallery, Website Hosting, IMAP email, Back to My Mac, Sync, iDisk, Groups, Backup, and 10 GB storage. There’s also easy publishing with the iApps. The webmail interface shames DreamHost’s webmail, but I download all my email anyway. The most useful-looking features are syncing and Back to My Mac.

Back to My Mac doesn’t work at all for me. There’s no errors, no feedback at all — it just isn’t there where it’s supposed to be. I’ve done a bit of research on this, and I expect it’s because my NAT doesn’t support the features Back to My Mac needs. But this is really just a guess, since there’s no feedback at all.

At first glance, syncing seemed to work for me. But then I ran into an odd problem: The sync created duplicates of a bunch of smart mail boxes. No problem, though: Delete them, reset up to .Mac. It’ll propagate to the other computers, right? Well, it turns out that’s a bad assumption. It worked to a point, but then one of the other computers just adds them again. I’d basically need to delete them from both computers simultaneously in order to get rid of them. No problem, I’ll just use Back to My Mac.

Oh, wait. That’s not going to work.

Well, maybe I’ll check out .Mac in another few years. But for now, I can’t imagine spending $100 on it. I want something that takes the gremlins out of a multi-machine existence, rather than adding bigger, more annoying ones. I feel like I started with a mogwai and .Mac fed it after midnight. Maybe if I was a bigger webmail user or wasn’t comfortable setting up things like WordPress it would be more interesting, but I’m not that guy.