Author: Steve

Apple claims to have fixed the issue where applications could run automatically out of a Time Machine backup. Look for CVE-2008-0038 in Apple’s About the security content of Mac OS X 10.5.2 and Security Update 2008-001.

In Where Keyboard Shortcuts Win, Gruber talks about Tog’s findings on mouse vs. keyboard. In a footnote, he adds: Especially with most Cocoa apps, where the Find commands are in a sub-menu, and thus take even longer to target using the mouse. To me, this is a real problem on Mac OS. It is not… Continue reading Hierarchical menus suck

A few days ago I re-added a search field to this site. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was; the CSS was a little fussy, but that’s more of a fun puzzle than a hard problem.

WarpedVisions has an article on automatic updates imposing on users. I’ve done some thinking on this subject. Should you wait on an update check before presenting the UI? Should you ask them if they want to update? If they do want to update, should they need to go through a web browser to download the… Continue reading Your app has a job, and it isn’t updating itself.

Not a lot of details yet, but apparently Mac OS X 10.5 supports Global Login Items. This would be a nice thing to have more information on, as I can imagine needing to remove these.

I filed this as radar #5574036, but it seems significant to share: Imagine that you trash an application because of a security flaw. Say, it handles the URL type foofoo, and is proven to be a security risk. But the developer won’t fix it (or hasn’t fixed it yet), so you’ve removed the application from… Continue reading Mac OS X runs deleted applications

I used the default packages and install options because I haven’t seen my Office 2004 disc around in a while. The install was slow (I let it check the DVD), but required no intervention.

An assertion is a check on a condition that you don’t expect to ever occur. These checks slow down the program, so they’re usually excluded from release builds. They’re often used in functions to check the parameters, entry and exit conditions.

Today I spent my evening helping a friend figure out how to burn DVDs from video he put together in Final Cut Pro. He’s a Mac neophyte, and not really a techie guy in general. This was my first time working with Final Cut Pro.

“I’ve got to figure out why he used ALIGN, despite it being deprecated since 1999.” “ALIGN the tag or the attribute?” “The tag.” “Wasn’t it introduced in 1998?” “No, it was introduced in 1995. It wasn’t supported until 1998.”