Software

Snow Leopard Update

Right, Snow Leopard has officially been released, so we can start talking about it..

Like many  in the Macintosh community, I thought that “sometime in September” would mean.. sometime in September, so I felt that it was safe to go on holiday until the second of September and that would leave me plenty of time for a nice orderly rollout of Mac OS X 10.6… silly old me, of course it meant the 28th of August!? I’m not really sure what Apple stands to gain from this kind of exercise, but it sure doesn’t make it easy for third party developers.

The good news is that I have tested all current products including A Better Finder Rename, A Better Finder Attributes, “The Big Mean Folder Machine” and MacBreakZ with the latest beta release, which rumor has it is the gold master of what appears on the shelves today and it’s all running just fine.

A Better Finder Attributes displays some odd behaviors on certain file date changes which I’m fairly certain are  due to actual bugs in Snow Leopard. I’ll report them to Apple when I get back to the office next week. The workaround is simple: click on the “OK” button twice and everything is fine.

Snow Leopard also appears to no longer allow the creator part of the creator & type legacy codes to be set!? This isn’t a great loss since creator & type codes have been on their way out ever since 10.1 came out and the creator part is arguably of less relevance than the type part. I’ll investigate.

A Better Finder Rename runs just fine with no problems at all, so assuming that the beta I had was indeed the Gold Master, it should be smooth rollout.

“The Big Mean Folder Machine” and MacBreakZ have displayed no problems at all.

Of course, once you put a new operating system into the hands of a couple of million actual users, inevitably quirks are discovered, so please let me know immediately if you find something. I can only fix problems that I know about..

One more thing..

How to get the Finder context menu on Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard finally does away with contextual menu item plug-ins, which is definitely a good thing. This ancient technology is replaced with “Services”.. you know that weird menu that appears in every application’s menu bar and you have no idea of what it does.

The gotcha here is that you need to activate the A Better Finder Rename and A Better Finder Attributes services to actually see them in the Finder context menu or the new streamlined Services menu.

  1. A Better Finder Rename and A Better Finder Attributes now definitely need to reside in your Applications because that is where Snow Leopard looks for “Service Providers”.. so if you have them installed somewhere else you need to drag them into the proper folder now.
  2. go to the Finder, open the “Finder” menu and select “Services Preferences…” from the “Services” menu
  3. in the Services Preferences tick the A Better Finder Rename 8 and A Better Finder Attributes 4 items

Voila.

If the items don’t appear in the Services Preferences, you might need to

  1. launch A Better Finder Rename 8 once
  2. and if that doesn’t work, log out and back into your account/ reboot

The reason for this complication is that the Finder only finds new services when it starts up. A Better Finder Rename 8 nicely asks the Finder to update its services list when it starts up , but it’s only a request..

I wish you all a good transition..

Frank

Snow Leopard Compatibility

One question that is certain to be on everybody’s mind at the moment is “Will it work on Snow Leopard?”.

I couldn’t possibly comment.. as I’m under NDA.. but surely it’s okay to just say: “Yes.”

There’ll be more info posted here on the 28th of August, the official Mac OS X 10.6 release date.

I’m on holiday right now and normal service will be resumed on the 2nd of September, so expect a few minor updates to iron out some minor issues that are sure to occur when tens of thousands of users simultaneously get their hands on a new operation system.

New Support Forums added

I have long been sitting on the fence when it comes to providing a discussion forum for supporting customers.

I like the direct personal contact of the one-on-one email exchanges and I hate the organized chaos of most discussion forums.

When you open one of those things, you suddenly become a moderator for community rather than just the guy sitting at home behind his monitor helping people sort out problems his software and trying to figure out what needs improving.

Sounds good, but what about the spammers, the trolls, the flaming wars and all of that? Oh, yes and what if you call “forum” and no one comes? Oh well, we’ll see..

I’ll be running the forums on a “wait and see what happens” basis until further notice.

Please feel free to use and abuse it and don’t hesitate to talk amongst yourselves. I’ll be trying to check in as often as possible and keep it as spam free as at all possible.

Hope you enjoy it!

Frank

Quick! Looking for alpha testers for A Better Finder Rename v8!

After over a year of intense development, I’m quickly approaching the stage where version 8 of A Better Finder Rename is ready to be unleashed on the unsuspecting masses.

I’ve finally got something approaching a first public beta, but since I ripped out the entire back end and quite a bit of the front end (new UI!) in the process, there’s still a few weeks of alpha testing left..

If you’re interested in becoming an alpha tester, please drop me a line at reiff@publicspace.net.

What’s ahead in 2008

It’s been a long time since I last wrote anything on this blog.. it’s been a busy few months and not all of it related to publicspace.net

I became a dad (hurray!) for the first time a very long 18 months ago. Since then everything has been a bit topsy-turvy. I quit my day job to be able to concentrate on my software business, but working from home with a little baby turns out not be the most productive environment to “get things done”..

Anyway, I did get quite a lot done over the past year or so, especially considering the many distractions and 2008 is going to be full of new improved goodness.

First in line will be the long awaited A Better Finder Rename v8.

Version numbering is always a problem. Whether you charge for upgrades or not, a “full digit” release is supposed to be an event. If you do charge for upgrades then it’d better be! If you don’t charge for upgrades then you’ll probably rather stay with version 1.1.2 anyway 🙂

Version 8 thus needs to needs to be chock full of new features and improvements, e.g.

  • A new GUI?
  • File filtering?
  • Saveable presets?
  • A new industrial strength renaming engine that make short shrift of a million renames?
  • Automatic file name conflict resolution?
  • Pairing up jpeg thumbnails and RAW picture files?
  • Sparkle-support?

It’s all in the provisional feature set.

I bet you must have scratched your head when you saw version 7.9.6.1 recently? or 7.9.1 for that matter.

Well another problem with version numbering is that it is has an implicit message, e.g. version 7.9 means that 8.0 is just around the corner. Well it isn’t really.. my policy has always been to make lots of smaller updates. This gets lots of new features and improvements out to you guys quickly and makes sure that the program remains reliable over time (if something’s broken it must be the last thing you changed).

Now the temptation would be to take all these small improvements and instead of releasing them piecemeal, bundle them all up into major new release. I don’t want to name any particular company or product (“Apple”, “Mac OS X”). Looking at A Better Finder Rename’s version history, there’s 42 updates since version 7 came out. Now that would justify a whole new “full digit” upgrade, wouldn’t it?

Only of course, that’s not what I’ve chosen to do. So I basically start from version 7.9.9.9 (just joking) and everything that comes after that is “new in version 8”. Doing something heroic for each major release isn’t easy however. Last time over, I completely rewrote the program from scratch using Cocoa. Now that was a good effort!

This time over, I have lots of new features and improvements, all of which take a lot of effort to implement.. which means it takes a lot of time.. and I haven’t started properly yet. I really don’t want to do this, but I think I might have to go for Apple’s new trendy “7.9.10” numbering strategy.. I wonder whether versiontracker and macupdate can handle this?

There’s another major factor that affects the release date of version 8. When I initially started coding on version 8, I quickly realised that I can do a much better job if I leverage all the new Leopard features. Lots of stuff that I was going to hand-code are already in there and frankly they are better than what I could come up with on my own. Then I quickly realized that “it’s in there, but it doesn’t work (yet)”. In Mac OS X 10.5.1 things are already a lot better and I expect that by 10.5.2 most things will work without a hitch.

So here’s the bombsheel: A Better Finder Rename 8 is going to be Leopard-only. This pretty much means that it will only be released once a significant share of Mac users have made the migration. I wouldn’t want to release something that only a few people can actually use. Right now it looks like about 30% of Mac users have made the switch, but by the summer I suspect it will be most of the people who download software from the internet anyway. Besides, v7 is still perfectly functional.

You might have noticed the “file filtering” on the new feature list. Yes, it’s time to say bye, bye to A Better Finder Select.

This originally was the file filtering component of the A Better Finder Attributes. This is another product that has long lived in the shadow of the mighty A Better Finder Rename, but has recently found a new lease of life after I included the ability to adjust the EXIF timestamps of digital camera pictures. It turns out that lots of people have lots of photos with screwy shooting dates.. the more the merrier. I have also finally found a way of changing the timestamps on the majority of RAW formats including NEF and CR2. I might even include this before the 5.0 release.

Then of course there’s our latest bad boy application, “The Big Mean Folder Machine“. It’s initial releases went fairly well and there’s a lot more in the pipeline for 2008. On top of that, I learnt a lot about Core Data which comes in handy for that new renaming engine. It’s hard to tell with a 1.x release, but I think I might have another hit application on my hands. Now that would be nice!

Last but not least, MacBreakZ, after its 4.0 rejuvenation efforts is once again doing fairly well and I can thus justify spending time on it. Since its release in late 2006, it has been updated regularly on a bimonthly schedule and I have some new illustrations and artwork stacked up as well. The dreaded 4.9 release is going to come up far too quickly again.. oh no! another “full digit” release!

This brings me to another priority for this year: documentation. I keep getting the same emails about documentation: “Where is the PDF manual?”, “Where is the download-able documentation”, “Where is the e-book?”, “Where are the screencasts?”, “Where are the tutorials?”, “Where is the major feature movie?”. You get the idea..

The thing is that no two people can seem to agree on what kind of documentation they would like to have. “Just do everything” is a nice idea, but it just isn’t possible. I’ve spent a lot of time recently finding out how other people deal with the situation and my web logs show that few people actually ever use the documentation anyway. Plus of course, it’s a bore 🙁

The Windoze guys all seem to solve this problem by using “Help & Manual“, the ueber-technical documenation tool. Unfortunately the only reference to the Mac that you can find on their site is an explanation of why it doesn’t work in Safari (it’s not made by Microsoft).

There are various tools available for the Mac, but they really aren’t any good.. I would plug my newly purchased Apple Help tool here, but it doesn’t do images (!) and I’ve been waiting for 6 week for a reply to my support request.. aarrgh.. at long last I have found something that’s better on Windows!

Nonetheless, 2008 is going to be the year of improved documentation on publicspace.net. Period.

I’m hoping to package an Apple Help documentation set with MacBreakZ soon and the other products will probably need to wait for their upcoming big releases. I’m also considering PDF versions of the manuals, which should satisfy most people..

Anyway, that’s all from me from now.

Take care,

Frank

Big Mean File Processing

What a couple of weeks it has been since the launch of Leopard..

I’m not sure whether I’m the only one to find this, but it does look like one of the buggiest Apple releases in recent history..

By in large, a new operating system release should have zero impact on existing programs. This time over, however, it looks like lots and lots of programs have been broken all over the place..

Of course, as a developer I spend most of my time in Apple’s development tools, namely XCode and the brand-new “Instruments”. I’m sad to say it, but the current XCode 3.0 is a no more than an alpha release. The editor hangs, the snapshot feature doesn’t work (force quit), half the time after running a program in debug mode, you need to quit XCode to “reset” it.. it will be great when it’s finished, but it has been released at least a year too early 🙁

Time Machine is great, but lacks configurability and feedback. Every hour it will pretty much freeze the machine and backup 360Gb of data (build directories do not seem to be excluded from backups), the only indication that you have that it’s busy is that the external hard disk starts making a racket, there’s no easy way of delaying a backup, etc, etc.

My own applications have also been hit by Leopard problems despite having tested them on various beta builds of the new operating system.

For A Better Finder Rename, the migration problems were largely due to changes (and apparently new bugs) in the Finder and in AppleScript. For MacBreakZ there are some oddities to do with Spaces (which does behave in some fairly strange ways).

At the moment, however, it seems that it’s the Big Mean Folder Machine that has been the hardest hit. This is largely due to some very nice progress on Mac OS X’s built-in Core Data database engine. It’s much faster, but it also seems to leak memory fairly badly where it didn’t before. As a consequence, “The Big Mean Folder Machine” appears to be both a lot faster (great!) and lot memory hungrier (no!) on Leopard than it was on Tiger..

Unfortunately the vastly increased memory usage on Leopard makes the whole application crash when it runs out of memory. Luckily this doesn’t happen during your garden variety 6000 file re-organization, but can quickly become a problem when you’re dealing with tens or hundreds of thousands of files. Well using Core Data was supposed to provide “The Big Mean Folder Machine” with fantastic scalability rather than make memory a problem!

I have therefore spent much of the last week optimizing “The Big Mean Folder Machine” for Leopard by manually testing each bit of code for its memory usage.. this is very tedious work, but at least it seems to be working:

My current test version now deals gracefully with half a million files and has a very small memory foot print even when it’s working flat out..

I hope to have a new version of “The Big Mean Folder Machine” that will gracefully deal with over a million files out very soon, so expect “The Big Mean Folder Machine” 1.3 very soon.

This is also good news for the upcoming version 8 of A Better Finder Rename, which will inherit much of The Big Mean Folder Machine’s processing pipeline.

If anybody is stuck with the current version of “The Big Mean Folder Machine”, please just email me and I can send you a development copy via email.

Best regards,

Frank

A Better Finder Rename and Leopard

A while back the 7.7.6 release of A Better Finder Rename introduced the “ultra-fast, ultra-safe” renaming mode.

Renaming files on Mac OS 9/X has always been a tricky affair because of file comments. In earlier releases of Mac OS 9/X these were called “Finder comments” and starting with Mac OS X 10.4 “Spotlight comments”.

The thing about them has always been: they keep disappearing for no reason.

The reason is actually all too clear: they are not properly linked into the file system programming interfaces. Every time to you save a file under a new name, move it off a Mac HFS+ file system, send it via email, move or copy it under Unix, etc the file comment stays behind because the Finder doesn’t know about the operation.

Generations of Macintosh users have stored crucial data in those comments, only to find that when they need them, they have disappeared.

Now renaming files outside of the Finder is one of those things that make file comments disappear, precisely because the Finder doesn’t know anything about the renaming having happened.

A Better Finder Rename to my knowledge is the only file renaming utility for the Mac that actually preserve file comments. It does so by telling the Finder about each rename. Unfortunately this is hardly the fastest way of doing things. Usually this does not matter too much because renaming 500 files in under 5 seconds isn’t really all that slow.

Unfortunately, this method does not work on FileVault encrypted home folders. The reason for this is that AppleScript does not work on FileVault files. This is a problem that I (and many others) reported to Apple when 10.3 came out, but that has not been solved yet. Perhaps because it can’t be solved?

This is why A Better Finder Rename in the “Advanced Options” sections lets you choose your own renaming mechanism. A full description of the different mechanisms available is in the manual.

Which brings us back to the “ulta-fast, ultra-safe” renaming mode. For a short while Apple managed to fix their renaming programming interface in the Cocoa APIs, so that file comments did not disappear, as long as you used a brand-new system level call to do so. If memory serves this was between Mac OS X 10.4.7 and 10.4.8. In Mac OS X 10.4.9 they promptly broke this again and file comments started disappearing again..

So in between the implementation and the release of version 7.7.6 the new feature stopped working and then had to be “removed” from version 7.7.7 as a bug fix. I did report the problem to Apple again..

Now it seems that in Leopard things are fine again. The renaming mode was never actually removed, but simply renamed. It is still available as “ultra-fast move mode (potential file comment loss)” and appears to work flawlessly and very fast under Leopard. So if you are under Leopard, by all means use it!

Leopard has pounced

Well, we’ve just survived another OS X migration and it’s time to take stock.

As a developer, I’m kind of committed to having all my programs work flawlessly on the latest operating system on the release day, so I have had quite a bit of preparation to do ahead of the launch.

My first impressions of OS X 10.5 go back to not long after the keynote speech where Steve Jobs presented it. System migrations are usually accompanied by a deep developer sigh (at least outside of Steve’s reality distortion field). This is not because it’s not great news, but because it means a lot of extra work just to stay where you are.

My main development machine is a Mac Pro and of course there’s no way that I want to install an early beta build of an entire operating system on it before it’s pretty much production ready. In any event, it’s safer to do a clean install on a fresh partition every time a beta comes out; which for most developers means installing it on a secondary machine.

In my case that’s my severely underused MacBook Pro that has hardly left my office since I got it. I have to say that the new Leopard look didn’t really impress me much the first time I saw it. It still doesn’t really, I’m afraid.

The challenge for a developer is to make his/her programs look good on the new version and I’m not really sure how to achieve that yet. A Better Finder Rename 8, due out in beta form 2008Q1 (that means March) will probably sport a few look & feel changes to fit in better with the “unified look”, but will it actually look better? or just more somber?

I was never a great fan of the brushed metal look, so seeing it essentially everywhere now doesn’t really improve things much. The new folder icons are of course unreservedly awful. The dock I frankly don’t care about much. I’ve got it hidden by default, and I’m the world’s only A Better Finder Launcher user, so never actually see the thing.

The translucent menu bar is also not a problem as long as you find a mostly black background picture. I use the picture of earth from space that has a completely black background and on my trusty 30″ cinema display that means that the entire menu bar looks the same “somber gray” as the unified look windows. It’s a shame that the rounded corners have gone, but what the hell..

The aesthetic choices that have been made for Leopard are not easily comprehended by mere mortals. Yes, I think it’s a step backwards in terms of looks. Surely a space theme appeals mostly to little boys watching Galactica (I watched the episode where number 3 sees the face of the missing 5 cylons last night) and not to most professionals and (Trekkers excepted) women. What a curious choice..

The new “capsule” buttons on the Mail app also surely must be a bad joke. After two years of people ridiculing the capsule buttons, they’ve simply gone and have made them even worse (quick, tell me which buttons are disabled!). Hhmm..

In terms of actual interaction, however, most of these changes are actually for the better. It is far easier to see which window is active. The keyboard navigation works much better (of course that was the only area where Windows 95 was still better than OS X), and the unified look is, well, more unified.

A disturbing feature of the new Finder is that it looks so much like iTunes that you catch yourself confusing both. “Unified” can also mean “indistinct”.

In terms of performance there isn’t much to report, except that the entire system seems to be more responsive. Tiger had a tendency (especially on Intel machines?) to become fairly unresponsive if it did any kind of disk heavy processing (such as crunching a couple of million rows of database records) or if you dared to mount a network drive. It’s too early to be definite about this, but the problem seems to have magically vanished.

The biggest feature of Leopard is of course the “Time Machine”. It’s terribly gimmicky and I haven’t been able to test it much so far, but it has huge potential.

Backups are a chore. They are expensive (you need a huge external disk, two if you want an off-site backup) and time-consuming (you need to schedule time for the backups). Finally, when you need to go back to an older version, you usually find that something has gone tragically wrong. So on the whole they can be useless and a chore.

My backup strategy so far consisted in two 1TB IOmega UltraMax external Firewire drives and “Retrospect Express”. Incremental backup of my entire user folder at 1AM each morning. Duplication of iTunes and Aperture libraries once a week. The second drive is stored permanently off-site. Every now and then I duplicate the on-site drive completely onto the off-site drive, which for obvious reasons takes “a long time”.

Today, the third 1TB IOmega drive has arrived and I’m about to do the first “proper” Time Machine backup: the entire drive for a full system restore.

The largely unanswered question is “is it good enough to do real backups with?” or is it just a gimmick? I have $300 bet with IOmega that it’s the first rather than the second..

Backup is a huge issue for somebody who makes their entire living off the content of a single hard disk.. but it’s not as easy as all that. There’s disaster recovery (you don’t want to have to re-install everything in the event of hard disk crash), but there’s also “data loss” (you don’t want to lose any crucial files) and finally “archiving” (the stuff that you don’t have any real need for anymore, but that might come in handy one day, say your 1998 tax returns). Related to that is the question of “version control” for things such as websites and source code (“this unique combination of 75,000 files represents version 7.9.5 of A Better Finder Rename).

Unfortunately all this stuff is getting so big that there’s no longer any time and money efficient way of doing it. Archiving your 90GB SVN repository onto DVD would take 25 DVDs and probably over a day of copying.. I had a quick look at backup tapes but those are now more expensive than hard disks. IOMega’s REV system would fit the bill, but at $1 a gigabyte and $399 for the actual cartridge drive, it’s hardly a cheap solution either. Add to that the fact that IOmega quietly drop their old storage formats (Zip, Jazz) every few years and there’s simply no acceptable solution out there.

Now (hint) if you guys at IOmega want to get in touch and send me a REV system for review, I would only be too happy to review it for you 🙂

My compromise is to put an archive section on my main hard drive for now.. do I still need to put everything in my SVN version control repository? I guess so since Time Machine does not support snapshots (yet?).

This leaves getting used to the new applications that come with Leopard. Mail app is quite a bit faster than it was and it now deals gracefully with large mail boxes (I’ve got around half a million emails). Putting aside the awful “capsules”, it’s a fine mail application. I’m not sure about the non-hierarchical to-do list; this seems kind of simplistic and with a million things to do and limited time, you need something more heavy duty. My current solution is a huge whiteboard and several hundred “to-do” post-its all over the office walls..

For me the fact that the new “Terminal” application has been improved is a not insubstantial gain. Tabs are great and there simply wasn’t anything worthwhile out there to challenge the built-in terminal application..

Another big change is that the Unix foundations of Leopard have changed quite a bit. A lot of things that you used to have to install yourself are now built-in: svn, ruby (a proper working version), rails, etc.. This is a double-edged sword (how easy is it going to be to upgrade the built-in unix tools?), but it’s a step in the right direction. It only took me about a day to migrate my “in-house” ruby/mysql system and another hour or so to figure out what’s wrong with svn.

As a developer of course the most significant change is XCode 3.0. I’m looking forward to getting more acquainted with it..

Is it a successful upgrade? Yes, it is. It might take some getting used to the new look, but there’s a lot of hidden goodness and the panoply of small improvements soon add up to an improved over-all experience.

Most importantly (unless you use Application Enhancer and other haxies), you’re in for a simple, largely trouble free upgrade to a more refined product. It’s not a giant leap right now, but once developers like myself can start using 10.5-only features (expect that to be around the time 10.6 launches and everybody who buys software has migrated to 10.5), you’ll see a lot of improvements in actual applications. And isn’t the applications that make an operating system great?

Take care until next time.

Yours sleep deprived..

Frank

Getting ready for Leopard

After yesterday’s release of “The Big Mean Folder Machine” 1.0, my attention is now shifting towards the imminent release of Mac OS X Leopard.

The rumor mill has it that it will be released the last weekend of October and as always we’ll be ready.. there are only minor visual glitches to take care of.

I’m not sure what your thoughts on the new and much darker “space” theme are, but I think it will take some getting used to. I’m still not convinced that the new “darker” Apple site looks anything as good as the old “aqua” one.. it’s the first time that I’m wondering whether Apple is actually taking a step backwards rather forwards at least in visual style..

As soon as Leopard is officially released, work on A Better Finder Rename v8 will start in earnest.. no rest for the wicked.