Life is grand

Disk Inventory X is a handy app for Mac OS X that gives you a useful view of what is taking up space on your disk. I was running low on disk space and thought I’d use it to find out what was up. Turns out I had nearly 3gb of iGarage and iDVD files that I never, ever use. So those are gone. I also cleared up some other unused files and am thinking I need to host my Parallels VM partitions somewhere else. All in all I’ve managed to clear about 5gb of files I didn’t use, a nice saving.

Tom Raftery pointed out the new Parallels RC3 release which now has “Coherence” mode. It is strange but very useful seeing Microsoft Windows applications floating on my Mac OS X desktop. They are running in a Parallels VM but have been “detached” from that desktop and allowed onto the host desktop as separate windowed applications. It makes flipping between Internet Explorer 7 and Safari while doing web-development a breeze. The installation was painless and the speed is impressive.

Another interesting feature is that Parallels can now run your Bootcamp partition in a VM. Very useful. Now I can save on VM and partition space.

Checkout all the new features of Parallels RC3.

(Apparently we are allowed to blog about Joost, just no screenshots as of yet. If I got that wrong then tell me and I’ll yank this down.)

I got a beta invite to try Joost out today and was pretty stoked. Finaly, I’d get to see what the hype was about.

I downloaded the 9mb file to a Windows XP VM in Parallels on Mac OS X. The installation was pretty good, even doing a system requirements check which the VM passed. The app installed but when I tried to run it it said it could not access the 3D hardware. Fair enough, nothing can do that in Parallels yet.

So I booted into Windows Vista Ultimate, downloaded it again and installed it. Running it though gave me a nice big error message. Fair enough I guess, it does say Windows XP with SP2 only (though there are apparently ways of getting Joost to work on Vista. I am just not going to bollocks about with that.)

So I grabbed my girlfriend’s laptop which had Windows XP SP2, installed the app and… you guessed it, it didn’t work. No dedicated 3D hardware in her work laptop. OK.

So I grabbed her other laptop, an Acer with a 256mb 3D graphics card. It installed and to my delight it ran. The screen went dark and then the strange but oddly cool Joost crystals whirled about the screen. Pretty.

I like the interface, clean and simple though I do worry about the average computer user being able to figure it out. Some of the icons are not intuitive.

So, what about the video?

It didn’t work.

I could list the channels, view the item entries, see the thumbnails, do searches, install plugins, check out the chat forums and everything else, except watch video. Sometimes Joost would tell me it couldn’t load the video but most of the time the crystals just whirred and nothing played.

Is my home broadband not fast enough? Joost says it will average about 320mb per hour download and 120mb upload per hour. I’ve downloaded 1gig files in about 45minutes and uploaded a few hundred mb in an hour.

I suspect something is up with the bandwidth but I wish Joost was a bit more informative about what was happening.

I’ll find a Windows XP machine at work (which has mega-bandwidth) tomorrow and see if it works better.

I normally launch TextMate through a terminal window with “mate *” in the project directory. That brings up TextMate with the folder list showing all folders and files in the project directory. It works nicely but often there are directories in your project that you don’t need to edit but which are cluttering the view.

So just the other day I learnt that instead of “mate *” you can type “mate dir1 dir2 dir5″ and TextMate will load with just those folders shown. e.g. in a Ruby on Rails app you generally only need to edit the app, config and public folders, ignoring the log, vendor, test etc. folders until you need them later. So you can type “mate app public” for a Rails project.

Very uncluttered and useful. Good one TextMate!

FeedDemon’s solution to a tough problem is elegant and simple. The problem is how does one find popular items within the feeds one cares about. Other systems are applying all sorts of voting systems, tagging pools, text analysis and “machine learning” which is all well and good but often doesn’t work quite the way one expects.

FeedDemon says “count the number of referrals and list from highest to lowest.” Simple. That it is applied just to the feeds you are subscribed to makes it so much more powerful. You have already gone to the trouble of selecting the feeds you care about so why throw that out in favour of some complex “blogosphere wide” analysis engine that gets it wrong a good deal of the time.

The Times Reader is an interesting project between the New York Times and Microsoft. For Microsoft it is a technology demonstration, in this case .NET 3.0 (WinFX really) and for the Times it is an exploration of delivering readable content to screens. The web and even most desktop software makes for a bad reading experience. Low DPI, wide blocks of text, poor fonts and, especially on the web, little if any typograhic control.

The Times Reader aims to make reading on the screen easy on the eyes. Using the Microsoft technology it offers the Times’ fonts, builds in readable columns and uses up all the screen real estate it can to present what looks very much like a print newspaper on your screen.

Here are a few screenshots of it in action though I recommend you download it and give it a go to see the layout technology at work (it is a Windows XP/Windows Vista only app, no Mac or Linux versions.)

When you first load it the app downloads a complete set of articles from the server. It then periodically synchronises allowing you to later use the app and read articles offline. As you can see it mimics a newspaper layout. On the right you will see some articles are just being displayed as headlines. If I made the window bigger the summaries of each would start to be displayed and the layout would change.

Along the top you have the different sections which smoothly flips the view from topic to topic.

Here you can see the front page after I have resized the window to a smaller area.

Clicking a headline/article takes you to the article view:

The article is nicely displayed in columns and flows around the image. You can see an advert in this screenshot but not all articles display an advert. If the full article was too long to fit on this one view then the page control (bottom right) would let me flip to the next page. It is a bit fiddly though as you have to click the little arrows rather than a bigger region.

You can also see the text-size control in the bottom left. As you adjust this the view automatically re-flows itself to fit. Honestly though the sizing is in steps and is quite jumpy. I’d have preffered something smoother.

You can go to the next article using the control near the bottom right. The arrows are once again a bit small but the transition to the next article is quite smooth.

An article has several tools one of which lets you annotate with a pen. Handy if a bit limited (other users can’t see it for instance.)

The search has three views one of which is this fluid diagram that shows an article with its assigned “topics” radiating out from it. Topics are much like tags.

Clicking on a topic takes you to a view which shows all articles tagged with that topic:

The other search view shows a grid layout of all stories that match your search, sorted by relevance (as indicated by the litte filled in dots):

Then onto the News in Pictures view which is very, very simple:

It simply takes all the photos in the paper and displays them one after the other with captions. A gallery would have been ideal and also links back to the originating articles.

I am not convinced of the usefulness of the What’s Read but it is an interesting view. It shows you each section with little squares that on roll-over display an article you have read. I would have liked an indicator next to each article title on any page to show that I have read it (much like links on the web change colour.)

All in all the Times Reader is interesting and works quite well. My main problem with it is that it is a separate, desktop app. bound to one OS. We need to get this technology into the browser.

This might seem a bit “me too” but it would seem all the Ruby on Rails developers on Mac who use TextMate actually have a clue. This is a really good text editor. Good enough that I just paid €39 for it. The “project” fly-out is simple and brilliant, no meta project files or strange directory structure requirements; it just shows everything under the directory you specify. The bundles work well too providing shortcuts and intelligent text handling for a variety of tasks e.g. HTML, CSS and Ruby on Rails.

All in all a great tool, go give it a try.

I really am a card carrying Rails on Mac user now.

CrossOver Mac is an impressive and useful piece of software. It lets you run Windows applications on Mac OSX without the need for virtual machines (e.g. Parallels). The app runs in what looks like a native OSX window and even allows you to access your OSX files from within the Windows app.

I was most impressed with the installation process. CodeWeavers has a repository of applications on their server that you can select to install on your Mac. No need for your own CDs (obviously this doesn’t get around licensing, you still need to own these apps or they have to be free e.g. Internet Explorer.) The installation process is very slick and dead easy, I can see non-technical users using this without much hassle.

In the above image you can see Internet Explorer 6.0 runnin on my Mac OSX desktop. Brilliant for testing websites. I’ll give Visual Studio 2005 a try next, a challenge if there is one.

S3Fox is an extension for Firefox that gives you an FTP like view of your Amazon S3 account. You can upload and download files, view their URLs, create “directories” (S3 doesn’t technically support directories within buckets and so this has to be faked) and set the Access Control List on items.

Finally found a decent replacement for Exodus in Spark, a Jabber IM.

We use Exodus as our “corporate IM” at the TSSG and while it does the job it can be a bit flaky, isn’t very pretty and overall needs some polish. Spark though, amazingly being a Java app, is clean, light, fast, feature rich and stable.