Leopard's Terminal Tabs

As I shared yesterday, I love tabs. One of the few good things that MacOS 10.5 Leopard brought, was enhanced Terminal application. A basic feature - Tab support - that was missing in Terminal for way too long, was finally added, and Terminal app became finally usable for anyone who spends a great time of the day working on the command line.

Before Leopard, I used iTerm, but there was just something about it that I didn't like, but the availability of tabs made me get over it. Now with Leopard there is no need for iTerm any more.

Just to point out that Apple seems to be unable to get anything 100% right these days, there are two flaws in the Terminal's tab implementation.

The first flaw is that you can't easily switch between tabs using keyboard shortcut. All you can do is to use cmd+{ and cmd+} to switch to previous or next tab respectively. What a "wonderful" choice of keys that require use of right hand or both hands. Most importantly, one can't use the handy cmd+1, cmd+2, ..., cmd+9 shortcuts (or anything similar) to switch to one of the first nine tabs. Maybe Apple doesn't want to overload us with new features and is planning to add this to Terminal in MacOS 10.6. :-) Fortunately, the cmd+{ and cmd+} shortcuts can be remapped via System Preferences.

The second flaw is that Terminal doesn't let you name the tabs or configure how the tabs should be named. This is a useful feature that many other terminal applications have, but Apple decided that using the name of the program of the currently running process is good enough. Well, this is what it looks like:

People are doing all kinds of crazy things to work around this issue. Including using hardlinks to change names of programs or creating dummy processes that carry the tab name.

I would be very happy if Apple did something similar to what xterm does - using an environmental variable to set name of the tab dynamically. But I have a feeling that we'll see MacOSX Trash go 3D sooner than properly working Terminal tabs. :(

Mac Applications That I Use

I've been meaning to write this entry on applications installed on my computer for a few months now, but never found time to do it. Hopefully none of those new Mac users that I told to check out my blog "in a few days", several months ago, got angry at me. If nothing else, my promise helped me to get more regular readers :).

Anyway, here is the list of apps installed on my Mac (all these apps work with Leopard, unless I noted otherwise):

Essentials

A Mac without these apps would never be the same:

• Quicksilver - an app that helps you find things on your computer and execute actions on these things. I use it to launch apps, pause iTunes, find contacts in the AddressBook, and many many many other things. Most of the cool functionality is added via plugins, so don't forget to checkout the plugin section of preferences. This app is a must have. Here are Some docs and a good video.
• Adium - a really handy IM client that can handle all the popular IM protocols. Definitely a must have. (it's much better than iChat when it comes to IM-ing).
• Growl - Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X: it allows applications that support Growl to send you notifications. Notifications include Adium or Skype messages, network up/down events, volume mount/unmount events, currently played iTunes song and many others. More info - One extension that I found to be incompatible with Leopard is GrowlMail for Mail.app notifications, when I received many new messages at once this extension would cause the Mail.app to crash.
• MacPorts - This is a geeky one: The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system.
• Firefox - no description needed :)

Nice to Have

• iStat menus - a nifty app that displays stats about cpu load, cpu temperature, memory and network utilization, and a lot of other interesting data about your Mac. I use it as a replacement of MenuMeters which I couldn't get to run reliably on Leopard.
• Perian - Perian is a free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats.
• Camino - yeah, as if the fact that I'm obsessed with tabs was not enough, I usually run 2 or 3 browsers at the same time to be able to take advantage of their unique features, or more often, while developing webapps, I need to be able to have more than one session open.
• Chicken of the VNC - A handy VNC client
• MacFUSE + sshfs - MacOS X implementation of FUSE, which makes it possible to painlessly mount all kinds of different filesystems e.g. sshfs.
• MacFusion - GUI frontend for MacFUSE
• VLC - alternative to QuickTime video player with build-in support for all kinds of video and audio codes, subtitle support and many other features
• Vine Server (OSXvnc) - a good VNC server in case you need a bit more control than the Leopard's built-in server offers
• Skype - I have a love-hate relationship with Skype. As soon as I find an alternative crossplatform communication tool with audio and video support and cheap calls to Slovakia, I'll switch. Maybe Gizmo will become that tool one day
• NeoOffice - don't forget to install the latest Patch. I have big hopes for OpenOffice Aqua to be released soon. My initial experiments revealed some very good performance results.
• iShowU - a cool app for creating screencasts. This is the only paid-for app on my list. But it's well worth it.
• Caffeine - Caffeine is a tiny program that prevents your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Very useful during video calls, while reading PDFs or watching movies.
• Twitterrific - a Twitter client
• Azureus - Java BitTorrent client
• SkeyCalc - An OTP (S/Key) calculator
• Cisco VPN Client

Development

• NetBeans - there is a lot of controversy in the community when it comes to the Eclipse vs NetBeans question. I used Eclipse for a really long time, but ever since I tried NB6 Milestone 8 or so, I started liking NB more than Eclipse. I'll give Eclipse another shot in a few weeks, but for now NetBeans is my default IDE. And as far as Ruby/JRuby development is concerned, I don't think that this is going to change for a long time.
• JRuby - a pure Java-based Ruby interpreter
• GlassFish - JavaEE 5.0 compliant application server

Other Stuff

• Drivers for my Vydeo eSATA 34: Dual Port 34mm Express Card - More info in my older blog entry

Other Lists

Rama and Martin composed similar lists some time ago, so you might want to check those out as well.

Mail.app Unread Message Mystery Resolved

Last night I finally resolved an issue that was bothering me ever since I got my MacBook Pro and by posting this entry I hope to help others with the same issue.

I use Mail.app for reading my emails via pop3s and imaps and I noticed that some messages were randomly getting flagged as unread. Sometimes the message would stay read forever, other times I had to mark it 10 times as read and a couple of hours or days later it would become unread again.

This was really frustrating and even though I tried googling around, I couldn't find the cause or resolution for this problem. When asking others, nobody knew or suffered from the same issue and that gave me hope that there must be a fix or a way to avoid it.

Last night enough was enough and I googled again. I don't know if I used the right combination of keywords, or if Google's index got better, but I found a forum thread discussing the very same issue I was having!

Apparently GPGMail (an extension that integrates GPG with Mail.app) is responsible for this. Sure enough, the author even acknowledges the issue on his site.

Q: Since I installed GPGMail, some read messages have their 'read' status come back to 'unread'. What's happening? A: It's is a bug in GPGMail that I've been unable to fix yet. The only workaround that works for most people (but not all) is to disable automatic decryption/verification of emails.

The workaround didn't work for me, uninstalling the extension did!

I'm not thrilled by not having GPG support in my mail client, but for now I'd rather be without GPG than having to bear with ~500 unread emails in my mailbox.

Since in my case the issue is repeatable (even after reinstalling MacOSX), I can provide any necessary information to the author if he's interested in fixing it.

In my opinion the issue has something to do with imap or imaps mailboxes and I wouldn't be surprised if many people at Sun would be suffering from the same issue, since imaps is the default mail retrieval protocol at Sun.

How TomTom Saved My Day

TomTom One in 3D Map Mode

As probably any other technology junkie out there, I had been looking at the evolution of car navigation systems and thinking about how cool it would be to have a device that could really make it easy to travel in a unknown area without having to worry about studying maps ahead of time or having another person filling out the role of a navigator.

A friend of mine bought a TomTom One recently and was telling me how great this device was. Not that he's untrustworthy person, but for some reason I accepted the information but didn't decide to take any further action.

On our last trip to Yosemite, I didn't pay attention to the direction I was driving for a moment and forgot to take a turn that I should have. This little mistake cost us 1 hour delay, wasted gas and created some frustration. At that point I revisited the information from my trustworthy friend and started looking for a GPS car navigation system that was affordable, yet feature rich and reliable.

Consumer Reports made it clear that TomTom One is the way to go. Other reviews as well as information from my trustworthy friend confirmed this.

Last week, my TomTom unit arrived, after I ordered it on the Internet. It looks good, is compact, and is very easy to use. In the following days I started to get to know it during my daily commute.

TomTom One is slim! I bet that many American's envy its figure :-)

It wasn't until last Thursday, that I had to put my TomTom into a real-world test. The main project that I work on right now at Sun is customization and deployment of Confluence for soon to be launched wikis.sun.com. Atlassian, the company behind Conluence, organized Atlassian User Group meeting in Stanford, that I was joining.

Even though I have been living in the San Francisco Bay Area for 2 years now, I don't know Stanford very well. The meeting was taking place in the Stanford campus, which is beautiful, but can be pretty challenging to navigate through thanks to many little streets with many intersections through out the campus. Combine all of that with my "talent" for doing things last minute and you get a person rushing to get somewhere where he's never been before. Sounds like a good challenge for my brand-spanking-new TomTom, right? ;-)

Well it really was. I left from Menlo Park campus much later than I originally planned to, so I quickly jumped into my car, input the destination address and headed out into the unknown.

TomTom picked a route that most likely I would have picked as well if I studied the maps or used Google Maps*. The fact that I didn't need to watch out for turns and making sure that I was on the right street made the whole "rush" much easier.

One thing that I observed during the first ride with TomTom was that the 3D maps that TomTom uses by default are really good. At first it seemed unnatural for me to use 3D maps instead of birds eye's view 2D maps. But after driving with the 2D maps on I quickly switched to the 3D view. It really is much easier to keep track of where you are and where you need to go on the 3D map!

There was one point during my travel to the meeting, when I truly appreciated having my TomTom. When I was already in the Stanford University campus, navigating through a maze of little streets, my TomTom said "Turn right", I tried, really tried - but the sign "Road construction. Road Closed" didn't let me go through. I had to take the only possible turn that there was and ignore the instructions. If I had just a small scrap of paper with driving instructions on it, I would have been lost. With TomTom there is no need for panic, I just took the only turn that I could, TomTom realized that something went wrong and recalculated the route taking into consideration my current position, successfully navigating me around the road construction.

I got to my destination on time and it wouldn't have been like that if it weren't for my TomTom One.

Night Mode

No product is perfect (at least not in my eyes ;-) ), so here is a few things that I'd like to see improved:

• Reorganized menu - some items that are often needed are buried deep in the menu structure (e.g. clear route), others are not found where one would look for them (e.g. edit favorites)
• Map Share technology recently announced with the TomTom Go 720 model, should become standard feature for all TomTom GPS products - to make this feature really useful they need to gain critical mass and to do that they should offer it in all products
• Redo the TomTom Home application - currently I found almost no value in this app - it's just shopping desktop application that happens to be able to backup your TomTom. Did I mention that it crashed on me at least 5 times on my Mac during the few minutes that I used it so far?!? All in all the app is next to useless. Features like creating an itinerary, reviewing past trips, showing some statistics are lacking.
• There are absolutely no statistics offered for the current trip, or just after reaching the destination. Americans love statistics, so it's interesting that such a feature is missing in a product that is successful on the American market ;-)
• Rama brought up a good point while we were talking about the device - there is no way to tell your current elevation. Isn't that like the most basic feature of a GPS device?
• The device seems to be a closed platform - software-wise as well as hardware-wise. I wish it was possible to write plugins that would make it possible to add some of the features that I miss. I haven't found any "developer" section on the tomtom.com website. If it was possible to connect the device with something else than bluetooth cellphones, it would be interesting to see what could one do with a combination of a TomTom and a SunSPOT - temperature, atmospheric pressure, humidity and acceleration readings, anyone? How about switching TomTom to the night mode when it gets dark outside? How many other possibilities would opening the platform enable?
  
• Last but foremost - I'd appreciate having a button which when pushed would make a car in front of me disappear. There should be a limit on how many "clicks" one can make per day or week though, to avoid a large scale abuse of this feature, which might have undesirable side effects :-D

See also: TomTom One Caught Speeding!

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* btw have you heard of the new real-time route adjustment feature? It would be really great if it was this easy to adjust the route in TomTom.

OpenOffice.org Aqua Development Snapshot - First Impressions and Comparison with NeoOffice

I came across the news that the first OOo Aqua build was released. This is still an early alpha and as my brief testing proved it's not suitable for any kind of production use.

First impressions are good though. OOo Aqua looks a lot like NeoOffice. There is still of lot of areas where OOo Aqua is lacking behind, but the improvement from the X11 based OOo are definitely noticeable.


OOo Aqua


NeoOffice

The application is much faster than the X11 version and feels more like a Mac application than X11 application. If any of you tried running OOo via X11 on a Mac you know what a pain it is :-/.

My shallow experiments showed that OOo Aqua uses only half of the memory compared to NeoOffice. If the stable release will keep this feature it will be a huge improvement and a slap in the face to NeoOffice.


Don't forget the NeoOffice numbers don't include memory used by X11

Some users claim that the alpha version of OOo Aqua is faster in certain areas than the current NeoOffice (see this in-depth review). I didn't notice a big difference between the two, except for performance in window resizing where NeoOffice is faster (but still terribly slow compared to any other Aqua application).

Overall I'm impressed about the results of only a few weeks of active development since the project announcement in the May. OOo Aqua developers keep up the good job!!!

(If you ever wondered why OOo Aqua and NeoOffice are two very similar projects that run in parallel, then here is a couple of answers that shed some light on this situation)

reasonsToIgnoreMicrosoft++

Last night I read about the big news from Microsoft.

Microsoft claims that free software like Linux, which runs a big chunk of corporate America, violates 235 of its patents. It wants royalties from distributors and users.

Is Microsoft really so desperate that it turns to desperate measures like this? I started my boycott against Microsoft two years ago and I've never had a moment's regret :-).

Here at Sun we strongly believe in open source software and open standards (need proof? see OpenJDK, OpenSolaris, OpenJFX and many others). Why? Because we are convinced that this is one of the things that can make the world a better place.

If you use Microsoft products you might want to look into alternatives which are often far superior. Most of these alternative applications/services are free or even open source. And these are the applications that Microsoft is trying to destroy because they can't find a better way to compete with them.

Check these out just to name a few:

• Java - as an alternative to .NET
• Ubuntu Linux/Solaris/MacOS - as alternatives to MS Windows
• OpenOffice/NeoOffice - as alternatives to MS Office
• Firefox - as an alternative to MS Internet Explorer
• Thunderbird - as an alternative to Outlook
• Miranda/Adium - as an alternative to MSN Messenger
• Google Online Products - as an alternative to MS Live

If you like any of these, don't forget to tell you friends and help us make the world a better place :)

Adobre Reader 8.0 Direct Download Link

I previously posted a direct download link for 7.x version of Adobe Reader and a bunch of people found it useful. So here is the link for version 8.0:

AdbeRdr80_en_US_i386.dmg

Enjoy Adobe Reader without the hassle of dealing with Adobe Reader Download Manager.

iAlertU - Alarm System for your Apple MacBook Computer

When I saw the light saber fight video and tried the app I thought that it was cool, but sort of useless. The other day I stumbled upon the iAlertU application that uses the sudden motion sensor (SMS) to protect a Mac against thieves. Too bad that it is so easy to bypass it by using earphones :-/. But I have to admit that it is a creative idea and more useful than the mac saber.

Private Wiki Dilemma

I've been using GTDTiddlyWiki as my private offline wiki for over a year now and I was pretty happy with it for a long time.

At the time when I picked GTDTiddlyWiki as my private wiki I didn't realize how much and how often I would use it. It's about that time when my needs have outgrown what GTDTiddlyWiki has to offer, so I'm looking around for something with a few more features and ongoing development.

I like the idea of a client-side wiki as a private wiki, and TiddlyWiki and all its flavors seems to dominate this area. I was considering switching to TiddlyWiki, but I found a very interesting feature called TagglyTagging of MonkeyPirateTiddlyWiki (yet another TiddlyWiki flavor). I though that content tagging couldn't get any better, but it seems that I was wrong. :)

I'll give MonkeyPirateTiddlyWiki a shot!

BTW tiddlyspot is hosting TiddlyWiki, MonkeyPirateTiddlyWiki and a few other TiddlyWiki flavors. By using their service you can easily upload your wiki to their servers and make it available to the public (or password protect it). Pretty neat, but after being among security geeks at Sun for some time I'm hesitant to use this cool feature. :-/

Am I getting paranoid enough Martin? ;-)