Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

Last week, I picked up the new O'Reilly book Mac OS X Hacks by Rael Dornfest & Kevin Hemenway, not quite sure what to expect.

Wow. This is a real must-have book for Mac OS X power users. The term "hacks" is usually not quite the right term. Sure, there are techniques for controlling iTunes via the Web and altering your user interface. But for the most part, it's a tour of many of Mac OS X's capabilities that I didn't know about, or seemed harder to access than they really are. (And this is coming from somebody who has used Unix for almost two decades and is a regular reader of MacOSXHints!) Instead, it's more of a "How-To" book.

Some randomly selected highlights:

• How to remove stubborn locked files
• Setting up an MP3 streaming "radio station"
• Sending SMS messages via Address Book
• Saving Terminal settings to presets
• Turning your Mac into a router to share internet connectivity
• VPN/SSH tunneling
• Setting up an IMAP server
• Using Perl, AppleScript, PHP from Apache
• Setting up MySQL and Postgres databases

It's much, much better than many other OSX books, including O'Reilly's lightweight Leaning Unix for Mac OS X.

Unless you've been focusing on more important issues, you're probably aware of Apple's new online music service. Apple says it is "revolutionary" and it's making the music industry be "reborn."

I say it was inevitable, and quite the opposite of what I would have hoped Apple would do. It really is more of a Microsoft kind of thing to do.

Apple used to be about empowering the "little guy" to do creative stuff. Desktop publishing and iMovie are great examples of this. Apple's music service, on the other hand, does just the opposite.

Why? It is a clearinghouse for the big music labels -- the same megacorporations that are stagnating. Chances are next to nil that I'll ever find a lot of the artists in my collection, such as Bay Area-based Eastern European vocal ensemble Kitka, my three-year-old daughter's favorite David Jack, MIDI Guitar wizard Mark Dwane, Oakland-based electropop band The Lovemakers, Italian superstar crooner Laura Pausini, or ambient/trance Delerium.

And yet I can go to the bands' web sites, my local record store or even amazon.com and get their music.

If Apple wanted to do something and revolutionary, they could have done something much more extraordinary that would have not only included the big names, but also allowed the "little guys" to make their music available over iTunes. (Robb Beal recently posted a reminder of a possible model for such a system, posted a couple of years ago.)

Come on, Apple. Think Different.

Since the 1.7 version of Watson came out last week, I've been deluged with e-mails (OK, maybe a dozen) asking how to delete the saved search terms that show up in the combo boxes across the suite of Watson tools.

A great idea for a future version of Watson to provide this functionality! But if you want to clear out your saved searches now, there's a slightly more elegant solution than throwing away your entire prefs file (which is a baby-with-the-bath-water approach).

Check out Watson's Grab Bag page for an AppleScript that will delete the saved searches for you (after quitting Watson).

Yipee! The new version of Watson, 1.7, is officially out today. I know a lot of Watson users would have been expecting a 2.0 release, but the major update work has progressing slowly. The new bleeding-edge technology that I've been adapting from some Schema Research work is, well, still bleeding. So to keep the embers warm, I decided that an interim update was in order.

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Well, it looks like doing "beyond the browser" Web-connected applications is the hot thing this year. At the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, it was announced that NetNewsWire and Spring were the first- and second-place winners of their Mac OS X Innovators Contest.

(Envious? Yep ... but Watson was not qualifed to even enter the contest! Something about that Apple Design Award last year. But since both applications make use of the CURLHandle framework that I've made availalbe as open source, I can privately share the glory.)

As it happens, these two applications can be bought along with Watson in a discounted three-way bundle ... but only until the end of April. Here's the page with the details.

Hearty felicitations to the programs' creators, Brent Simmons and Robb Beal!

Just for fun (because I think the icon is so nice; Michael Matas does some great work!), I thought I'd share the icon for an upcoming freeware application, in development....

If you already have Watson, this won't be a big deal; it will just be a subset of the existing tools.

And no, I don't have a scheduled release date. Please, no breath-holding. It's just a pretty icon!

I'm pleased to announce the opening of an open-source repository of some useful Cocoa tidbits used in Watson and some other projects I've been working on. Unlike the Omni Frameworks or CocoaTech's new frameworks, this is a lot less ambitious and less packaged. It's really just a weblog (Yes, Virginia, there is an RSS feed) where each entry is just a snippet of code. You need to copy and paste into your projects as needed. The copyright is, I believe, extremely liberal (certainly not infectious like the gnu license), but let me know if you feel it can be improved.

Why do this? Just a way of giving back to the Cocoa community that has been so helpful to my efforts in building Watson.

I'll add to this repository occasionally as I run across more generic bits of code, but don't expect a steady stream! :-)

A Watson beta tester/plugin developer passed this image to me. I thought it was funny and relevant... maybe Apple will replace Sherlock! :-) Plus, it hints that perhaps Apple will be resurrecting the Taligent Pink technology, long suspected dead.

(By Andy Tarpinian, used with permission)

While many of us will be working on getting out our income taxes at the last minute, I'll be at the meeting of the Diablo Valley Macintosh User Group in Walnut Creek, California, talking about who knows what. They will probably convince me to show off a few features from the upcoming update to Watson. If you're in the East Bay, come to the meeting and say Hi!

Here's a tidbit for the more technically inclined user of Mac OS X (in otherwords, somebody who can deal with the terminal and shell scripts): You can create "cron" jobs to pop up periodic reminders! For example, I have my development system configured to pop up a reminder every afternoon to remember to check in my files.

Use Cronnix (or if you're brave, edit your crontab file manually) to run your reminder script whenever you wish. In my case, I have a line in my crontab file to invoke my "remind_cvs" script:

30 16 * * * /Users/dwood/bin/remind_cvs

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The story about Sherlock 3 vs. Watson has been beaten to death*. But what about good old Sherlock 2 (and 1, for that matter?) Watson was originally conceived as a companion to Sherlock -- because Sherlock didn't go far enough. But still, the original Sherlock had some useful features. There are dozens, if not hundreds of Sherlock 2 plug-ins available for download from various Web sites, but Apple effectively abandoned them.

There's an interesting project that's part of Mozilla called Mycroft that resurrects the Sherlock 2 plug-in as a way of conveniently searching a site.

Hmm, this gives me some ideas....

We've teamed up with UserCreations and Ranchero to create our first software bundle, packaging Watson together with Spring and NetNewsWire, two other great "beyond the browser" apps. Get all three applications for $68, which is 25% off of individual prices. Details are here. (This goes through the end of April, and unfortunately there's no deal for current Watson licensees...)

A few tools are being updated today:

• Amazon (1.6.2.1) -- CD track listings; a few new attributes in the details list; changing store does not clear the search field.
• Movies (1.6.2.1) -- Fixed AppleScript to force the QuickTime Player opened to be the Mac OS X version.
• PriceGrabber (1.6.2.2) -- Updated to latest product hierarchy (including cross-references); fixed bug that prevented showing more than 25 items in the list generated from the third column; emphasized digital photography since it was hard to find
• Packages (1.6.2.2) -- Fix UPS site parsing.

I've given up using rsync on the Mac. Maybe it's not on my end, but I'm getting all sorts of mystery files with "dirattr" in their name showing up when I upload files from the local development machine to the hosting server. And mysterious messages of "fopen: No such file or directory", and attempts to upload "rsrc" directories that don't exist. A Google search doesn't turn up much help, though others are having that problem as well.

Here's something kind of cool. It's possible to embed files of any type inside a TextEdit "rtfd" document, much like you'd put attachments in an e-mail message! (But see the caveat below!)

Putting attachments in your file is easy -- just drag a file (or folder) into your document. (The icon will now be placed in with the text.) The "receiver" of the document can just drag the icon out to their desktop.

The caveat: Be careful when saving your document with the embedded files. If you had changed the file externally, and then you save your document containing that file, you will lose your changes!

(Note: There's a Mac OS X Hints article similar to this tip, and it discusses possible security implications of embedded applications.)

An interesting speech compression technology has been invented by a fellow I know. Maybe it's time to start thinking about integration with Watson.