Well, I spent a few more hours on this little tool today, and here we go, v1.0a2 is available for your consumption:

• Added split views so they can be resized (not saved to prefs yet),
  
• Chats directory parsing is smarter now, only adding newly added transcripts.
  
• Fixed an issue with some names appearing blank in the participants table.
  
• Your own name no longer shows up in the participants table.
  
• Participants table is now being sorted by name.
  

It is pretty useable for me now. Wow. A few things I want to add to it, still, yet that will wait till the next weekend, i guess.

Grab it here.

UPDATE 11/20/2005: We have released a new product (Chat Transcript Manager) which does everything iChat Transcript Manager used to. It uses an entirely different codebase, and is much more convenient. Try it out!

Does anyone remember the AppleGuide? It was such a great technology. What did you love or hate about the AppleGuide?

What were its strongest and weakest points?

Meet iChat Transcript Manager 1.0a1, my little pet project I've been working on weekends for 4 days already. As the name says, the purpose of this app is pretty simple - it will index and keep in a database all your saved iChat transcripts, so you can search through them and sort them. I got almost 3300 chat transcripts saved and being unable to search through them made me frustrated to no end, so I finally sat down and started the work on iCTM.

So, for the adventurous minds, below is a link to the very first alpha. It will only scan the saved chats directory upon launch, and in general it's still "first alpha" quality, but it is somewhat useable (to me, at least). I know of plenty of quirks already, but feel free to comment and leave the bug reports in the comments to this entry.

iChat Transcript Manager 1.0a1 - 140K. It is an alpha, so it may or it may not work, blah blah blah, download at your own risk, and if you want to recommend this thing to a friend, make sure you link to this blog entry and not the file directly. Thank you and tell me what you think. ;)

UPDATE: iCTM is up to 1.0a2 now: here.

So after several weeks of mucking of my iGesture Pad in the Russian customs, the thing has arrived to me. I immediately swapped out my mouse and connected the pad to my keyboard USB port. Mac OS X complained the device needs more power, so I had to take out my SoundSticks out of the LCD and stick them to the keyboard, and connect the iGesture Pad to the LCD, that has proper powering of the USB.

Anyway, the device started up immediately, and I was able to point and click right away - no driver installation was necessary (hello, USB!). I touched the three corners of the device to configure it as a Mac mode (so it sends out Cmd key combos), and voila, it's up and running!

Getting used to gestures seems not as hard as I have imagined. I've used the thing for half an hour now, and can semi-easily perform most of the basic gestures (pointing, clicking, dragging, scrolling up and down, and copy/pasting). I still have to think a bit before I do stuff, of course, but I suppose this will grow into a habit in a few days (weeks?) of use.

So far, I am liking it a lot -- gestures are pretty natural, so I don't have to stress my head thinking about how something has to be done. Closing windows via a gesture is cool, too, except I keep doing it the wrong direction - you need to turn my fingers clockwise to close a window, while I am used to the fact that turning clockwise opens something (bottle caps, for example) (Update: ugh, as LKM pointed out, I lost my touch with reality on that one, heh). So I ocassionally mix the Close and Open gestures -- no idea why it is done that way and not the reverse. Other than that, no gripes yet. Kudos to the FingerWorks team!

I'll post the updates about how I am progressing with this thing here, so if you're interested, watch this place.

Does anyone happen to have the September 2002 issue of Playboy and a scanner? I've been told that Unsanity was mentioned in an "article" on page 33 or so. If anyone has this, can you please email me a scan of it? (NO PORN!) I don't want the porn and I don't endorse the porn. My email address is at unsanity.com and not at .org.

Alrighty, back from the vacation. Managed to never fall down while skiing, but my neck hurts because of these evil things:

Overall, 'twas good. =)

Well, it's ready and uploaded. If you'd like to try it, send me an email (my email address is at unsanity.com, not unsanity.org) and tell me. The beta will not be posted here.

I need to send an email out to the beta list and I'd like to use MailDrop but that all depends on sending it to more than 20 people. wink

I am going out to a lil' vacation today to a small local ski resort for 3 days. The most amusing thing (to me, at least), is that I take no computers with me. Wow.

See you on Wednesday! ;)

Rosyna ranted about WWDC '03 just an entry ago, yet I wanted to contribute my own feelings and vision on the same matter.

Why did they rescheduled WWDC to summer? An obvious answer - to demo a version of the next major update to Mac OS X, code-named Panther. It is clear the new version has been in the development for a while on a different code trunks internally at Apple dev teams, yet they won't have the exciting glory Mr. Jobs wants to present by May.

But let's look at it from a slightly different angle. Apple mentioned recently they essentially don't want to have two big Mac-centric MacWorld events a year - simply cause it is hard to keep up the pace and present something outstanding every 6 months, as the public expects. Moreover, recent quarreling with the organizers of MacWorld made me think Apple purposely may have shifted WWDC to turn it into a more-expensive ($1295 anyone?), eye-catching replacement for MacWorld NY. Why? First of all, it will rake a little bit more money. Second, WWDC turns out to be an expo of one exhibitor, which is really good for attention. Third, by juicing the public about the Panther, Apple definitely wants more attention from even non-developer types, which turns WWDC into a more consumer event than before (is this good?). Fourth, no matter how childish it may sound, but knowing Apple, "it will teach IDG a lesson". I won't be surprised if Apple will not be present at all at MacWorld NY.

So, the conclusions? I guess WWDC will permanently happen in June from now on, and will try to fade out MacWorld summer event that way. It will also turn into a more consumer show over years, effectively making it a new Mac expo with the single exhibitor controlling the show. Am I blatantly wrong? Only time will tell...

As for MacHack being affected by the move, I don't think Apple did it intentionally. It's just what tends to happen when an elephant tries to turn around in a shop full of glass - it may break something accidentally even without wanting to. We'll see what happens with MacHack (I guess they will have to reschedule as well, sad). If it will stay at the same dates, I will try and make it to both conferences in a single trip (if I get a visa, that is =).

Oh, Apple, what are you doing to us...

I was checking the links in the last post and noticed that Apple not only moved WWDC (to the Moscone center in San Francisco) but they changed the dates as well (June 23-27)! What's worse is that it is now two days after MacHack! This is going to seriously affect the attendance of both events. Well, at least I won't have to deal with the lame soft water in the Fairmount hotel. I really, really hate soft water. The harder, the better.

Actually there is no possible way to do both MacHack and WWDC without massive overlap. MacHack would end events on June 22nd and WWDC usually has Early Bird sessions on the day before (also the 22nd). I guess its possible if you take a flight from Michigan to Oakland (since I only fly Southwest and they don't fly into SF) on the 22nd and completely skip your home town (or something to that effect).

When I was getting ready to go to work (school work, not Unsanity work) this morning I had a crazy hankering for Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Amazingly when I arrived there was a small box of said doughnuts in the "coffee" area. I happily helped myself to one, and only one, because I didn't want to get greedy even though usually the amount of doughnuts in the box only decreases by one at the end of the day. Honestly, this is the main reason I go to WWDC is for the free Krispy Kremes and the Gummy Bears. Mmm... Gummy Venus de Milo.

The school district's minimum requirement for a teacher's primary computer is a Power Mac 5500. Any teacher with a computer not meeting these requirements would be lynched. I mean, they'd be given a "teacher Dell" which is an Optiplex GX260 with an ATI Radeon 7500 (with video out, mirroring, dual displays and capturing), DVD-CDRW Combo drive, 256megs RAM and a 17 inch monitor that sells for $1,025.38. Instead they were given a second-hand Transource computer with a 500Mhz Celeron, a 48x CD-ROM Drive, some lame video card that only does video out (to TV, mirroring only) and a VIA VT82C692BX chipset. Transource no longer makes these computers.

All the Transources were wiped and re-imaged at the high school for this area before being shipped here (a middle school). Problem is, they were incorrectly configured. Office was installed and set to run "off the network". Which meant that it could only run if a particular network share was mounted. A network share shared from the high school. Granted, I could log into the high school and mount the share but then the teachers wouldn't be able to access their personal files and whenever they shut down (which I tell them to never, ever do) or restart, I'd have to log back in so they could use Office or check their email. The email program is Outlook 2002 and the first time it's ran, it does a little wizard thing which works great. But if you open Outlook before fixing the Office install (by running Word and giving it the data1.msi file it needs) then you must cancel the Outlook install which cancels the wizard. The wizard does not rerun and subsequent launches and must be run in order to complete the install. Every time I launched Outlook, it would use the partial settings from the wizard and then freeze. The only fix was to delete all the profiles and all the data files Outlook uses on the machine, uninstall Outlook then reinstall it. This whole problem took 5 hours to fix because of a slow network (Outlook installer was on the network shared).

Then today I got a work-order for a Dell that wouldn't boot and was showing the error "Invalid System Disk". Yes, this is incredibly easy to fix, just eject the floppy and hit the keyboard. I will cannot and will not blame this on the teacher. This is a PC problem and she should have never expected that to be a problem if she hasn't used PCs before and experienced this error. When a Mac encounters an invalid System Folder on a CD or some other removable media, it will go to the next device to find one. PCs should be as smart. I could change the boot order in the BIOS but I can't remember the password and I shouldn't have to resort to these methods. Needless to say, I really don't like PCs at all.

We are proud to present an update to our premiere menu customization haxie, FruitMenu. The minor update is recommended for all FruitMenu users, and features the following:

• You can now select the contextual menu popup delay for "Click and Hold Mouse Button to Access Contextual Menu In Finder" option.
  
• Cocoa applications now support shortcuts without the Command key set in FruitMenu (it was a Cocoa limitation).
  
• Improved handling of the shortcuts and selecting a menu item with a Command key to reveal an item.
  
• Added hardcoded Exclude List items that can optionally be synchronized from the Internet to prevent incompatibilities with individual applications.
  
• Improved contextual menu modules support.
  
• FruitMenu is now compatible with OnMyCommand CM by Abracode.
  
• Fixed a bug with FruitMenu crashing on displaying running applications list if one of the running applications has a trademark symbol in its name.
  
• Gather Items feature is no longer available for single file selections.
  
• Miscellaneous bug fixes.
  

Direct download: fruitmenu-301.dmg (1.03 Mb, internet-enabled disk image). As usual, thanks for your feedback and support - I said it before, and I'll say it again - our users kick ass!.

I am currently toying with a little pet project on my spare time, and has come upon a pretty big obstacle. I need a database solution that can be compiled into a Cocoa app and store Unicode strings in it. So far I've tried the usual NSArray/NSDictionary approach, but it becomes very slow and unusable with a large number of entries in a database (my database contains 115,316 entries in it, and searching through it is not easy). Moreover, it saves and loads very slow (about 10-12 seconds on an application launch).

So what other options do I have?

• Valentina SDK - a very fast and robust engine, which could be ideal for my needs (especially since we have a license since the Unsanity Echo days) - but it cannot handle Unicode, only ASCII, which is not good for my purposes;
  
• SQLite - another nice engine, but from what I've read on its site, it cannot handle strings that contain \00 - which makes it impossible to store unicode text in it directly. I think NetNewsWire uses SQLite, any tips/ideas, Brent?
  
• What other options are there?
  

Your ideas and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. To reiterate, I need to store lots of unicode strings, and search through them, and it gotta be faster than NSDictionary.

Amazing. I just spent a weekend without touching the computer for longer than 15 minutes. This is a rare thing for me, and I can say that it was pretty enjoyable (as long as I don't do it much, I guess ;). Went downhill skiing, broke one pole and my glasses when I flew over to a forest. I can also feel both hands and legs now -- I really have to exersize more often. Being a computer geek is fun, but sport should take a reasonable time in one's life as well.

Either way, a whole new week of work is ahead, and it looks good. ;)

The promised Labels X update is out, so grab it while it's still smokin' hot and our download servers are not overloaded:

• Added an option to change file modification date on label change.
  
• Labels contextual menu is no longer shown for the Desktop folder.
  
• Fixed an incompatibility with Folder Icon X contextual menu module.
  
• Fixed a bug causing Labels X contextual menu to crash the Finder under some circumstances.
  

Labels X 1.1.2 (1.2 Mb) (one of these internet-enabled disk images, by the way ;)

There seems to be nothing I can do about Cocoa's "Unique Font Handling" I've tried and tried and tried. The most I can do is just disable those fonts all together.

Silk 2.0 will be the final of Silk 1.5 (Silk 1.5 alpha has been pulled from this site.)

So now. Should I name the new Silk "Silk Pro", "Silk Extreme", "Silk Plus", or "Silk PEP (Pro Extreme Plus)"?

The old silk 1.1 will *not* be updated. There is no way to separate the current code base without making it unmanageable (preference system and the like). However, when the new Silk expires, the features that were in Silk 1.1 (And the new "Prefer Outline Fonts") will *not* be turned off. This has little to do with generosity and more to do with my laziness in finding a way to implement it. ;)

I am not sure the demo period of Silk 2.0. It could be anywhere between 5-15 days.

Please, which one of the above names do you prefer? I personally prefer Silk PEP because it mocks the others.

What are people's issues with companies charging for new versions of previously free software if the software is a significant change from the predecessor and the original, free version would still be available (but never updated)?

At least, this is the plan for Silk 2.0 because it is such a huge change from 1.1. The current plan is to leave all the current features of Silk 1.1 in (but that might change...) and release a beta of Silk 2.0 as soon as someone makes my movie. (Slava...)

Well, well, well, it seems like the updates day today... Mighty Mouse 1.1 is out now, and it's a free update to all the registered users, as usual.

New in v1.1:

• It is now possible to save previews of the currently installed cursors in the GIF format (either in one big image or in a series of small ones).
  
• Changing resolutions or awaking a computer attached to multiple displays no longer removes customized cursors.
  
• Cursor images are usually now premultiplied properly when necessary and unpremultiplied when separated into opaque and mask images.
  
• Fixed inconsistencies in mask colors - white is always fully opaque, black is always fully transparent.
  
• The Opaque and Mask image wells now indicate when they have keyboard focus.
  
• It is now possible to change the hotspot for cursors that are larger than the Image and Mask wells.
  
• The hotspot indicator is no longer one pixel away from its true position.
  
• The hotspot for the default arrow is now in the correct position.
  
• The arrow keys can now be used to move the cursor hotspot.
  
• Fixed a bug that disabled cursors that contained no transparent areas.
  
• Mighty Mouse no longer utilizes the CPU to animate images when the System Preferences window has been minimized, or when a sheet is being shown.
  
• Changing the Frame Duration; moving the hotspot; adding or removing frames; or importing or exporting a cursor toggles off Try Cursor.
  
• Frame Duration now indicates that it is displaying seconds.
  
• Navigating Mighty Mouse with Full Keyboard Access now makes sense.
  

Direct download: 2.0 Mb.

I did a small update to MUMenu. New version adds searching (either by manually entering keywords in a dialog or by searching by clipboard contents (if you, say, copied an application name to the clipboard)), along with some other changes. It's still free, so feel free to grab it if you like it, or never heard about it before.

So I ordered one of these iGesture Pads yesterday (I was ranting about it earlier). It will take a week to get here, and then another week to get it out of the customs (and they'll prolly eat like $150 of customs taxes off me, too), but I am looking forward to its arrival and will let you know how well it works for me. The guy over at FingerWorks said they take a good 3-4 weeks to get really used to, but once you did, they are very good. We'll see, we'll see.

Apple has posted an article on how to create these disk images that auto-copy their contents when you download them and move themselves to Trash. Some people love it, some people hate it, yet now we all know how to make these (and we knew it long before via ~stevenf, heh).

While working on other things, I also am doing a small update to Labels X, to address some bugs and issues that were found in older versions.

So far, I have added an option to "touch" the file modification date when changing label (some people requested that), made the Labels contextual menu not appear if you're clicking in the Desktop, fixed an incompatibility with Folder Icon X, and hopefully fixed an issue when Labels X may crash the Finder if you access its contextual menu under some semi-rare circumstances (that is, I can reproduce it sometimes, and some people never hit it). If you experienced that last problem very often, please let me know and I'll seed the latest beta to you.

Other than Labels X, an update to Mighty Mouse is coming. I also am progressing well on a brand new haxie - more info on that to follow sometime later. ;)

Try this in a Cocoa text editor that supports multiple undos. ProjectBuilder and TextEdit are both examples.

Open a read/write file with lots of important text in your editor (make a backup first). Select all the text in the file then press option i. Press delete. Try to undo. Try to revert to saved. Both should do nothing but present you with a blank window. If you close the file without saving, then reopen it, all the text will return.

David says, "Cocoa-Easiest way to share bugs across multiple applications." Of course, I had to clean that up for content.

Update: it appears "Revert to Saved" does work in TextEdit which might be another bug altogether. I mean, why enabled it if the file hasn't changed? Even though there is nothing displayed, the file is not dirty.

This screenshot was taken from a school computer (5400) in a very unused Mac lab. It's running System 7.5.3 and the date was shown by clicking on the current time. The date is in month/day/year format. Click the image for a full sized screenshot. Bah, THEM.

Oddly, ClarisWorks also has problems with floating point numbers in the spreadsheet "module". I haven't centered an image in a very long time.

Cocoa doesn't supports menu shortcuts that have no Command key in them. I wonder why - NSApplication calls -[NSMenu performKeyEquivalent:] only if it sees a Command key modifier in the event.

This would make sense if we were in Mac OS 7 days when standard menu definition didn't supported no-Command shortcuts, but since Mac OS X uses all-cool and great Carbon menus (yes, Cocoa menus are in fact mapped directly to Carbon), there is really no reason to implicitely not support something that is already there. It doesn't takes too much time to check, either, so forget about possible performance overhead.

Cocoa experts, anyone, am I missing a bigger picture?

I have updated the Application Enhancer homepage with a more extended, in-depth information about what Application Enhancer really is, what it can and cannot do, along with some answers to some most commonly asked questions. Hopefully this will clear up some misunderstanding and myths going around about APE. We're not as evil as you think! ;)

Well,

It's exciting that our Application Enhancer technology is getting used more widely by the fellow Mac developers. Two new tools that use APE, one very small and one much bigger were released recently:

PullTab 1.0 allows you to reclaim the Command-Tab and Command-Shift-Tab keystrokes from the MacOS X Dock. This allows you to have the best of both worlds, you can use the Dock alongside whatever third party application switcher best suits your needs. Small, but useful none the less.

The bigger thing is another tool released just today, Audio Hijack Pro.

Audio Hijack does just what it says - "hijacks" audio from any running application, allowing you to save it as an AIFF or even MP3, set alarm timers that will start timed recording of any audio output from any application (record your favorite streaming shows? real audio/wma anyone?), and apply a wide variety of VST and AU plugins to the hijacked audio. The latter means you can apply equalizers to DVD Player audio playback, or distort that Britney Spears song coming from your iTunes... whatever. An impressive use of Mac OS X technologies in general and APE in particular. Check it out.