Well, I've got APE working on Panther. Amazingly enough, existing versions of our haxies still work fine, aside from some minor tweaks required for WindowShade X to display window titles for MIPed windows. Well, we've got plenty of time to get that fixed. APE is still getting confused about fast user switching, but it's fixable, and I'll get to it as soon as I am back in Russia.
I am so sick of spammers using our domains as Return-To: address. For this reason, from now on, all emails arriving at unsanity.org domain will be trashed immediately. Please use the dot com ones if you want to reach us - the amount of rejected/failed spam delivery reports on the .org domain is way too much for me to tolerate it (few thousands a day), so I had to make a procmail rule that just puts anything that comes to unsanity.org to /dev/null.
Bleh.
I want to go to Japan... say Tokyo later in the year when it starts cooling down... say October. I live in Phoenix. How do I get there? Cheaply? The prices I have seen are more than I'd like to pay and they go through New York instead of LAX or SFO.
This is not an Otaku thing or anything like that. I've got my own sick reasons for wanting to go there.
As most of you EU folk are aware, the Directive 2002/38/EC and
Regulation No. 792/2002 amending the Sixth VAT Directive (77/388/EEC) has been passed.
What does this mean for you? If you live in one of the states that are part of the European Union, you will have to pay a VAT tax on our products at purchase time.
This tax is effective staring July 1, 2003 and will be in the range of 15% - 25% depending on which state you live in.
So that gives you a few days to buy our goods at the current price.
Anyway, we'll get some less business, more WWDC fun posts up soon. (maybe ;) )
Well, excuse me for slacking off and not blogging enough during WWDC. Too many things were happening, and I guess I haven't had enough time to touch our blog.
So what happened? The keynote was somewhat great, and the new G5 Macs are definitely something I want now (don't we all?). Panther is pretty slick, I sorta like the new Finder window with locations in the left column, and the way they implemented labels. Of course it's a big buggy and rough around the edges, but they got half a year to brush it up, and I am certain they will.
Other than sessions at WWDC that were a bit less in-depth than I'd appreciate, and troubles with Internet in both Moscone West in first 3 days of the conference and in my hotel (W San Francisco), Apple campus bash party was pretty exciting. I picked up lots of merchandise junk in the Apple Store, including a polo shirt for my son, got my right wrist badged with a little white paper saying 'WWDC 2003' (meaning I am eligible for the free booze), talked with lots of interesting people.
Finally met the guys from Panic. These folks just won an Apple Design Award for Transmit, and boy, they deserved it.
APE is somewhat broken under Panther and needs some fixing. I've been doing it for past few days, half an hour per day, and it looks pretty much promising - I am certain I'll be able to tune it up in next few days. The most exciting part about the process so far was compiling an APE in the middle of Apple campus, while waiting for the band to start playing. We made a picture, but my camera's batteries are worn out, so I suppose I'll update this post sometime later to include the photo, just for kicks.
Overall, the future looks bright. Apple managed to pull it off again, and we sure will be helping in all the ways we can, providing quality and innovative software. Thanks to all Apple engineers, managers, and all people around who make it happen!
I'm on my way to our office in Utah now.
The Awards Banquet here at the MacHack is over, and Rosyna's thing got 5th place. Woo hoo. So we now hold an amazing screw set - one being enormously big (the kind you never would want to screw in somewhere without sufficient machinery) and one small, of course related to the name of the hack - Size Doesn't Matter.
What's notable is that the first place went to the Unstoppable Progress hack I was referring to (the overflowing progress bar), made by Jon and Ben Gotow, is using the Application Enhancer framework. We don't have permission to put it up here, but I think MacAddict is going to put up some of the hacks on their CD.
This is also the last MacHack ever. That's right, the name is being changed. The new name will be the Advanced Developers Hands-On Conference, or AD HOC for short. I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, general public just don't get the name (we got all these hotel people asking us what are we going to hack into now), on the other, the name is such a tradition, it's hard to break. I guess it will always remain the MacHack in our minds and hearts.
The whole thing was pretty good, it was nice to meet many of the people I've known from online only. The only shame is a sore lack of sponsorship on certain places, like late night pizza sessions. I've promised to myself that if we'll be doing well by the next year, we gotta sponsor something, just because this is such a great community.
Thanks to the organizers and all the attendees of the MacHack conference for a kick-ass 3 days of geek goodness. It was great.
As for us, we're heading to San Francisco for the W W D C. I'll try to wave to Steve.
So the hack contest is over. There were quite a few interesting hacks that I've spotted -- the mind is a bit too fuzzy to remember everything cool I saw, yet some funky highlights:
- A progress bar that overfloats and the water floods off the right edge of it, filling the entire window. Cool.
- Ping-pong thingie that runs over screens of networked computers. Inventive.
- Longhorn-like spinning windows with variable opacity and tracking paths. Ours (ok, actually, just Rosyna's, since I just lurked around).
- A cartoon about MacHack. Fun.
- A thingie to arbitrary move the Cocoa controls in a window and even drag them into other windows. Slick.
- That click-and-a-half Finder thingie to reveal contents quickly. Useful.
- Probably some others which I don't recall right now.
So we see who wins. There's so many of these fun hacks I'll have problems voting tomorrow, I guess. And I really should stop using the word 'thingie' so often. Blame Rosyna.
PS On a completely unrelated note, my son turned 2 today. Hooray!
Alrighty, we've listened to the various point made in the comments on the WSX 3 upgrade idea and come to a decision. We hope there weren't too many feathers ruffled over this. ;)
There were good points made for both sides of the issue. We're glad to see that many of you understand the problem facing us - that we want to continue to develop and maintain our products, but have a hard time doing so for free. You'll be glad to know that we also understand the problem facing you. Paying for every little thing gets quite old. We are users just like you, we didn't cheer during the infamous .Mac announcement at MacWorld either. ;)
Our plan was to charge a $5 upgrade fee for WSX 3. We hadn't worked out all the details of who would have to pay it and who wouldn't, but that is all moot now. We are scrapping the upgrade fee for WSX 3 entirely.
But, (you knew there would be a "but" right? ;) ) we will be officially changing our policy of "free upgrades for life". Some of you may have noticed that policy has been missing from recent products anyway.
Please don't read this to mean that we'll be charging for CoolNewProduct 1.0.0.1 two weeks after version 1. If and when we charge for a product upgrade, we will do so only after a significant period of time and/or very significant changes and additions to the product. (WSX 1.0 was released 18 Oct 2001 and has had seven releases since then)
Moral of the story today: We talk, you listen, you talk, we listen. Communication happens, we move on for the better of all hopefully. :)
We at MacHack. We no sleep well. We release WSX 3 Preview It expire September 1st.
Seriously though. Slava's desktop died at home so he's had to use his TiBook without properly transferring over settings and the files. This caused him much pain as he has to gert the WSX disk image ready without being able to get "in the zone". Russian cursing sounds funny. Slava asked me to announce it in the blog so I do.
How would y'all feel if we charged an upgrade fee for WSX 3? Starting now, any new registrations and any registrations within the first 3 months of WSX 1.0's (yes, the first version) release will get 3.0 for free whether we charge or not.
So after a tiring 28-hour-long trip (counting wait times in the airports), I have finally arrived to Phoenix, Arizona. Rosyna's been showing me around the place a bit, and it looks pretty nice. It is very unusual to see how dark it comes by the time it's 8-9 pm -- in St.Petersburg, this time of the year, during white nights, it's still very bright outside, so I am constantly feeling myself in the dark night here.
The heat is another topic. Our regular temperature is probably more or less equals the temperature that's kept inside of the A/C houses here (like malls or restaraunts). So I feel myself outside in the malls and on some sort of a frying pan outside. It wasn't as bad as I have expected it to be, though. The funny thing is that you don't sweat while outside. Totally weird. (Excuse me the ones who live in the warm places, I'm all new to this thing =).
We've met Jason Harris, the programmer behind Mighty Mouse. What's funny is that he looks exactly how I imagined him to look. We met in an Apple Store, and I was wearing that orange Unsanity t-shirt (I brought some of these with me). It was very tempting to come over to an Apple Store employee and ask something like, "I just switched to OSX, and I cannot figure out how to collapse the window into that tiny bar instead of that genie effect. Know how can I do that?". =)
Either way, tomorrow early morning it's my way to the airport to Detroit, for the MacHack. I'll continue blogging from there, I guess.
Tata!
PS WindowShade X is progressing well, if you wanted to ask that. Sooner than you think.
Does anyone know how to connect a T68m phone to the internet using GPRS with T-Mobile? I just signed up for T-Mobile's unlimited access plan but I've go no clue what to do with it ;). None of the three T-Mobile dealers had any idea what was going on and in fact one said GPRS was automatic and is used to find your location in emergencies. He was very adamant about it. Also seemed to refuse to give me my phone when I asked for it back. He was too busy looking for what was not there.
So anyways, PowerBook+Bluetooth+T68m (T68)+GPRS.... how?
Update: Thanks to Jonathan LaCour I was finally able to get my phone to connect via GPRS. Check the comments for information. Steven Frank should get subsidies for getting people to sign up to T-Mobile unlimited GPRS. He's gotten two people to sign up so far (me and Jonathan I guess) all because he said T-Mobile had this plan available. $20 US/month is extremely cheap for inet access on the go like this and have very good coverage (if it asks, zip is 85018 city is Phoenix or you can use your own). Even though there are a LOT of holes in that map it covers all the major cities and the highways between them. At least any where I suspect I'd go in this country. Except the reception is very poor where I live and the area around it (called the Arcadia Neighborhood) because Camelback Mountain messes with the reception. Hmm, I don't suppose I could use this service in another country though.
Mmm... 2k/sec inet access with huge ping times. It's all good. I feel like I'm back in 1990.
I guess I own a few anime DVDs.
I prefer dubs myself. It's all about the art and the story. If it were just about the dialog, one would read the original manga. How many realize that except for songs, Japanese audio is not lipsynced? Not many. You also have to play stop and go a lot of times to read the dialog then watch the scene. That hardly seems like the experience the creator wanted you to have when watching their anime. I dare someone to try to watch Excel Saga subbed especially the later issues and the next episode "previews". I dare you all.
A lot of times the dub has the same exact script as the translated sub except the dub matches lip flap. You'll notice that when there are no lip flaps and time permits, the dialog of the sub and the dub is the same. Not too much of any issue since a lot of animes hide the mouth of a speaking character to make it cheaper to produce.
Companies like ADV, Pioneer, Bandai, AnimEigo (they're mac users too), Viz, and Anime Works (mostly) do excellent dubs. Way above bar. However, U.S. Manga and FUNImation do so-so dubs/subs. There is nothing wrong with the dialog of U.S. Manga (Read or Die, Virus) dubs but the subtitles are annoying. They do not have a signs only sub. So you have to turn on the subtitle track to read the signs/songs translations. Even Hard Titles are better than this. FUNImation (Dragon Ball series, Fruits Basket, Yu Yu Hakusho suffers from the same problem and on some series if the in show Kanji is translated at all, it's done at a separate point in the DVD. It's really fun when you have a joke that plays off some sign (Fruits Basket) and you never get to see the translation. Worst, they seriously change the script of the episode. It's almost depressing how bad it is. For example, when they are arriving at the place to rescue Yukina, the sub says something like "Wow, this is a very big place." the dub translates it to "This place smells like ass." There are plently more of these examples where the story suffers seriously from such replacements. Saiyuki also seems to have this problem of randomly adding curse words. Son Goku has quite a month on him.
I'd have to say my favorite animes are Love Hina, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Lain, Slayers (hitting next on the DVD remote always goes to the next episode, not the next chapter), Ranma 1/2, Now and Then, Here and There (most depressing anime ever), Trigun, Cowboy Bebop, Kimagure Orange Road, I My Me! Strawberry Eggs (never have I cried so much at the end of something before...), Mahoromatic, Berserk, Excel Saga (All hail Lord Ilpalazzo!), Hellsing, Great Teacher Onizuka, Ai Yori Aoshi, Chobits (so cute...), Sugar (so cute...) and many more.
Personally I love Shoujo the most. Mmm... Menchi Snacks.
I was working on that Font Menu thing. It's hard to believe how many different ways there are to handle font menus on OS X. AppleWorks uses one way which I've got working. MS Word uses another way which I've got partially working (fonts in submenus don't work) and Indesign uses yet another way which I've got yet to figure out. They make a very custom Font Menu. I've yet to look deeply into it.
But this kind of makes me wish I had contacts at Adobe at MacBU that could assist me with these sort of things. It's a real pain in the butt to reverse engineer these things in such a way that is completely compatible and completely agnostic in regards to what application I am in. If anyone does know anyone (or is anyone) on these programmer teams, please contact me... rosyna at our company's name dot com (not dot org). Spam sucks.
Well, spent a day yesterday getting my tickets booked, conference passes bought out etc. So now it is official - I will be on MacHack and WWDC. So please look out for me - I'll be delighted to shake hands with you. ;)
On the work side, thank you for lots of excellent feedback about MIP in WindowShade X. I will be doing some substantial coding over the next week and will try to roll up a new WindowShade X version for you to try out ASAP.
I ordered a 17 Inch Aluminum PowerBook G4 (AlBook) last friday (the 30th) along with a backpack for it and an Airport Extreme Base Station. I ordered the 17 incher because I needed something to replace my iBook for WWDC but I could not wait until the 15inch AlBook was released. I had to use my "educator" discount on it because I couldn't find anyone with an ADC Hardware Discount Key which was slightly disappointing. I was only able to save $200 instead of $600+. Still, something is better than nothing, right? The items were shipped via Fedex.
Not sure how this will look, but here is the FedEx tracking information for the AlBook and the Backpack (Base Station is the same as the AlBook). OK, Safari cannot copy tables well at all.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| Date/time | | Status | | Location | | Comments | ||||||||
| Jun3, 2003 | 8:56 am | | Delivered | | PHOENIX AZ | | |||||||||
| 8:11 am | | On FedEx vehicle for delivery | | PHOENIX AZ | | ||||||||||
| 7:35 am | | Arrived at FedEx Destination Location | | PHOENIX AZ | | ||||||||||
| 5:12 am | | Left FedEx Ramp | | PHOENIX AZ | | ||||||||||
| Jun1, 2003 | 6:55 pm | | Arrived at FedEx Ramp | | SACRAMENTO CA | | |||||||||
| 1:30 pm | | Arrived at Sort Facility | | MEMPHIS TN | | ||||||||||
| 1:30 pm | | Arrived at Sort Facility | | MEMPHIS TN | | ||||||||||
| 6:08 am | | Left FedEx Sort Facility | | OAKLAND CA | | ||||||||||
| 5:50 am | | Left FedEx Ramp | | SACRAMENTO CA | | ||||||||||
| May 31, 2003 | 6:39 pm | | Left FedEx Origin Location | | RANCHO CORDOVA CA | | |||||||||
| 3:17 pm | | Pickup status | | RANCHO CORDOVA CA | | Pre-routed meter pkg picked up | |||||||||
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| Date/time | | Status | | Location | | Comments | ||||||||
| Jun3, 2003 | 8:56 am | | Delivered | | PHOENIX AZ | | |||||||||
| 8:10 am | | On FedEx vehicle for delivery | | PHOENIX AZ | | ||||||||||
| 7:35 am | | Arrived at FedEx Destination Location | | PHOENIX AZ | | ||||||||||
| 6:24 am | | Left FedEx Ramp | | PHOENIX AZ | | ||||||||||
| 5:11 am | | Arrived at Sort Facility | | OAKLAND CA | | ||||||||||
| 5:11 am | | Arrived at Sort Facility | | OAKLAND CA | | ||||||||||
| 4:11 am | | Left FedEx Sort Facility | | OAKLAND CA | | ||||||||||
| 3:56 am | | Arrived at FedEx Ramp | | PHOENIX AZ | | ||||||||||
| Jun2, 2003 | 11:31 pm | | Arrived at Sort Facility | | OAKLAND CA | | |||||||||
| 9:08 pm | | Left FedEx Ramp | | SEATTLE WA | | ||||||||||
| 7:46 pm | | Arrived at FedEx Ramp | | SEATTLE WA | | ||||||||||
| 3:48 pm | | Left FedEx Sort Facility | | ANCHORAGE AK | | ||||||||||
| May 31, 2003 | 5:57 pm | | Package status | | ANCHORAGE AK | | Regulatory Agency Clearance Delay | ||||||||
Can someone please explain to my why it'd go from Oakland to Memphis and back to Sacramento? It seems like a waste of time, money and effort. What's worse is that the Airport Base Station was in Phoenix then got shipped to CA then back again. All I can guess is that it go to Memphis and there they sort to it's final destination, then send it back to the main sorting facility in that area. However, this is not efficient at all. And people wonder why FedEx shipping to Russia is $219 for 14 pounds or from Phoenix to LA is $13. I bet they could save a lot of money by doing it directly. That and kill the Air Conditioner in the FedEx trucks. When the FedEx guy delivered it today (oddly, 4 minutes before the earliest they would deliver it) he complained that I lived on the 3rd Story (the one on the ground is the 1st) and there was no elevator up. Well, it was 108 degrees F a few days ago. Neither the USPS nor the UPS delivery trucks have A/C in them. FedEx trucks do.
Enough of that FexEd rant. This AlBook is huge. It barely fits on the TV tray I have in the bathroom. Seriously what's the point of having a laptop with wireless networking if you can't use it in the bathroom? As soon as I got the AlBook, I wiped it's hard drive cleaned, partitioned it the same as I had my iBook in (with the same partition names), then did a software restore of the included boot-able DVD. After that was done, I ran the software updates making sure to install the QT update after the 10.2.6 combined updater. Ahh.. 300 megs of updates to be pulled over Airport (non-extreme) and then installed. For the record, installing and optimizing took longer than it did to download the updates. I then set my iBook into FireWire disk mode by holding down the T key at boot time, connected it to the AlBook via a 6-to-6 pin FireWire cable (the one that came with the first and second generation of iPods). The AlBook immediately saw the three partitions and I dropped into the terminal, typed sudo ditto -rsrcFork /Volumes/Consecrated\ 1/Users/rosyna /Volumes/Consecrated/rosyna and while it was doing it's thing, I copied the /Library (sans receipts folder) and a few applications over. When that was all done, I opened NetInfo Manager (/Applications/Utilities/NetInfo Manager) and changed my home folder to /Volumes/Consecrated/rosyna. Logged out for good measure and back in to make sure everything was ok. All settings and passwords were successfully brought over. I had to reset the desktop picture and a few applications in the dock had to be reset. Only those that were on a differently named partition on the iBook and not on the boot partition. Login items and sharing also had to be re-enabled and for some odd reason, I had to reset the iPhoto library path. It asked me to find one but wouldn't let me choose the one I use so I just made a new one and renamed the old one to have the new one's name. And of course, I had to install APE on this AlBook.
After I was done with that tedious process, I searched for a bootable Mac OS 9.2.x CD. Before OS X, each localization came on a different CD. I could easily find my copies of the Japanese, Korean, Chinese (three dialects), German, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Spanish, French, and Portuguese but not the English (American) version. After more searching I found it in a Developer DVD case I had placed it in a few months ago. I then proceeded to unmount and disconnect the iBook from the AlBook and booted the iBook of the 9.2.1 CD (I held option, I was lazy). Opened Drive Setup and zeroed all the data on the drive and made one partitioned. Waited the 3 hours for it to complete and did it again. I then reinstalled Jaguar on the iBook and ran all the updates. Tomorrow the iBook is going down to the Apple Store (chandler, I don't feel welcome at the Biltmore one) and from there being shipped off to Apple to get repaired. I've been wanted to get it repaired for a long time. It peters out on DVDs about one and a half hours through which is a serious problem with anime. And anyone that knows me knows I have an addiction to anime (260+ DVDs and rising).
You can see a picture of my iBook on the AlBook to get a difference of size here. Notice the missing key.
There we go, just as I promised, Application Enhancer 1.3 and Labels X 1.5 are out. If you're going to download Labels X, you can skip APE 1.3, as Labels X installer contains APE 1.3 inside. ;)
What's new (I was talking about this before, so just to summarize):
- Application Enhancer 1.3:
- Substantial speed improvements with the application launch times.
- Fixed some bugs in the APE Manager preference pane.
- APE Modules can be installed by double-clicking them.
- Double-clicking on existing APE Modules will now open the APE Manager preference pane with settings for that module.
- Extended and enhanced the Application Enhancer SDK (available as a separate download).
- Labels X 1.5:
- New Label menu in the Finder's file menu to quickly set labels on selected files.
- New shortcuts to set labels (available in the new Label menu in the Finder) - Cmd+Option+0 to 7.
- Included label command-line tool (installed to /usr/local/bin or ~/bin). You can get and set label information from the command line by invoking it.
- Labels information will now be visible in Open and Save dialogs in all applications.
- Applications using labels data (such as Eudora) will now correctly fetch and use label colors and names set in Labels X.
- Label changes on the Desktop are now visible immediately, without having to click elsewhere outside of the affected icons.
- Optimized and updated for Application Enhancer v1.3.
Either way, I recommend APE 1.3 update to all of the haxie users!
Direct download: Labels X 1.5, Application Enhancer 1.3.
Thanks for your support!
Just a quick note on a third-party APE module made by icon master Hide Itoh of Pixture Studio: IconSizeEnabler 1.0.
This APE module makes it possible to use multiple icon sizes in a single Finder window or on the Desktop by adding the "Icon Size" menu at the bottom of View menu. Oh, and it's free.
Due to a nature of Application Enhancer, it can potentially cause certain instability in your system (although, as all of you know, we work hard on preventing and/or fixing this asap).
However, many people notice traces of APE in every crash log they get (this particular post has inspired me today). In short, when an application crashes, CrashReporter dumps all the threads in the process to the crash log. One of the threads always carries __ape_agent. What is this? This is an idle thread that APE creates in the process that normally lurks idly in the background and that handles messages sent between APEs (for example, reload preferences).
While looking at the logs, you should also pay attention to the "Thread Crashed" message in one of the threads in the crash log. This is what have caused the crash, and if you see no APEBundleMain or APEBundleMessage in the trace, then it's highly unlikely an APE has caused it. If you do see one, though, please send the log to urgent at unsanity dot com - I'll investigate it immediately.
Rock on!
Silk 2.0 has finally been released to the public. Get it now.
Hmm, both VersionTracker and MacUpdate were extremely fast in posting the updates, although VT was slightly faster. Maybe 2 minutes compared with 3 at MacUpdate? MacUpdate also left the 1.5 info in there for some reason. I love the Mac software update websites they give me such a warm feeling inside. Then again, could be a weak bladder. Should have that checked.
UPDATE: Those filthy crashing errors should be fixed now. It was caused by the "caching" feature I introduced earlier. If the caching dictionary was NULL, it'd crash on CFDictionaryContainsValue. That fix caused a memory leak because I was CFReleasing a value that wasn't retained.
I went to the US Consulate to attempt to get a visa to go to WWDC (and probably MacHack). I tried before, and it wasn't easy, even though I already was in the US back in '94.
So today, to my great surprise, they have issued a visa to me, without asking any questions on the interview. What's up with that? =)
So, all in all, for the ones who plan on going to WWDC, see you there! ;)
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here's the whole 2 thousand words for you (warning: in-production screenshots), for two different things that might be coming down to you in the coming month(s):
Now if you haven't guessed yet, left screenshot is WindowShade X 3.0d4. Coincidentally, this post is your chance to give feedback on what aspects of Minimize-In-Place functionality you'd want to customize. Currently I am thinking of the following things that should be changeable for the minimized (iconized) windows:
- Size of the window;
- Transparency of the window;
- Whether the window should have an app icon or not;
- Whether the window should magnify when the mouse is over it;
- Whether the window title should be shown.
Anything else? Please comment. ;)
Second thing is something Rosyna is supposedly working on now, and we'll see if it turns into a full-fledged utility. Little detail is known as of now, and I'll let Rosyna rant about it in the future. ;)