Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Timeslip of the day: Saving Time

I’m supposed to be gearing up for NaNoWriMo, so of course I geeked instead, downloading desktop manager demos for You Control:Desktops and CodeTek Virtual Desktops (CTVD). So now I can do a three-way comparison of them and the free, open-source Desktop Manager:

There’s nothing like free software, and Desktop Manager has freedom going for it. It also has enough features to satisfy the average cheapskate such as yours truly. Development seems to have stalled, but development is pretty slow on the other two as well so it’s hard to say which product is the most moribund. Desktop Manager felt the most stable of the three on Tiger.

YouControl has some nice features, like separate desktops for each virtual desktop. (The others show all you desktop icons on every desktop.) YouControl has nice OS X transitions (the fast user-switching Cube, etc.), but unfortunately they go backwards most of the time, making them highly annoying. (DesktopManager has transitions that work correctly; CTVD has no transitions.)

The major downside of YouControl is the linear desktop model. They’re very cute up there in the menu bar (on those rare occasions when program menus don’t hide them), but virtual desktops are traditionally paged through with a grid pager like that of Desktop Manager and CTVD. Paging through my six to nine desktops linearly just takes too long. But I think the real reason I gave it up was that it required a control click on the menubar icon in order to access the preferences or shut the thing down. Requiring right-clicks for anything is against the Apple Human Interface Guidelines.

CTVD follows the HIG very nicely indeed, though it’s behind the times on the fun transitions. Besides the preference settings for individual app behavior (which YouControl also has but Desktop Manager makes you set manually, window-by-window), CTVD also has a handy interface for setting separate desktop wallpaper. YouControl makes you do this manually with System Preferences; Desktop Manager crashed when I tried to do the same. CTVD also implements that pinnacle of all Unix features, focus-follows-mouse, as well as other subtle but handy features. The link to the pager skins page is wrong; the real page is here. On the down side, it seems to be a bit of a resource hog compared to the other two.

To pay for CTVD or go back to Desktop Manager, that is the question. I’ll see how the 15 days of my demo go and report back.

Filk of the day: Survival Song. Thanks to Veronica for the link.

Due to a sudden and unexpected rearrangement of my living room, my mac was far, far away from my cable modem. Rather than stretch my favorite crossover ethernet cable across the middle of the room, I went to the Apple Store and got an Airport Express. All the setup software was already on my mac, so I just ran the Airport Setup Assistant and kitty was on the air.

I did have trouble coaxing my free printer into printing through the Airport Express. I followed most of the advice on this printer troubleshooting page, and the step that worked was deleting and recreating the printer queue.

There’s at least one other wireless network in the building, with a cryptic, non-Airport-looking name. This entry was blogged wirelessly.

Book of the Day: Conventions of War, the third and final volume of Walter Jon Williams’ Dread Empire’s Fall series is out! I snagged it at Borders yesterday.

My desktop was getting cluttered with too many windows at work, so I went looking for Windows software to simulate multiple desktops. The Microsoft Virtual Desktop Manager (a powertoy) was far too buggy to use, but AltDesk turned out to be wonderful. I may even have to pay for it when the demo expires.

For my Mac, though, I prefer free software, so I went with Desktop Manager, rather than the promising you control: desktops or the traditional CodeTek Virtual Desktops. Right now I’m using the stable 0.5.3 version of Desktop Manager, but I may upgrade to the developer build for more fun and excitement.

Filk of the day: Hope Eyrie by Leslie Fish (1975)

I just downloaded a free preference panel called Textpander. I had been using Quicksilver for some simple text insertion (especially a hrefs), but it annoyed me to no end because it used the clipboard to paste in the html code, nuking the URL I had saved in the clipboard to put into the hyperlink. Textpander (optionally) gives you your clipboard contents back again.

This was the other half of the ActiveWords functionality that I didn’t really need for my Mac, but it is handy in some cases.

Update: Either Textpander or the latest security/QuickTime update (2005-008/7.0.2, respectively) killed Emacs. I tried reinstalling–no luck. So I checked out the latest from cvs and rebuilt. (I’m still building the self-contained installer, just to be safe.) After a long, long build, Emacs is back, if a little funky on the font settings. Whew!

Update #2: Some days are good CVS days, some days are bad CVS days. My home-built emacs turned out to be funkier than I thought (lots of issues with tex-verbatim, so I downloaded a pre-built emacs from Japan. So far, so good.

Fun link of the day: The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme (Daring Fireball)

Loyal readers (and I know I’m running out of them) know that I appreciate the occasional educational video. BitTorrent, however, is a den of thieves just waiting for the next big police raid. So I decided to move on with the technology to eDonkey. I checked out likely eDonkey clients for the Mac and decided on the cross-platform aMule, even though their mac client is just an experimental daily build.

To set up aMule I followed the directions in their wiki, with some bandwidth-setting advice from their ED2K faq. Other things I’ve heard about the network are that it’s not as fast as BitTorrent, but has more stuff available. I’ll find out either way.

I had a couple of kernel panics last week, so I tried out the X Lab’s advice on resolving kernel panics. There was nothing wrong with my disk or my memory, and repairing permissions didn’t help. In the end, I uninstalled the graphics program I’d been playing with and reinstalled. So far, so good…

Google has instructions for connecting to Google Talk with iChat. If you have a Gmail account, then you can Google Talk. The general FAQ is here.

I’m a trackpad devotee myself, but Apple’s new Mighty Mouse looks like a handy rodent. Slashdotters are already complaining about the tail. For a more optimistic review, see Here I Come To Save The Day from DetroitMac, Inc.

I haven’t looked at the comment spam in a while, so about a thousand of them had piled up in moderation, and a bunch also got through the filters. I’ve adjusted the filters to handle most of the new crafty spam, but I recommend against discussing gambling, drugs, or mortgages in the comments.

Invention of the day: Breathing with the fishes

Though my first reaction was “Noooooooooooo!” I’ve adjusted pretty quickly to the New Mac Order. I was hoping that John Gruber would explain why his anti-Intel predictions were so wrong, but the only comment so far from my favorite Mac guru is that classic apps won’t run on Intel.

So I’m going to have to provide the geek commentary myself. I’m not sure why they’re switching to Intel, but I am sure it’s not for the sake of the Apple faithful. We liked the PowerPC chip and no one wants their computers or their programs to go out of date so soon after the last big switch (to OSX).

Intel chips cost more than PPCs, so no savings are going to passed onto us. There’s no huge or guaranteed speed gain with Intel, if you believe the PowerPC benchmark numbers, but there is one concrete advantage to Intel chips: there are a lot of them. Apple has had pipeline problems with PowerPC chips no matter who was making them (Motorola, IBM, or Freescale). Intel will be a cake walk in comparison. Imagine ordering the latest and greatest PowerBook and getting it in a week instead of a month or two.

Of course the biggest advantage is the clone market for MacOS, but I thought Steve was against the clones. Only time will tell whether the clones attack.

(For deeper thoughts, try Slashdot.)

[Update:] John Gruber comes through with some analysis.