No man is an island

So You Just Bought A Mac

This is an introductory series for people new to the Mac. It is assumed that you did use computers before but maybe it works just fine for newbies. Feedback Welcome!

You couldn’t resist the hype and the peer-pressure anymore. Or you simply went on the spending-spree and a new Mac happened to be in it. Or maybe your new mac is a gift from a dear soul.

Note: I assume you have the current version of OS X, 10.5 aka. Leopard, installed on your new Mac.

Sections in this part: §

• It’s All so different
• The First Steps
• Adjust It
• Learn

It’s All So Different §

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Assuming you are coming from another platform, like - umm - Windows ™, there are quite a few things that are different. It maybe a matter of opinion if they are different in a better or worse way compared to whatever you were used to before.

Used to is the key here. You’ve grown accustomed to the way to get things done - with or against your previous os - and will automatically map those habits to your new mac. Some irritation will be inevitable. There maybe a few things you think were better on your old platform and a few that are just better on the mac. As this is a matter of opinion i personally grew so fond of the way things get done on the mac that i can’t imagine going anywhere else - but i also had my moments in the beginning where i thought some user-interface aspects to be odd.

Most of these oddities though made a lot of sense later down the road.

The First Steps §

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The first impression when using a mac is that the very core of the user interaction is the same (windowing system, e.g.) but some elementary things are done differently.

First off there is no Taskbar and thusly also no “Start” Button. Secondly all menus of native mac applications are at the top of the screen. The menu always shows up for the currently focused application. And thirdly just closing the last windows of an app usually does not exit it. This is really different from most platforms. You have to really quit an application. To see if an application you see no open windows for is still running have a look in the dock. Every running desktop application is listed there plus the favorites you dragged there which are visible even if they are not running. A running app has a small triangle dot at the screen-edge-side.

You can quit an app by selecting Quit from the app’s menu point that has the name of the app. This is usually the first menu on the left right next to the apple menu which is always visible. There are other ways to quite an app which i will get into later on.

So, but how do you start an app in first place? Okay, the apps present in the dock are obvious, but how about an app that isn’t there. For this open a Finder windows. notice how i didn’t say “Start the Finder” - this is because the Finder is always running. In fact it powers your desktop and you can’t (normally) even quit it. If the Finder wouldn’t run you couldn’t see any icons on your desktop. Once you have a finder window open, locate the “Applications” folder in left half of the finder and select it. On Macs all your apps are in there although you can put apps anywhere you like theoretically. Macs come with a bunch of pre-installed apps of varying usefulness. Have a look around.

If you got a mac notebook you will probably use the touchpad a lot. I still recommend you get a usb or bluetooth mouse for the long run. One specialty i always get annoyed at other notebook when i notice it’s not there is the ability to scroll vertically and horizontally with two fingers on the pad.

While we’re at it: OS X does support right and middle mouse clicks even if it appears not to by looking at the touchpad. To right click without having a 2/3 button mouse attached you can either:

• Click and hold (about a second or two). (hmm, this doesn’t seem to work anymore? Used to in Tiger)
• Control-Click
• Put two fingers on the touch pad and click. (this has to be activated in the System Preferences)

There are quite a few context menus in the applications and you can only reach them by right-clicking. for former Windows users this should be familiar.

Adjust It §

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Like every os, OS X comes with a bunch of options to modify the system’s behavior. You can find the Settings Panels when selecting “System Preferences…” from the apple menu in the top left corner of the desktop.

I suggest you have a look around in there to adjust some settings. Although the default settings are quite sane i recommend you have a look in the following panels:

• Desktop & Screen Saver - Setup your Desktop Picture and your Screen Saver.
• Dock - Setup where the Dock appears and some visual gimmickry.
• Exposé and Spaces - Setup Exposé and Spaces for the screen corners you like. This is a HUGE time-saver.
• Energy Saver - This is especially useful when you have a notebook. Note that there are separate Settings for when running on Power Adapter and Battery.
  
• Keyboard & Mouse - Setup basic behavior of your input devices. Tip: Activate “Zoom using scroll wheel while holding XXX” in the “Mouse” tab. I find this highly useful.
  

  I also suggest you visit the “Keyboard Shortcuts” Tab for reference. There are a lot of useful shortcuts in OS X.

• CDs & DVDs - Setup which application if any to run if certain media types are inserted in the drive.

Learn §

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Of course every new software comes with new ways of doing things. New Shortcuts, new behaviors and so on. Even after months you will find a feature in a software that is so useful that you cannot imagine how you overlooked it all the time. This holds true for OS X as well. There is quite a bit of not so obvious usefulness in there.

To get started i suggest you get used to some terminology. You will often hear references to the “Command Key” for example. Here’s a short list of the keys:

• Command Key - - The most important key in OS X. This is basically the replacement for Control if you come from Windows (although the Control key still exists). On newer Apple keyboards command is written on the key itself and the apple logo is gone.
• Option Key - - Also nick-named “Badewannentaste” (bathtub-key) in german. It’s also called alt (it’s written on the key itself) but i never heard a real mac user or website call it that way.
• Control Key -
• Escape Key - - This is the top left key on your keyboard. I list it here because this symbol is not on the key itself but appears in some menus. The first time i saw this i had a hard time figuring out what this is. It is used for example to open Front Row with Command+Escape.

To look up the global keyboard shortcuts refer to the System Preferences’ “Keyboard & Mouse” Panel. For application specific shortcuts cycle through the menus of the respective app and you can see some menu entries with the shortcut combo listed to the right of it.

There are a few generally applicable shortcuts though that work in (nearly) every application. I’ve also thrown some global shortcuts in the list:

• Command-Q - Will quit the currently active application. This is probably one of the shortcuts you will use every couple of minutes… i do.
• Command-, - Will an active application’s Preferences.
• Command-Tab - Will display a HUD with a list of running apps. With repeatedly pressing Tab without releasing the Command Key you can cycle through them. When you release all keys the last highlighted app will be focused and foregrounded.
• Command-M - Minimize the currently active window. It will shrink into the Dock where you can retrieve it later on.
• Command-H - Hide the currently active application. This will completely hide all windows of the respective app and render the icon for the app transparent in the Dock.
• Command-Space - Open the Spotlight input box at the top right. Highly useful.
• Only in Finder: Space - Open the currently selected file or folder (can also be on the desktop) with Quicklook. Very useful.
• Command-W - Close the current window. This is especially useful in apps where you end up with a bunch of windows frequently, like for example the Finder.
• While any menu is open: Option - This reveals enhanced menu entries. For example when you open the Context menu in the Dock on a running app and press option you will see “Quit” to change to “Force Quit“.

… continued in Part II (when it’s done)

After my DeveloperTools installation from the Leopard setup DVD i had a look around at the tools.

First let me say that the new tools are all great. Especially Instruments is quite useful. Being a Python guy i remembered something about a new version of PyObjC coming bundled with the DeveloperTools. In fact it should be version 2.0. So i created a new python-project in XCode and it seemed to work fine - but i was using the old PyObC version i had installed before on my Python 2.4. I tweaked a few paths back then to get rid of the 2.3 version of python which was delivered with Tiger. I somehow expected 2.5 with PyObjC 2.0 to be installed and setup by the DeveloperTool’s installation.

In fact it’s all there in all it’s greatness. First make sure you didn’t override some paths/symlinks or whatever. Starting python from the console should start the Version 2.5.1. It’s home is in /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/ and it comes with a bunch of packages

• PyRSS2Gen - 1.0.0
• Twisted Xish - 0.4.0
• Twisted - 2.4.0
• altgraph - 0.6.8.dev
• bdist-mpkg - 0.4.3.dev
• bonjour-py - 0.2
• modulegraph - 0.7.2.dev
• numpy - 1.0.1
• py2app - 0.4.1.dev
• pyOpenSSL - 0.6
• pyobjc-core - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-AddressBook - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-AppleScriptKit - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-Automator - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-CalendarStore - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-Cocoa - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-Collaboration - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-CoreData - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-CoreText - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-DictionaryServices - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-ExceptionHandling - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-FSEvents - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-InputMethodKit - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-InstallerPlugins - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-InstantMessage - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-InterfaceBuilderKit - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-LatentSemanticMapping - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-LaunchServices - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-Message - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-PreferencePanes - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-PubSub - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-QTKit - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-Quartz - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-ScreenSaver - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-ScriptingBridge - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-SearchKit - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-SyncServices - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-SystemConfiguration - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-WebKit - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-XgridFoundation - 2.0
• pyobjc-xcode - 2.0
• python-dateutil - 1.2
• setuptools - 0.6c7
• wxPython-common - 2.8.4.0
• wxaddons - 2.8.4.0
• xattr - 0.5
• zope.interface - 3.3.0

I generated this List with Yolk and modified it a little to exclude packages i installed already and added a few that yolk seemed to have missed.

First off i find it remarkable that wx is included. I don’t know the reason for this. I use wx so this is great for people like me. Secondly py2app was kind of obvious (XCode bundles python projects up in the build phase to produce a stand-alone app) but i was really surprised to find twisted in there.

I got my hopes high when i heard about Apple being officially more supportive towards dynamic languages like Ruby, Python and Perl and i am not disappointed - and yes ruby on rails is there for those interested.

The integration in XCode and it’s tools seems to be nice but i didn’t have enough time to dig into it.

So, today at about 12:30 AM Leopard was delivered.

I did all my Backup and cleaning stuff yesterday, including a disk repair from the tiger startup discs (which was necessary as some stuff fucked up). My system is fairly tweaked and customized. I use custom icons all over the place. I also have a huge Fink installation, tons of additional Frameworks i use from time to time and a couple of addons like DiscTop or Perian (add codecs to Quicktime). You get the picture. The only thing i did additionally yesterday was to grab the new version of googleDesktop, which according to Google fixed some Leopard compatibility issues. I did expect the upgrade to work fine but a few things not to work after the upgrade.

I can happily report that this upgrade was SUPER-SMOOTH. It all works. All my settings and apps and addons and so on work and are intact. That is great! Really great!

Currently Spotlight and GoogleDesktop have an indexing competition which i notice on the system’s performance.

One thing to remember is that you may not see the quicklook icon in your Finder’s toolbar. If that is the case customize the toolbar and drop the icon where you want it.

Not at all revolutionary but nicely done and integrated in the whole mac desktop experience is Spaces. I already got so used to it that i cannot imagine working without it. It blends completely in.

Next station: Dev Tool installation

Some time ago i stated that creating pages using transparent pngs will be easier and more feasible in the future now that IE7 is out.

I predicted that IE7 will get about 50% market share compared to about 20% it had back then. Well, all those statistics have to be taken lightly - as it is with statistics. My prediction is off my quite a margin anyway.

“The future exists today. It’s just unevenly distributed.”

So we will have to hang in there until this sadness that IE6 is will grow out of the systems. From what i have seen in the past with other technologies this will take a long time.

The workarounds for transparency issues will remain and we will continue to use those IE filters to get our site to work in that sad thing that IE6 is.

Recently i got the idea of scribbling down all the things i learn a day. I firmly believe that life long learning is important and i also believe that we will learn anyway. Mostly we collect all kind of factoids within a week or so. Most of them drop out of our memory within a week to a month.

So last friday, when i got home i recited a short list to me what i learned and it was surprisingly long, about 30 single items. Granted, i counted also small things like learning a new shortcut in vim - but still.

I am still unsure where and how to store the factoids. Naturally i coud spam my blog with this on a regular basis but that would block all future things that could be done, like questionnaires so you can check yourself if you remember what you entered a month ago, thusly refreshing and training it.

For me a natural way to do this would be a (2.0ish) website where other people could do the same and the can check each other’s factoids. Maybe this would be a good django training.

Just a short reminder mainly to myself how awkward IE is. I retouched a website for a customer today to make it fully working in IE. There were a few minor problems but nothing serious to get me to step in earlier.

So i went through my list of IE weirdness and discovered some things new to me:

• IE 6 cannot display borders with transparent as color. Now this was annoying since that meant to define a color in quite a few more spaces than necessary. Since the whole things i Zope/Plone backed i will collect all those colors in a DTML. Though Plone.org says this method is about to be deprecated i have yet to see what new way should be.
• IE 6 cannot display dotted borders. Yeah, thats right. It displays them as dashed. Workaround includes transparent gifs and a few css tricks so Mozilla or other browsers capable of displaying dotted borders don’t pick up the picture.
• IE 6 and 7 behave odd with fieldsets and legends. When you define a background color for a fieldset and that fieldset will contain a legend, the background color extends into the space above the fieldset itself to the upper border of the legend. This is definitely awkward, since the workaround really feels like fixing IE itself. The fix was basically to define fieldset position relative and legend position absolute and then move the legend to the right space again. This fix works only partially since a yet to be determined combination of margins, paddings and borders still lead to the background extending outside it’s borders.

Now that IE finally supports transparency in it’s 7th inception it’s time to look more into website design using transparency in PNGs.

32 Bit images (24 Bit color, 8 Bit transparency channel) allow effects previously hard or even impossible to do on websites. IE5.5 and IE6 in fact supported these transparencies to some degree with AlphaImageLoader. This was painful, had it’s issues when using this on PNGs that were background images of elements and simply didn’t work when ActiveX was deactivated. It also had issues when animating these PNGs for example in a draggable area although that worked ok in IE5.5+ most of the time.

The time for workarounds comes to a close, especially as soon as IE7 becomes the major IE in use out there. Currently it’s 20%+ for IE7 and about 50%+ for IE5.5/IE6. This still leaves a lot of room for improvement but it’s a start. I think IE7 will gain marketshare of about 50% by July 2007. Within a years time IE5.5 and IE6 will only be used by a minority. One issue with IE7 is that it is not and will not be available for Windows 2000. There are still a lot of Windows 2000 installations out there and some die hard resisters to switch to a newer Windows version (I am). But there also are still users out there using NS4 (yes, surprising). The only chance for those visitors i see is simply telling them to upgrade their browser or use an alternative browser that works fine. This may not be possible for every target group but for some websites this approach may work. Either way this will reduce users of your website. You can’t have it all i guess.

With proper use of transparency a lot of fancy designs can be achieved a lot easier than before. Just think of the dreaded drop shadow or even worse the drop shadow on the gradient. This will all work just fine with PNGs. I predict that we will see an uprise of transparent PNG using websites within the next 12 months. It will probably not reach mainstream websites until later but the geekier websites probably alread use it anyway.

Just read about iReader on Techcrunch and first i thought it would work similar to snap.com’s website picture preview. Eager to get it working i hit the download and it is in fact a firefox plugin.

Check it out for yourself. It is quite nice.

It summarizes the content of the page linked to. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to work or at least not right away though.

Update: What is quite annoying is that you cannot move the popup bubble and there is no close button. Sometimes it pops up out of nowhere and keeps you from clicking the link you just wanted. Often reloading a page is the only solution. They urgently need to fix that

Imagine you are a car manufacturer and you want your cars not only to outperform your competitor’s cars in technical performance but also in visual appeal. Of course you would hire a designer to do that. Any designer? No - you would hire a designer that not only is a good designer but one that also knows about aerodynamics and the technical limitations like how much space does the motor take up.

Same game, different results with web designers. Every designer i worked with to create a website had no idea what designing for the web is about (one noticeable exception, who happens to be an ex-flatmate and a very good friend). All of them simply replied with “simply cut it out” or “pick the color from the photoshop file” when confronted with questions about how to get all the info needed to implement the design in html. Read the rest of this entry »

In the past few days i saw several links on website that popped up a screenshot of the site they are going. I thought it was nicely done. Nothing uber-fancy but nice and well done. It is provided by snap.com and registration to use that feature on a site is for free. I immediately decided i want it on this blog and registration+installation literally took me less than a minute

On another note, i got a new DSL connection today. Also nothing uber-fancy but okayish so far. It’s a 6MB/1MB ADSL connection with VOIP, all flat (VOIP is flat to 7 european countries - YAY). The connection comes with a Fritz Fon Wlan box, which is okay so far. One thing that struck me odd was the loading time on one of the setting pages. It displays the DSL spektrum. The spektrum is made up of a lot of small images that get loaded into the browser. And Firefox on windows is DEAD slow loading those images. Takes easily 4 minutes to load them all - mind you this is not on the internet; it’s accessing the local box in my LAN.

That kind of struck me odd since the same page loaded in a blink in firefox on my mac this morning. Turns out it’s not windows, as i first thought, since IE displays that page also in a blink. I thought it may have to do with DNS caching, caching in general and multiple channels to retrieve data. Without wanting to dig too deep into all this (was already suffering from IT burnout since i configured reverse proxies the whole day) i installed FasterFox! The page loaded a LOT faster after that (though still slowish). It can be tweaked with a few settings and finally i was able to properly browse the normally extremely slow Bioware boards. Now that an extension i warmly recommend to any Firefox user.