Recently in All Things Mac Category

Recently, I downloaded the iPhone application Zumocast after hearing a recommendation from Leo Laporte on the podcast MacBreak Weekly. I installed the server at on my Mediacenter PC and my Mac. In no time at all I was listening to music over my network, watching videos and browsing through photos. This is an application that shines.

In addition to watching videos, viewing photos, and listening to music you can also view some of your files. Because the iOS includes the foundations of the MacOS there are some files that can be read natively like txt, pdf, doc, rtf. I haven't gone through all of them. Because reading all of that on such a small screen is futile. But it is nice the capability is there.

One of my favorite features is the ability to encode and download videos to your iOS device. I've already done one, the documentary "Gasland". I have queued up a few episodes of the third season of the Boondocks and eventually I'll see if it can also download songs and integrate them into the iTunes library. Something I've wanted to do but not able to try because the Mac was off.

So if you are like me and have lots of media and a few iPods, iPhones, and other devices around the house give Zumocast a try.

If you’ve been under a cave than you probably haven’t heard that Valve’s Steam game service is now available for Mac. I’ve had an on/off relationship with Steam over the years. Using it on a PC, getting a Mac and all but forgetting about it, trying dismally to use it in Crossover Games, and finally using a native Mac version. You can grab it here at steampowered.com. There is also a limited time free download of Valve’s Portal to start the show and garner interest from Mac gamers.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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If you’ve already bought some of the games from outside the Steam store (in my case I have Tales of Monkey Island I bought through the last MacHeist nanobundle. You can enter your license key and it will be included in the steam menu. I haven’t tested the to see how it deals with Mac to PC and vice versa gaming. But all will be done in due time. Until then, I’m going to take this time to enjoy Portal. A game I’ve been curious for a long time that I didn’t work up the nerve into purchasing.

As for my PS3? It’s still dead to me until Sony gets off their high horse. With the price of quieter blu ray players coming down constantly that also have standard remote IR functionality. This device “that only does everything” has gotten less useful as more capable devices in my apartment have replaced it. It does less than my HTPC, it does less than my region-free DVD player, it doesn’t seem to connect to my ReadyNAS. I’m a little unhappy with it frankly.

As a developer I don't enjoy paying for things when I don't have to. One of them happens to be Apples iPhone Developer program. I could find better ways of spending $99. Debugging my own stuff isn't one of them. So what is a developer to do when he can't or won't pony up the money to be allowed to load and debug his own applications. He uses that tiny developer brain to bypass all the checks that's how.

I'm not going to go into the ins and outs of jailbreaking the iPhone. There are plenty of tutorials on the net to do exactly that. If you are in over your head at this point you should probably bail now, shit is definitely not going to get easier from here on out.

You'll need your own self-signed certificate. iPhone OS will check for it, jailbreaking will tell it that it's good, regardless of who it came from. So crack open Keychain access and create one for yourself. It's in /Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.app. From the menu choose Certificate Assistant > Create Certificate.

Give it the name "iPhone Developer" and check overide defaults.

Give yourself enough time. 10 years sounds about right. And change the type to Code Signing.

Add as much or little information as you want to the personal information screen.

After here, click next until the end. It should be shown in your Keychain Access application list.

Update the Developer stack

We'll need to make a modification to the Info.plist of the SDK. Go to /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform. Create a backup of Info.plist and open the original in Property List Editor. Change all instancese of XCiPhoneOSCodeSignContext to XCCodeSignContext. There are 3 instances of them in SDK 3.1.2. There might be more or less in future versions.

Back to XCode

In XCode open your project and change the Active SDK to iPhone Device - 3.1.2. Run the build command with Command-B. Go to the Directory with your project, open the build folder and into the Release-iphoneos or the Debug-iphoneos folder you'll find the executable. We're going to need to get this file into the iPhone.

Copy your application to iPhone

You won't be able to get your application onto the phone using the normal channels. iTunes won't allow it. So the alternative is to copy it to the phone using SSH or iPhone Explorer. As with all things Mac, iPhone Explorer provides a GUI. And a GUI is always handy. Using iPhone Explorer go to the /Applications folder on the device. And upload your app folder. When complete it should appear like this. In some cases the app won't be set to executable. If this is the case you'll need to run the "chmod a+x" on the app folder to allow it to run.

Your application won't be present on the springboard. For that you'll need to restart the springboard. There are jailbreak applications that allow for this. You can also install the UIKitTools and run uicache from the commandline to update the springboard without restarting it.

My favorite bittorrent client has been released for the Mac. I've just finished downloading and was looking through the screens and configurations. I didn't have a chance to test it yet because I had a download in progress on my current client, Transmission. When I get home later I'll be sure and try it out. Transmission has been doing great, but I always felt the speed of transmission was consistently underwhelming. Maybe it was the clients I connected to but when I ran µTorrent Windows in a XP VM it got the job done in half the time. Plus the memory footprint and filesize was minute compared to just about every other client.

I just remembered my previous favorite client was Tomato Torrent. It was nothing more than a window dialogbox showing the progress of the current download. The memory footprint was relatively small, but as you spawned more downloads each one would take up the same amount of memory. This was 2002 and memory was cheap, but even 1GB of RAM cost a little bit of money. So accumulating 8-10 open windows used about 20-40% CPU and 150MB or RAM.

Last night I bit the bullet and downloaded the iPhone SDK to my Mac. It includes the new XCode 3.1 so that and all the files were updated as well. On a side note it reinstalled CHUD which was giving me errors since upgrading to 10.5.3. Now I can disable 3 of my cores and see how a single 2.4GHz Kentsfield really work. It was still very useful and quick running on just one core. I wouldn't try that with VMWare Fusion running.

After getting all my files installed and setting my IDE I went on the web and was looking through various tutorials. Here is one I liked but I'm sure there are many others. As soon as the NDA is lifted or defined about what can and can't be shared I will look at buying one of the programming books.

At first I ignored because I really hate spiral marketing but after watching it I was thoroughly impressed. And it wasn't a campaign but some guy cutting a demo real.

Today I've been transferring my photo library from the "My Documents" folder that was on the PC drive into iPhoto. Well it didn't turn out great because that folder was no where to be found. I think I might have already it with the same folder from my laptop. The hoops I had to jump through were incredible. This drive was formatted for Time Machine backup.
Using Data Rescue II I did a bit scan of the drive. I'm looking for jpegs so any of its kind would be found. I was able to recover almost everything. But now the files don't have any real file names. except a short desciption of size and a serial number. Now I'm using Aperture to build out a quick library. Using the embedded EXIF information I sorted the images into folders by year and date. Since I know the approximate times we had family vacations, festivals, visitors, and parties, I'm able to quickly stitch together a working pattern.

Now all I have to do is explain to my wife how I almost lost over 3000 photos.

I just realized it's been a long time since I posted under the All Things Mac category. Almost 3 years really. I had a Mac (at a really good price), I lost it, while I would love to buy a Mac Pro I can't justify the insane price (my Quicksilver in 2002 was no speed demon, but it was competitively priced at $1100, refurb.) I do wish I could have sprung for the iMac 24". The screen is so much better than the 20" but I still couldn't get over the asking price. In the end I built my own. Its been a headache, with random error messages (and missing a lot of the functionality and quietness of a Mac Pro. But it is my baby. Chosen from a list of carefully researched and selected components.

So now I'm back to buying Mac software once again. I have all my CDs from the quicksilver but the applications were compiled for Panther. Which might as well be Windows 98 in Apple years. No I'm looking at building, buying, or downloading all new ones. I've been checking the MacHeist bundles for something good. but I don't see anything useful, yet.

I've been struggling with my custom PC over the weekend. After ordering, waiting, and assembling the parts it just didn't go all the way like I wanted it to. My Gigabyte P35-DS3R was stuck at "Verifying DMI Pool...". I searched all over the internet about why I would be stuck at "Verifying DMI Pool......" after assembling everything correctly. I tested the motherboard to see if overclocking the easily overclockable Q6600 was the proper. Not. I thought the order of SATA drives was the problem. Not. I thought the drive had gone bad between the time I plugged it in the first time and the time I restarted the computer. A disk check later, not. So I disabled the ACHI capabilities. Meaning I would loose Hot-disconnect, NCQ, and RAID. This basically made the computer I planned to build with nearly unlimited capabilities, incapable of doing some of the things I would like in the near future.

So I browsed the forums and checked other posts on the same board, and I got nothing. One day I was browsing the OSx86 forums and someone with an ABIT IP35 (a similar chipset with similar features) mentioned the Boot Order in BIOS.

Apparently, my Pioneer DVD Drive is no longer recognized as CDROM, but as PIONEER-DVR... down in the bottom of the list if bootable devices in BIOS. It's important that CDROM is not selected if you are using AHCI or else it will hang everytime. Realizing this might be the problem I'm having I changed the BIOS, booted and got the "Press any key to boot from CDROM". Yes!

I posted this here in case someone else with a gigabyte P35-DS3R motherboard also encounters this Verifying DMI Pool error. Maybe the search engine gods will have this in a useful search.

I'm in the process of moving from a Windows PC to a Mac. I haven't decided which Mac it's going to be yet, but it's going to be powerful for sure. I was a mac user for a long time but something went down and the mac was never seen again. I've been using a PC since. The price was lower for sure. But it's been quite apparent for a long time where the limitations creep in. My budget laptop is barely capable of running Windows Vista. But it carries that stupid capable sticker like a badge of honor. If only Intel didn't screw people around. And pulled Microsoft into the scam. My laptop was only bought a 4 months before the release of Vista. It wouldn't be the fastest on the block, but it damn sure should have worked the way it was supposed to.
Now as soon as the budget clears this month I'm going for it. But with change of operating systems comes slightly different, yet annoying ways of doing the same tasks.
For example. I was using iPhoto for a few years on the Mac. The equivalent on the PC was Picasa, bought by Google. My first impression of it was a pretty good one. The interface was similar to iPhoto in many respect. The editing tools were very nice. I didn't understand it's reliance on folders. I like the way iPhoto sorted this mess out for automatically based on year/month/day hierarchy. I have multiple cameras so when I download them to the PC I use the month of the download. Picasa really made a mess of things, because Albums of the same date weren't put in the same folder 2007_4 and 2007_4_1 for example. I'm using iPhoto once again. I hope the speed has improved, one thing I like about Picasa was the speed. and the integration with picasaweb. But as a long time Flickr user I prefer to use flickr.

I have a Mac... OSX86 :-P and it kicks ass. So after playing around with all the default stuff for a few days I download firefox. Not the crusty, memory hogging 2.0 but the brand new slick looking 2.0 beta, from here. And I must say it looks really really nice on OS X. I think the developers have been really working there ass off to get it up to speed on the Mac. It's got polish and it shows. I think a lot more Mac users are visually aware of their surroundings and you really have to bring your interface up to atleast the Apple HIG if you're going to get any traction at all. Else you face losing those users to Safari. Trust me, you don't have to try hard to get users off Safari, but first impressions are important. And if the end-user doesn't like what they see in the first 5 seconds you are dead meat.
So imagine my surprise when I download the firefox beta on vista. :-\ See what I did there? Yes it sucked that hard. I know windows users aren't the same as mac users and are willing to put up with a lot more slackness. But the windows firefox beta, looks like a beta. Garish ugly blue buttons and all it warts.
Basically, it didn't blend.

I waited and waited and, finally, they did it. Google Maps includes support for Safari now as announced by Bret Tyler. This announcement comes as a great relief to those of us waiting to get our Map on! Now the list has grown to include IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, and Safari. Good work guys!