I use email a lot. I’m sure many of you do as well. So why not have a super-safe way to keep all of your email (from as many accounts as you might have) in one place, and get some virus protection to boot?

Sound too good to be true? It’s available to you right now. Thanks god, errr…. google…..

Get Google To Store All Your Email

First, login to gmail (yeah, you have to login first :/ ). Next, find the ‘Settings’ link in the top right of your browser. Read the rest of this entry »

A while ago, I replaced a broken screen on my macbook. It was a difficult thing to do, and after I was done, I noticed I wasn’t able to use the CD / DVD drive any longer. I didn’t really care too much about the problem, until I got Leopard, and wanted to get it installed on the machine.

So, I got some tools from my buddy Derek, and got to work on it tonight. Taking apart a macbook is a delicate thing to do, and should be taken seriously. I laughed when my wife suggested I just screws into a bag so I didn’t lose them. Ideally, one should have a clean white surface to place screws that mimics the placement of them in the actual computer.

Anyways, after about an hour of disassembly and inspection, I figured out the issue. One of the brackets that sit above the CD / DVD drive was lodged underneath the CD / DVD player. I fixed the issue and re-assembled the computer in about 10 minutes. Not bad if I may say so myself.

Then I went to install Leopard .

The first time I attempted the install, I got everything started and left the machine alone. When I went to check on it about a half hour later, I saw a large notification that the install had failed. I tried to restart the machine to re-attempt the install a few times. Each time however, the installer couldn’t find the HD to install to.

Finally, I got a notification that the HD was formatted in a way that was incompatible for Leopard. If I proceeded with the install, I was going to have to wipe the HD clean. That was a bit daunting to hear, since my wife is the primary user of the computer. If I lose something she cares about, well, I don’t have to tell you the horrors I’d face then.

So, I got out my handy-dandy external HD. It’s really just a shell with an old 120GB IDE thrown in there, but it does the job well. I got everything I could figure she might want off of the computer, and re-started the install process.

When the computer asked where to install Leopard, I recieved the same prompt as before, but this time I went ahead with the install, knowing that I was formatting the hard drive.

After the format was complete, the installer proceeded. I left the machine alone, figuring that I had a while before I needed to do anything with it. About another half hour later I checked on it, only to see another “Install Failed” screen. Now I was in a serious bind: would my wife be without a computer at all?

Well, I’ve always been one to keep trying until something gives up and works for me . So, I re-started the install again. This time however, I was happy to see that it worked! I went through the typical post-install steps, and was delighted to see my wife’s macbook successfully running Leopard.

The one issue that did come up afterwards however, was all my iLife apps were gone. I suppose I can’t complain too much about it. I didn’t pay for the original iLife apps, so I’m not out any money. But still, It’d be really nice to not have to buy soemthing I already had on here.

The new Apple OS X has finally arrived, and I can tell you one thing: Leopard was definitely worth the wait. A few months ago many of us were enlightened to the new features to be unleashed upon us. Even then, it was apparent that the wait would be worth while. Well, I’ve recently been testing the new release out, and here’s what I have:

The Install was easy! To install Leopard, insert the DVD provided, and run the installer. You’re prompted to be sure if you want to install, and upon confirmation, your machine is restarted. After the restart, an optional disk consistency runs. You can cancel this at any time, but I let the whole thing go. It took about an hour. After the consistency, the install itself runs. I was initially prompted that it would take 1 hour and 38 minutes. However, the actual install was done in under 45 minutes.

Once I started my using the new OS, it was clear that all of my previous settings had been preserved. I ran all of my critical applications, and all work fine.

 

For those of you comparing, here’s my current setup:

new 24″ iMac

And the Apps I run (not all, just the most necessary)

• Zend Studio 5.5
• CS3 Premium
• Firefox, Sunbird, & Thunderbird
• iWork ‘08
• Coda
• Transmit
• Adium & Skype

The new Dock is awesome!

I’m a huge fan of the stack concepts that have been implemented into the new dock. The default stacks are ‘Documents; and ‘Downloads’. This is great for cleaning up your desktop. I however, don’t like having all of my commonly accessed programs stuck in the dock, so I added my own stack, ‘Applications’. Adding your own stack is as easy as dragging the folder to the Stack area.

The old marker that signified a running application has been replaced by a nicer, though much less obvious, light underneath the icon. You can change this icon if you like, and there are several tutorials on how to do this already.

Overall, the Dock is much prettier than it used to be. All icons have shadows behind them, and the Dock itself reflects windows near it.

The new Finder is awesome! For those of you who don’t already know, the new Finder allows you to view files with the ‘Cover Flow’ view system. This is great for pre-viewing files before opening them. What’s even better; you can now open many files for even closer preview, without actually opening their default applications! This is a great time saver for those of you with limited system resource, who don’t want to open very photoshop file in a directory to see which one you want.

Much of the new look of finder is quite similar to iTunes. So mounted drives appear on the left much like an iPod appears on iTunes. Furthermore, unmounted, networked computers now appear the same, just without the option to ‘Eject’. Finding files and folders is cake with Finder’s great indexing capacities.

Apple Mail, is now my mail client. I’ve been an ardent user of Thunderbird for a couple years now. So I doubted that I would use the new Apple Mail, despite all the buzz about it. After trying it out however, it’s a really fun mail program. The program itself loads quickly, and keeps everything simple. There’s also a built in RSS reader (nothing new). Though I would prefer that iCal be embedded into the program, Mail’s integration with iCal is certainly good enough.

The one thing I might miss, is the tons of available plugins that are available for Thunderbird. Apple has a weird way of not directly promoting additions to it’s software.

iChat, is now my IM client. I’ve been a big supporer of Adium for a while now. However, iChat is a great IM client. iChat allows for multiple accounts, which was largely why I used Adium for so long. What’s more, video and audio chats are a snap. All you have to do is click one of the available buttons while selected on a buddy, and you initiate that form of chat.

The only thing I wish that iChat had, was the ability to send notifications to Growl. I’m a huge fan of Growl for notifications of program events, and anything that integrates with it, I always check out.

Photo Booth is awesome! Photo Booth has always been one of my favorite Apple programs that come standard on macs. That’s how I got those candid shots of Bender sleeping on the job ! With the new Photo Booth, custom backgrounds are introduced. All that’s necessary is to activate the video background, then step out of the picture. Once your background is detected, you can re-enter the photo and voila, you’re in France!

As you can see from the picture here, the background detection isn’t perfect, and could still use some work.

Spaces is alright. I’ve heard a lot of buzz about the new ‘Spaces’ feature for Leopard. I’m a little less than impressed however. Video card vendors manufacturers have been providing this type of service for a long time now. So, I’m not all to sure why there’s been such hype about the feature. Don’t get me wrong, Spaces is cool. It is a clean way of having more than one desktop at a time. However, this is not breakthrough by any means.

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There are quite a few features that I have yet to try out.

 

 

Time Machine - I know, I know. This is supposed to be an amazing new feature for OS X, and certainly worth the cost of the OS itself. There are well known bugs however, about trying to use Time Machine without an external HD already set up. What’s more, the external HD should be a large one, as Time Machine is not light on space. I’m a little pressed for cash right now, so I’ll have to try this one out later.

Parental Controls - Hey, I don’t have kids. It might still be a good idea to keep my wife from viewing inappropriate websites, but I don’t think she’d like that to much.

Boot Camp - I’m already running Parallels, so I don’t feel the need to use this. Parallels does everything I need for running multiple OS’s on the same machine.

Conclusion

As is quite evident, I’m thoroughly happy with Apple’s new OS X release. There are a few features that I wish were available, but as a software developer, I recognize the need to release a product without some features is greater than waiting infinitely to release the ‘Perfect Product’.

As always, I welcome your comments!

Google Analytics is Down! That’s the worst news any webmaster can hear. I’ve already received phone calls from clients wondering why they’ve lost traffic to their site. It appears that people can still use their account, but recent visits aren’t showing up.

The official story is the data isn’t lost. It’s still being collected. It’s just taking a while for google to fix their issue and get the recent traffic data out to the public.

The exact cause of the outage has yet to be released. However, there is a lot of speculation that it’s due to the ‘upgrade’ that the reporting service received in May. That upgrade caused a similar, but less severe outage, back then as well.

There’s a good thread going about this here

Today Apple announced the immediately available Safari 3 Beta. It’s also available for Windows users. This is a huge development for Apple, which seems to enjoy invading Microsoft’s space every chance they can get. There are other new features, which bear good reason to talk about.

First, there are all of the announced changes from Apple:

1. Blazing Performance
2. Elegant User Interface
3. Easy Bookmarks
4. Pop-up Blocking
5. Inline Find
6. Tabbed Browsing
7. SnapBack
8. Forms AutoFill
9. Built-in RSS
10. Resizable Text Fields
11. Private Browsing
12. Security

These are all debatable, especially the ‘Blazing Performance’, but a few of these really stand out.

Namely, Resizable Text Fields. I checked on this, and sure enough, users can resize textarea elements in a form. Your layouts will be critical now, that the user can change the size of the containing element(s) well after your page has rendered. I wonder how many AJAX apps are going to be broken because of this.

Also, all of the form elements can be styled now! That’s a big departure from previous versions of Safari. I’m glad the ‘Safari form elements are perfect’ snobbery has been replaced with an attitude more conscientious the of needs of web developers

The next big development is the find feature. Typing in the find area dynamically pops up results on the page, as they’re found. The UI for this is amazing, and really shows the talent at Apple.

Of course the big question on everyone’s mind is, ‘How is all of this going to work on Windows?!’

Well the executive summary is: It does work, and it works well.

Tom and I loaded up Safari 3 though Parallels 3.0 on his machine running Windows XP Pro. The installer was typical Windows stuff. We were prompted to install the Bonjour Service and Apple Software Update Service for Windows.

This is another big development that I don’t think a lot of other people have mentioned yet. Bonjour is a great program for Mac, that now will be available for Windows too!?! Apple Software Update will also run on Windows?!? We’re going to be talking about this for a long time.

After we installed Safari, we encountered our first problem. For some reason (we don’t know why yet), after we installed Safari, the network adapter for Windows stopped working. We used Parallels to specify the shared adapter, and everything worked again.

The app itself looks great on windows. It’s not bound by the typical Windows frame. Safari 3 basically looks the same as iTunes already does.

It was really strange to see Safari as an option in the Start Menu:

One thing that is still frustratingly still an issue is HTTP_AUTH between Safari and Microsoft IIS servers. Even if this is a problem with Microsoft, I think the developers could figure some type of workaround for this.

Another problem I have with Safari, is lack of code-coloring in the view source window. I have yet to see a developer toolbar built for Safari (I live by Firebug), and until there is one, I’m not leaving Firefox.

Recently, Derek and I were running into problems with CGI errors on our development server for NFI Studios. We had recently upgraded our PHP install from 5.0 to 5.2, so we started looking for differences between the two.

After a brief search on Google, I came up with a German forum with a potential solution: APC (Alternative PHP Cache). It turns out that Caching for PHP 5.2 is different than for PHP 5.0. So, I turned of APC (by editing the php.ini file).

For all of you coders out there, just an FYI.