Neuberg on OmniFocus

Matt Neuberg brings a career of writing and contemplating information management to a deeply thoughtful analysis of the OmniGroup's OmniFocus Getting Things Done application.

The OmiGroup is drinking heavily tonight.

It's not that Matt dislikes OmniFocus, it's rather that he exposed lots of significant design issues. His conclusion ...

... If OmniFocus were a public beta, I'd be unhesitating: "Go for it!" I'd cry ... But OmniFocus isn't a beta, and its price seems out of proportion to the state of its development.

Ouch! I've been hoping the OmniGroup would implement a great iPhone OmniFocus client with sync support (assuming Apple allows it) to desktop OmniFocus. Matt's review sets that hope back a bit.

The good news is that he had lots of serious suggestions. The next version of OmniFocus might be a great improvement.

(PS. Matt, before there was In Control there was GrandView - the preeminent app combining columns and outlines. I think in the early days of dBase Borland's Reflex had some similar tricks, but I don't see that mentioned in a delightfully old review -- those were the days.)

Interesting OS X observation from Firefox development

OS X has memory issues, and APIs that don't do anything ...

Firefox 3 Memory Usage pavlov.net:

... On Mac, If you look at Activity Monitor it will look like we’re using more memory than we actually are. Mac OS X has a similar, but different, problem to Windows XP. After extensive testing and confirmation from Apple employees we realized that there was no way for an allocator to give unused pages of memory back while keeping the address range reserved.. (You can unmap them and remap them, but that causes some race conditions and isn’t as performant.) There are APIs that claim to do it (both madvise() and msync()) but they don’t actually do anything. It does appear that pages mapped in that haven’t been written to won’t be accounted for in memory stats, but you’ve written to them they’re going to show as taking up space until you unmap them. Since allocators will reuse space, you generally won’t have that many pages mapped in that haven’t been written to. Our application can and will reuse the free pages, so you should see Firefox hit a peak number and generally not grow a lot higher than that....

My sense is that OS X does a lot to test the patience of application developers.

I've been using Firefox 3 beta 5 on OS X, and I feel that it's faster and much less likely to peg my CPU.

WiTopia personalVPN - need custom DNS configuration

I've been paying for the Witopia personalVPN service ...

Gordon's Tech: WiTopia personalVPN 

...PPTP VPN: This is built into OS X, though in 10.4 it works through the peculiar 'Internet Connect' application rather than the network preferences (where I looked for it). Easy to use, requires no additional software. This style of VPN is disdained by experts for some security issues, but of course it only has to be better than nothing -- which is what everyone else at the Hotspot is using. It's the old 'park next to the better bicycle' theory...

Problem is, it really slows down my browsing. Long delays for every transaction. I'll send them a note and see if they have any ideas, but I'm inclined to disable renewal of the service and try another vendor ...

Update 5/1/08: Both Witopia and a helpful commenter tell me that it's essential to use the Witopia DNS servers to get good performance. I think that's the problem, so I'll change and test. If it fixes the problem I'll amend my post title to "Use the DNS servers!". (The recommendation is down in the Witopia FAQ, I'll look over their site again but I think they could do with a bit of rework on setup documentation.)


Update 5/31/08: When I was running 10.4.11 I didn't see a way to specify a DNS address for the PPTP connection alone, and I didn't want to change my usual DNS address. With 10.5.3 it's fairly obvious how to change the DNS address for the PPTP connection alone (advanced button).

I added the DNS address from the Witopia FAQ: 38.119.98.220 Performance seems quicker, but, oddly enough, the Witopia Wiki won't open. Other sites seem fine, so perhaps the wiki is coincidentally offline. I'll test this out for a while.

Why was my OS X mouse behaving so badly?

It had been bugging me for a while, but now I was going over the edge.

OS X 10.4.11 wasn't responding to my mouse clicks. I was double, triple and quadruple clicking where one should have done.

What had gone wrong? Some recent update? Something stealing the mouse clicks?

I keep my system very plain, so I decided to check into a new mouse driver. It had been a while since I'd updated my Microsoft IntelliPoint driver -- years, come to think of it.

I installed the new IntelliPoint and IntelliType Pro driver from Apple's site. The reboot took a long time, the mouse install seemed to require some major rebuilding.

The new driver had loads of new options, but my mouse clicks were still being missed. Now, however, the driver told me my battery was low.

New batteries, but the problem remained. The driver had one more diagnostic though ... my signal was oddly weak.

Yes! The small wireless receiver (this is pre-Bluetooth) had fallen off my desk, and was now buried between the back wall and the back of the desk. Restoring the receiver restored the signal -- and my mouse clicks.

Of course the real problem was that I'd lost my receiver, but it was odd that I didn't get the battery and signal warnings until I installed the new driver. My IntelliMouse driver was ancient, probably inherited from a 10.3 build. I wonder if some recent update didn't knock out the battery warnings it used to give; Apple can't possibly test against ancient drivers.

Really, these computer systems are a wee bit complex.

I do like the new mouse options however, especially Microsoft's acceleration support. I feel as though I got a new mouse out of the deal.

Google Docs: still no working clipboard

I've been using Google Docs for ages, and there's been no progress in providing any kind of reasonable clipboard functionality with any OS X browser. We're told to use ctrl-c to work with the system clipboard instead of using the native Google Docs clipboard. Of course that shortcut works for Firefox on OS X, but not Safari.

Honestly, Google Apps is still a semi-useful toy compared to a desktop application. Progress is very slow.

Firefox noscript add-on - time to start using it

A recent large scale hack of Microsoft's IIS web server means that lots of reputable web sites may be hosting exploits more commonly seen on the shady side of the net.

So it's probably time to start using the Firefox NoScript add-on ...

Hundreds of Thousands of Microsoft Web Servers Hacked - Security Fix

There is a great add-on for Firefox called "noscript," which blocks these kinds of Javascript exploits from running automatically if a user happens to visit a hacked site. Currently, there is no such protection for IE users, and disallowing Javascript entirely isn't really an option on today's World Wide Web. True, you can fiddle with multiple settings in IE to add certain sites to your "Trusted Zone," but that option has never struck me as very practical or scalable.

I've been using it for a few days. I whitelisted a number of the Google sites I use (if they're hacked we're all doomed) and so far it's been easy to enable JavaScript when needed by clicking on the S icon.

Video editing - lord, this is ugly

I'm pretty disgusted with iMovie '08, so I decided to read a review of Final Cut Express 4.

Yuck.

MacWorld desperately tries to say nice things about Apple, but despite the "4 mouse" rating the review reveals a right mess. Different behaviors on different processors, inability to import some formats iMovie '08 handles, etc, etc.

Video editing was always pretty complex, but I think the profusion of codecs and file formats has driven it over the cliff.

Apple's offerings are pretty sad at the moment (iMovie HD was the closest they got to a good solution, and they abandoned it). Unfortunately I think Apple is the only consumer video option for the Mac.

Digital-TV converters: choices for the Saint Paul area

A local paper's tech blog reviews Digital-TV converters available locally. His preference is the "Digital Stream DTX9900 sold by RadioShack". I need to spend my vouchers before they expire, so I'll probably follow his lead here.

From what I've read elsewhere broadcast digital may require a fairly expensive antenna investment. So the converters are only a part of the cost. We have very cheap antennae; I'll report on what we find in our real world testing. All we need is for one sports channel to come in so my son can spend his tv-time credits.

Update 5/4/08: Bloody 'ell, it worked.

QuickTime Player: saving the configuration files

QuickTime Player Pro AppleScript driven batch translation from FLIP Video 3ivx to Apple Intermediate codec requires a QuickTime configuration (.set) file.

You can't save a configuration file from QuickTime Player Pro. (How hard would that have been?)

You need to open video file, set up the export settings, then run an AppleScript like this one:

tell application "QuickTime Player"
tell first document
save export settings for QuickTime movie to file "BootDrive:Users:jfaughnan:Documents:aic2.set"
end tell
end tell

You'll need to edit the "BootDrive ..." stuff to match your hard drive (Volume) name and user name.

What a nuisance!

Apple stripped AppleScript functionality from QuickTime Player - in a fairly rude way

Once upon a time you could use AppleScript to make QuickTime Player do many of the tricks that QuickTime Player Pro is supposed to do. In those days people wrote scripts to do things like batch file translation:

Gordon's Tech: FLIP Video Ultra camcorder: iMovie HD works, iMovie '08 doesn't

Update 3/30/2008: I found an AppleScript that should do what I need. It tells QuickTime Player to open multiple AVI files, process them to DV stream, then delete the originals. Unfortunately, it's giving me cryptic error messages.

Update 3/31/2008: I'm beginning to think Apple quietly disabled AppleScript driven conversion in QT Player. Nobody seems to know anything about it.

As you can probably guess my theory of 3/31 seems to be correct.

When I ran those scripts with QuickTime Player, they simply didn't work. No error messages, but the AppleScript APIs didn't seem to do anything.

I paid for QuickTime Player Pro and now the original scripts work.

This seems kind of obnoxious. At the very least QuickTime Player should have produced an error message like "AppleScript functionality requires QuickTime Player Pro". Apple wasted a fair bit of my time.

Video codecs: iPhoto, iMovie HD, iMovie '08 and FLIP Video

As a part of my ongoing struggle with FLIP Video, I'm delving ever deeper into the broken world of Apple video.

iMovie '08, for example, recognizes some video formats when it's importing directly, but a smaller set when the video is stored in iPhoto. I even have an sneaking suspicion that my test results differ between my Intel MacBook and my PowerPC iMac.

The FLIP camcorder uses the 3ivx toolkit form MPEG-4 compression and playback, but it's a completely proprietary implementation. It can only be read with a 3ivx decode, so it's not what I want to keep video in.

So what format makes sense? I'd like something that

• is fairly standard
• is fast to edit
• doesn't use tons of disk space
• doesn't lose immense quality when it goes through edit cycles
• is recognized by iMovie '08 even when the video is stored in iPhoto
  

One option is Apple's Intermediate Codec (used by Final Cut, emphases mine):

Final Cut Pro 5: About HDV and the Apple Intermediate Codec:

... The Apple Intermediate Codec is a high-quality video codec that Apple developed for use as an alternative to native MPEG-2 HDV editing in an HDV workflow. Instead of editing the MPEG-2 HDV data directly, you can capture video from the tape source and then transcode it with the Apple Intermediate Codec to optimize the video data for playback performance and quality.

Working with the Apple Intermediate Codec is less processor-intensive than working with native HDV. Unlike MPEG-2 HDV, the Apple Intermediate Codec does not use temporal compression, so every frame can be decoded and displayed immediately without first decoding other frames. The drawback of this codec is that it requires three to four times as much bandwidth and hard drive storage space as MPEG-2 HDV.

Data rates for the Apple Intermediate Codec are variable; the data rates and storage needed may vary slightly, depending on the complexity of your footage. Images with a lot of detail have a higher data rate, while images with less detail have a lower data rate.

I did some experiments converting FLIP Video to MPEG-2 and Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC). On my MacBook iMovie '08 recognized the AIC encoded .mov files within iPhoto (you need to restart iMovie to get it to recognize new iPhoto additions):

• Original (3ivx): 3.6MB
• Apple Intermediate Codec with AAC encoding for audio: 14MB
• MPEG-2: highest quality, AAC audio - 15MB
  MPEG-2 "high quality" - 7 MB

So in my testing the MPEG highest quality was about the same size as the AIC file, but the MPEG-2 "high quality" was half the size. Both were fairly quick on a MacBook.

On my iMac, using QuickTime Pro, I wasn't able to find MPEG-2 as an option for export. I did find Apple Intermediate Codec and even on the old PowerPC machine the 3ivx to AIC conversion was pretty quick. The resulting file was "seen" by iMovie '08 even when it was stored in an iPhoto library.

So I guess for the moment I'm going to be transcoding to Apple Intermediate Codec. Problem is that QuickTime Pro doesn't do batch file export. More on that later ...

Update 12/25/08: This all largely obsolete when Apple finally updated iMovie HD so it will work with FLIP camcorders after you install the 3ivx files (at least on Intel machines).

In any case, I did come across more explanations of 3ivx and other video codecs in a well done Gizmodo review:

Okay, so all that stuff up there are industry-wide standard video codecs. On top of all of those, various entities love putting out their own spin on those standards. As we mentioned before, DivX (proprietary) and XviD (open source), for instance, use MPEG-4 Part 2 (more specifically, MPEG-4 ASP) compression, meaning stuff that'll natively play back MPEG-4 ASP will also play back DivX. Like the Xbox 360, for instance. There are a ton of MPEG-4 ASP-based codecs, actually, like FFmpeg, 3ivx and others, but DivX and XviD are the most common.

So 3ivx is a sibling of DivX. I wrote a later update on this topic.

Camino not working with Gmail

Camino has stopped working with Gmail. I assume the bug is well understood -- it's not obscure! The screen redraws constantly, never progressing beyond the first 20 pixels or so.

I tried upgrading to the new 1.6, but it has the same problem. I'm back to Firefox beta 3 for now. (Safari has never worked well with Google products, and it still doesn't.)

I'm surprised there's no fix yet.

Update 4/28/08: I followed the advice in comments; emptying the cache fixed the problem. It's funny, I used to empty the cache the first time I had browser problems, but it's been years since that did anything. I just lost the habit ...

Devon Technologies free OS X services - including WordService

I'm very surprised I haven't been using this free service app. DT lists several others worth looking at. All free. Thanks CT comments!

Needful Things: Services

WordService 2.7

This service provides 34 functions to convert, format, or speak the currently selected text, as well as insert data or show statistics of the selection within all Cocoa applications (such as TextEdit, Mail, iChat, Safari, XCode, or our commercial applications) and Carbon applications supporting services.

Features:

Reformat, Remove line attachments/endings/links/multiple spaces/multiple feeds/quotes, Trim line beginnings/line endings/lines, Sort lines ascending/descending, Shift left/right, Initial caps of words/sentences, All caps and lowercase, Mac/Windows/Unix line endings, Rotate 13, Straight/Smart Quotes, Encode/Decode tabs, Insert date/date and time/time/contents of path, Speak native/German text, Statistics.

Has Google heard of the Macintosh?

From a Google blog post on malware:

Official Google Blog: Working together to fight malware

... Use anti-virus software. Most anti-virus software is specifically designed to find and remove harmful software on your computer. Be sure you have anti-virus software installed on your computer (you can get a free trial through Google Pack if you don't), keep it current, and use it to run frequent full-system checks...

I don't know any OS X user running antivirus software; in any case it would cause far more problems than viruses have to date.

Clearly, someone needs to bring a Macintosh to Google's office. That's the problem with these big, slow, corporations, they're stuck in the 20th century.

Then Google could write something like this ...

Avoid Windows XP. We recommend Vista with anti-virus software if you want to invest in a brand new quad core 4GB 64 bit system with all new hardware, Desktop Linux, or any Macintosh.

OS X support notes - recent updates

Several interesting Apple Support articles have come out recently:

• Mac OS X 10.4: Keychain Access asks for keychain "login" after changing login password. The keychain password and the user account password are stored separately. It's possible to change one and not the other. This tells how to manually change the keychain password to match the login password.
• Browsing for PCs on a network requires that the PCs have NetBIOS enabled. (Wow, that's really old and creaky stuff.)
• How to recover when a server won't let you connect with a different account
• Single user and verbose startup (verbose is new to me)