Launchers for Mac OS X: LaunchBar, Butler, Quicksilver and more

MacDevCenter.com: Launchers for Mac OS X

This was published 4/04 but I just came across it. Quicksilver has since gone into general release. Great discussion.

Google Desktop Search lays down another card

Google Desktop Search Plug-ins

When I tested out various desktop search tools Google Desktop search looked pretty feeble. I use Yahoo's relabeled X1 product -- it's not perfect but it's pretty acceptable on reasonably modern hardware.

But now Google has laid down another card - GDS plugins that extend its functionality:

This plugin is a web spider ('Kongulo' is Icelandic for spider) that crawls websites you specify and makes them searchable via GDS.

Kongulo follows links in HTML frame, image and anchor tags. It obeys robots.txt and knows basic and digest HTTP authentication. It can be run continuously, checking for updates to previously crawled pages, and uses the If-Modified-Since HTTP header to minimize transfers when doing so.

You can provide a regexp to limit crawls to e.g. your intranet domain.

This version does not have a graphical user interface and can be run from the command-line only.

Note my emphasis. This is a personal version of a corporate indexing tool. I'd guess it wouldn't scale to a large corporation, but who knows? In the meantime I'd use it to index my blogs so I can find stuff in them.

The product itself is interesting, but it emphasizes two things:

1. GDS might have a future.
2. When you build a product around Plugins, you gain a lot of power.

A strange bug with Microsoft Office Outlook and Access 2000 and Palm HotSync and PocketMirror and ...

Microsoft Office Online Home Page

I wanted to consolidate and manipulate about 1100 contacts stored in an Outlook file. The history of those contacts is probably valid here. They've been through a myriad of applications over the years: FileMaker Pro on a Mac. FileMaker Pro on Windows. Palm Desktop/Mac. Palm Desktop/Windows. PocketMirror. PocketMirror Pro. Exchange. Outlook.

And that's the short list.

I export them from Outlook into Access. So far so good. In Access I can parse, manipulate and clean-up the data.

Except my queries don't work. I query 'not null' and get records with empty fields. I know Access 2000 had problems (2003 is better), but this is ridiculous. It can't be that buggy. The fields, however are empty. I run all the database repair utilities -- no effect.

Or are they?

I export all the data to a delimited file. Then I use a text editor to set the character set to ANSI and save the text file as PC format. They I reimport. Now all the queries work.

My guess is that there were 'illegal' characters in those fields. I know Access 2003 can handle UTF-8 data, maybe there those characters would have rendered in some way. In this case, they didn't. They were there, but Access couldn't get at them and couldn't delete them.

The risks of moving data between a LOT of platforms ...

Utility for import into OS X Address book

turingart - AB Transfer - OS X address book import utility:

'AB Transfer' imports from any file source, while 'AB Transfer Pro' (*) imports from databases too. The following database systems are planned as data sources: FileMaker, Oracle, SyBase, MS SQL Server, generic ODBC, MySQL, Postgres, SQLite."

Acrobat 7 and various PDF related Safari bugs

Macintouch report: Acrobat 7

Macintouch had a bunch of reports on PDF dispaly in Safari. Here are some fragments.

• a well regarded plugin that takes care of the problem: http://www.schubert-it.com/pluginpdf/

From Adobe - a whole bunch of workarounds for numerous bugs:

Chris Gulker, Adobe

Here is a recipe that should make Acrobat or Reader 7 show PDFs inside Safari windows (please note that Acrobat/Reader 7 require Safari 1.2.2 or newer on Mac OS 10.3.x):

1. Quit Safari (this is important).
2. Launch Adobe Acrobat 7 or Adobe Reader 7, whatever you want to use within Safari
3. In Acrobat or Reader:
Choose "Preferences..." from the Apple menu item
4. In the Preferences dialog:
Select "Internet" from the list on the left
...if all the items in the top section are disabled, you have Mac OS 10.2.x. Acrobat and Reader do not work inside Safari in 10.2.x.
5. Check (or leave checked) "Display PDF in browser"
Select (or leave selected) the first item in the menu to its right.
6. Click 'OK'
7. Choose "Detect and Repair" from the Help menu
... you should see "Adobe PDFViewer" as one of the options
8. Check (or leave checked) Adobe PDFViewer
9. Click "Continue"
... "missing components were repaired" or
"No missing components detected" should appear.
10. Click "OK"

You should now be set up to see PDFs in the browser. Launch Safari and test.

If it still doesn't work, here are some diagnostics to perform to help figure out where the problem may lie; some have solutions and some would need further investigation:

(1) Make sure Safari thinks our browser plug-in is there and is the only one for handling PDFs

1. Launch Safari
2. In Safari:
3. Choose "Installed Plug-ins" from the Help menu
... you should see a section titled "Adobe Acrobat and Reader Plug-in" - you may need to scroll to find -and it should contain several lines, the most pertinent being:
application/pdf :: Acrobat Portable Document Format :: pdf
... if you don't find this, then somehow the Safari plug-in that is connecting Safari to Acrobat/Reader is not being correctly installed.
4. In that same browser window, Find (command-F) "application/pdf" (no double-quotes). ... you should find *only one* of these, and it should be in the section titled "Adobe Acrobat and Reader Plug-in", in file
"AdobePDFViewer.plugin".
... if you find more than one, then you have another plug-in that is interfering. Delete that other plug-in (then quitting and re-launching Safari) should make PDFs appear in the browser using
Acrobat/Reader -- although I don't recommend deleting a plug-in without first understanding why it's there. Plug-ins are in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins
In that same browser window, Find "pdf"
... you should find several, but they should all be in the section titled "Adobe Acrobat and Reader Plug-in". If you find "pdf" in another section, specifically in the third column of the table under "Extensions", then again you have another plug-in that is interfering with the connection between Safari and Acrobat/Reader (see above).

(2) In Finder, make sure our plug-in exists and isn't duplicated: / Library / Internet Plug-ins / AdobePDFViewer.plugin There should be only one copy of it; there should not be any copies in the following directory:

/ Library / Internet Plug-ins

(3) More advanced: check for errors in the console

1. Quit Safari
2. Launch / Utilities / Console.app
3. In Console:
Command-K to clear the console (this doesn't delete anything in the
actual log: it only temporarily clears the window).
4. Launch Safari
5. In Safari: Navigate to a PDF
... check in the console for error messages that indicate a problem.

(4) Even more advanced: check Acrobat-Safari connection infrastructure

1. In Finder
Right-click on / Safari.app and choose "Show Package Contents"
2. Double-click on "Contents"
... you should see a folder labeled "Frameworks"
3. Double-click on "Frameworks"
... you should see many aliases that start with "Adobe"

We are working to put these procedures in the Adobe support knowledge base.

and a few others:

Very annoying but easily fixed. Go into AcrobatReader 7's prefs/Internet - switch off the use-AR7 Browser Option tick boxes.

Larry Macy
Say What?? Why are these folks having this problem?? Oh Yeah Apple hid this one: In QuickTime Player, open QuickTime Preferences (or From System Preferences), click on the Advanced tab, click on MIME Settings, click on the disclosure triangle for Images - Still image files, scroll down to PDF Image and check it. It is unchecked by default (Why?? Ask Apple). All PDF's will show in Safari just dandy. Been there since 10.3. something.

We'll always have Paris

Yet another Google curiousity. They've introduced a "movie" operator.

Try it out.

Google Search: movie:we'll always have paris

Speculation on a future iPod

Next-Generation iPod Details Unveiled : Multimedia Devices : MobileMag

PortalPlayer makes the chipset for the iPods. They put out an announcement that MobileMag has commented on. In the past Apple has punished partner announcements of this sort, but I don't know if this one will merit the full Jobs fury.

Apple has kept the wraps on their upcoming 5G iPods very very tight, with almost no information surfacing except scattered rumors. Today PortalPlayer announced the release of their next-generation PP5022 System-on-Chip, could this be the mark of the new 5G iPods? We think so.

Current 4G iPods, iPod Minis and iPod Photos use the PortalPlayer PP5020, a predecessor to the new PP5022. The PP5022 is specifically designed for enhanced features on hard-disk drive-based personal media players (iPod?) and offers triple the battery life of the PP5020....

The chip will also support a USB 2.0 host controller and transceiver; this will offer compatibility with peripheral devices such as digital still cameras and printers. You will be able to connect your 5G iPod to your digital camera, download the photos, then connect it to a printer and print your files.

In addition to USB 2.0 high-speed Device support, there is On-the-Go support; FireWire Link Layer integration; dedicated ATA-66 enhanced IDE bus supporting up to four devices; 4-bit SDMMC controller; consumer CD I2S port; 8/16-bit expansion IO; B/SIR infrared; TWC 3-wire controller; 4 channel, 8-bit ADC; 4 channel, 8-bit PWM/FM; up to 48 GPIOs; dedicated 16-bit memory controller for two banks of 2.5V or 1.8V SDRAM. I’m beginning to think this thing would be a waste in a 5G iPod, maybe put it in a smaller Mac Mini.

Performance on the PP5022 will top that of any chip in any media player, the architecture integrates dual 32-bit ARM7 CPUs with zero wait state and four-port 128 kilobyte iRAM and six DMA channels that connect through multiple high-speed internal buses. Simply put, it will offer peak performance on high demand operations while maintaining ultra low power consumption. The high-performance interface will increase download speeds, improve performance when transferring a large number of music files and when managing photos.