The best firefox extensions: information week

[Updated: added a screenshot of my extensions]

InternetWeek | Firefox Essentials: A Dozen Must-Have Extensions

A great reference - very frank. I have the Google toolbar, SwitchProxy and IE View. I think I'll end up with most of what he recommends.

Running iPhoto 6 on a G3

I wonder if the success of this tip might vary depending on video card. Interesting performance comment. I wonder if the G3 restriction was more for the other iLife modules.

macosxhints - Run some iLife '06 apps on a G3:

It's easy to get iPhoto 6 and iWeb installed on your G3 by copying the iLife installation package to your desktop, control-clicking on the package installer, picking Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu, and then removing this code from the Distribution.dist file using TextEdit:

// Rule out insufficient hardware
if ( !hasAcceptableHardware() )
{
   my.result.title = system.localizedString('TITLE_INCOMPATHW');
   my.result.message = system.localizedString('ERROR_INCOMPATHW');
   my.result.type = 'Fatal';
   return false;
}

Petcam: checkup on your doggie

This is obvious -- except it hadn't occurred to me. I've heard of using a webcam to monitor grandma (my mother would just love that), but of course it works just as well for Fido: Home petcam made easy.

There are several security issues. A wireless webcam may not support robust encryption standards. If you are uploading images you need a place to access them -- and most of the upload sites are a bit ... unseemly. If you are accessing the webcam directly then you run into serious security issues -- it needs to connect to the DMZ of one's LAN...

Keyword Assistant is not compatible with iPhoto 6

Keyword Assistant doesn't work with iPhoto 6. Ouch. Ouch. Aperture is looking more inevitable all the time.

Mail.app bug: This message could not be saved

OS X Mail (mail.app) started giving me an annoying error message: "This message could not be saved". Fortunately googling on the error string gave me what looks like a plausible solution:

Mail.app on Mac OS X and Courier IMAP Server

In order to use Mail.app effectively with most servers based on Courier-IMAP, you need to set the "IMAP Path Prefix" to "INBOX" in the account preferences.

BBEdit's perspectives on OS X 10.4 and MacTel

This post was a draft last year, but I think the story is interesting enough that it's worth republishing now that MacTel stuff is out. Emphases mine. Mac developers are a determined lot.

Developer::Pipelines | A Mac Text Editor Migrates to Intel

First, with Mac OS X 10.4, the OS itself was no longer a moving target. In earlier releases of the OS, its underlying architecture—notably the kernel APIs—was in a state of flux and subject to change. And change these low-level APIs they did, as Apple refined the kernel and underlying frameworks to make improvements. As a consequence, each new release of the OS left broken applications in its wake, an unpleasant outcome that dissuaded many Mac users from switching to Mac OS X...

In 10.4, the kernel programming interfaces (KPIs) have been frozen, and a versioning mechanism lets drivers and other low-level software handle those situations when the KPIs are changed to support new features. The result is an underlying infrastructure for the OS that's stable and consistent across different platforms. This, in turn, makes the porting process manageable.

According to the BBEdit engineers, Mac OS X 10.4 does a good job at hiding the hardware details, while still providing low-level services (such as disk I/O). In addition, its APIs are mostly platform neutral, which means no special code is required to counter side-effects when invoking the APIs on each platform. Put another way, the code to call an API is identical for both platforms, and the results of the API call are identical; no glue code is necessary.

... BBEdit 8.0, which was released in late 2004, uses the full Unicode conversion and rendering features of Mac OS X. These APIs automatically read a file's encoding scheme and manage the data transfers and file I/O appropriately. By choosing to use Unicode early on, the Bare Bones Software engineers not only expanded the number of languages the editor could support, but also avoided what could have been a serious problem with reading and writing files when migrating to the x86-based Mac platform.

Another key revision made in BBEdit 8.0's code design was that the application began using Mac OS X's Preference Services API, rather than storing binary data in a custom resource. This modification also side-stepped the Endian problem...

TextDrive – Hosting service with WebDav

I'm not in the market for a hosting service at this time, but if I were TextDrive's WebDav server would be very appealing.