TidBITS reviews OS X remote control software

One of the things that keeps me from being a complete Mac head is Microsoft's remote desktop protocol vs. OS X's ... ummm... uhhhh.

It's pathetic. OS X does have some hooks for a raster based unix remote screen control application, but it's stone age compared to Microsoft's iron age RDP. My best explanation for the absence of useful remote desktop control is that OS X users simply aren't interested. Once again I am reminded that a Vulcan's life is a lonely one...

Supposedly 10.5 includes some iChat remote control for remote maintenance. In the meantime we have CoPilot (works, but very slow -- useful only for remote support) and a variety of costly products that may or may not work. Now TidBITS reports one more option: LogMeIn for OS X is in beta. This product works quite well for Windows, so if the beta news isn't too bad I might give it a try.

Google public calendars: inline skating in the Twin Cities

Google has expanded their public calendar offerings with new search facilities and better support for adding public events to personal calendars.

I decided to give it a whirl by creating a public calendar for Minneapolis and Saint Paul Inline Skating (Minnesota). Currently it holds only events from the Minnesota Inline Skate Club and for the Twin Cities Friday Night Skate.

I was motivated to give it a whirl after a memorable skate through Minneapolis last night. I don't get out very often (yearly, basically) and I barely recognized the den of debauchery across the river. (My home town of Saint Paul is more sedate.) The Guthrie seems to have been transported from Manhattan, and the skate into the city across the Stone Arch bridge is now a first rate experience. I particularly enjoyed skating the spiral hill by the Guthrie, and I am oddly fond of skating around the dealers of Hennepin. They mostly seem to find us an amusing distraction. Slaloming through Loring Park in the moonlight is not to be missed, and we end with a skate along the Nicollet mall, waving to the diners.

Alas, the group has shrunk over the years and we're mostly, to put it delicately, beyond the carding range. (That may explain why the dealers find us amusing.) I'll give some of the free "meet-up" type sites, and Google's public calendar, a try and see if we can get some new folks. Unfortunately the Friday night skates are every 2nd and 4th Friday, which has always struck me as odd. It's too weird a schedule for most folks to be able to track, I'd prefer the group try every Friday but I'm strictly a passenger.

Update: Just for the heck of it, I added an entry on eventful.com. So now a search on inline skating in the twin cities lists this event. The odd schedule is again an awkward fit.

Google's blogger widget

Google has an OS X widget for creating blogger posts. I'm using it to create this post.

It's cute. It's also worthless.

That's why you've never heard of it.

Google Reader goes offline with Google Gears

I've been a longtime Bloglines user, but if I were starting over I'd probably be using Google Reader. It's just that Bloglines was good before GR was. Recently, however, I've been annoyed by feeds being "silent" for days, then appearing with 100 posts. That's rude.

Now I've got one more reason to consider the big switch:

Official Google Blog: Feeds on a plane!

With last week's launch of Google Gears, we're happy to let you know that Google Reader is the first Google web application made for online and offline viewing...

... Once you've installed Google Gears, you can download your latest 2,000 items so they're available even when you don't have an Internet connection.

To get started, simply click the "Offline" link in the top right of Google Reader.

What I really want is an offline drastically improved version of Google's "BlogThis!" bookmarklet.

In the meantime, everyone's been commenting on Google Gears, but there hasn't been much emphasis on how it works. From the original announcement:

Official Google Mac Blog: Google Gears for WebKit

... Google Gears ... adds support for local data storage and helps web application developers manage resources so you can make your web application work offline. It is currently available for Linux, Windows, and Macintosh platforms and you can learn more at http://gears.google.com....

.... Google Gears for WebKit is made up of an Internet plugin for Webkit or Safari (Gears.plugin) that's installed into /Library/Internet Plug-Ins and an InputManager (GoogleGearsEnabler) that's installed into /Library/InputManagers. The GoogleGearsEnabler ensures that Google Gears can provide resources to web applications. It registers a NSURLProtocol class only if the OS X Application is a supported version of Safari or WebKit. Once installed, the registered class will check any URL requests to see if Google Gears can provide the content. If so, it will intercept the call and provide the data. Otherwise, the URL will be processed normally. This is how Google Gears is able to work when you're not connected to the Internet.

Google Gears is an open source project and we're working with partners like Adobe, Mozilla, Opera, and others to make sure this is the right solution for users....

Note from the description that Google Gears, once in place, works all the time. So it has the not insignificant side-effect of dramatically decreasing some web traffic. In this regard it reminds me of some of the technologies currently built into IE 7 [1]. Google Gears is providing a similar application foundation universally.

[1] Incidentally, earlier versions of IE made a big deal about being able to browser pages offline. Those were the days of intermittent connectivity ...

MarsEdit: how not to distribute software

MarsEdit is a blog editor for OS X. In the XP world Microsoft's free Live Writer has crushed the competition, but the OS X world is wide open. MarsEdit should have a niche. I'm the perfect candidate for them since I blog a lot, prefer to use dedicated editors and I buy software. Happily. When I know it's good.

I downloaded MarsEdit and tried to run it. Nope, my trial has expired. I'd tried an earlier version, years ago, and it clearly wasn't ready for use. Apparently, that's all the trial I'll ever get.

This is so dumb it's sad. Each significant update, at the very least, should have a renewed trial period. Best of all:

1. New trial period for each major release.
2. Trial period is 30 uses, not 15 days.
3. After end of trial period can still try the app again, but now it's limited -- so you you can test it but not exploit it.

I'm still waiting for someone to clone Microsoft's Live Writer ...

Update 6/6/07: Hoisted from the comments:

For now, if you're still interested in giving it another spin, you should be able to get a fresh start by removing the Application Support and Preferences file for MarsEdit:
[Home] -> Library -> Application Support -> MarsEdit
and
[Home] -> Library -> Preferences -> com.ranchero.marsedit.plist

I'll give it another try!

Update 6/11/07: The good news is I was able to try it out, and it did an excellent job fetching blogger posts. The lesser bad news is that you can't save as draft to blogger, drafts are local to the file system. The bigger bad news is that it's not a wysiwyg editor, it's an html editor that doesn't emulate paragraphs. For my purposes Camino with Blogger's native editing controls is a better option.

Camino 1.5: recommended for OS X

I move between Camino and Firefox depending on sunspot activity, with a rare pause at Safari. For the past month I've been using Camino 1.5 pre-release on an ancient iBook (10.3.9), an iMac and an Intel iBook running 10.4.9. It's been great everywhere, fast, reliable, attractive. I sometimes miss Firefox's Google integration, but the OS integration, efficiency and performance outweigh that. I found only one ultra-obscure issue that would, I think, also occur with Firefox.

Now Camino 1.5 - is officially available.

There are almost no visible feature changes since 1.1. The big changes are spell checking, Keychain integration with Safari and excellent Gecko rendering. They don't have full OS X services integration however, for that you need to use the OS X text services and that's not compatible with Gecko. Camino also lacks the phishing protection built into Firefox.

So you get 90% of the OS integration of Safari with 100% of the rendering excellence of Firefox and performance that's at least as good as Safari. I almost never run into the CPU spikes that can force me to kill Firefox.

Recommended.

A stalled restore from screen saver in 10.3.9

Debugging an ill-behaved XP or OS X machine can strain anyone. My latest OS X adventure is illustrative.

The ancient G3 10.3.9 iBook was being found unresponsive. If I touched the mouse pad a cursor would move about, but the screen remained uniformly gray. I couldn't force quit or logout, and I had to power cycle the machine. This went on for several days. The only recent change was installing a pre-release version of Camino 1.5 (excellent browser, btw).

I spent a day or two trying various experiments before I came upon a fix. At first I treated this as a "wake from sleep" problem; OS X 10.3.9 had quite a few of these. I even reset the PMU

The Power Manager is an integrated circuit (computer chip) that is usually on the logic board of the PowerBook and iBook. As the name implies, it is responsible for power management of the computer. It controls backlighting, hard disk spin down, sleep and wake, some charging aspects, trackpad control, and some input/output as it relates to the computer sleeping.

Over time, the settings in the Power Manager may become unusable, which can result in operational anomalies with the computer. Examples include not turning on, not waking from sleep, not charging the battery, or not seeing the AC Adapter, among others.

but that was a waste. The machine was not asleep. It had the look it has when it's waiting to start the screen saver -- a JPG slideshow that takes minutes to start on this old, slow, machine. I wondered then about a corrupted JPG messing up the screen saver, so I refreshed my images and tested my ability to copy them. I switched to a different screen saver temporarily, but the problem returned.

Next I wondered about a network issue. 10.3.9 has a lot of issues with losing connectivity (esp. SMB) so I made sure none of my 4 users (mom, dad, child, admin) had any direct or indirect automatic network connections. Along the way I solved an unrelated Airport bug. In 10.3.9 if you set a client to automatically login to a network, then renamed the network, the client would simply not login (rather than default to the last used network). I also figured out a very annoying behavior with security updates, key chains, multiple users and WLANs. If one user makes a WLAN (WEP 2) connection, every user inherits that connection. If they inherit, however, they never do the OS X keychain update magic that happens the first time you make a connection after a security update.

Eventually I fixed all the network issues and all my users stored the WEP password correctly in their keychain, but the problem still persisted.

The clue was noticing that sometimes the machine was responsive. When it did respond I'd find one of two things. Either I'd find the last user had logged out or Camino 1.5 pre-release had canceled the logout -- because I'd not responded to a user dialog. I dug down into the user prefs and I found two relevant settings and one probably irrelevant:

• users were being logged after 6 minutes of inactivity (security)
• the screen was going blank in about 30 minutes (power)
• (probably irrelevant) the screen saver was set to run around the inactivity time, but it took a very long time to startup because the image folder had thousands of JPGs and the old iBook is very slow ...

This is what I think was happening:

• the machine tried to log a user out
• Camino blocked the logout with a dialog
• the power setting tried to blank the screen
• around the same time the screen saver kicked in and blocked interactions ...

I think some combination of the above setup the locked state.

I made these changes:

• turned off auto-logout
  
• set dim screen to 3 hours (because I wanted to display the family slideshow)

That seems to have done the trick. There's no more auto-logout, so Camino doesn't block anything.

Now that was a hard one to figure out!

I think these machines have too much of the emergent behavior of evolved systems without the built-in homeostatic mechanisms ...

Update 6/5/07: No more occurrences over the past week, so this problem has been fixed.