Lazycoder

12Jun/070

It’s a Safari world after all

Safari running on Windows was announced during the WWDC 2007 keynote and is available for download right now. I’m writing this post using it under Windows XP/SP 2.

safari3fontrendering

Let’s count up where Safari/WebKit is in use as of today.

Adobe AIR uses WebKit as their HTML/Javascript engine.

Safari runs under both OS X 10.4.9 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard and Windows XP/Vista.

Safari runs on the iPhone.

My gut tells me that Safari on Windows combined with AIR using WebKit AND third-party development on the iPhone being done against Safari is going to be much, much more significant than we realize right now.

Depending on the adoption of the iPhone and AIR, the browser war could turn into IE vs. Safari instead of IE vs. FireFox like everyone expected.

Filed under: Apple, Javascript, MacOS, Technology No Comments
6Jun/070

ZFS in Leopard

Putting ZFS in Leopard is pretty cool. It looks like a nice filesystem.

So, can I access it under Windows? Without resorting to sharing it as a network share?

It’s 2007, I’m really looking for a filesystem I can format my external USB hard drives with, that doesn’t suck, that I can access from either my Windows or Apple computers. Fat32 is what? 10 years old now? When was Win95 OSR2 released? It’s time for a new system. Hopefully someone will release ZFS drivers for Windows.

Filed under: Apple, MacOS No Comments
1May/073

Silverlight 1.1 for OS X is Intel only

As best as I can determine, Silverlight 1.1 for OS X is Intel only. I’ve installed both the 1.0 beta and the 1.1 version of Silverlight on my G4 iBook. The 1.0 version works fine, but the 1.1 version crashes both Firefox and Safari. I think it’s intentional and I think my confusion is due to the confusing state of the Silverlight sites.

There are two different Silverlight sites. microsoft.com/silverlight and the community site at silverlight.net.

You can’t get to the system requirements for Silverlight through the community site (in fact, there is a link called “system requirements” on that page, but nothing seems to be clickable for me right now). If you click on “getting Started” at the community site and click on the links to download the specific version for your platform, the system requirements only state “OS X 10.4+”. You can only get to them by going to the main microsoft.com/silverlight downloads page. There I found the system requirements

for 1.0

System Requirements: Macintosh Computer with Power PC Processor

* Supported operating systems: Apple Mac OS X
* Supported browsers: Firefox 1.5.0.8, Firefox 2.0.x, and Apple Safari 2.0.4
* Minimum recommended hardware: Power PC G3 500-megahertz (MHz) or faster processor

System Requirements: Macintosh Computer with Intel Processor

* Supported operating systems: Apple Mac OS X
* Supported browsers: Firefox 1.5.0.8, Firefox 2.0.x, and Apple Safari 2.0.4
* Minimum recommended hardware: Intel Core Duo 1.83-gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor
128 megabytes (MB) of RAM

for 1.1

System Requirements: Macintosh Computer with Intel Processor

* Supported operating systems: Apple Mac OS X
* Supported browsers: Firefox 1.5.0.8, Firefox 2.0.x, and Apple Safari 2.0.4
* Minimum recommended hardware: Intel Core Duo 1.83-gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor
128 megabytes (MB) of RAM

It’s a not so subtle difference. It’s something to keep in mind if you are a PowerPC owner and want to play with Silverlight. You’re stuck with version 1.0. No Dynamic CLR for you! It’d be nice if a MS employee would post a notice about future PPC support for Silverlight?

Filed under: .NET, Apple, MacOS, Technology 3 Comments
30Apr/070

My first Silverlight experience on Safari

Open Safari after installing the plug in.

Drag the “default.html” from the Chess/Run folder in the 1.1 SDK into Safari.

Wait while the beach ball spins.

Boom.

Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0×0001)
Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE (0×0002) at 0×00000000

Thread 0 Crashed:
0 <<00000000>> 0×00000000 0 + 0
1 slr.dll 0x07b32dd0 CreateManagedRuntime + 656 (SLRuntime.cpp:52)
2 com.microsoft.WPFePlugin 0x05987e94 CMacServices::CLR_Startup(CRuntimeHost*) + 212
3 com.microsoft.WPFePlugin 0x058fe058 CCoreServices::CLR_Startup() + 320
4 com.microsoft.WPFePlugin 0x058fbfc0 CCoreServices::DownloadCustomAssembly(unsigned long, wchar_t*) + 72
5 com.microsoft.WPFePlugin 0x059b9734 CParser::StartElement(unsigned long, wchar_t*, unsigned long, wchar_t*, unsigned long, wchar_t*, unsigned long, wchar_t*, unsigned long, unsigned long) + 520
6 com.microsoft.WPFePlugin 0x059bae14 CParser::LoadXaml(CCoreServices*, unsigned long, unsigned char*, IDependencyObject*, IDependencyObject**, long) + 1252
7 com.microsoft.WPFePlugin 0x058fe974 CCoreServices::LoadXaml(unsigned long, unsigned char*, IDependencyObject**) + 388
8 com.microsoft.WPFePlugin 0x0597ba44 CMacBrowserHost::put_Source(unsigned long, unsigned char*, void*, void (*)(void*, unsigned long, IDependencyObject*, IDependencyObject*, wchar_t*, long, IScriptObject*)) + 316
9 com.microsoft.WPFePlugin 0x0597be1c CMacBrowserHost::GotResponse(IPALDownloadResponse*, long) + 228
10 com.microsoft.WPFePlugin 0x0597a574 CMacBrowserHost::CallResponseCallbacks(RequestInfo*, unsigned long, wchar_t*, unsigned long, wchar_t*) + 536
11 com.microsoft.WPFePlugin 0x0596b438 PluginObject::Write(_NPStream*, long, long, void*) + 364

(sigh)

Futzed around some more. Now I get a Javascript error from Silverlight when I load the page, if I reload the page it bombs out and Safari crashes. Who says Macs don’t crash, they do if they are running Microsoft code! My guess is that the 1.1 version of Silverlight is Intel OS X only.(sigh again). Is it even worth it to try playing around with it at this stage? I may try on my Windows PC (after I create a Virtual machine and install the alpha there). Just when you think Microsoft has changed, same crap different platform.

Filed under: .NET, MacOS, Technology No Comments
30Apr/070

Downloading Silverlight for OS X

As of 10:15PM on 4/30/2007 when you download either Silverlight 1.1 alpha or 1.0 beta for OS X, the disk image downloads with a .BZ2 file extension. If you unzip the BZ2 file and try to mount the disk image, you’ll get an error message. To fix the problem, just remove the BZ2 extension and you can mount the image normally.

Filed under: .NET, Apple, MacOS No Comments
2Jan/0710

iTunes – quit hurting my music library

We have two laptops here at the house. My iBook and our Windows PC. Both of them have iTunes on them and are authorized. All of my music is on a large usb drive that I can connect to either laptop when I need to. That’s not the problem.

The problem is that they can’t share the same iTunes library. If I add a song to iTunes when I’m using my iBook. I have to then remember to go in and add the song to iTunes on my Windows laptop. But when I do that, since I have “copy the file to my iTunes music library” checked, it sometimes makes a copy. It will then append the file name with ” 1″ (unless there is already a ” 1″ file, in which case I get a ” 2″ filename and so on.). If I’m merging two physical libraries, the story gets worse.

Whee!

So right now, when I click on the “view duplicates” option in iTunes, it shows I have 4.75GB worth of duplicate files. Automator doesn’t provide any actions for comparing two file names and finding the physical file and then doing something to it. Like removing it from iTunes and moving the file to another directory. I still haven’t learned Applescript yet, so Python to the rescue.

All I ask is this: iTunes, if I’m copying a file and you find a file with that name already in my library. ASK me what to do. And give me the option to say “apply this decision to this question if it comes up again.” Or better yet, just scan the library for new files at startup or while the program is running. You are checking the files anyway. I know you are, I see the little “!” next to the files when I open you up and the usb drive isn’t connected. Just quit hurting my music library.

Filed under: Apple, MacOS 10 Comments
   Older Entries »

The Lounge

TwitterCounter

120x60-1

What I'm Doing...

Powered by Twitter Tools

Books I’ve worked on

Contributors

Links

Delicious  FriendFeed  Last.fm  LinkedIn  

RSS Herding Code Podcast