njr 3.0

My compiled version of GNU Emacs broke in Tiger with some inexplicable error message. After several hours of struggling with Emacs’s build process, I got CVS HEAD to compile, and all is well except for the font spacing.

In Tiger (after changing the font height to 120 from 110):

In Panther (the way I want it):

On the other hand, I can now M-x customize without Emacs crashing. Hopefully the font spacing issues will be resolved at some point.

The first screenshot above is brought to you courtesy of 1001Screenshot 1.0.1, my Flickr screenshot poster. (If you missed the first announcement, you can read about it here.)

Apple broke their command-line screencapture utility in Tiger by making its default output be PNG instead of PDF. It still exits successfully even on error conditions. However, they did fix some bugs such as actually complaining via stderr when the file couldn’t be saved.

Aside from Tiger compatibility—which uses the PNG output directly, instead of converting from PDF, so it’s much faster—1001Screenshot 1.0.1 also brings better error reporting. Instead of just dumping errors to Console, it uses py2app’s error script support to gracefully report errors in a dialog box and even offer you a direct bug report email button.

Source for 1001Screenshot is now in Subversion; I had to slightly patch py2app to get error dialogs out of it, as you’ll see if you try to build from source, but a fix should be in the official distribution at some point.

And yes, the above wrangling means I didn’t even get a chance to start on ICeCoffEE 1.4.2 today. I’ll try to knock it out tomorrow night, but it might be another week. Sorry for the fans of discontiguous selection.

12:15 AM | PyCS
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Spotlight doesn’t come with a HTML importer.

No, really.

I was wondering why I couldn’t search through the release notes.

Someone want to write one?

(Yes, I can imagine about 800 reasons why it would be a bad idea performance- and UI-wise to enable by default, but I want one.)

3:33 PM | PyCS
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ICeCoffEE work would have been started by now, except my access point, now almost three years old, seems to have become unusable today. The access point part of it is giving abysmal performance (1 KB/sec) and the Ethernet switch part just stopped working; when I plug things into two ports, one of them goes through a continual cycle of being connected for a second, then disconnected for another second.

I’ll borrow an access point and get working tomorrow, I guess. An AirPort Express will likely replace it, since I’d love to dump my current three-step “getting music to the stereo” solution. Though that means I’ll need to get a router box and Ethernet switch when Steve leaves in about a month.

3:33 PM | PyCS
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Unfortunately it’s been two incompatibilities in two weeks for ICeCoffEE—discontiguous selection (command-drag) in NSTextView, which is new in Tiger, is broken with ICeCoffEE installed. I’ll get to work on it this weekend.

Otherwise, Tiger is great except for the impossibly broken Find/Spotlight UI. One thing John Siracusa didn’t mention was Apple’s inexplicable replacement of a great, resizable path widget with one that is no longer resizable, and expands when you mouse over a given folder. Of course, the new version doesn’t let you easily see deeply nested paths to multiple folders by just using the arrow keys on find results, which I’ve done since Find File in System 7.5. Maybe it’s the new retro thing: you couldn’t resize the Find File DA window in System 6, either.

1990:

(Remember booting from floppy?)

2005:

Also note the great display of file information in System 6. Instead, to see more information in Spotlight, you have to click the almost-invisible little “i” widgets…once for each search result. Or option-click the “i” and watch as one category of search results expands to fill several screens in space-wasting manner, or use the Inspector window if you’re lucky enough to be using the Finder’s variant of Spotlight. Progress!

On the positive side, Tiger makes my over-four-year-old dual G4/533 so much faster that I almost thought about not buying a new Mac this year. (Almost.) It boots in about 20 seconds, which is pretty amazing.

7:54 AM | PyCS
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Good news: The Missing Sync for hiptop finally shipped today, after a development cycle too long to imagine. (Don’t blame Mark/Space; they’ve been nothing but amazingly responsive throughout the testing period.) It’s not perfect, but it works admirably well given T-Mobile’s idiotic sync limitations. And of course, not having to connect your Mac to a device to sync it is a great benefit.

Bad news: the sync interfaces changed significantly in Tiger, making third-party sync integration a lot easier, but the existing conduits don’t work. Mark/Space promises a free update by the end of June, which means I’m not going to upgrade my PowerBook to Tiger until then. Of course, if the sync software had shipped back when originally intended, it wouldn’t have been so close to Tiger’s release.

So, finally, I can show you this screenshot.

6:28 PM | PyCS
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