Updated Applications
Over a year ago in Update Expectations I noted three Mac applications that I had bought, which had seen little or no attention since their release. Today I noticed that one of these apps had seen a major new release. The application in question is AppZapper. The changelog on i use this notes the following:
- Free for all 1.x customers!
- Completely rewritten from the ground up for Snow Leopard
- Faster, smarter, easier to use zapping
- New ‘Hit List’ feature lets you browse and filter all of your apps
- New ‘My Apps’ feature lets you store license info for purchased applications
- Many overall improvements
This is great news. Although it would have been nice to see some evidence the application was still alive in the 3 years between updates.
Also worth noting is another app that I mentioned in the original post, Xtorrent has also seen some recent activity with the release of Xtorrent 2 in beta. I wonder if we’ll ever see any of those amazing new features promised for Disco.
Exclude Directories From TextMate Side Bar for Faster Find in Project
I’m not much of a user of TextMate project files, generally preferring to just mate . in a directory. This works great until the directory or one under it contains large, irrelevant files like log files or database dumps. Its at this point you start encounter massive slow downs in the otherwise very useful ‘Find in Project…’ function. The slow downs turn into crashes if the files are big enough as this results in TextMate atttempting to grab vast amounts of memory. Eventually the OS tells it to, “bugger off, 1Gb is all I can give you”, or something along those lines.
A common solution, particularly when working on Rails projects is to create a shell alias that just invokes mate with the directories of interest. This works ok but given I’m working on a mix of project types (Pylons, Rails, Radiant) I wanted a solution that did the reverse: Choose everything except what I want to exclude. Informed by an answer to a question on Stack Overflow I came up with this:
As the comments in the script note I have this in a file called ‘ate’ in ~/Local/bin, which is in my PATH. I can now happily go to any directory, type ate and have it ignore that list of directories.
Mac Remote Desktop Connection Without Installer
Microsoft provide a Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) client for the Mac. This is a good thing. However it is packaged as an Installer meta package, which to me seemed unnecessary, so I went digging. Viewing the Packages folder within the meta package shows that Microsoft have thoughtfully included an Office updater, error reporter and help viewer as well as the RDC client itself:
- Office2008_en_autoupdate.pkg
- Office2008_en_errorreporting.pkg
- Office2008_en_helpviewer.pkg
- Remote Desktop Connection 2.pkg
- Remote Desktop Connection.pkg
Note: From what I can tell the second RDC package (the one with 2 on the end) exists to provide internationalisation, something I don’t need. If you aren’t an English speaker (yes I’m aware of the irony of this post being written in English) then you may not want to follow these directions.
Install Microsoft’s Consolas Font on Mac OS X
With the introduction of Windows Vista and Office 2007 Microsoft included some new fonts, which became the defaults in Office. Their names all start with ‘C’ and they are quite attractive. In particular there is a monospaced font called Consolas that is nice to use as a text editor font and Terminal font. The problem is they aren’t technically free, although Microsoft does include them in a number of freely available updaters. What follows is how I went about installing the fonts on my Mac.
Update Expectations
I’ve recently upgraded from a Power Mac G5 to a Mac Pro. Since this upgrade also includes a switch of processor architecture I’ve been making a point of re-downloading all the apps I use, instead of just copying them from the old Mac. I’m doing this for two reasons. Firstly it ensures the apps are all up to date1 and secondly I ran Xslimmer over a lot of apps on the G5, which removed the Intel binary from Universal apps.
This process has made me somewhat aware of a few apps that have seen little or no updates in quite a while. For some reason I have an expectation that applications will see periodic updates, say every six months or less. This expectation seems to stem from the fact I’ve paid for all these apps, which seems to bring with it some expectation of updates. Whether or not this expectation is justified or not is certainly up for debate. I clearly purchased a tool at some point and it performs its job fine, so I got what I paid for. I guess the expectation comes from not wanting to think you’ve bought abandon-ware and that software is one of those things that tends to continually evolve.
In some cases I think the authors of the software fuel these expectations by explicitly indicating that there will be future development or by implying there will be updates. The following are some examples of what I’m talking about: