Those of the more OS agnostic might agree that the package management solution for software installation is a great enhancement over traditional means of distribution. Especially when it comes down to open source software, which often needs to be compiled for the underlying hardware, package management can be a salvation – since it allows one to turn away from complicated problems like finding all the necessary libraries / headers to satisfy “./configure” or finding RPM’s in the right version so the selected software will finally install.
If you’ve ever worked with Ubuntu’s Synaptic or Debian’s dpkg you know how easily software installation via package management can be.
For Mac OS X, there’ve always been several solutions to package management: Fink, MacPorts, DarwinPorts and even Gentoo Portage.
While some of these already come with a solid UI, MacPorts doesn’t. It’s standard distribution contains the powerful but not-so-easy-to-use “ports” commandline application. Porticus is a 10.4+ GUI package manager which tries to fill this gap. It offers a (quite synaptic-like, if I might say so) overview over available and installed packages, and allows of easy package installation.
Features:
- Viewing the current MacPorts categories
- Installing, uninstalling, updating, activating and deactivating ports
- Port variant handling
- MacPorts self-update support
- Growl Integration
- Sparkle Software Update
Porticus is freeware and can be found here.
During one of the newer OS X software updates Apple extended the list of compatible RAW Cameras by the Sony Alpha a 200 and the a 350. The a 300 however was omitted. This is insofar weird, as the hardware differences between the a 200 and the a 300 have no effect neither on the ccd nor on the exposure / shutter options. The only difference is the tiltable LCD-Screen as well as the option to shoot using LiveView.
Thus the basic RAW picture from a a 300 should be similar to a picture from a a 200. I researched this a bit and found that that’s mostly the case. Thus I present a small script which will convert Alpha a 300 RAW Files to Alpha a 200 RAW Files. The process is rather simple.
You can download it either as a commandline script, or as a Automator Action. The commandline script can be used in the following way:
“python ./A300fix.py DSC0001.ARW” in order to convert the file DSC0001.ARW to A200 raw. Please note that the script doesn’t create copies but changes the original file. So you’re advised to create copies of your original RAW files in case anything doesn’t work out as expected – although this never happened to me so far.
Alternatively you can use “python ./A300fix.py all” to convert all scripts in the current directory.
The usage of the automator action should be rather clear.
Download the commandline script here
Download the Automator Action here
Although Time Machine offers a very slick and intuitive interface to your past data, there can be situations, where you’d rather like a much more common list style approach to the changes off a specific file. Tms, a neat commandline tool from FernLightning does just that. It offers a cvs / svn like interface to your Time Machine data. Among the most interesting features is being able to Diff between two versions, being able to list the difference between two snapshops and listing all unique versions of a file.
The tool as well as the corresponding documentation can be found here.
When it comes down to feature-richness in UI Libraries Cocoa really shines. Especially the 10.5 bump, bringing Core Animation to the table, really extended the graphicall capabilities of Cocoa. The Windows Vista pendant, “Avalon”, for example, offers a wide set of features just as well, but still lacks a extensive integrated animation package (apart from many other smaller details).
Avalon however, just as well as Cocoa, is bound to the underlying operating system and thus not available for other platforms.
So if one intends to write a multiplatform graphically extensive application, one either has to write seperate backends for each operating system, or use a agnostic framework, like for example Trolltech’s Qt or the open source Clutter.
Clutter has a lot to offer:
And much more. As you can see, Clutter has a lot to offer. It’s still at version 0.6.2, so maybe not yet ready for production use. However, if you’re thinking about developing a graphically extensive application that has to be deployed to several platforms at the same time, including iPhone, Clutter could come to the rescue.
January 4th, 2006 in Unix Tips |
We already mentioned DarwinPorts some weeks ago.
Honestly, I use Gentoo Linux at work (next to Mac OS X) so I’m quite tech-savvy if it comes down to the application installation or compilation, but I still managed to bunk my DarwinPorts installation. Repeatedly. I don’t even want to think about when I tried to install Gnome and had to patch my X11 with newer Freetype2 libs.. was a mess… Anyway, if that sounds similar to you, then here’s a nice little solution to some of these problems: A set of scripts to simply the DarwinPorts installation.
mac os x, darwin, darwinports, unix
Those of the more OS agnostic might agree that the package management solution for software installation is a great enhancement over traditional means of distribution. Especially when it comes down to open source software, which often needs to be compiled for the underlying hardware, package management can be a salvation – since it allows one to turn away from complicated problems like finding all the necessary libraries / headers to satisfy “./configure” or finding RPM’s in the right version so the selected software will finally install.