StyleMac.com

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:

• OpenGL / OpenGL ES compatible
• 2D Layered scenes with possible 3D transformations
• Built-in Effects and Filters
• Media Playback
• WebKit Support, meaning one can mix WebKit with UI Elements just as with Cocoa
• Built-In Animation engine, much like Core Animation (albeit less powerfull)
• Linux, Windows, MacOSX and even iPhone Support
• Written in C, bindings for Perl, Python, C#, C++, Vala and Ruby

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.

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

DarwinPorts is a Package Management System for Mac OS X and Darwin. Other famous Package Management Systems are Debian/Ubuntu’s DPKG/Synaptic or Gentoo’s emerge system. Package Management Software eases the installation of, mostly, open source applications and the management of the installed applications. Instead of downloading a source tar.gz file and doing the old “configure && make && make install Dance” one can just select the application and it’ll download, configure, make and make install automacially. Another great aspect of Package Management Systems is that they download their so-called dependencies too. So if you want to install Gimp, and Gimp needs libjpeg, libpng and libxml, the Package Management System will download, compile and install those libraries too - if you don’t have them installed yet.

DarwinPorts contains a huge collection of 3038 Packages for Mac OS X / Darwin. That’s alot. From KDE over Gnome to small applications like Scite. It’s all there. If you’re interested in running Open Source Applications on your Mac, you should really try this out.

DarwinPorts

There’s a new article on MacDevCenter which explains various HTML Tools on the Mac OS X commandline (read: Terminal.app).

CLI Tools (especially on unix-based systems) have a high amount of features which can be utilized to solve certain specific tasks via shell- or apple-scripts. Even Automator allows to include cli tools into it’s workflows.

This MacDevCenter Article explains how to use some tools so you can modify or create html-files on the fly.

MacDevCenter.com: HTML Tools on the Mac Command Line

Hot on the heels of yesterdays CSSOptimizer comes PNGCrusher which is an ‘automaic PNG optimization’ tool.

One can just drag and drop some files onto it and it’ll try to reduce the file-size without any visual changes. It only overwrites the previous file if the new file is smaller than the old one.

I’ve testet it with some Photoshop CS PNG files, and I had mixed results ranging from almost no reduction (1kb) to massive reductions of up to 70%. However I think that those PNG files whose size I already reduced during the export from Photoshop CS (by playing around with the export options) showed little reduction, while standard-exports from Photoshop or other applications showed a great deal of reduction.

PNGCrusher is based on a Unix commandline application called OptiPNG, so one could - once again - implement it on the server-side to auto-crush new PNG files.

Download PNGCrusher here

We’ve reported about the new Safe Sleep (Hibernate) features of Mac OS 10.4.3 before.
Safe-Sleep is a new features which saves your ram onto your harddisk, so that your Mac can - even after power-los - awake from sleep.
Now reader David wrote about a Preference Pane for Safe Sleep which he developed:

I’ve created a control panel for this. The basic functionality is implemented.
I’ve decided that it would be nice to be able to choose wheter the computer suspend just to RAM, or both RAM and DISK, or just to DISK. So I’ve started a control panel to enable just this. So far it has only the basic functionality imlemented.

The Preference Pane is still a tad basic, which means that it’s only available as a Xcode project, so you need to compile it yourself, and - additionally - modify some of the code so it fits your Mac.
So just like the Safe Sleep itself which one can only get to work if terminal savy, the installation of this Preference Pane expects a certain amount of technical knowledge, too.
However, I reckon that if you successfully managed to activate Safe Sleep, installing this Preference Pane shouldn’t be a problem at all for you.

Control Panel for Apple’s Safe Sleep Feature - David’s Blog

I’ve been ignoring all the news about Safe-Sleep so far as I always thought that it’d be new-powerbooks only, but seems I was wrong. Although Apple says that it’s a feature of the new powerbooks it’s actually a Software-Feature which comes with 10.4.3.

When using Safe-Sleep (in contrast to the normal sleep we Mac users know and love) your mac saves the contents of your ram to the harddrive, and then falls to a sleep-mode which doesn’t need any additional power. That’s great, for example, if battery power is limited.

Andrew Escobar has a guide that explains how to activate Safe Sleep using standard Apple Hardware (that is not-new Powerbooks or iBooks, and maybe even your Desktop) by applying some terminal voodoo

I’d love to try this with my G5, but I’ve got 2.5gigs of ram in here and I guess the process of writing 2.5gigs of ram to the disk everytime I set it to sleep can be quite frustrating. However, I’m gonna try this with my Powerbook, I’m using it frequently in conditions where Safe-Sleep would come in handy

How to Safe Sleep (Hibernate) Your Mac -
AndrewEscobar.com