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