Etwas unglücklich ist auch die Beschreibung, das Growl ursprünglich dazu entwickelt wurde, um den Inhalt einer neu erhaltenen Mail anzuzeigen, ohne das aktuelle Programm verlassen zu müssen. Wenn man das liest, geht man in der Regel davon aus, dass es auch mit Apple’s Mail klappt. Aber das funktioniert nur GrowlMail, das mittlerweile nicht mehr mitgeliefert wird und separat installiert werden muss. Die GrowlMail Version 1.3.2 unterstützt Mail auf Lion.

Nach dem letzten Growl-Update auf 1.3.1 und der Sichtung des Changelogs sind alle diese gravierenden Mängel, die auch mich bisher vom Kauf abgehalten haben, beseitigt worden.

Nun habe ich die kostenpflichtige Software seit einigen Stunden im Einsatz und kann nur sagen, dass es viel besser ist und der Kauf sich definitiv lohnt!

Die Einstellungsmöglichkeiten sind viel grosszügiger und vor allem übersichtlicher, als in der Vorgängerversion.

Neu dazugekommen ist das Sammeln von Benachrichtigungen während der Abwesenheit vom Computer. Das ist wirklich vorbildlich gelöst, denn sie werden nun in einem schicken scrollbaren Fenster gesammelt.

Fazit:

Die neue Version zum Preis einer Tasse Kaffee ist lohnenswert!

Von Anfang an war ich begeistert und mit jedem weiteren Beta-Release wurde alles noch runder, besser und schöner. Ich bin so begeistert, dass ich nicht einmal auch nur einen Gedanken oder Wunsch hatte auf das “alte” Vierer zurückzugehen. Auch selbst programmierte Apps liefen sofort ohne Anpassungen weiter.

Apple hat scheinbar den Termin zur Veröffentlichung schon wesentlich länger gekannt, denn das sollte mein Screenshot zur letzten iTunes 10.5 beta zeigen:

Von daher wünsche ich allen, die iOS5 noch nicht selbst auf ihrem eigenen Gerät haben, viel Spass damit! Es lohnt sich.

Lizenzen bringen Probleme

Allerdings soll es bei diesem Codec in Zukunft einige lizenzrechtliche Probleme geben und die Suche nach Alternativen ist die einzig vernünftige Lösung.

Die Zukunft

Bei modernen Browsern der neuen Generation wie Google Chrome, Firefox 4, IE9, etc. ist ein Audio- und Videoplayer bereits integriert, um das Video-Tag einzubinden. Das Format WebM mit dem VP8 Codec ist bereits gut unterstützt.

Google ist sogar einen Schritt weitergegangen und hat H.264 direkt rausgeworfen und setzt nur noch auf VP8. Bei Youtube wird ebenfalls alles dahin codiert und abgelegt. Somit ist der Trend scheinbar festgelegt.

Press play on tape

Das Abspielen innerhalb der oben genannten Browser funktioniert bereits. Einfach die Videodatei mit dem Browser entweder über das Menu öffnen oder per Drag und Drop reinwerfen. Auch andere Wiedergabeprogramme wie VLC zeigen die Inhalte einwandfrei.

Encodieren

Leider gibt es auf dem Mac mit OS X 10.6.6 noch keine native Unterstützung, doch es gibt eine sehr bequeme Methode für Quicktime 7 Pro. Einfach das Paket WebM Component Installer.pkg installieren und schon kann man im WebM-Format exportieren.

Ein kurzer Test mit dem VP8 Codec hat sogar noch kleinere Dateien als mit H.264 Codec erzeugt – allerdings muss ich das erst noch genauer unter die Lupe nehmen.

Did you ever plug in a headphone? Then the same happens like on the iPhone: The Computer is muted and the headphone makes the music. I hate that! Why? Because I am so fussy and want to spare my hardware. Especially jacks are sensitive and easily getting loose. So it would be so much better having a headphone connected, put it aside and still enjoy the iMac’s speaker sound as well. There is no option anywhere in the preferences, so I have to accept this. The only solution I know is getting an external sound card.

Phase change

So I did, and I am the proud owner of the external Terratec Phase X24 Firewire audio card. Really great device, and you know what? I can connect a headphone with still having sound everywhere. YES!

Record

I love making music and hopefully you have subscribed my audio podcast. To create my sounds I mainly use software like Record in combination with Reason. Record is so great in connecting audio hardware with multiple inputs and outputs.

Combine in, combine out

For my latest song I needed to record my voice while playing the music inside Record. That masterpiece software is able to do that, but my USB microphone was not in there. Checking out all the devices, I noticed for the first time, that Record combines audio devices with inputs and outputs.

Shit happens, my PhaseX24 and the Samson GoMic was not listed up in combination.

Got a Mac? Do it yourself!

Damn, yeah! I am a Mac user, so that’s no big deal. I will create my own device!

I have just opened the Audio and MIDI settings, and voila, there is the add button. Give it a name and click all devices I want to have in there. Made a check on PhaseX24 and one Samson USB GoMic, that’s it! Restarting Record, running to preferences and there it is: my PhaseX24+GoMic device.

Previously, when a user clicked a link leading to a podcast, it brought you to an empty white web page. Then, iTunes was opened – and if not installed you got a offer to download the free ware. The user did not know what is to be expected.

The new change is, that you will now see a tiny preview with the same information that is presented only in iTunes, before. The behavior of starting iTunes or the download offer is still there. Click the picture on the right to see an example with my podcast.

You also can view video and pre-listen audio!

Pricing

In my humble opinion the price for this update is very much to much. Some months ago, I just bought the update from 3 to 4. If the performance increases, then it is some bucks worth, but this time…

The update

They offered a free v5 trial for 30 days. Thanks, that’s great! But using that in makes your v4 operating systems converted to v5. Guess, what happens when the 30 days are over! Right, your VM’s are dead until you buy the update. There is no way back to 4, except for you made a copy of that images before. Ok, the installer warns about that, but is it fair, yet? Why is there no option, that a copy will be created by the installer itself?

Alternatives

Are there alternatives for OS X for another virtualization software? The first application I had in mind was VMWare Fusion. They offer a free trial, too. So I went out to their website to grab my personal copy. Good thought, but that was only a idea. They force you to fill out forms with lots of your personal data. That is not the way I want to get a free trial!

So I went further and remembered some news I read about Sun’s Virtual Box. That is the way how it should be! Free download, free ware, full of rich features and available on Windows, OS X and Linux.

Virtual Box

First of all, I must tell you, that I am very impressed of that piece of software! It is tiny, easy to use and brings all functionality you need and supports all notable kinds of modern OS in 32 bit and 64 bit!

Approaching

In this article I will compare Virtual Box against Parallels 5. I tested several features and performance. The operating systems used are Windows 7 in 32 bit and Debian 5 in 32 bit – both given 32 MB Video RAM with activated 3D and 2D accerlation. Main memory is set to 256 MB.

Performance

Performance and speed is really important when using virtual machines – at least for me. And the winner is: Virtual box! It does not slow down my Mac with 2 GB RAM like Parallels does. It even starts and shuts down very much faster and it seems my harddisk is not tortured that much. Virtual Box is optimized to run multiple instances, and I think that brings the speed.

With performance at all I mean

• Pausing, resuming and sleep like hibernation
• Harddisk usage
• RAM usage left for Host OS
• OSX response (keyboard, mouse, usage of apps)
• Guest OS response (keyboard, mouse, usage of apps)

What’s missing?

Virtual Box is not that rich as Parallels, but here is a list of features which are not yet available in Virtual Box:

• Drag and Drop files between Host and Guest OS, but you can share folders!
• Application folder of Guest OS integrated in Host OS.
• No bootcamp partitions.
• Seamless mode (guest OS window integration into host OS) only works on primary monitor!
• Keyboard input is interpreted as “PC”-keyboard.

Conclusion

The speed of Virtual Box is much better, at least on my hardware. I never used bootcamp and I am a little bit sad, that the seamless mode does not work on my secondary monitor. Also I am missing the drag and drop, but get used to the shared folders quickly.

Parallels got deinstalled!

One of those moments could be

• A party and your MacBook is serving some music, but you don’t want anybody to touch it and to see what is on your screen.
• It is bedtime and you want to listen to my podcast or some other music and set your sleep timer, but the display is too bright.
• You have a time intensive task like defragmenting harddrive, backup or downloading and want to prevent dust getting on the keys.
• The screen is no longer used while watching a movie on an external monitor.
• Just you want it!

A tiny freeware tool called InsomniaX puts some matches into the menubar to simply enable or disable the sleep functions.

As a Webkit lover, of course I love the Safari browser. It is fast, reliable, powerful and easy to use. I wish Firefox would use its engine, but there are lot of discussions in the Mozilla forums, that it will remain using the Gecko engine.

From a technical perspective, Gecko is now very solid and no longer lags behind WebKit.

Arstechnica

Alternatives

The only alternative I know what uses Webkit is the Google’s Chrome. Unfortunately, they say, a Mac version is not available, yet. But there is! You can download the developer edition, which is a completely compiled and ready-to-use application. Install it by just dragging the icon to the Application folder like any other program.

After the first start it asks for importing bookmarks. So I did, and it works very well. The passwords are taken from OS X‘s Keychain Access and you do not need to enter all your identifications, again.

At the first look, compared to Safari

• it looks a bit more stylish,
• the preferences are easier to use,
• performance feels better on loading pages, working on sites containing Flash objects,
• the developer menu can be found at View, instead of a own menu column,
• no need for an extra search bar, just type into the address field.

Unfortunately I am missing two features, but I can shortly live without:

• Syncing the bookmarks with MobileMe or back to Safari,
• the option to merge all windows together

What Safari does not have is

• the function “New incognito window”.

Pages you view in this window won’t appear in your browser history or search history, and they won’t leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window.

• opening every tab or window as a own thread
  • if one crashes, not all of the browser activity is lost,
  • if one gets unresponsive, you can work with all the others.
• jumping through search results initiated with CMD+F.

Conclusion

I am using it now for a several time. It works very stable and fast. The workflow is great, everything works fine so far. This my new default browser!

In some situations, it would be helpful to start it again – especially system applications like the network scanner.

With the help of Path Finder it is no big deal to start a running application as much times as you need it, by just right-clicking on the app in process sidebar and selecting “new instance“.

With that way it is easy to manage some unique tasks as a mass task.

Many disc accesses are usually done with a Virtual Machine, so I put a blank Parallels Windows XP virtual machine image to the stick, hoping the speed would be fantastic.

But, the hope still remains a hope. The speed is just OK, and absolutely not faster than directly starting from a harddisk. The USB probing sais 480Mb/sec which is a maximum of 6 MB per second, but the average speed I could measure in fact is 5.2 MB per second.

That is absolutely too slow and the conclusion for me is, that flash memory is only really fast if it will provided over the S-ATA port.

On the release time of the free application Skype for iPhone, I could not let it be to install it. Because I am lazy at typing I initially tested it with just a small chat, only.

But, today I had a situation that I needed to do a Skype call to ask something. The voice quality is amazing good! The person I called just used his MacBook with the integrated Microphone.

A very big plus for Skype is, that when I turned my Mac on, the iPhone’s history was inserted immediately to my Mac’s Skype!

Very great to keep the conversions complete.

Merge windows

To feel as fit as a fiddle on my Mac’s screen I need to have it clean with only that windows in front I am currently working in.

For how to hide unwanted applications without termination I blogged the article The secrets of hide and seek.

The Eventbox is my best friend when getting updated on RSS feeds, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. When clicking the arrow to see the original or full details it opens the source in Safari as a new window.

If you click many details, you will get many Safari windows open. You can configure Safari to put them in tabs. I have not enabled this, because I prefer that when applications open a browser it should be a fresh window.

When having lots of Safari windows, but you want to have them just in only one and seperated by tabs, you can go to the menu Window and select merge all windows.

To verify it does not depend on my firewall configuration I have tried doing the same on Windows using Total Commander as FTP client. That has worked instantly without any issues and delays. From my former times on the glassy operating system I remembered on the free available cross platform FTP client FileZilla, so I decided to test it on my Mac. And the result is very positive.

FileZilla

FileZilla‘s user interface is very well designed and gives many quick information of all the data I need. The feel of speed is awesome. It supports all today neccessary transfer standards and the preferences provide tons of settings in a tree organized view.

The most important thing for me of course is, that it does the thing what the Cyberduck still does not do the job even with comparing all combination of settings.

One primary functionality I do expect from a FTP client is to be able to use a custom editor to directly edit a remote file. I am very lucky that FileZilla does me that favour using my prefered programming and text editor (currently Smultron).

But when saving a remote file you need to go back to FileZilla to get it uploaded. That is no big deal, but an annoying message box is coming up recognizing that a file has changed. Of course it changed, and I want it to be uploaded. On no account I do not want to confirm that box, so I searched through the preferences. There is nothing and the official FileZilla forum does confirm that!

It has been filed, that there should be option for beeing able to auto-confirm that. The only way until now to get rid off it is to compile the source code with modification. So I did! That was quite horrible, because lot of errors occured during the makefile, but I hit the ground running.

Download the modified FileZilla client 3.2.4 without that always nerving message box compiled on OSX 10.5.6. I would be pleased, when you leave a short comment when downloading to appreciate all the time on spending getting it work. Just unzip after download and move to your Application folder. Thank you!

Skype

Yes, I do have an account on almost every important protocol and I was managing them with the Adium client. That is really a great and superb tool with an awesome tight interface. But, I have made a hard and ultimate decision.

I decided to take just only one messenger and one protocol, since now: Skype.

Why Skype?

• It runs on important platforms: Linux, Mac, Windows, Mobile phones.
• The interface is free available and really easy. All functions an instant messenger needs to have are there. My favourite is to sort out old and unused contacts.
• Encryption is enabled by default. Other instant messenger do not even encrypt at all or plugins are not easy to install.
• Can run even through firewalls.
• Chat, audio/video possible. Even conferences with multiple users.
• Standing out audio/video quality and reliable.
• Working and fast file transfers, also encrypted.
• Less network traffic by using just only one protocol.
• Available web graphics to show current online status.
• Great directory with search. You can specify by yourself what is visible by anybody and what to your personal contacts.

If you need, you can charge services at fair prices:

• Call from internet to local lines and mobile phones.
• Send SMS to mobile phones.

That list is incomplete, but that points are facing exactly what modern instant messaging in those days should be able to do. There are even LAN/WiFi phones available having Skype implemented. Also, having just one account makes it easier to configure and to handle.

If you have Skype installed and want to get in direct contact with me, click the Skype icon (blue cloud with a “S” inside) on the top right social profile bar to add me to your contact listing.

And when you have copied something once to the clipboard it would be nice to get it back later on or to use it more often and not to have searching it again in written texts before.

Jumpcut

The helper tools for managing that kind of task is called a clipboard manager. There are plenty of them available, but most are quite expensive.

I found a simple and nice one which keeps only text in mind and not images, what I do really prefer. That program is named Jumpcut and freeware.

In the menu bar is a small scissors and clicking on it shows all previous cuts. Just select one to paste it back anywhere in a textbox. Even with a specialized and customizable shortcut you can scroll through them with a head up display.

The most nerving thing is the way how to edit the crontabs. There is unfortunately no simple interface delivered by default or I did not find it, yet. Normally, it is required to open a text editor and know the format to do changes.

The developers from abstracture did not sleep and created a wonderful application named CronniX which is a fantastic easy and simple interface to match exactly the task to edit the crontab.

CronniX

The greatest feature I like is to make screenshots of Safari. You can specify a screen resolution and it is rendered with the Safari engine and stored as an image.

This is nice to have all your links pictures or thumbnails. Unfortunately you can only either add a URL or take the active one from Safari.

LittleSnapperBatch

But I want to have all open tabs as websnapshots. And to solve that I wrote my first Mac Application called LittleSnapperBatch.zip using the powerful AppleScript. I hope you find it useful, too.

Step 1: Open your favourite flashvideo – let’s say on Youtube. Then open the Activity Window using the menubar.

Activity Window

Step 2: Now you see the activity window which shows every data file transfer from the current open tab. When the video is playing, then you will notice that the download is still in progress and the transfered size is increasing. But, if the video is already stopped, then it will be line with the largest file size. Just do a doubleclick and watch the flashvideo downloading.

File List

Step 3: That’s it! Once downloaded you can play the flv-file with Quicktime.

Downloading flv

Hint:

When you are not able to watch and listen to flv files, then you need the codecs! You may download Perian to have your Mac enabled playing those and AVI videos.