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Java 6 now available for Apple Mac's

Mark Derricutt — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 05:25:00 GMT

Apple has finally released Java 6 for OSX:

About Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 1

This Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 1 adds Java SE 6 version 1.6.0_05 to your Mac. This update does not replace the existing installation of J2SE 5.0 or change the default version of Java.

— Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 1

Let there be rejoicing!

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VirtualBox For OSX

Mark Derricutt — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 10:59:00 GMT

Started looking at the new beta releases of Virtual Box (recently purchased by Sun Microsystems) and decided to give OpenSolaris a bash. So far this is looking very sweet - easy to use, fast to run - and best of all - free (I'm talking about Virtual Box - but they same looks to be said for OpenSolaris as well).

The software's still in beta form currently and isn't fully there yet, but so far it sure looks like it'll do everything I need.

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Java SE 6 Developer Preview 9 Release Notes

Mark Derricutt — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 23:26:00 GMT

Ooo nice - it must be Apple Release Week - a new Java SE6 preview release - which can now be set as the primary VM.

New features in this preview:

AppleScript is a supported javax.script scripting language

New API in com.apple.eawt.Application:

Get and set the Application Dock icon

Set a badge label on the Dock icon

Set the Dock menu

Open the native system help viewer if your application has a help bundle

New API in com.apple.eio.FileManager:

getPathToApplicationBundle() obtains the path to the currently running Java application package.

GraphicsConfiguration.getNormalizingTransform() now returns a transform value that represents the physical size of the attached monitor.

The system focus ring color can now be obtained using: UIManager.getColor(“Focus.color”);

Aqua-style title-less group borders can now be obtained using: UIManager.getBorder(“InsetBorder.aquaVariant”);

Java SE 6 can now be set as the primary Java VM, and selected for use with applets. Note that you must be using a web browser using a 64-bit Intel version of WebKit for applets to work. Java SE 5 will be used if the browser does not support the selected version of Java.

Java application bundles that want to use Java 6 are no longer required to use the JVMArchs key. Specifying 1.6* or 1.6+ as the JVMVersion is sufficient for selecting Java 6 to be used in your application.

The javax.smartcardio API is present and works as expected on other platforms.

Java DTrace probes are supported.

A refreshed implementation of the Aqua Look-and-Feel, designed to work with a User Display Scale Factor greater than 1.0. This is the same Look and Feel provided in J2SE 5.0 for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Please see Tech note 2196: New Control Styles available within J2SE 5.0 on Mac OS X 10.5 for more information about new client properties available in this implementation of the Aqua Look and Feel. Any use of the legacy Aqua Look-and-Feel classes is deprecated.

Additional per-window client properties. Please see New Window Client Properties.

Splash screen support for bundled applications. The Info.plist’s Java dictionary has a new SplashFile key with a string value of a path to the image or Jar containing the splash screen image. The $APP_PACKAGE and $JAVAROOT expansion macros can be used.

The default image during a drag is now scaled to a maximum of 128 pixels in any direction. This value can be set via the apple.awt.dnd.defaultDragImageSize System Property. The value should be greater than 0.

— Java SE 6 Developer Preview 9 Release Notes

One really nice thing to see here is the implementation of Apple Script as a javax.scripting language:

import javax.script.*;

public class SayHello {
        public static void main(String[] args) throws Throwable {
                String script = "say \"Hello from Java\"";
                
                ScriptEngineManager mgr = new ScriptEngineManager();
                ScriptEngine engine = mgr.getEngineByName("AppleScript");
                engine.eval(script);
        }
}

Using the simple setJDK script I now have SE6 as my default VM from the command line, however - changing the "Java Application Runtime Settings" to use 6 by default seems to crash IDEA, however Moneydance and other applications (so far) seem to run fine.

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Apple hit with antitrust lawsuit

Mark Derricutt — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 22:14:00 GMT

So Apple's got another antitrust lawsuit looming:

For iPod users looking beyond the iTunes Store, there's the Amazon Mp3 Store. In some ways, in fact, the Amazon Store is more appealing than iTunes: all of their tracks are DRM-free and many are cheaper.

Of course these aren't perfect solutions. To get the most out of iTunes and an iPod, one must use them in conjunction. However, this suit feels like sour grapes: punishing Apple for their success. There's a difference between dominating a market and preventing others from succeeding. So far, no one has created a more successful alternative and that's not Apple's fault.

— Apple hit with antitrust lawsuit - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

I just had the thought that Apple could open up the iTunes player with a "store plugin api" somehow which would allow Amazon or whoever to connect their own store into the iTunes interface - sharing the common interface, 1-click purchase and downloader, iTunes/iPod integration that makes the combination so seamless.

It would simply rock if I could shop at Amazon.com, Amplifier.co.nz, cdbaby.com, or any other online store easily from within iTunes.

Please Mr Jobs - give us an iTunes Market - not just a store.

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Leopard and Pair Programming for the win...

Mark Derricutt — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 07:12:00 GMT

I've just been watching the new Leopard Guided Tour from Apple and was impressed with the new desktop/screen sharing capabilities of iChat:

Is it just me or does anyone else think this would rock for distributed pair programming, hell - this would even make quick reviews/pairing sessions for collocated developers.

Technorati Tags: apple, development

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iTunes and Creative Commons - wot if?

Mark Derricutt — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 12:54:00 GMT

Standing there in the shower reflecting on the days passing I was struck with an interesting thought - what if Apple iTunes (along with EMI and everyone else doing DRM free MP3s now) released everything under Creative Commons?

The initial license strategy that comes to mind is the by-nc-nd license:

Attribution - The artist should be recognized, as well as the label and online store - credit where credit is due.
Noncommercial - I'm assuming iTunes users are consumers - we could probably skip this thou.
No Derivative Works - this would limit the user from transcoding the MP3 into another format (OGG for instance) or stripping out any meta data such as the iTunes user information.

The only addition/alteration to this I thought being used would be some form of limited redistribution clause - solely to allow you to sync the MP3 to your various MP3 players or devices (AppleTV, iPod, XBox 360 etc.) but not other peoples.

Whilst the creative commons licensed music is usually freely redistributed, there's nothing in the license, or the organization that requires it. I'm just wondering what the public response would have been if Apple came out initially (or subsequently) licensing these songs under limited commons. I can certainly imagine the outcry from people wishing to strip the encoded iTunes user data against the non-derivitives clause.

I'm not sure what pros there would be for such a license usage beyond having a well known, easy to understand license, and from a basic users perspective I can't see any major problems giving the limited redistribution would allow me to play the music on any device I owned (and thats pretty much all I really care about) but I'm sure other people could come up with some cons for me.

Technorati Tags: apple, music

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Official Glassfish for Mac OS/X

Mark Derricutt — Wed, 09 May 2007 11:08:00 GMT

I just noticed on MacSlash that Sun now officially supports Glassfish under Mac OS/X - download the package from here. Rockin - now to download and give it bashing...

Technorati Tags: apple, java

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No Joy with Parallels

Mark Derricutt — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 09:15:00 GMT

Last week I got myself a nice shiny new black MacBook and so far am definitely in love with the machine and the OS - so much so that I've already fallen away from my open source ways and purchased a copy of XTorrent and Parallels. Unfortunately - as both the operating systems I've tried to install failed dismally I think I should have given parallels a demo run first before buying it (impulse over-the-counter-box purchase).

So far I've tried:

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn
Solaris Express

From the simple onscreen instructions it doesn't look I've been doing anything wrong, I wonder if anyone else has had problems with these two OS's out there?

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AT&T Apple Phone?

Mark Derricutt — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 03:10:00 GMT

Given that every man and his dog is writing about the Apple iPhone I wasn't planning on making any comments on it, but now that I see that the Cingular branding is being discontinued I'm wondering if we'll actually an iPhone with Cingular after all.

One of the biggest “de-brandings” in advertising history is to begin Monday when AT&T, now the sole owner of Cingular Wireless, starts changing all Cingular marketing to adopt the AT&T name.
AT&T will not disclose the budget for the campaign, which will continue for five or six months — leading to the partnership with Apple on the new iPhone, scheduled for midyear.

Whilst all that may need to change is the Cingular logo with an AT&T one, I wonder if it'll give Apple a door way to making more changes to the eventual release strategy.

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Corrupt iTMS songs

Mark Derricutt — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 22:29:00 GMT

...so I just purchased the recently released Chris Caffery album Warped from the new iTunes NZ store to find one of the tracks ("State of the head") all corrupt and white-noise like. Grrrrr - enter my first ITMS support email.

Hopefully the nice folk at iTMS will respond shortly and make available a nice uncorrupted tune for me...

Update: Arrrrrrg - now I find the song "Iraq Attack" and "Amazing Grace" are also a scratchy corrupt song - hopefully theres not more songs on the album corrupt... Somehow I thought this digital music revolution was supposed to prevent 'scratches'.

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iTunes Music Store NZ Broke my iPod

Mark Derricutt — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 01:30:00 GMT

Ok, so I'm being a little bit melodramatic here - iTMS NZ didn't break my iPod but ever since I signed up and purchased some music from the new store, my iPod's being having some weird experiences:

Along with having this message pop up once twice (which seems dependant on the USB port I use on the laptop, and iTunes/iPod all contain the current/latest software) I've been seeing the iPOD return to displaying its navigation menu and behaving likes it disconnected whilst iTunes still shows the iPOD attached (with no drive available to Explorer - this also seems dependant on the USB port I use).

However, the most annoying thing so far is that two days after purchasing some music from the new fangled store (and having enjoyed listening to said music on the iPod) I now find that whenever I attempt to play one of these purchased tunes - the song is instantly skipped and it's play count is increased - the later behavior makes me think the iPod thinks the songs 0 seconds long (even thou it shows them as 4mins).

Google suggests "bugs in Apple's DRM" and shows up several sites suggesting to "delete the tune from the ipod and copy it back", but when pray tell HOW - I have iTunes automatically syncing so I can't just 'delete' it, nor could I just delete the file on disc as I have no idea what it is... I've loath to 'restore' the iPod just yet...

Grrr.

Update: All working again fine, with little mess or fuss - I have iTunes automatically syncing so I can't just 'delete' it - duh... From itunes I can easily find the files on the laptop as their filed by artist/album, so copying them elsewhee, deleting the song iTunes, resync the iPod and answer "don't transfer" to the prompt to pull back the purchased (corrupt) songs. Then drag the original copied files back to iTunes, add them back to the purchased playlist and sync away... The only downside is the playcounts have been reset to 0 - but oh well, at least now they play again :)

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New iPod firmware fixes Smart Playlist Bugs...

Mark Derricutt — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 10:24:00 GMT

Finally! The recently released iPod Updater 2006-01-10 finally fixes the long standing Smartplaylist bug which prevented the live updates of Smart Playlists on generation 4 iPods. Woohoo!!! Finally my iPod is back to how I like it...

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Apple iTorrent

Mark Derricutt — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 11:02:00 GMT

Note: The following is pure wild speculation and guess...

Earlier in the year Apple launched iTunes 4.9 with support for podcasting, the support was somewhat flawed and reminiscient of an early beta product, but it worked. It worked enough that people, both new listeners and old flocked to it in droves. They flocked to it so much that podcasters everywhere dropped off the 'net under the sudden increase in load.

Podcasters and podcatchers alike rose to the challenge, and the use/support of bittorrent emerged, but iTunes stalled, new versions were slow to arrive, and when they did they showed a consistent lack of new functionality. No torrent, no resume, the all to common "wipe out the library" problems, but still it prevailed.

We roll our story forward to the iPod Video and the iPod Video Store, the sales are there, the people are there, and the downloads (for those without super-high-broadband) slow.

"Give us the torrent!" the people cry, but no - all we get is silence, and why is that? P2P is bad, its illegal, but wait - a few months ago BitTorrent and MPAA team up for a truce, Apple starts selling TV shows and rumours of a new distribution nework for more TV shows show up around the place.

Now that BitTorrent (the company, not those running illegal trackers) has made friends, it's now possible for Apple to "make friends" as well and integrate a DRM laden BitTorrent client into iTunes for shared delivery of restricted content.

Pure fantasy? Quite possible, but if Apple wants to distribute all those tv shows, what better way is there?

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Good night iPodder - Good morning Juice Receiver

Mark Derricutt — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 11:15:00 GMT

I noticed Scott Grayban posted to the ipodder-dev list that due to legal action from Apple over the use of the iPod name, the iPodder podcast aggregator is now known as Juice Receiver and that the linux version has been forked into its own project is now called Cast Podder:

Well we all knew it was coming. Apple went after us over the "iPod" part in our name. The claim we were decieving users that our software was connected to Apple's iPod device, morons.

We have moved now !! Our new name is "Juice" or "Juice Reciever".

Website is now at http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/ and there is a new version to be downloaded that reflects the changes for both the name and all the URL's in the program.

Also the linux version has forked into its own name and version but will always be a sister project of Juice. The linux version can be found at http://borgforge.net/projects/castpodder/

Scott
Juice & CastPodder developer

I'm not sure of the reasons behind forking the project for linux as opposed to continuing the cross platform nature of the original, but I hope both projects continue to put out some great releases.

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Apple - all I want for christmas is working smart playlists...

Mark Derricutt — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 10:31:00 GMT

So Apples releasing "one more thing" early next week - what ever it is - I just wish they'd %(*&(*$#( release a new iPod firmware that returned the functionality of live smart playlists to the device.

One of my main reasons for buying an iPod over any of the other MP3 players was the smart playlists - having a playlist setup that automatically gave me:

5 Recently played songs
5 songs not played in 3 months
Any unplayed song on my recent purchase list
5 Most played songs in my library

was great. More so that it updated automatically on the fly. Now, even the "recent played songs" playlist doesn't update untill you sync with iTunes.

*sigh*

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3rd iTunes 5.0 Library Import

Mark Derricutt — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 20:29:00 GMT

Grrr. Not content with having to rebuild my library twice, I booted iTunes this morning to find it importing my library again for a THIRD time. Thankfully I exported my library.xml file the other day which I'm now importing, hopefully this will mean I won't have to resync the entire iPod....

Update: No such luck, plugged in the iPod and got the now all too familiar "this iPod is part of a different library..." arg.

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iTunes 5.0 - 2nd iPod resync in process...

Mark Derricutt — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 05:51:00 GMT

Following last weeks release of Apple iTunes 5.0 I eagerly upgraded, only to find that iTunes crashed out whilst importing my library, so it decided to rebuild it. That was ok, all the MP3s were still around, but lost were my podcast subscriptions...

Then it came to plug in my iPod - oh wait, its a new library: "This iPod is not synced to this library, delete all content and sync?" doh. Annoyingly I clicked yes and watched at 7000+ MP3s copied slowly over the USB connection.

It's not even a week since the installation, and iTunes just crashed after I deleted some tunes, a restart of iTunes brought up the "importing library..." dialog and progress bar and a feeling of dread swept over me.

So once again iTunes found all my music, but lost all its podcast subscription information, and once again, my iPod was synced to "a different library" and is now, once again resyncing all 7000+ songs, oh so very very slowly over USB.

Thanks a friggen lot Apple.

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iTunes 4.9 and Podcasting...

Mark Derricutt — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 05:40:00 GMT

Ok, so I'm sure everyone else has there own opinions on podcasting in general, and podcasting tools, and it's no surprise I'm also one of them...

Anyway, I eagerly downloaded the new iTunes and iPod updates and gave this beast a whirl - WOW - ok, its nice. VERY nice. The interface looks clean, but...

How the hell do I add a new podcast? Why, simply drag the URL from a browser to the app. Thats all well and good, but it would also be nice to have a simple "add a URL" entry box...
How do I set a proxy? Ok, so we have fibre in the office capable of getting a nice 100kb/s transfers, the only problem is that when I do that no one else has ANY bandwidth, and Zach the admin nazi gets annoyed. For this reason I have my self a rate limited squid proxy, iTunes - how the hell do I use this? (After some initial annoyance, I set the proxy in Internet Explorer and bingo - iTunes will use this setting/proxy).
There doesn't seem to be any options for automatic ID3 rewriting, or automated classification of a "podcast", problem due to the fact that there completely separate in the user interface - in both iTunes and the iPod. In fact, there so separate that my live bookmarks don't show them up, even thou the genres match.
That leads me to this pet hate, the iPod has a new "podcasts" menu which list each different show, allowing me to drill down to each episode; but unlike the normal song/artist/album browser, theres no "all" option. So I can't just say "give me a playlist of all podcasts, at random". This could be a bit annoying...

All in all its looking nice, but iTunes doesn't exactly have the upgrade cycle of an open source app, so I don't think I'll be seeing any of these pet peeves go away anytime soon, nor do I know of any valid email address to submit these problems to ( or if anyone would answer if I did).

Still, my hat goes off to Apple for what they've given, it'll make getting podfolk into podcasting so much easier.

Update: Ryan Ozawa has started an iTunes Podcasting Wiki page to track its quirks...

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MacMini and Disk Space

Mark Derricutt — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 04:22:00 GMT

I've just been reading a "hands on" article about the MacMini over on MacCentral:

And for those curious about hard drive space, fresh out of the box the 80GB hard drive has 67GB of free space with OS X and the included applications installed; after installing iLife ’05, that drops to just over 65.5GB.

After I add in my iPod Photo 60gb and sync up the MP3s, that leaves me around 15gb free, add in all my photos, code, applications and assorted movies - dayam - out of disk space. Somehow I know I wouldn't want anything LESS than an 80gb drive in any Mac I (dreaming....) get; and I thought Fedora Core 3 was bad with a 4-5gb full install.

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The Birthing of an Mac Lover

Mark Derricutt — Sun, 16 Jan 2005 03:41:00 GMT

So I spent the morning loitering amongst the Apple Mac laptops down at Harvey Norman, part of me felt like a young thirteen year old boy again (only then it was the local Amiga store), anyway - I've been thinking about a new machine for some time, moreso after my 19" monitor went kaboom. Anyway, the 12" Powerbook is the beast thats tempting my eyes, I had a good play with the 17" beast but it's just a little too large, the 15" is nice, but theres something about the 12" unit that I find appealing.

The only problem I have with it, which is more to do with perception than anything is that it might be too small for working with, however today I able to explore the system more, and in a way which more matched my normal habits - enter the AirPort...

So far I've never really explored the joy that is wireless internet (at least other than my Woosh connection, which is attached to a fix location desktop), the laptops at Harvey Norman had no internet connectivity active but I'd seen a saleperson surf so knew there was a trick - turns out it's not so much a trick, rather than click the AirPort icon in the menubar and select "Activate AirPort", the menu expands to show 3 wireless networks and one active! Woohoo - fireing up a Safari window and voila, theres a webpage - off I go to my blog, then on to bloglines to read some sites and compare my user experiance. I'm not exactly sure I was surprised that everything as clearer and just as readable as my office windows laptop, in fact I'm sure it was even more readable.

Opening a terminal I was impressed to find not only java, perl. tcl, and python installed, but also ruby (no cvs but I understand thats on an additional dev-tools CD with X-Code).

Colour me impressed!

If only they were cheaper.

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