Crooked Spin

From the beta list of a new Windows product:

If some of you haven’t noticed, there is a problem with the installer configuration for the Beta 2 installer which makes it NOT completely remove/replace/uninstall the old version. Due to this bug in the installer configuration, you MUST do a manual uninstall from the Add/Remove applications panel before installing the second beta.

The use of installers and uninstallers for normal apps on Windows is appalling. Microsoft really should have given up the practice when they designed Windows 95 or at least for Windows 2000/XP. The drag and drop of bundles on Mac OS X is so much easier and convenient that it’s not funny. Installers simply add another level of complexity and give another place where something can go wrong. KISS.

Nice, a quick look plugin for zips. Now we just need one for disk images.

Henry Storyv:

The reason you have multiple spaces is to be able to clearly separate your work. So I could have one desktop for Mail and other communication related activities, one for programming, one for blogging, and one for other tasks such as giving a presentation.

(via John Gruber)

Henry outlines his use-case and the problems with Spaces and it. I’ve been following the same basic pattern and have been running into the same issues. It gets frustrating at times when you get thrown into another space for apparently no good reason. The Finder is my biggest headache. I’ll have a finder window open, switch back to Xcode, and then hit the Finder’s dock item to pull the window back to the front. Sometimes it works, but usually I get thrown into some other space that has a finder window open. I’m assuming it has something to do with the open order of the windows. It should give priority to open windows in your current space, if none are open, then fall back to the current behavior.

The other thing that I ran into last week that would be a nice change is space switching with an app in full screen mode. This might be a Keynote issue, but either way, it’s an Apple product. What I wanted to set up last week when I gave my CocoaHeads presentation was to keep the slides running full screen in one space, set up each of the demos in their own space, and then control-arrow to the correct one when the demo slide came up. Neither the control-arrow keys worked (they still switched slides) nor the show all spaces hot key. So I ended up having to drop out of full screen mode and then go to the correct space. Not a huge deal, but it would have been a little slicker to not show the ugly navigator screen in Keynote.

Tip: If you want to test iChat’s screen sharing feature using your laptop and desktop machine, don’t set the laptop down on your desk in front of your desktop’s speakers. Sound is also shared with it and you can get a really nasty feedback loop going. My ears are still ringing from it.

For those of you looking to set up gmail IMAP still, here’s a couple tips to help things go smoother.

• Use [Gmail] for the IMAP path prefix instead of INBOX. Gmail uses the [Gmail] label for the all mail, trash, spam, sent, and draft folders. So using it will keep any folders you create sectioned off with them in Mail.
• As with all IMAP accounts, set the mapping for the correct folders on the server to the ones in Mail for drafts, sent, trash, and junk by selecting the folder to use and then choosing the corresponding item from the “Use this mailbox for” item under the Mailboxes menu.
• When assigning mailboxes in Mail, use the All Mail folder for trash instead of trash. Doing so will cause the email to be put into your archive when you hit the delete key or toolbar item. If you use the trash folder the item will be set for deletion. Test this out on an unimportant email first. Some of the documents make it seem like it will only remove the label and keep the email in all mail by default. My testing showed the email being moved into gmail’s trash so I changed the mapping. It’s possible I ran into a bug.

I finally got the new IMAP option enabled in my Gmail account today. I was really excited when they added the option, so far I’m not impressed. I’m going to give it another day or two, but I might be either going back to pop or setting the mail to forward and archive (not sure why I never did this before). My current beefs with it are:

• Slow - It can be really slow. Painfully. I can see my “All Mail” access being slow since it has about 50k articles in it (Gmail is used for all of my mailing lists), but all of the other folders/labels are empty except for incoming email that is filtered to them. They take a few seconds to load and then a couple more seconds to select or delete an email. Even the “All Mail” folder is slower then it should be. Right now I’ve been sitting here for about 15 min. with Mail “Comparing notes with server” which is way too long (it already did the initial sync).
• Filtering - Right now, it doesn’t seem to work correctly. Well, the filtering itself seems to work. The problem is that most of the time the folder that the message was filtered to doesn’t show that it has new email until I click onto the folder. This might have something to do with it not supporting the /Recent flag or bad timing on my part, I’m not sure it. I’ll see in the morning if it’s the latter.
• Incorrect Unread counts - the unread counts on folders (the couple times they’ve been updated after filtering) are showing up double what they should, i.e. 3 new messages are received but the unread count shows 6. This might be related to the issue where the same email is being listed multiple times for people.
• Read flags are not always sticking - I keep getting a group of 256 old articles in my “All Mail” folder showing up as unread. The IMAP server doesn’t seem to always be updating the mail store it seems.

We’ll see how it goes over then next couple of days. Hopefully the issues (especially the slowness) are due to Google still getting the servers up and due to the servers being hammered with everyone setting up and trying out the new IMAP feature. I’m not very optimistic though.

Andrei Drynov:

If you like the look of the Dock when on the side, you can get the exact same look everywhere by using:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

(via John Gruber)

Saving this one for later reference. I have a feeling I’m going to want it shortly.

Cyndicate 1.0.4 is now available for download from either Cyncial Peak’s website or running Cyndicate’s updater. As with all our point releases, this is a free update for all Cyndicate users. This release is for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard compatibility. Any user upgrading to Leopard should update to Cyndicate 1.0.4 to avoid a number of issues that resulted from changes between 10.4 and 10.5.

• Fixed all known Leopard issues (sorry, can’t be more specific on these)
• Fixed a bug that could lead to incorrect parsing of Atom .3 feeds.
• The update panel has been redesigned with new options.
• Fixed memory leaks.
• Fixed an issue with auto deleting unflagged articles.

apple’s antiCAPSLOCK (Via John Rentzsch.):

Unique among the rest of the keys, Caps Lock doesn’t activate immediately upon strike. There’s a very small time window — perhaps a quarter of a second — where if you release the key inside the window, the keystroke is ignored.

But that’s only part of the conspiracy. The Caps Lock key isn’t just universally slow to react. If Caps Lock was already engaged, the keystroke is registered immediately, even before the upstroke.

I bought one of the new keyboards about a week ago. So far I really like it. The feel is just like my MacBook. I’ve always preferred the feel of a scissor key, so for me the new keyboard blows away the old apple keyboard which I hated. It was always the first thing I replaced.

I hadn’t realized about the caps lock change until the Wolf posted about it today. Thinking back on the last week, I don’t remember accidently turning it on. I used to accidently do it all of the time. Nice little feature by Apple. They get bonus points if it helps keep people from typing in all caps.

Daniel Jalkut:

I remember using that “Bounce” command in Mail.app a few times many years ago. My intentions were good: to convince spammers that my email doesn’t exist and they shouldn’t bother. But I always sort of wondered whether it was worth it, and whether I would sufficiently fool the sender that my email address no longer existed, or whether it would just indicate that I was alive and actively looking at spam before bouncing it.

Michael Tsai, developer of SpamSieve, is the man I trust for all things spam. He says bouncing is useless, and may be dangerous. So that settles it.

Like Daniel, I used to use it bounce spam a few years ago. I stopped doing it partially out of laziness and partially because I never got the feeling that it was effective. It always seemed more cathartic then anything else. I was going to trick those spammers. After reading Michael’s comments, I’m glad I stopped. It was probably doing more harm then good.