I just pushed out an update for DfontSplitter for Mac. The application now features:
You can download the release from the (newly prettified) DfontSplitter project page. Enjoy!
Tweetie for Mac was released today, to much fanfare. Its interface on the iPhone is absolutely top notch (I happily paid the £1.79 for my iPod Touch) and the Mac interface also looks interesting as well.
I’m not going to go into a full review, because I really haven’t used it much yet. What I don’t want this post to come across as, however, is a rejection of it totally. There are just a couple of issues relating to privacy I have with this initial release.
UPDATE: As of Tweetie 1.0.1, which was released minutes ago, this issue is fixed. Consider this paragraph obsolete.
For some reason, Tweetie for Mac does not send your Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible username and password over a secure HTTPS connection. Quite frankly, I’ve come to expect this in any Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible client. It surely takes no extra effort to implement this, it has a minimal performance overhead and even if you don’t really need it, does it really hurt to encrypt your password?
This really bugs me. I don’t really want to be throwing my credentials across the network in plain text every few minutes. It’s like shouting out your Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible username and password to everyone in the street. Sure, probably no-one cares, but why do it if you don’t have to?
UPDATE: I contacted Fusion Ads on this subject recently and as of this morning, 2009-04-23, the Tweetie for Mac page has been updated with a brief, but better-than-nothing privacy statement. I’m still interested in seeing something a bit more substantial, but this is a good step forward.
Tweetie for Mac costs $14.95 at the moment, going up to $19.95 later on. To get people to try it, there’s a free ad supported version, using ads provided by a company called Fusion Ads.
What alarms me is not the fact that it is ad-supported, or even that I’ve never heard of that ad company before today (although the latter is a little bit of an issue). The problem for me is that I can’t find a privacy policy detailing how this ad system works, what information it collects on you and what it does with that information.
It concerns me quite a lot that in a desktop application, where an advertising system can get a lot more information about you than it can within the constraints of a web browser environment, nothing is said about what is going on.
I have emailed the contact address on the Fusion Ads site asking where I can find a privacy policy, voicing this concern and asking them to make it more prominent if there is one. I will update this post when I get a reply.
For me, these two issues stop me from using the client right now. I’m sure the SSL issue will be addressed in a future release if enough people ask for it, as I can’t imagine it being difficult to implement at all. It would also be nice to have a little bit of transparency in how the free model works as well, and hopefully this will come with time as well.
For the time being, however, I’m not entirely satisfied that I can use the app comfortably, so I am holding off for now.
Yesterday my brand new MacBook Pro 15″ arrived.
I got my original white MacBook over two years ago and it quickly became my primary machine. The seamlessness of the Apple hardware-software connection, its increased performance over my existing Linux PC and the desire to learn about OS X motivated this. Since then it has been, for the most part, my primary computer.
The MacBook still is an excellent machine for what it does, but being a full-time desktop as well as a portable computer, I began to desire a larger screen for when I’m using it at the desk and to get away from the limitation of the rather pathetic Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics.
So to address these issues and erm… continue my investment into computing (nothing to do with the fact that the new Pros are just, really, nice) I went out and bought the new 15″ MacBook Pro.
I got the middle model, with a 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM and the dual GPU Nvidia GeForce 9400M (for battery life) and Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT 512 MB (for performance).
I’ve had it just hours, but I love this machine!
NOTE: for the latest release of DfontSplitter, please link to https://peter.upfold.org.uk/projects/dfontsplitter.
The software development wheel has been turning again and I can now announce DfontSplitter 0.2 for Mac OS X.
DfontSplitter is a program which allows you to convert, or split, a Mac OS X .dfont font file into one or more TrueType font files (.ttf). TTF files are much more portable than this Mac-specific format.
This new release sports an entirely new interface built in Cocoa. It is a great improvement over the previous AppleScript interface which required a lot of unnecessary clicking and was generally quite horrible. The new interface also supports batch converting; you can drag several dfonts into the sources list and convert them all at once.
The DfontSplitter icon is from the Oxygen Icon set and is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Unported licence.
UPDATE: I’ve given them all out now – no more left. Sorry!
Thanks to Agile Web Solutions‘ American Thanksgiving giveaway, I have two one free licences for 1Password to give away.
If you want one, comment here, leaving the email address you want on the licence as the email field (not in the comment body) and the name you want on the licence. First come, first served, and this ends on the 30th November.
All the time we get information thrown at us and managing that information so that you are in control of it and not the other way round can be a real challenge.
As you should know, I have recently started university. If there’s anything you can do that suddenly causes loads of information to be thrown at you, then that is it.
And it all adds up. A brand new email account with lots of stuff coming in, timetable information from multiple places, tasks to add to to-do lists and so on.
So I thought I’d take a moment to share how I’m dealing with some of this information and how I am using the technology available to me to have access to that information (hopefully) wherever I need it.
Well, I’m here at Reading University and one of the joys of living here in halls is using the wonderful internet connection, shared with many other download-happy students.
As well as the speed being quite variable, there’s also a greater security risk, especially when transmitting passwords over normal, unencrypted HTTP connections. To solve that problem, I SSH into my server, still sitting back at home and tunnel HTTP traffic through the SSH connection.
This creates a SOCKS proxy server on my local machine and I can push the Mac’s traffic through it. It takes a long time and is fiddly, however, to switch the SOCKS proxy on and off from System Preferences, especially when (as in my special case) you can’t use Leopard’s Locations feature.
The AppleScript applications provided below are a quicker solution. Launch the right app, type your password and the proxy is flipped on or off. Nice and simple and much less fiddly than messing around in System Preferences.
I got a new printer today. Actually, it’s a printer and scanner and copier, All-in-One sort of device. It is the HP DeskJet F2180, found for £30.
It’s replacing my ageing and rather incompatible Lexmark Z45. The Z45 was bought a very long time ago, back even before I started using Linux. Back then, compatibility with alternative operating systems wasn’t a priority and ever since I have been dogged with issues printing from my own machine.
Another one of my completely random, and probably uninteresting observations about the MobileMe preference pane in Mac OS X System Preferences. It’s also an excuse to try out a very short screencast with Jing and its Screencast.com hosting.
If you can’t, or don’t want to watch the video, if you search for iTools (.Mac/MobileMe’s original name) in the search box of System Preferences, it highlights MobileMe as a search result. Just as you’d expect from an intelligent search tool, it realises what you really mean.
However, that functionality hasn’t been replicated for if you search for .Mac, now MobileMe’s former name. It does highlight Back to my Mac as one of the results, but just as with iTools, MobileMe should be highlighted straight away.
It’s actually quite difficult to believe that my MacBook is 18 months old now. About a month ago, I noticed that mounting DVDs became unreliable. CDs worked fine, you put them in the slot, it span up fine and everything was good. DVDs, though, would take a long time to decide whether to read, involving a lot of spins up and spins down.
Eventually, reading DVDs became unreliable to the point of not working most of the time, and on Tuesday, since I could now do without the MacBook for a few days if necessary, I decided to ring AppleCare (I have the three-year Protection Plan) and get booked in to get it looked at.
I called the number and got through pretty much instantly. The guy on the other end didn’t sound like a native English speaker and occasionally was difficult to understand, but I got my message across quickly as to what the problem was. I got booked in at the Genius Bar at the Southampton Apple Store. It’s about 30 miles away, and I had to take two trains to get there, with a total journey time (including walking to the station and to WestQuay at the other end) of about 2 hours.
So on Wednesday I arrive at the Apple Store. Despite the fact that it was still being intermittent, in the sense of working, but being slow about it and making some funky noises, I was surprised that the Genius didn’t need much convincing that there was an issue.
It was checked in there and then for a new DVD drive (they call them SuperDrives, but for some reason I don’t like calling them that).
The one thing I didn’t like at that point is that the agreement you sign to give it away for service states that if you don’t let them take it, they apparently charge you £100 plus VAT. It’s labelled as a diagnostic fee, but really it’s a lock in to get service done with them if they think you need it. Well, fair enough, but that should have been disclosed up front, before the ‘diagnostic’ is done. This is especially important if you don’t have AppleCare, or you’ll be at the mercy of Apple’s repair prices, whatever they make them, or £100 odd and nothing done.
Anyway, it went off and they reckoned 2-3 days to get fixed, as they didn’t have the drives in stock.
The next day, in fact little over 24 hours after I checked it in, I get a call saying it’s ready for pickup. I headed back down and picked it up.
They even managed to handle the potential confusion due to the fact that it was bought in my dad’s name, but I alone did this whole process. I made this clear at the initial Genius Bar appointment, and it was subsequently well communicated between the staff for when I picked it up.
The result? I have a new … er, SuperDrive and DVDs work fine again.
Overall, a pretty positive experience. Just watch out for diagnostic fees, and don’t go to the Genius Bar unless you’re sure you can hand the machine over there and then for service.
An interesting footnote – they quoted that without AppleCare, the repair would have cost just under £200. Which incidentally, is what AppleCare costs. So, it’s already paid for itself, perhaps?
The photo is hideously blurry… but for some reason I like it.
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