Flash tidbits, struggles, revelations, and teaching

I’ve seen hundreds of these lists over the last few years, but I was cleaning up my bookmarks today and going through all stuff I bookmarked and tried out over the years. This is a list of Mac utlities that I use all the time and are free. Definitely not a list of all great apps out there, but just a list of what I use regularly.

Adium: The best IM client on Mac. The only downside is that it doesn’t support video, but it supports nearly every IM platform out there.

DropBox : Not really an app in the traditional sense (and available on Win & Linux), but 2 gigs of free storage that is sync’d to the cloud, provides revisioning, sharing between peers, and has proven to irreplaceable for me as I work from both a laptop and desktop, or from an office (contracting) or at home.

Linotype FontExplorer X: Manage your fonts. They’ve kinda hidden away the free version, but its the bottom link on the download page.

MAMP: 1-click solution for running Apache, MySQL & PHP locally for testing.

QuickSilver: More than an app launcher. Not be actively developed anymore. Some have recommended Launchbar (not free though). If QS stops working once Snow Leopard comes out, I may have to pay for Launchbar.

AppFresh: checks all the installed apps, preference panes, plugins, etc on your Mac and checks to see if there are newer versions out there. It will even download and install those updates.

Carbon Copy Cloner: Great utilty for cloning, syncing, and backing up your drives. I just used it recently for cloning my 250 gig startup drive onto a newer 1.5TB drive.

Chmox:Â CHM viewer.

CleanArchiver: On the surface, just another archive utility, but it strips out the .DS_Store and custom icons from your archive file. I use this a lot when sending files to clients who I know are on PC. Opening a Mac .zip file on PC can be confusing when looking at all the extra files.

Name Mangler: Awesome utility for doing batch renaming of files. Has tons of options, and can use RegEx.

The Unarchiver: Far more capable decompression tool that Apples built-in tool and has handled zips in the past that just refuse to decompress under Apples utility . Handles nearly every file format out there.

Xee:Â Â Fast image viewer and browser.

TimeMachineEditor:Â Change the default 1 hour backup interval for Time Machine.

Visibility: App for viewing and hiding invisible files in OSX. Handy when working on files like .htaccess or .profile while using GUI apps.

Mail Unread Menu: I use a lot of rules and folders in Mail. The Mail icon in the dock only shows the unread emails in your Inbox. Mail Unread Menu provides a customizable menu bar icon that can show any collection of folders in your Mail app.

Perian: Gives Quicktime the ability to play nearly ever video format out there.

iStat Menus: Great menu bar item for monitoring all aspects of your system from cpu usage, memory, bandwidth, hard drive usage, and much more.

QuickLook: Not enough people know about or use QuickLook. Its built into the Mac OS 10.5 and is awesome. If you don’t know what it is, find out about it here. Now the reason I mention QuickLook is because it is extensible and people have written a lot of great plugins for it. Two sites that I find great plugins at are: QuickLook Plugins web site & QLplugins web site.

Not sure how I’ve never noticed this, but when existing fullscreen flash video, focus isn’t returned to the original HTML page. If you notice in the screenshots (probably way too large for this purpose), prior to clicking on the fullscreen button, everything is peachy.  After exiting fullscreen (2nd screenshot), the original window has lost focus.  This isn’t “end of the world” but it leaves the user having to click twice –and gives the appearance that the app is broken.  This appears to be a Mac-only issue and I tested it on two different Mac’s and on both Firefox 3 and Safari. It worked under WinXP under both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer.

Is this a bug in the Flash player? or just how it is on Mac?  I can’t believe I never noticed it before.  I haven’t looked for a workaround yet. I imagine I’ll need some javascript, but odd that I couldnt’ find much online about it either.

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?

[Update 11PM 12/22/08 - I didn't find it in the Adobe Flash Player bugbase, so I logged it --> LINK ]

Here are my predictions for tomorrow’s keynote by Steve Jobs:

• Faster Macbooks & Macbook Pro’s and upgraded graphics
• Updated AppleTV
• new iPhone SDK w/ Flash on the iPhone
• Movie Downloads
• and “the one last thing” will be a ultra-portable (like the Nokia n810) with Adobe AIR pre-installed (that’s the “air” in the banners at MWSF)

[EDIT Jan 22] I guess I wasn’t too far off. I did play it a bit safe though. – John O. Â

With new video cards coming out all the time on the PC side, when will Apple release some new video cards? I got my MacPro w/ the stock nVidia card hoping Apple would be releasing a new card at some point. Well.. almost one year later and nothing.  It is by far the one thing that really is a huge P.I.T.A. about being a Mac user.   I don’t mind paying a little more but I just can’t see paying $399 for the ATi X1900 which is already extremely dated.

After the AppleTV and iPhone were released, I had some key questions about both which would impact my decision to buy either product. Looks like I may have my answers. I found David Pogue’s iPhone FAQ on his blog (via MacRumors) and it looks like neither product will fill my needs.

 Apple TV: It can play MP4/H.264 (protected and unprotected). So it won’t play my other video files. This is a major issue (for me). I would rather pay the extra $$ and just get a Mac Mini.Â

Apple iPhone: Can it display Flash or Java? No (according to David Pogue).  Ack.. That just about kills it for any web page and web app.   Hopefully this will be fixed in the future. Will Apple provide a SDK for it or allow 3rd party development? This also looks like a big “no” from Apple. They will provide additional apps (ala iPod games), but not allow us to develop our own stuff. Ugh.. Apple has such a great product and they will kill it (for me and others..) by not allowing us to develop our own apps/widgets.

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