techno.blog("Dion")

As we use web applications more and more on core tasks (email, calendar, office) I have found that I sometimes get frustrated when some annoying piece of Flash on a random web page brings down my entire browser process (including the web applications that I care about).

Some browsers allow you to run multiple instances in their own world. For others you could hack around that by having multiple copies of the browser. I have gone through phases of compartmentalizing my work on various browsers.

• Development work on a Firefox instance because I want to use Firebug
• Fluffy browsing on WebKit nightly (to try to be a tester too)
• Apps in Safari

My main problem with this is that I normally also want Firefox for certain apps because I make heavy use of Greasemonkey. I couldn’t do Gmail without at this point (let alone the other sites).

I am used to having my calendar on window 2 of VirtueDesktop (iCal). I am not experimenting with Google Calendar, and I want to do the same. Instead of just having an instance running Google Calendar over there, I decided to try to built a wrapper around a browser component.

I am trying this in both Mac OS X Cocoa, and Adobe Apollo.

Today we will discuss the OS X version.

In theory the hard work is definitely already done for us. The WebKit component is nicely done for us, and the documentation is thorough.

I decided to try to follow the “Multiple Windows” example:

You can implement multiple windows in a Web Kit application easily by beginning with a Cocoa document-based architecture as follows:

1. Using Xcode, create a document-based Cocoa application. Your new project file will already contain the needed classes and interface files to support multiple windows (namely MyDocument.h, MyDocument.m, and MyDocument.nib).

2. Add the Web Kit frameworks to your project.

3. Open MyDocument.nib using Interface Builder and drag a WebView from the Cocoa

I was ready to get frustrated. I wanted it all.

If an event is sent to my Gmail account I want to be able to just click ‘add it’ and see conflicts.

I want to have iCal up to date for offline / nice rich app use.

I want to be able to create events in iCal OR Google Calendar and for everyone to be happy.

I was ready to sigh and just have iCal as a read-only offline view, or to not use Google Calendar, when I stumbled on Spanning Sync which does the hard work to get true two-way syncing. It is still in beta (which is worrying with a tool that can nuke your data) but it is working nicely, and backups are happening frequently.

At first it seemed obvious that I would get an iPhone. It is the phone I have wanted for years.

Yet, over the last couple of weeks as details come out about it, I am souring on it.

The biggest issue is that it may not allow any third party applications.

I expected the opposite Java, Objective-C, and even Ajax apps. A huge ecosystem would come about as you could now develop for the coolest phone (as well as others).

To hear Steve b.s. about third party apps not being worthy (killing the phone? hammering the network????) is painful and FUD.

I love my Apple products, but although I enjoy their software, it is third party software that really makes my Mac’s hum. Would I be on an Apple if I didn’t have Quicksilver, NetNewsWire, Textmate, insert the rest of this list?

No. There are always going to be better applications built outside of your company. Let the platform lose and see what amazing things people build Steve. If not, the iPhone will be eclipsed by copy cats that do.

I was just caught out by an apparant long standing bug with apple display calibration and fast user switching.

On a new laptop the colors looks all bleached and crappy. I went into the Display prefs and generic RGB was selected instead of the usual ‘Color LCD’.

I hope they fix this one. Painful.

The migration assistant that comes with OS X is too good. It makes life so tempting when you get a new machine. Hmm, “I could be right back where I was if I just migrate everything”.

The .app applications and plist files make life easy for that application to do its work of course. No registry fluff to try to merge here.

There are items that you will miss though. Did you tweak /etc/hosts on your machine? Change the lookupd order?

There are many little things like this that you will find over time.

I used to look forward to getting a new computer as a forced spring cleaning. It would take me awhile to custom migrate applications over, but it felt like life was cleaner because of it.

So, to migrate or not to migrate….

As someone who has to take screenshots for blogs all the time, I have often wondered if there was a better solution to do the simple tweaks to the images that I do.

The Mac makes it trivial to grab the shots themselves, but Photoshop is too heavy for most ot the tweaks, GraphicConverter doesn’t quite do enough, so I think that Skitch may have the right combination.

Small, simple, does something you need a little better.

How long until Billy G comes out with a 2 button iPhone? :)

• I have wanted a phone that is basically all screen forever. They did it
• Running OS X (Cocoa developer rejoice)
• Will Flash/Apollo run on that bad boy soon?
• How many iPods will be on eBay today?
• I would hate to be in the room w/ Bill G watching this. Nice try Zune :)

We get 2 hours of Steve Jobs next week.

Everyone is talking iTV and iPhone, but I am more keen to get surprised by something wacky like the GPS rumour. Sure, these surprises may not be as practical, but they are fun.

I hope that Steve is back on form next week, and we are left saying “bravo”.

Oh, and a 50″ monitor would be nice too.

I was watching a friend working on her Mac. She was cursing as a ton of spam snuck right through the default junk filter that you get with Mail.app.

In the Apple software list that I published in the past, Spam Sieve was there with the comment “Waiting to see if needed”.

When I first started to use Mail.app, it was pretty good at coping with spam. It caught all but a few. However, a few months ago it couldn’t handle it anymore. A set of spam such as the darn stock images would get right through. This is when I jumped in to get Spam Sieve and it has taken care of the issue.

At this point I don’t know how you can cope with the normal filter as it just doesn’t work. I hope that Apple has put in some time on that for future Mail versions. Spam is such as PITA that you need to update your barriers regularly, so to do a good job you need the mail app provider, or plugin provider, to release constant updates that take into account the newest baddie.

What a shame.

The OS X team seems to be moving away from 3d-ish stuff in Leopard and iApps.

Why wait for Leopard when you can use a simple utility called UNO to unify your look and feel (and tweak it for various components).

(Updated shared list of Mac OS X applications)