Leopard, one week later

Now that I've been using Leopard for a week, I'm started to get used to it and like many of the features. However, there are few things that I don't like.

Likes

• Preview You can add, remove and re-arrange pages in a PDF. This actually made me stop a product I was developing as Apple's implementation is so slick.
• Time Machine While I still do a daily backup with SuperDuper!, having another, automatic backup is nice. I bought a 250 GB Western Digital Passport drive just for Time Machine and to have an extra SuperDuper! clone of my drive.
• iChat I like that iChat shows which buddies are mobile as I have a number of buddies that use the mobile feature.
• Xcode 3.0 So far the coolest feature is the ability for Interface Builder to automatically read the Class files from the header file without having to manually tell IB to read in the file.
• Mail IMAP Idle is cool, but sometimes it just doesn't seem to work. I also like that the Mail Activity can be put in the lower left of the main window. Like any geek, I like to see what is happening.
• Stacks Yes, I sort of like them. I created a folder with my current projects in it and added that to the Dock. Now I can quickly get to my current projects.
• AirPort Utility You read that correctly. The new AirPort Utility has a feature that shows the current list of DHCP Clients. Right now I see 11 DHCP clients on my network. In addition, you can see the signal strength for any wireless client.

Not sure about

• iChat I'm not sure I like tabbed chats. I know I can turn them off, but I use iChat all the time and a ton of windows can get distracting. I know I can put them in a Space, but I'm not sure about that either.
• Spaces I like the concept of Spaces, but am having trouble getting used to it. I use the Finder a lot and Spaces (by default) puts the Finder windows in whatever space you created them in. I thought that applications could only be in one space. Someone suggested that I tell Spaces to put Finder windows in all Spaces. I'll give that a try (the Finder is in /System/Library/CoreServices if you need to add it to Spaces). The problem with the Finder windows being in different spaces is that I drag files to other programs that may be in other spaces requiring me to start dragging, command tab to the other app and then drop it. In addition, I notice that sometimes Spaces just switches the current Space on me if an alert pops up or something like that.
• Terminal The tabs in terminal are interesting, but I'm just not sure about them. I use terminal all the time with multiple windows open. Tabs would clean up the clutter, but then again so would Spaces.

I guess I didn't have anything that I completely disliked which is good. All in all, I think that Leopard is a good upgrade and hope all my users switch to it so that I can drop Tiger support and take advantage of all the cool developer things in Leopard!

SetSignature Plugin for Mail

One of the items that Apple has never solved adequately for me is having multiple email addresses in one account with an associated signature for each one. If I had one account for each email address, things would work fine, but I have a large number of email addresses in one account. So, a few months back, I coded up a plugin for Mail that does this automatically. Unfortunately, it stopped working with Mail 3.0 on Leopard, so for the last week I've felt like I've been typing with one arm behind my back is this plugin is vital to me. I had some time yesterday to fix it for Mail 3.0 and have decided to put it out there as a free product; I don't want to put out something that relies on unsupported calls and charge for it.

Feel free to use this in anyway you like; use at your own risk and if you have problems with Mail, remove the plugin and try again.

Installation instructions:

1. Quit Mail
2. From terminal, type:

   defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1
   defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 3
   

3. Download the plugin
4. Uncompress the plugin and place SetSignature.mailbundle in ~/Library/Mail/Bundles (create the folder if it it isn't there
5. Launch Mail
6. Name your signatures according to your email address, i.e. johndoe@nowheresite.com

Now when you reply to a message, it attempts to set the signature correctly. In addition, when you change the From address, it will attempt to match the signature with that address.

If you have any questions or problems, please post a comment. Since this is free, please don't bug me too much about it. It works for me and that's all I'll guaranteee.

The 1 gallon water challenge

Yesterday as I was attempting to remove a tree that was too close to our house, I managed to puncture a PVC irrigation pipe. Unfortunately, the only way to shutoff the water to the pipe was to turn off the water to the entire house (why anyone would put a shut off to the internal water, but not the external water baffles me). After a trip to Home Depot and a few attempts at repairing it, I finally succeeded. In order to let the PVC cement set, I had to leave the water off in the entire house overnight. We still had some clean water in our reverse osmosis system, but not enough to wash hands and brush teeth. So, I happened to have a few 1 gallon containers of water in my car. As I'm washing my hands with the water from the container, I start thinking of how much water we waste everyday. If I was restricted to using just a few gallons of water a day, I'm not sure what I'd do. Next time water is going down the drain, think about how many gallons of water you just used.

Why is it so hard to email support?

A few users of mine have had problems with the Fujitsu ScanSnap and ReceiptWallet/DocumentWallet under Leopard where they scan, but the programs don't open it. After a bit of futzing and not believing that my users had stuff configured, I had the same thing happen this morning as I was researching the issue. I've described the issue in a Knowledge Base article. Basically what happens is that the first time the ScanSnap Manager is launched and a document is scanned, the ScanSnap Manager doesn't send the necessary AppleEvent to open the document. I turned on AppleEvent logging and the first time, it does nothing, the second document, I get something like this:

------oo start of event oo------
{ 1 } 'aevt':  aevt/odoc (i386){
          return id: 833355777 (0x31ac0001)
     transaction id: 0 (0x0)
  interaction level: 112 (0x70)
     reply required: 0 (0x0)
             remote: 0 (0x0)
      for recording: 0 (0x0)
         reply port: 0 (0x0)
  target:
    { 1 } 'psn ':  8 bytes {
      { 0x0, 0x32d32d } (ScanHelper)
    }
  fEventSourcePSN: { 0x0,0x331331 } (ScanSnap Manager)
  optional attributes:
    < empty record >
  event data:
    { 1 } 'aevt':  - 1 items {
      key '----' - 
        { 1 } 'list':  - 1 elements {
          { 1 } 'alis':  326 bytes {
            /Users/scott/Pictures/Scans/2007_11_04_08_32_19.pdf
          }
        }
    }
}