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This enhancement is not so transparent

Macworld logoWhen Steve Jobs demoed Leopard at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June, one of the new features included in the revised Desktop is a semi-transparent menu bar. It's clearly visible in the streaming video of the keynote, and in many of the screenshots on Apple's Leopard pages.

Now, I'm all for fancy effects, at least where it makes sense and might actually help the user. But in this case, I don't think it makes sense—look at many of Apple's own screenshots, and you'll see that certain entries in the menu bar are quite hard to read, owing to the bad mix of black text, a semi-transparent background, and a dark background image. Instead of being useful, it seems to me that—based on what's been shown, at least—the semi-transparent menu bar will do nothing but annoy me when I try to find a menu item against a non-cooperative background image. Of course, I won't know for sure until October when Leopard ships and I can test (and discuss) how well it does or doesn't work.

Read my Macworld blog entry, This enhancement is not so transparent, for the rest of the story...



An Office 2008 VBA to AppleScript helper

Macworld logoA while back, I wrote about what I thought of Microsoft's decision to drop Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) from the next version of Office. In short, I think it's a short-sighted and stupid decision. Apparently my thoughts had no influence on the folks in Redmond (shocking, I know!), as Office 2008 is set to ship without any form of VBA support.

But it will have AppleScript support, and the fine folks at MacTECH were kind enough to send me a preview copy of their upcoming 150+ page guide to switching from VBA to AppleScript. I wrote a brief preview of this guide for Macworld last week. If you're a serious VBA scripter looking to make the move to AppleScripts, this looks to be a must-have guide. And thanks to some Microsoft support, you can buy it and six-month subscription to MacTECH for all of $10 or so. More info can be found in the link in the Macworld article.



Don’t leave the Windows open

Macworld logoI've been running Windows on my Intel Macs for quite a while now--I have Parallels, VMWare Fusion, CrossOver, and Boot Camp installed on two machines. Across all those installations, I've never done anything to protect my Windows installs from viruses and malware, other than using Windows XP Pro's built-in tools: the malicious software removal tool and the firewall. I wanted to see if Windows really was as susceptible to attack as everyone was claiming it was.

pwned

Yes, it was. I wrote about what happened for Macworld, as it was a most eye-opening experience for me--this particular Windows install hadn't done anything more "risky" than surf to a few well-known download sites, looking for some iPhoto-type applications for the PC. If this is the risk a Windows user faces every day if their machine isn't fully armored against outside attacks, I must ask...why do people choose to use this OS on a regular basis? It also made me quite thankful I've never worried about such things in all my years of Mac usage.



My opinion on the next version of Office for the Mac

Macworld logoIn case you haven't heard, the next release of Microsoft's Office for the Mac will lack one major feature: support for Visual Basic (VB). This core technology is what allows one to record macros, and it works basically the same on both Windows and Mac. But the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft has discovered that porting the code to Intel would be very hard...so they decided to just drop it completely.

I think this is a really bad mistake, and wrote about why in this opinion piece for Macworld.



All washed out

Macworld logoAfter struggling for many months to solve an odd color fading issue with videos I encoded using H.264, I decided to get serious about solving the problem.

After much Googling, I found an answer and wrote it up for macworld.com, in case others are being afflicted by the same problem.





This is going to take not quite as long…

Back in February, I wrote about the incredibly lengthy time estimate that Stuffit gave me for an expansion. Well, it happened again today, but with QuickTime:

estimate

I was thinking about including a 1920x1200 movie capture of Redline Racing in my Pick of the Week writeup, so I had captured a couple minutes of the high-res stuff--the raw movie file was 8.6GB in size, in fact! After it opened, I had trimmed it down and then wanted to convert the format. When the export dialog appeared, the above was the initial estimate. It should be noted that at "only" 1,491,308 days, this is about 84 times faster than the Stuffit expansion!

What I also found humorous was the "7 minutes" bit -- it's not enough that I wait over 1.4 million days, but don't forget about those extra seven minutes! And yes, the dialog cleared itself up (unlike the Stuffit dialog, which never changed), and the actual export took only five minutes or so. In the end, I chose not to use the movie, but the funny dialog was worth seeing.





When good cache goes bad…

OS X uses a multitude of cache files--as an example, my user's Library/Caches folder contains 164 top-level items, most of which are folders containing more folders. In total, there's presently 1.18GB of cached data, just for my user. Wow.

Most of the time, this is a Good Thing, as it makes the system more responsive, as it's quicker to retrieve something from cache than to calculate or redownload it. However, it can also be troublesome at times. Like this morning, in my case.

I fired up Mail, and despite the fact that it was running perfectly last night, it was glacial. Folders took multiple minutes to open. Moving a message was a 15 minute process, if it worked at all. Even worse, though, was that when Mail was having its fits, the Finder was completely unresponsive. I could click on some folders, but others would bring the Finder to the land of permanent spinning rainbows. Trying to mount a disk image resulted in more spinning rainbows.

So I restarted, and tried again--it had been quite a while since the last restart. But I had the exact same symptoms. Unresponsive Mail and flakey Finder. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out if I'd changed anything or not, even though I was positive I hadn't touched the system while sleeping :).

Then, after another restart and repeat of issues, I thought I'd try deleting Mail's cache folders. Inside my user's Library/Caches folder, I opened the Mail folder and deleted everything, then emptied the trash. Launched Mail again, and...voila, it was perfect! Speedy as its ever been, and the Finder didn't have fits while Mail was running. Everything was basically back to normal--all because I deleted a series of temporary files that are supposed to do nothing more than make data access quicker. Go figure!

This is the first real cache trouble I've had on OS X, but it is a relatively common source of issues for others. Since cache folders exist in many spots (your user, the top-level Library folder, and the System folder), you might want to look into one of the cache cleaners, such as Cache Out X or Tiger Cache Cleaner (among many others), to make the job simpler.

I think I may add a general cache emptying routine to my crontab, just to make sure it happens somewhat regularly, given how much trouble this one incident caused.