A Few Modifications

I've made a few changes to the site's appearance. Hopefully these will help with readability, which was the intent.

To start, I've pretty much gone with a black and white color scheme. Body text is now a dark gray and links are black. The only place we see color, really, is in the rollovers. Hopefully this is easier on the eyes than the muted blue-gray I had before.

But perhaps more importantly, to my tired aging eyes at least: body text size has been increased to 16 pixels and the line height has been increased as well. This (for me anyway) greatly increases the readability of posts. Before I found myself hitting command+ all the time; now it feels just right.

As I've said before, I'm not a designer by any stretch of the imagination, so I'm totally open to comments and suggestions. But hopefully most folks will find the changes to be an improvement.

Final Cut Pro X Sneak Peek

Apple recently gave a sneak peek to some very lucky folks at NAB of the upcoming release of Final Cut Pro, now dubbed Final Cut Pro X. The "X" seems appropriate as it looks like Final Cut has finally made it into the world of modern applications written for a mature, modern and cool-as-hell Operating System.

Which is to say that FCP will finally be able to do all those things like threading and taking advantage of multiple cores, using as much memory as you've got, background rendering and exporting, and simultaneous ingestion and editing.

Image Via The Loop

Essentially, Final Cut Pro X is a complete, ground-up rewrite of the app, as well as rethinking of what a non-linear digital video editing application can and should be. Much like they did with iMovie — and likely drawing from many of its lessons — Apple has sought once again to redefine how we approach video editing. In fact, FCPX even looks like a mashup of the elder FCP and iMovie. It also looks to me like they've got a winner.

In addition to finally leveraging core OS components, the new FCP both removes the annoyances of yesteryear — things like the inability to use the application when you're performing an export (God, that was frustrating!) — and adds forward-thinking improvements like the addition of metadata for faces, places and tags, as well as a far better ability to deal with today's complex CODECs and cameras. It's very cool and makes me wish I still did video. Frankly, despite the fact that these days I am not making nor teaching video, I may buy Final Cut Pro X anyway, just to play with it. Yeah, it looks that cool.

It's also fairly reasonably priced at $299 (no more Final Cut Express, apparently), and available from, of all places, the Mac App Store. While I'm not quite yet a fan of the MAS, I am kind of excited at the prospect of being able to get FCPX on a whim with nothing more than a credit card and an Internet connection.

At any rate, even though I'm no longer a video guy, I'm so very happy to see one of my all-time favorite applications, Final Cut Pro, finally, after years of neglect, get the upgrade it so richly deserves. The actual video guys must be so psyched! Lucky bastards!

Looking Forward to Lion

I admit it: I'm an OS nerd. I get very excited about new OS releases, particularly (okay, only) those of my OS of choice, Mac OS X.

Mac OS X 10.7 — or Lion as it's affectionately codenamed — is certainly no exception. In fact, Lion looks to be a very exciting release, both for its wealth of new features and for its refinements to Apple's already sparkling OS.

It's an exciting time to be an OS junkie, really. Snow Leopard was a wonderful release that brought stability and refinement to what can finally be called a mature Mac OS X. From here on out OS development seems to be less about making Mac OS X work quickly and succinctly — less about the guts of the OS —  and more about making it work well. That is, from here on out, Mac OS X developers are concentrating on making the Mac OS X experience a wonderful one. And that means even further refinement to an already polished OS, with maybe a dash of experimentation thrown in for good measure, thanks to convergence with Apple's mobile OS.

I haven't installed the beta, but I've read as much as I've been able to find. Here are some images and links, with just a dash of commentary from yours truly thrown in.

Mac OS X Server

One of the shockers about this release is that Mac OS X Server will be included, for free, with the standard Lion DVD. It will be a separate install, but has been discontinued as a separate, paid release. Looks like Apple's professional server platform is dead, but I'm glad it will live on in some form, at least for the time being.

Images Via AppleInsider

Administrative Tools and Goodies

One of the great things about OS updates — particularly the latest Mac OS X updates — has been further expansion and refinement of any and all administrative tools. This is, needless to say, of particular interest to SysAdmins like us. Here are some updates that Lion brings to the table baked right into the About This Mac window.

Images Via AppleInsider

The Finder

Of course I'm always, always, always happy to see Finder improvements and refinements, and it looks like there will be plenty in Lion.

We have some new and potentially very useful Finder views, though I must admit to not being a great fan of the iOS-like buttons in the toolbar. The sidebar is also toned down (a-la iTunes) and features some new and potentially useful items.

Image Via AppleInsider

Spotlight in The Finder is now smarter and more useful.

Image Via AppleInsider

And my favorite Finder view, column view, even receives some love.

Image Via AppleInsider

And finally, the big Finder news: windows can now be resized from any edge. Just like in Windows.

Image Via TheAppleBlog

Other Improvements

There are a bunch of additional refinements to the core OS. One of my favorites is support for automatically saving documents, or Auto Save as they're calling it.

Images Via AppleInsider

Auto Save is accessed just like Time Machine, which is just brilliant.

A signature capture utility also makes its way into Preview, allowing you to sign digital documents using that app and your built-in iSight camera.

Image Via 9to5Mac

Dock and Exposé get refinements as well.

Images Via Engadget

Even Spotlight gets better, with larger icons and inline previews.

Image Via AppleInsider

All-in-all, from what I've sen so far, Lion is shaping up to be a very nice release. I'm sure there will be under-the-hood improvements that will add performance gains as well. I am, as always, really looking forward to using Apple's next OS release.

Third Time's a Charm

Another Xcode update, another bad App Store experience. This one was the best so far, but still not perfect.

After the last update I pretty much just gave up and started keeping the Install Xcode.app in the /Applications folder where it's expected, despite the 4.5 gigs it takes up. So when I went to update to Xcode 4.0.2 I expected everything to just work. I ran the Updater from the App Store, which took about 20 minutes as the entire Install Xcode.app, we now know, must be downloaded and installed from scratch (which, to be fair, was how it always worked in the old days as well).

Once that completed I knew, from cold hard experience, that despite the App Store reporting that the update was complete, the Install Xcode.app still needed to run and update the actual Xcode components. I find it very sloppy that you are not instructed to do this. Or, hey, better yet, why doesn't Install Xcode.app just launch when the update in finished? That seems like the best way to go. Either way, some instruction here are really needed to make this work like an Apple product. Fortunately, I know the deal, so I ran Install Xcode.app, and this is what I got:

If you're following along at home you'll recognize this as the same message I got when I first bought and installed Xcode 4. Nice to see somethings never change. This is what the log said:

Apr 16 10:33:07 hassium installer[39689]: Free space on "SysApps": 9.96 GB (9962598400 bytes).

Apr 16 10:34:28 hassium installer[39689]: install:didFailWithError:Error Domain=PKInstallErrorDomain Code=110 UserInfo=0x10817b630 "An error occurred while extracting files from the package “OtherDevDocumentation.pkg”." Underlying Error=(Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=2 UserInfo=0x106722570 "The operation couldn’t be completed. No such file or directory")

Apr 16 10:34:28 hassium installer[39689]: Install failed: The Installer encountered an error that caused the installation to fail. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance.

Not particularly helpful. So I decided to hit that "Try Updating Again" button, see what happens. This time, at least, I get some useful error info:

Okay, so this is just like before. We've run out of space and I need to clear some off. I still think this is the wrong place to bring this up, or at least not the ideal place. But still, I know what to do.

And sure enough, once I've cleared some space up (by deleting /var/vm/sleepimage, btw) the update works fine and dandy and Install Xcode.app automatically launches my updated Xcode (oh! sure, now you auto-launch!).

So it looks like, for me and Xcode anyway, third time's a charm.

Oh, by the way, if you're looking for the plist editor that used to be included with the Developer Tools, it no longer exists as a standalone application. Instead, it's built right into Xcode itself (makes sense to me). So if you want to edit .plist files, you just open them in Xcode now. Simple enough.