A Home Page To Nowhere

I very much appreciate Firefox's ability to save and restore my window and tab settings every time I quit and relaunch the app. It's one of my favorite things about Firefox.

But I seem to remember that there was once a way to enable this feature while also having Firefox open new blank windows, that is, empty windows with no web page loaded. I believe this was an independent setting in Firefox 2, but now the only place I see such a setting is in the startup behavior, and I'll be damned if I'm going to turn off my session restore behavior.

By default, Firefox 3 opens all new windows with your homepage. If you try to leave this setting blank, Firefox 3 will use its own branded Google search page. But there is a way to tell Firefox to make your home page an empty one. Instead of using a URL in the Home Page field of the Main preferences tab, use about:blank. By doing so you're telling Firefox that a blank page is your home page, and thence onward Firefox will open all new windows empty, blank, bare as white paper. And that is just great.

If you're like me, you don't need to see your home page every time you open a new window. In fact, there's no page I want to see every time I open a new window. It seems like a goofy default. I wish the Firefox devs would either bring back the preference to open new windows sans content or change the default to a blank page the way it is with new tabs. It just makes more sense.

Until they do, though, I'll be setting my homepage to nowhere.

Enclosing Mail Folders

A quickie: It's fairly common knowledge that, in the Finder, command-clicking the icon in the titlebar of the folder you're in will reveal the folder hierarchy that said folder lives in. This is a handy way to find your current location and "drill up" in the folder hierarchy, if you will.

I've always longed for similar functionality in Mail.app, but the best we'd had was titlebar text that displayed the email name and its enclosing folder. Until now.

In Snow Leopard Mail.app finally gets the same command-click behavior we have in the Finder (control-click also seems to work). Open a message in a new window, and command-click the icon of the message in the titlebar.

Doing so reveals the location of the message and allows you to navigate there.

Excellent!

Native App Superiority

I was recently reading an article on the Tao of Mac that said, among other things:

"I’ve long preferred to use iPhone Twitter and Facebook clients over desktop ones..."

It's true, there are a handful of iPhone applications that are actually better than the original apps they replace — Facebook, for sure, and my recent fave, the Zipcar app among them. Of course the original ones — the "Desktop ones" referred to in the article — are actually web applications.

The fact is that, despite the push towards — and what many believe is the inevitability of — the web as the primary source of applications, native apps are still vastly superior in almost every instance. This is why Apple had to finally give developers —  and consumers, of course — the App Store. Web apps just weren't cutting it on the iPhone. And while they do somewhat better inside a full-sized browser on a full-powered computer, I still think web apps have a long way to go — a very long way — before they'll ever rival the experience of native apps. Platforms like the iPhone and continued interest in things like Site Specific Browsers offer very convincing evidence that native apps will continue to thrive for a long time to come. To be honest, I have my doubts that web apps will ever completely replace native ones.

I should also point out the probably obvious fact that there are certain apps that will always be best on a mobile platform because they just happen to be particularly well-suited to mobility. The Zipcar iPhone app is a perfect example. It's an app for finding, renting and controlling cars, for Chrissake. Where better to have an app about travel than on a mobile device? In fact, having the Zipcar app on an iPhone gives it certain powers the web app will likely never be able to match. But I'd venture to say that there are very few, if any, application experiences that are better in a web browser than they would be in a dedicated, native app.

No doubt about it, web apps are supremely useful, especially for certain tasks. But that's like saying the web is useful. The ironic fact that many of us prefer surfing Facebook on our iPhones to using the original web app version on a full-sized computer should give you an idea of just how hard it will be and how long it will take to supplant native apps with web apps.

Snow Leopard Server-Related Changes

That title should give you a hint just how much my responsibilities have changed since I took my new job. Yes, I still run a Mac OS X Server, but I no longer get bi-yearly hardware updates. So my server is running a PPC, as is my workstation. So no Snow Leopard Server for me, at least not for a while.

I have noticed (as have many others) a few changes to how Snow Leopard handles certain server-related tasks, and I thought I'd just jot them down for the record — mine as much as yours.

Directory Utility

The first, and possibly weirdest, change is that Directory Utility is no longer a readily available application. It now lives in the very unintuitive /System/Library/Core Services, which tells me that Apple would rather us not use it unless absolutely necessary, which, generally speaking, it should not be, at least not for binding to Open Directory servers. Much of its functionality has moved to other applications and parts of the OS.

OD Server Binding

Curiously, OD binding now happens in the Login Options section of the Accounts preference pane. Even more curiously, you can open the Directory Utility from here as well:

NFS Mounts

Directory Utility used to have a pane for configuring NFS automounts. That pane has been moved to the arguably more logical Disk Utility application, where you access it under File->NFS Mounts, but it looks pretty much the same as it did before:

Root User

Since 10.5 the root user has also been activated via Directory Utility. I haven't found a new way to do this. It looks like if that's your bag you'll need to either find a way to open Directory Utility, or use the command-line. 'Course, if you know what root is, you shouldn't find either of these things terribly difficult. Especially since I just told you two ways to do the first thing.

Directory

There used to be an app called Directory in the Utilities folder, but it too is gone. I'm assuming some of its functionality has been added to Address Book, which now has its very own Accounts preference pane:

And I've read that some of its functionality has been moved to the iCal Server Utility app now included with the 10.6 Server Admin Tools:

I've also read that there is some functionality that is completely gone now.

MCX Cache

A fellow SysAdmin has posted his own groovy list of Snow Leopard changes as well. My favorite:

"New command, mcxrefresh, used for refreshing managed preferences on clients"

Hallelujah! I've bitched frequently about Mac OS X Server's overly aggressive cache. Having a way to clear it makes all the difference.

Conclusion

So we have a bit of a shuffling around here, but overall it looks to me like Apple is trying to keep simplifying the OD binding and setup process in Snow Leopard, as they have done with each iteration of Mac OS X. The most obvious features are in obvious places, whereas the more obscure features have been moved to more obscure locations. Most of these changes make sense, too, though dedicated apps for OD setup make sense on some level too. Must everything be another preference pane? In any case, it's just good to know that all the same stuff is there, it's just been moved around a bit.

On a personal note, it's a bit of a bummer to not get to play with Snow Leopard Server. I may never get the chance, actually. It could be long gone by the time we get new hardware, and we just don't rely on Mac OS X Server like we did at my old job. Ah well life goes on.

If anyone has any Snow Leopard Server stories to share, I'd love to hear them in the comments. As far as reportage goes, though, I'm gonna have to sit this one out.

Landscape Mode

One of the touted features of the 3.0 iPhone upgrade was the addition of landscape mode throughout most Apple applications. Initially this sounded like quite a boon. Until I realized: I never use landscape mode, I don't like landscape mode, landscape mode is always activating when I don't want it to and there's no way to turn it off.

My biggest complaint about landscape mode — and what seems to me the biggest UI gaffe — is that it forces itself on the user. If you happen to be reading something in Safari using portrait mode and, for instance, lying on your side, the iPhone will constantly attempt to reorient the screen to landscape mode, even if it's completely inappropriate. It interrupts what you're doing and requires all manner of acrobatics to keep the thing in your orientation of choice. In the end you give in and just sit up. And that sucks.

The one time I almost always like landscape mode is when I'm looking at photos in the Photos app. Ideally we'd have a way to opt-in to landscape mode on a per-app basis. But at this point I use it so little I'd settle for a way to just turn it off.

I understand a lot of people love landscape mode, but the way it is now is far more annoying than useful for me.