What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I'm still getting used to the OS X 10.8.2 changes - specifically, Notification Center. This is clearly a take on Growl, and as a long-time user of Growl, I know there are apps that are only recently Growl 2 compliant, so I really doubt they are wired into Notification Center. Thankfully, there's a mode in Growl to ship all notifications to Notification Center. But there's a catch…

All notifications that are redirected from Growl come into Notification Center as Growl notifications. That's no good. You loose at least half the really useful information in this. You need to be able to tell what app sent it, and then what the message is. Thankfully, someone thought of this and created Bark.

It's a Growl 2 plug-in, and it requires OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, and it redirects all Growl notifications to Notification Center - leaving the application intact. You simply download it, install it, and then set the 'Default Action' to be 'Bark', and the 'Default Style' to 'No Default Display', and you're done!

I'm hoping this is going to do what it says it does, but I haven't seen any notifications come through, but I've got my fingers crossed, and I'm hoping this works exactly as advertised.

This evening I decided to update my main laptop to OS X 10.8.2 Mountain Lion because it's about time and I think they've got the vast majority of the bugs worked out, and it's ready for prime time. I'm not exactly certain how I'm going to feel about it… I've heard good things and bad, but it's where Apple is going, as with Xcode 4, and I need to just realize that it's time to get with it and make the move.

I will say that I'm a little nervous, but I'm sure it'll all work out in the end.

UPDATE: it took about 40 mins to download and another 30 mins to install, but it's working so far. Lost all app positioning and startup, but that's not totally surprising. Working well - so far.

This afternoon I saw that Safari 6.0.1 was out on Software Updates along with iPhoto. I'm very interested in the improvements in Safari, so I had to update right away. Interestingly enough, this did not require a reboot - so they must have done something in 10.7.x to make it possible to update Safari without the reboot. It used to be required.

What's very exciting is that the memory usage has really changed. This is great news as I was really getting close to the limit recently. Now I've got a good bit of headroom, and don't have to worry about things for a while.

Nice work, Apple!

This evening I'm taking the time to update my iPhone 4S to iOS 6. I'm expecting a long download time due to massively overloaded servers, but that's OK. I've got the time. I'm looking forward to what I've heard about, but really… I'm quite happy with my phone and not looking to upgrade to the 5 this cycle.

Great work Apple!

UPDATE: I wasn't wrong - it took a long time to get it all done. They changed a lot of things and I'm not really fond of the changes to the App Store, but hey… I'll live with it for a while and see if it grows on me.

This morning I noticed that Java 1.6.0_35 was updated on Software Updates most likely due to a security issue that's been patched. Given the way Oracle is handling Java, I'm really wishing that Apple would retain control of Java for OS X. Right now, I'm wishing they had it slightly better integrated into the OS such that starting a JVM instance wasn't so time-consuming. Linux handles this with all the shared libs being loaded. Then it's a very lightweight thing to spin up the JVM. On OS X, it's a lot more.

Still, it's nice to see that they have at least one more update. Maybe cooler heads will prevail in the coming months? Most likely not, but a guy can wish, can't he?

I'm sitting here this morning smiling quietly to myself after working a while on some problems. I realize I'm smiling because the keyboard is just such a wonderful piece of work - the Apple (small) wireless keyboard and wireless mouse, to be precise. These are simply the best input devices that I've ever used. The keyboard is low to the desktop, responsive, small, and without a cord. The trackpad is large, the gestures wonderfully thought-out. It's amazing what I can do so effortlessly on this machine.

Then there's the machine. I'll admit I'm not a fan of the glossy Apple displays. I never have been. The HP 30" is really the best I've used in a long while. I think Apple could make a nice 30" display, but they don't want to, and there's no making them do something they don't want to do.

But back to the laptops… they are, without a doubt, the best in the industry - and have been for a long while. Really, the only solid competition was the IBM ThinkPad, and IBM sold that to Levono, and the quality has become so very ordinary now. Nothing to write home about.

But great hardware gets out of your way. You stop thinking about how to do something, and focus on the doing. In some cases, it even enables you to see things that you might have not seen - large displays with more code in them really are very beneficial.

So I have to tip my hat to the folks at The Shop that see this as well, and outfit the developers this way. It's really quite amazing.

Today I had a nasty scare - I was trying to migrate my son's old MacBook to a new MacBook Pro we just got him at the Apple store. The migration was going over WiFi and was going to take 14 hours. I hooked up ethernet cables, but it wasn't smart enough to detect the new and faster transport. With each passing minute, the time to finish was going up! This was bad and getting worse.

So I decided to kill it by shutting off the old machine and then the new. I then restarted the process, but decided moving my account wasn't necessary - Huge Mistake! Mine was the Administrator account. So when I got done transferring his, mine was in an incomplete state - all messed up, and his wasn't an admin! We were sunk.

No install disk. No way around it. Well and truly hosed.

Then I saw this: How to restart the setup process. If I could get that going again, and transfer my account this time, we'd be set. So here's what I had to do: Restart the Mac holding down Cmd-s to get into single-user mode, and type:

  $ /sbin/mount -uw /
  $ rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
  $ exit

at this point, I got to restart the setup process and I could re-transfer my account. Once that was done, I could make his account an admin and we're safe.

That was a close one. No fun at all.

This morning I read an interesting fact about OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion - they removed the Web Sharing from System Preferences -> Sharing. Odd. I didn't use it a lot, but they also reset the config files for Apache, so it's something that I'm going to need to work on when I finally upgrade to 10.8.

Thankfully, the post talks about how to get all this functionality back and includes nice screen snapshots, so when I need to, I'll have a nice reference to walk me through anything I haven't seen before.

I know I need to get Apache, PHP, PostgreSQL all working together as my work on SyncKit requires it. So I'll have to factor that into the time for the upgrade.

Still planning on doing it, just not right today.

Today along with OS X 10.8 and Safari 6, Apple released to the Mac App Store Xcode 4.4 and while I can't find any release notes for it, I'm guessing it's an uptick in the version of GCC and the LLVM compiler. With the coding I'm doing these days, it makes a big difference with 10.8 a reality, I need to get things up to date reasonably quickly. Glad to see that Apple is continually improving the tools as well as the end-user products.

Today OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion goes on sale for $19.99 in the Mac App Store, and while I'm certainly going to update - eventually - I'm not going to do it while I'm at work, nor on a work evening. I'm definitely going to wait for a weekend. However, we have updates in Software Updates for Safari 6 - and that's great news.

It's not often we get a major revision of Safari, and this should (hopefully) make a few things a little nicer, but we'll have to wait and see. It's certainly something I can update in the middle of the day comfortably.