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With the introduction of Apple’s newest operating system OS X 10.7 Lion, the company has taken one step further to disconnect their users from other competing user interaction schemes.

Let me elaborate on this rather strong statement by going back in history a bit.
I can still remember, when I got my first Mac, it was a 12″ iBook G4 with OS X Panther. Being a rather curious person, I started tweaking the user interface and tested out all available options, until I was satisfied with the speed and metaphors of my personal set up. On thing that I started using very frequently almost immediately was Exposé (now extinct due to Lion’s Mission Control). I had several hot corners set up, so windows would fly out of the way and reveal the Desktop whenever I moved my mouse in the lower left corner of the screen or reveal all opened windows when I moved to the lower right corner. This method of interacting with my programs quickly became very natural to me. Going so far, that I started moving my mouse into corners on Windows systems several times in vain, until I realized that I had to use the taskbar for those similar tasks. This wasn’t more than a little annoyance to me. I just found out that OS X permitted me to work faster than what I’d be able to achieve in the rare cases, where I’d need to use another system.

But the problem also ran in the other direction. People not used to Mac systems and their concept of hot corners seemed to have a much more clumsy way of moving their mouse around on the screen. Thus they inadvertently triggered the “Show Desktop” or “Show all windows” functions all of the time and were completely irritated by windows flying around all of the sudden. I merely laughed about that fact back then, but from my point of view today, that’s where the gap began to widen. I was used to a UI paradigm, that wasn’t logical at all for users not familiar with OS X.

Skip a few years forward and now we’ve got OS X 10.7 Lion with many more ways of interaction, that are nowhere near to be seen on any other platform. Take gestures for instance: they save a lot of time and clicks when used properly, but setting ones muscle memory further apart from the rest of computer users, who don’t have or use gestures. Now this isn’t a very big problem, because gestures need special hardware to be applicable and add new ways of interaction that don’t overrule the way of using a computer you got used to before. A much bigger problem could be the way Apple changed the scrolling direction in Lion. They call it “natural scrolling” and if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense and there isn’t much of a learning curve, once you’ve wrapped your head around it. But think of the ramifications that arise when others happen to sit in front of your computer or if you want to use another persons system.

If I think about a typical day at work, there are several times when a colleague  might sit down at my Mac to look something up, load some spreadsheet or notes about what we are just discussing, or similar examples. In the past this was no big deal, they might only be annoyed by triggering hot-corners or when they searched for the “close window” button on the wrong side of a window’s title bar. But now there is also the reversal of scrolling, which not only is new and “weird” to them, but is completely contradictory to how the same metaphor worked for them over the last decades.

Don’t be mistaken, I’m not against the new “natural scrolling”. I’m getting used to it rather quickly and enjoy how I can now interact with content more logically. But on the other hand it will make it more difficult for me, whenever I have to use a Windows or Linux Desktop and now even when I use an older OS X system. At the same time other users will find it more irritating and difficult to use my machine. It will be interesting where this will take us in the future. Will the gap grow even more? Or will operating system manufacturers decide on a common ground for user interactions?
I don’t mind adapting to the new principles Apple comes up with, as long as they make sense for me and help me interact with my computer in a more efficient way. But this also means I’m separating myself further from the herd (aka millions of Windows users), which might not be entirely bad in itself 😉

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Growl iconIt’s time again to circumvent Apple’s Mail Plugin policy and update the GrowlMail Bundle with the correct identifier string. Otherwise, after updating, Mail will tell you it has disabled the GrowlMail plugin and will move the bundle to ~/Library/Mail/Bundles (disabled).

To amend this, follow these steps:

  1. Quit Mail
  2. Move the GrowlMail.mailbundle Folder back into ~/Library/Mail/Bundles
  3. Enter the following two commands into your Terminal: 
    defaults write ~/Library/Mail/Bundles/GrowlMail.mailbundle/Contents/Info SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUIDs -array-add "1C58722D-AFBD-464E-81BB-0E05C108BE06"
defaults write ~/Library/Mail/Bundles/GrowlMail.mailbundle/Contents/Info SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUIDs -array-add "9049EF7D-5873-4F54-A447-51D722009310"
  4. Start Mail and enjoy Growl notifications for new eMail again!

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For quite some time Mac users where searching for a way to paste the currently playing song from iTunes in chat messages etc. I never thought about it much but recently a friend of mine, who was a former AMIP user on Windows, needed a similar functionality under OS X. Together we constructed a working solution.

So here it is the AMIP alternative for Mac:

    • Open Automator and start a new “Service”
    • Choose “no input” for “Service receives”
    • Drag the “Run AppleScript” Action into the workflow
    • Paste in the following and edit the output in (green) to your hearts desire
on run
 try
 tell application "iTunes"
 set songTitle to the name of the current track
 set songArtist to the artist of the current track
 set songAlbum to the album of the current track
 set songYear to the year of the current track
 set the clipboard to "np:" & the songArtist & " - " & songTitle & " \"" & songAlbum & ", " & songYear & "\""
 end tell
 end try
 try
 set the clipboard to Unicode text of (the clipboard as record)
 on error errMsg
 display dialog errMsg
 end try
 tell application "System Events"
 key code 9 using {command down}
 end tell
end run
  • Save the service. I named mine “music” (creative isn’t it? 🙂 )
  • Now your able to run the service from every application’s menu under “Services”. Be sure to have your cursor in a text field because the service will immediately paste in the constructed string.
  • If you’re in a super nerdy mood today, you can also give your service a keyboard shortcut.
    Go to “System Preferences”, open “Keyboard”, go to “Keyboard Shortcuts” and set your desired Hotkey. (mine’s CMD + SHIFT + M)

I’d be happy to see further improvements, thoughts & ideas about this solutions in the comments!

 

And to all my Austrian friends: Frohen Faschingsdienstag (not that I’d care!)

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GoAccess - web log analyzer

GoAccess - web log analyzer

Description

GoAccess is a very handy tool, that runs in the terminal on most *nix Systems (e.g. Linux, Mac OS X, BSD etc.) and displays relatime data gathered from Apache’s access logfile.

It offers a very structured display with different “modules” that break down the parsed access.log data into sections:

  • General Statistics – Information analyzed from log file – Unique totals
  • Unique visitors per day – Including spiders
  • Requested files (Page-URL)
  • Requested static files (images, stylesheets etc.)
  • Referrer URLs
  • HTTP 404 Not Found response code
  • Operating Systems
  • Browsers
  • Hosts
  • HTTP Status Codes
  • Top Referring Sites
  • Top key phrases used on Google

Each module has a detail view that can be opened by pressing “o”. The detail view gives you a scrollable list with more information on the currently selected data.

Installation

Since I couldn’t find a package for GoAccess in Debian lenny’s apt sources, I took the manual compile route. But the installation is still really easy and fast.

  • Make sure you’ve got the GLIB2, ncurses & GeoIP packages installed. 
    aptitude install libglib2.0-dev, libncurses5-dev, libgeoip-dev
  • Download the latest GoAccess tarball from http://goaccess.prosoftcorp.com/download and uncompress it on your webserver.
    At the time of writing the current version was GoAccess 0.3.3.
  • Go into the newly created folder where the uncompressed files are and type “./configure”
    (include the dot and slash before the command!)
  • If all tests pass, you should see those three lines at the end of the output: 
    config.status: creating Makefile
config.status: creating config.h
config.status: executing depfiles commands
  • Type “make” to start the compile process.
  • When the program is readily compiled, it is time to install the binaries on your system.
    For that gain root access (or use “sudo”) and type “make install“.

Running GoAccess

Once you are done installing you can start the program by typing in “goaccess” on the command prompt and pressing enter. If you don’t add any command line options, GoAccess will print a few lines of help text.

GoAccess - 0.3.3

Usage: goaccess [ -b ][ -s ][ -e IP_ADDRESS][ -f log_file ]

The following options can also be supplied to the command:

  -f  - Path to input log
  -b  - Enable total bandwidth consumption. To achieve
        faster parsing, do not enable this flag.
  -s  - Enable/report HTTP status codes. To avoid overhead
        while parsing, this has been disabled by default.
  -e  - Exclude an IP from being counted under the HOST
        module. This has been disabled by default. 

For more details visit: http://goaccess.prosoftcorp.com

If you want all the features you can start it with:

goaccess -b -s -f /var/log/apache/access.log

Give it some time to parse the logfile (could take a very long time, depending on your logfile size), then you should see the mainscreen with live updating data and can start to use GoAccess.

GoAccess - Operating Systems module report

GoAccess - Operating Systems module report