And yes, yours truly, your beloved geek, the one on the bleeding edge, just had to run it on his a) encrypted disk image and b) his mac book pro!

In both cases, DiskWarrior 4 found errors - Improperly named .journal files on the disk image and various icon and text encoding issues on the laptop, as well as giving me back 200mb of free disk.

Now compatible with Intel macs, this utility is (sadly) a must have for any Mac user. I’ve used Macs since Feb, 1984, so I know what I am talking about here.

If you do not own Disk Warrior, run to your nearest Mac retail store, or go to Alsoft and pick up a copy.

If you own an older version, upgrade! Support these guys. DiskWarrior 4 now repairs disk images and Apple’s file vault, which is a huge huge deal. You can upgrade at Alsoft’s website.

Boot Camp is Apple’s system for letting one install Windows XP onto a Intel based Mac. Boot Camp partitions your disk into two partitions, one for OS X and one for XP, creates a CD of drivers for XP and then installs XP.

I have a copy of XP that came from the launch. It has no service packs (major updates) so I can’t use it with Boot Camp. The Intel macs require SP2. So I spent $5 and ordered an XP SP 2 CD from Microsoft (how cool of them!). That arrived so I was ready to go.

I run Boot Camp and let it create my CD of drivers for the Mac hardware. Then Boot Camp tries to partition my disk, but it found disk errors! Well thats a nice side effect of this whole process, actually. So I boot into single user mode, run FSCK and I’m all fixed up (geek method which is faster than booting off the OS X installer cd and running Disk Utility)

I reboot and try to partition with Boot Camp again. No go. Now it can’t move some files. (ie, some files are so important to OS X they can’t be moved down into the OS X space so a XP partition can be created)

Well poop. So I boot off my external HD and run Boot Camp. Now it tells me I cannot partition an external disk. So much for that.

Next I run iDefragLite which I had never run, but owned as part of Coriolis’ iPartition package. iDegragLite ran overnight and when I woke up, the hard disk was nicely compacted with a huge block of free space at the end.

So I reboot from the internal drive and run Boot Camp. Success! I now have a 10gb partition all set up for windows.

I whip out my brand new Windows XP SP2 CD, insert it into the Mac and click “Begin Installation” Acccck. No go. “No installer CD found” Sheesh. Ok so I check on the CD and it just installs SP2! Its not a full installer CD, just for the damn service pack.

I run Boot Camp again where it kindly offers to delete Windows XP and restore the 10gb back to my Mac drive. I thank it and accept.

I downloaded the 30 day Aperture trial to give it a go. I like the app!

I imported my 7500 some odd photos from iPhoto. Took about 8 hours to import, generate thumbnails and previews. Resulting Aperture library is about 1gb larger than the iPhoto library.

If you’re into photography and especially if you shoot RAW, give the trial a test run for yourself!

Aperture Trial

Cocoatech released Path Finder 4.5, their wonderful replacement for the Finder.

It is truly a great application. Check out their 30 day demo. Tabs, navigation bars and a much better searching/filtering system make this one of my favorite apps.

If you use dot mac, get Backup 3 from mac.com and fill up that new gb of iDisk!

One nice thing is the easy to add backup of your itunes purchased music to DVD or CDs monthly. I’m doing a backup to DVD-RW right now and it even asked to erase the DVD-RW. This will be a nice monthly reminder.

I’m not sure how to keep the daily incremental backups from filling my iDisk - There are no preferences I can find!

Cute, colorful, intelligent and easy to play but tough to solve. Check out the demo of:

Professor Fizzwizzle

Ambrosia is one of my favorite software companies. Get your free, awesome, no longer needing MS Word envelope printing widget for Tiger!

it is gorgeous, prints well, uses address book and is just neat!

Easy Envelopes

I have been a beta site for NetNewsWire 2 for quite awhile now and it is a wonderful product. I use it daily to read my news/RSS feeds, download podcasts and all sorts of other wonderful things it does. Check it out!

Have you ever wanted to delete a song from a playlist and also have it be removed from your library? I have many times since downloading podcasts, so I googled it and, funny enough, found this iTunes shortcut list at Apple.

The answer: option-delete!

Run, don’t walkt, to download TextWrangler from BareBones. Very nice, especially for the price.

The Myst IV demo is out. They suggest a G5. What the hell? What happened to the old myst? You know, where the content was appealing, not the technology?

Myst should run on a color classic, make the puzzles fun, challenging, interesting. Don’t make it required a G5 to play. Sheesh.

The first public beta of NetNewsWire 2 is out. Get it now! Have been a tester for some time and it is still my RSS news reader of choice!

Much goodness in this new version, check out the read me.

Brent Simmons (NetNewsWire fame) did it again with Big Cat. While not new, this little plugin lets you write contextual menu items in AppleScript and Unix shell scripts. One plugin to filter text/files and then it dispatches to the chosen script. Much faster than having 100 individual plugins!

AdiumX is my new favorite chat client for the Mac. Open source, free, actively worked on, can theme the contacts list, message window and dock icons.

So speaking of themes, they are all simple bundles. Inside the bundle (control click, Show Contents) is a set of images and a plist (text file of XML goodness) that defines say the dock icon. So this iPod dock icon I downloaded was blinking way too fast and making me go nuts. I opened the icon pack and changed the delay to 10 seconds and it worked! Check this out:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Description</key>
    <dict>
        <key>Creator</key>
        <string>Created by Quincy</string>
        <key>Title</key>
        <string>iPod Adiumy Remix v3.0 (motionless)</string>
    </dict>
    <key>State</key>
    <dict>
        <key>Alert</key>
        <dict>
            <key>Animated</key>
            <true/>
            <key>Delay</key>
            <real>10.0</real>
            <key>Images</key>
            <array>
                <string>Flap.png</string>
                <string>Awake.png</string>
            </array>

Very nice design by the engineers. So while there is no user interface for this, a simple edit in BBEdit and then double clicking the icon set to load it slowed my icon way down. Thanks, guys.

Suddenly I am a avid fan of Omniweb I bought a version 3 license but never used it, because well OmniWeb sucked.

I skipped 4 and 4.5 for the same reasons. Now with 5, they are here.

5 is behind on it’s webkit integration, which has caused a few errors, but the features are so stunning!

For example:

• Workspaces - You can save off sets of windows and switch with F-keys
• Per Site Preferences - For my bank, I set up the prefs for just that domain to download files to a folder other than the desktop. Now my banking downloads go into their own folder for saving and other needs.
• Resumable http downloads - Just stop a download if you need to and resume it later
• iTunes searching on bookmarks - While confusing at first, now it is really powerful
• Safari bookmark syncing - Still use safari for some sites? No problem, add the Safari collection and it is updated each time you open Omniweb
• Bookmark syncing - To .mac or any webdav server, each time you quit Omniweb it syncs your personal bookmarks. Open up Omniweb on another machine and it syncs. I have even had Omniweb running on both machines at once, made dissimilar changes to bookmarks, quit both copies and relaunched them to find the bookmark changes reflected on both machines. Nice.
• Per page ad blocking, popup blocking, etc. Turn popups off for all sites except that one that really needs to open popups.
• Gazillions of preferences
• Support has been responsive to the bugs I have been finding.
• Tabs can either be a vertical list of site names or a list of page icons from those sites the tabs
• Control when and where autofill is used (manually or automatically)
• Delete cookies from all sites on close, or just some sites
• Tell Omniweb to not open a new window when you click it’s dock icon, so minimize web pages stay minimized.

The list goes on. Check it out for free.

Check out LaunchBar 4! What a great improvement to a killer app. With LaunchBar 4 you can, after pressing command-space:

• Launch Applications
• Open Documents
• Send emails to people in your Address Book
• Search the internet
• Open iPhoto albums
• Play itunes by typing in part of the song name
• Execute Applescripts

The list goes on and on. It is a wonderful, wonderful Mac OS X application!

I have used LaunchBar for Mac OS X since day one of Mac OS X. This little application will save you so much time, you’ll not know how you lived without it!

LaunchBar is a program that scans selected directories and indexs the files found. You can refine this search to just applications, or documents, or add other data types, such as your bookmarks or address book entries.

“So what?” you say? Now that LaunchBar has indexed things, you can activate it from within any application via a simple command-space. Now a menu slides down and you can type the name of the file/application/person you want and LaunchBar will find it for you. You can type “BB” for example and LB will show things starting with BB, or that have two “b”s starting separate words, etc. Scroll down to “BBEdit” and BBEdit will launch. Now do this again and LaunchBar has learned that when you type “BB” you mean BBEdit!

so “PSE” opens Photoshop Elements, “mr” opens a new email to my brother, “sp” opens system profiler, on and on and on!

“Again, Steve, so what?” Well, now you can only keep applications on your dock that are running, seeing as you can launch them from LaunchBar faster usually than clicking on the dock!

Or like me, you can add a new entry in LaunchBar to scan a folder named “Databases” for all documents. Now, “sn” opens an excel spreadsheet containing all of my serial numbers, “ab” opens the address book, “md” opens my movie database. You are starting to get the speed of this.

Even better, you can now store all applications you install in a folder named “My Applications” and simply tell LaunchBar to scan that folder for applications. Now you have separated your applications from Apple’s, making migrating to new disks or operating systems easier and you don’t really care where they are located because LaunchBar gives you one, simple, common user interface to all of these files.

LaunchBar comes with a 30 day demo - you owe yourself to try it out and if you hate it at first, give it a week. You might thank me later.

Nice job, Panic. Transmit was getting some “stalled” errors to some sites last week, so I paid for Interarchy 6.2 and it was even slower. Now Panic has released Transmit 2.5 and they fixed things like dragging a large list of files (which used to stall the Finder for 20 seconds).

I ran my upload folder test, an album of photos. The results (the first two run back to back a week ago, 2.5 ran today)

Interarchy: 12 minutes Transmit 2: 8 1/2 minutes Transmit 2.5 6 1/4 minutes

Cocoa eFax, from Ben Mackin, is a simple, elegant user interface on top of the UNIX eFax program.

eFax sends PDF files, which thankfully is supported so well by OS X that any application can save to a PDF via the Print dialog.

Simply launch Cocoa eFax, enter your phone number, add your PDF files and off it goes. I sent a fax and it went through cleanly, even after the other end picked up and said “hello? hello?” and then started the fax machine on their end.

I have not tried receiving a fax. There is also an untested “Scan and Fax” feature.

In the “Send Fax To:” field you can enter a name “Riggins” and click Check Address Book. The popup menu will then list matching items, however it shows them even if they don’t have Fax Numbers listed. Only choosing the name will report the error. Cocoa eFax should take a page out of Mail.app and use a nice palette for searching for a name (complete with x in the search field) and only match on records with Fax: numbers.

Cocoa eFax is shareware $10, quite affordable, requires no extensions to run and allows you to send 5 faxes before paying.