Remote Applications

BCC provides remote access to “licensed campus software”. This allows students to log in from off campus to use desktop software hosted on campus. I’m not too familiar with the protocol, but it seems like a Windows-oriented combination of VNC and X. Happily, clients are available for many platforms.

All I had to do to get started was download the Mac OS X Citrix ICA Client. Choosing a program from the access page downloads a “bookmark” that the client uses to launch the remote application.

Here’s Microsoft Word 2007 running in the background with a local application in the foreground. Sharp eyes may notice minor compression artifacts in the Word window. Connecting from across town, performance is sufficient to get work done.

Of course, the real benefit of this system is access to specialized professional applications, not word processors. Not all software available on campus is remotely accessible, but some of it is.

You can also access a virtual Windows desktop. Handy for confirming the cross-platform compatibility of mathematical curios without the need to maintain a separate PC.

Remote applications of this sort are surely unsuited for many purposes. However, I think it is a viable approach for occasional use, particularly in cases where an institution provides software that isn’t otherwise practical for its members to obtain. Good for wrapping up projects without hasty trips to the computer lab, I imagine.

Posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008.

State Abbreviations Service

Here’s a little service for Mac OS X that replaces the selected US state name with its postal abbreviation, or vice versa. If NY is selected, it will be replaced with New York. If New York is selected, it will be replaced with NY. Case doesn’t matter.

Download State Abbreviations Service 63K

Posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008.

Hacking Leopard Help

Update: A better way to improve the help viewer’s usability is documented here.

Mac OS X 10.5’s help viewer application is widely considered to be a piece of crap. Unlike the help viewer in previous iterations of Mac OS X, it presents no Dock icon, no proper menu bar, and exhibits an annoying tendency to obscure the application you needed help with in the first place.

So, fix it. Or at least have your vengeance by grossly disfiguring it.

Navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices. Copy Help Viewer.app to the Desktop, right-click the copy, and select Show Package Contents.

Open the Contents folder and open Info.plist. Change the value of the LSUIElement property to 0:

This makes the application’s Dock icon and menu bar visible. There are definitely some quirks (keyboard shortcuts don’t seem to work as expected), but it works.

Next open the Resources folder and the appropriate subfolder for your localization (English.lproj in my case). Open HelpWindow.nib with Interface Builder and select the HelpWindow item:

Display the Inspector (from the Tools menu) if it is not already visible and display the Attributes pane. Uncheck Utility and Non Activating under Panel Style:

This makes the help window look and behave a bit more like a regular window. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to prevent it from floating above other windows (perhaps that behavior is not controlled by the nib file). However, if you check Hide On Deactivate under Window Behavior in the same Inspector pane, the help window will at least sweep itself out of the way when you bring a different application to the front.

Clicking the help viewer’s Dock icon makes the window visible again, but also creates a new help window.

To apply your changes, save and close HelpWindow.nib and drag your copy of Help Viewer.app back to /System/Library/CoreServices. You’ll need to authenticate the copy operation since you really shouldn’t be diddling around in this directory. (You did make a back up, didn’t you? Good. Neither did I.)

You can test your modified copy of Help Viewer before copying it back to CoreServices, of course, but it won’t handle requests from the Help menu until you do.

Now when you seek help, Help Viewer will actually show up in the Dock. You’ll have menus, and you can even open multiple help windows. Unfortunately, the program launches in the background, so you’ll still have to switch applications with Command-Tab or click the Dock icon to view the requested documentation.

Please share any corrections, clarifications, or further contributions to the cause! I’m no Cocoa or Interface Builder expert. Most importantly, minimize the need for constant help consultation by thinking carefully about the use and design of your application. Put reference material in a nice PDF and call it a day.

Posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008.

An Introduction to News Feeds

Most web sites are updated from time to time. News feeds are supplementary files (in RSS or Atom format) that provide a summary or an alternative source of recent additions to such sites. These feeds are read by programs (or web-based services) known as feed readers, which provide people with an overview of what’s new at their favorite sites.

Popular feed readers include NetNewsWire and Google Reader. I use Vienna. Current browsers can display feeds, too.

Web sites that offer news feeds are usually identified by an icon in the browser tool bar. Safari displays a blue “RSS” badge when it detects an available feed; Firefox and other browsers show an orange logo. Alternatively, a link or button within the web page, labeled “RSS/Atom,” “XML,” or “feed,” may indicate that a news feed is available. In any case, clicking the icon or link will establish a subscription to that feed.

Your feed reader will periodically check to see if any of your subscriptions have been updated. If so, it will retrieve information about the new content — often including the new content itself — and display each new item in a list resembling an email inbox.

You can read new posts right in the news reader or follow a link to read them in context at the original web site. Since some news feeds provide only the title of new articles, you must visit the associated page to read the actual content in these cases.

Different feed readers provide different ways to manage your subscriptions. There are some common features, however. You can group related subscriptions, and you can save or discard items you’ve read — otherwise, they may eventually expire.

Feed readers are sometimes called news aggregators because they collect information from many sources in one convenient location. I find this service useful because it helps prevent me from wasting time online: instead of surfing from site to site and back again, I simply subscribe to sites I find interesting. It’s like receiving a newspaper instead of spending all day gathering news myself. It also helps me to keep an eye on sites I might otherwise forget to check.

Posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008.

Computing Power

The current Mac Pro is available with eight 3.2 GHz 64-bit cores, 32 GB of RAM, terabytes of storage, and support for up to eight 30-inch displays (eight 30-inch displays!), all in a practical form factor that runs certified UNIX.

Sure puts some of the rack-mount monstrosities I’ve met in perspective.

Anyway, perhaps you’d rather meet my calculators.

Posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008.

File Comparison with FileMerge

Wherein I explain the anatomy of a FileMerge window

FileMerge is a visual diff utility included with the developer tools that ship with Mac OS X. As its name suggests, it is intended to help compare and resolve differences between files. It is particularly useful for quickly and clearly reviewing changes between different revisions of a single file under version control.

You can choose which files to compare with a dialog

or via the opendiff command:

opendiff original new

For this example, I will compare the contrived sample files used in Wikipedia’s diff article. In either use case, the files are displayed side-by-side with differences highlighted:

Blue highlights indicate changes. The regions where these changes occurred in each file are connected by gray highlights.

Scrolling is synchronized to show most unchanged areas together; as you scroll, each pane moves at variable speed to maintain this visual correspondence between reference points. It’s nice.

The relative location of each change in the file is indicated by a tick mark in the scroll bar. For long files, these marks act like a simple histogram to summarize the distribution of changes throughout the file.

A dark border surrounds the currently selected difference (number 2, in this example). The up or down arrows move the selection to the previous or next difference.

The left and right arrows keys can be used to select which version of the current region of change should take precedence if you save a merged version of the files. In this example, and by default, the arrows in the center column indicate that the file on the right always takes precedence.

The separator near the bottom of the window can be dragged up to reveal a preview of the merged file. The Actions menu offers additional ways to merge the selected change.

FileMerge can preprocess a file if a command line filter is assigned to the file’s extension. This can be used to compare dynamically-generated text representations of binary files.

Update: The new application Changes performs a similar function with the advantage of Unicode support. Might be especially useful for revising localized files like message catalogs.

Posted on Tuesday, January 1st, 2008.