Open Source Macintosh

Mail options

2008-09-01T12:02:00.004+01:00

I thought I'd do a post about open source email options for OS X as this is something I've not yet covered.
There are a couple of options for mail. The most obvious option would be apple mail, but of course, this is not open source.
I guess the most obvious open source choice would be Mozilla's Thunderbird. This is an excellent client. I used to use it a lot, back in the dark days when I used Windows. It has all the things you would expect from a modern email client and it also features add ons and plugins just like firefox.
For those of you who don't mind the command line, two of my favourite clients are Mutt and emacs/gnus (which is what I use primarily). Mutt can be a bit fiddly to set up but is very good especially if you are running your own mail server. Again, gnus can also be a bit of a nightmare to set up, especially if you want to use SSL connections to retrieve your mail, but I just like using emacs to write my mail.

Firefox FTW

2008-08-18T11:03:00.004+01:00

Well, I've not posted about Firefox yet as, to be honest, it always slips my mind when I'm thinking about open source on my mac, even though it's probably the best known open source application. I'd even go as far as saying it may be the best known open source application on any platform.

I use this application everyday without fail. I would recommend it over Safari in a heartbeat. This is not only because it is open source, but also because of the plug ins that are available for it. In fact, I thought the best way to blog about this app was to tell you about a few of the plug ins/addons that I use.

The first and probably most used is the del.icio.us toolbar. For those of you who haven't check out delicious then it's definitely worth a look. You'll never be without your bookmarks again.
This addon allows you to quickly bookmark a page to delicious, tag it and also to access recent bookmarks in a very convenient way.

Secondly, I would definitely recommend the web developer toolbar, for all those web devs out there. This toolbar is the main reason I now find it very difficult to use any other browser when I'm debugging a site (as you may or may not know, I'm a web developer myself). This toolbar has great features like, being able to disable javaScript, quick viewing of CSS/HTML and also quick resize tools so you can test your site in smaller windows.

The last addon I thought I'd recommend is greasemonkey. This is a very powerful tool that allows you to write custom javaScript for specific pages. This is great for adding functionality to a page or even disabling annoying javaScript you may experience on a page you visit a lot.

I would just close by saying, if you have never tried firefox as an alternative browser, give it a go at once. You won't be sorry.

Further thoughts on the iPhone and Free Software

2008-07-31T10:37:00.002+01:00

The Free Software Foundation has been very vocal recently concerning the newly launched iPhone 3G. In a new article on their blog they raise some very good points about the incompatibilities between the GPLv3 and the Developer agreement one has to sign in order to develop 'official' software for the phone.

One of the points that stuck out for me was they mention the fact that Apple use free software in OS X, e.g. the kernal is based on free software. Some of this software must be in the iPhone OS as we know it's a derivative of OS X. So, they reap the benefits of free software but don't want the users to do the same.

I found the blog post a very good read and look forward to the next installment.

Open source Twitter client

2008-07-24T11:17:00.002+01:00

As some of you will know, I am quite a heavy user of Twitter. I've been hunting for a little while now for an open source Twitter client for OS X.

I've found a couple of free apps e.g. Twitterific, which in all fairness is a very good client, but not open source, which is what I'm looking for.
Now, there is one client that is open source in one sense, called spaz. The problem I have with this is that it's built on Adobe's AIR technology, which is not open source. I had an interesting discussion with the developer of spaz where he mentioned technologies like Java (although that is now going open source) and asked me if apps built on layers like that were not 'true' open source.
This is an interesting question and one that I'd like to explore further. Does a piece of software have to be open source all the way down the stack for it to be truly open?
The major problem with this from my context is that I'm running OS X, which, although built on some open source is not an open source operating system by any stretch of the imagination.
I'd very much like to get some reader thoughts on these points and I'll probably be doing a longer post on these issues in the future.

In the mean time, if anyone finds an open source Twitter client not built on AIR then please let me know.

Pwnage 2.0.1 released

2008-07-21T17:16:00.002+01:00

The iPhone dev team have been hard at work and have just released Pwnage tool 2.0.1 that will jailbreak an iPhone running the new 2.0 software.
This will then allow you to install the Cydia community installer which allows the installation of free and open source apps.
I shall be upgrading my iPhone and jailbreaking it asap.

iPhone 3G vs Open Source

2008-07-18T10:32:00.006+01:00

Yes, I know there are about a million blog posts about the iPhone 3G, and I'm sure there's no need for another. But, there have only been a few on the iPhone 3G and open source and free software. One of the few groups that have spoken out against the new iPhone 3G is the Free Software Foundation.

I haven't really blogged much about my personal experience with the iPhone so I'll give you a bit of background before I comment on the new phone and its relationship to open source.
I bought a first generation iPhone when it first came out in the UK. I was very happy with it for the first few months. I was even known to say that it was "the best phone I've ever owned."
After about the first four or five months I started to want more though. For me, the biggest thing it was lacking was games. It's great to have games on your phone so that you can occupy yourself, where ever you are. So I did a bit of research and downloaded Ziphone, with the intention of jail braking my phone. This turned out to be unbelievably easy. It took literally two clicks and a three minute wait and I was downloading fully open sourced games for the iPhone.
When the iPhone 3G was announced, I decided it wasn't for me. Edge is working just fine, so no need for 3G and GPS is also not a strong selling point. The only other thing was the app store, but on doing some research, I found that the Apple NDA that one has to sign to develop for the iPhone officially is in conflict with the GPL.

The bottom line is, if you sign the NDA, you can't disclose your source code. There are still some open source java applications out there of course and the iPhone dev team have already cracked the v2 software.
I'm personally waiting for Ziphone to update so that I can update my phone to 2.0 and instantly crack it to get the best of both worlds. For now, I'm happy with my v1 iPhone running a cracked version of 1.1.4.

iPhone SDK

2008-03-14T16:18:00.002Z

On Thursday the 6th of March Apple released the official iPhone software developer kit. As a lot of developers were hoping it is a 'real' SDK, working with Xcode and opening up the iPhone OS. It appears that the iPhone OS is very much based on Mac OS X, even down to running on a BSD derived kernel.
The most exciting layer for myself is the cocoa touch layer, where one can program all the user interaction level.
Personally, I'm very excited about developing for this platform and, naturally my first question was around open source. Apple have stated that one can produce free apps for the iPhone and they will not charge the developer anything. You must obtain Apple certification however and pay for the privilege to do so. It's a one off payment though and not very substantial.

The only bad news is the new software for the iPhone that enables apps to be downloaded; the appstore, will not be available until June. A good few companies have already been developing some very interesting apps though. Find out more on the Apple developer site.

Open source text editor

2007-12-18T11:40:00.000Z

Just a quick post to let you know something I didn't know until yesterday, which I thought was pretty cool.
I was reviewing my text editors for my web development work, as Smultron has gone over to Leopard only. I was plugging various strings into Google; things like "open source text editor mac" and I came across articles talking about TextEdit, which I thought was a bit odd. After a bit of further reading and rummaging around with Xcode, I discovered that indeed TextEdit is open source and the source code is included with every mac (that has installed Xcode).
You can find it in Developer/Examples/AppKit/TextEdit

What a nice little easter egg.

The iPhone and open source

2007-11-12T10:15:00.000Z

Recently I picked up an iPhone and thought I should do a short post on development for the iPhone and how open source fits into all of this, if at all.
At the moment, there is no official SDK (software development kit) for the iPhone. All applications are supposed to be built for the iPhone's web browser and hosted remotely. This doesn't really leave any room for open source as most of the interesting code would be server side. Of course you can still open up the site on a mac and use the view source feature to see any HTML, CSS or JavaScript but this may not be properly licensed and may not be the whole app.
I did a little digging around on the internet and any mention of open source and the iPhone usually refers to the 'jail breaking' apps and the applications that can then be installed. As far as I've heard the most recent way to jail break your iPhone was using a TIFF overflow vulnerability, which I believe has now been closed with the release of firmware 1.1.2. This means that those apps will no longer be able to be installed onto the iPhone at this point.

Apple have come out and said officially that there will be an SDK available in February of next year. I believe this is the time when we will see official, open source iPhone applications.

Leopard incompatibilites

2007-11-08T12:19:00.000Z

I thought I should maybe post about the issues that have arisen with Leopard being released. Personally I haven't felt the need to upgrade to Leopard yet but I have been hearing a lot about certain apps not working under the new operating system. Therefore I thought I would try and bring together a list of the open source apps that are not yet Leopard compatible. If I have missed anything off of this list, please add them in the comments.

Azureus
As far as I can tell this is an open source app, although I haven't played with it myself. According to MacRumors, this software has conflicts with the airport driver which causes a kernel panic.

The GIMP
An old version of the GIMP, version 2.2.11 has problems with Leopard.

Growl
Some of the growl plugins will not work.

Path Finder
There have been reports of various issues on Leopard. Read more on the Cocoatech blog.

Songbird
I haven't been able to find out exactly what the problem is with Songbird but if anyone has anymore information, please comment.

Quicksilver
I've heard there have been some issues with Quicksilver, but I believe the developer has now released a Leopard compatible version.

Quicksilver

2007-11-07T14:30:00.001Z

This application has been one of my must haves on my new systems for a while now. I have been unable to write anything about it on this blog because, although it's freely available, the source code has not been given. Luckily, blacktree have recently opened up the source and made it freely available on Google Code under the Apache license.

Many people describe Quicksilver as an application launcher, which is true, and it is very good as one, but it is so much more. I use it as a file browser and file launcher, iTunes controller, quick contact lookup, URL launcher and as a quick way into many other apps, e.g. to launch a blank email with a certain file attached to it with just a few keystrokes.

As I just mentioned, Quicksilver uses keystrokes and key combinations to execute different actions. You can also set up tiggers that will do a wide variety of tasks. Some simple tiggers that I have on my system are, F2 launches Firefox, F3 launches mail.app.

You can also use it to do more complex tasks without having to touch your mouse. For example you could summon quicksilver (I use double tap command key), navigate to a file, hit tab to move to the next pane, hit 'o' and then 'p', which for me brings up 'open file with...', then press tab again and start to type the name of the app you would like to open that file with. I find this a lot quicker than having to open up a finder window, navigate around then have to right click.

The best way to get into quicksilver, I believe is to download it and just start using it to launch apps and files and slowly work your way into it. A very good resource for tutorials and ideas is Merlin Mann's 43 Folders website.

Welcome to Darwin!

2007-10-25T15:20:00.000+01:00

I realised recently that I've neglected to publish a post about maybe the most important open source topic in OS X, Darwin. What's even more important is Darwin is part of the very lowest levels of OS X.
"Darwin includes the kernel, device drivers and driver support frameworks, a BSD personality layer, and various libraries and command-line utilities." This may not mean all that much to the regular user, who is used to using applications and lets the OS do its thing in the background, but there are some very powerful Darwin tools that you can get your hands on.

For most of us, we would access Darwin's features and programs through the Terminal application. This can, by default, be found in your applications folder, then in the Utilities sub folder. Once Terminal is opened you are now able to use the UNIX layer of OS X, which comes with many of the GNU tools which are used in the GNU operating system and many of the classic UNIX tools.

Some of my favourite tools are; the emacs text editor, ftp and the less command.
Emacs is a text editor originally built by Richard Stallman. It comes installed as default on every mac and you can access it simply by typing 'emacs' into your Terminal. Emacs is known for being highly customizable and is largely used by programmers. I use it for quickly editing a file, usually if I'm browsing my hard drive from the Terminal. If you type emacs then the file name you can quickly make some adjustments then press control-x then control-c to exit emacs. You can find out more about emacs here.
Next there's ftp. It amazed me when I used to go hunting around for the best open source ftp client when there was one already built into my mac, and a good one at that. Ok, I admit it's a bit strange to get used to coming from a GUI app as it's text based. But if you want to quickly retrieve a file from a remote server it's ideal. Simply type ftp then the address of the server into your Terminal, followed by the username, then the password and you're away. Type 'bye' to exit.
Finally there's the less command. This is great if you quickly want to view the contents of a text document. I use this a lot when I've named a lot of files incorrectly and I can't for the life of me remember which one I need. With less I can view the contents and find out. Type less followed by the file name to use this little puppy. Press 'q' to quit.

I have very much just scratched the surface here. There are many many more built in commands and software, even more available online. A good place to start would be to get to grips with some of the basic commands and view the man pages for these commands. This can be done by typing 'man' followed by the command. Another good place to find some great ported software for Darwin is Darwinports.

Adium 1.1 released

2007-08-13T10:16:00.000+01:00

Check out all the news here. I haven't installed it yet myself but will be doing so asap.

Aquamacs 1.0

2007-06-07T11:19:00.000+01:00

Just a quick note to let everyone know that Aquamacs, the native mac version of emacs, has released version 1.0.
A full list of features and bug fixes can be found on the website aquamacs.org

NeoOffice

2007-06-06T09:48:00.000+01:00

After trying out the OpenOffice.org development Alpha I decided to sign up to the mailing list. After a few posts I noticed that there was a lot of talk about OpenOffice.org “vs” NeoOffice. I thought it only right that I should check out NeoOffice and report it here.

NeoOffice was started by two developers that were part of the OpenOffice.org mac port. To find out more about why they started the NeoOffice project visit the FAQ page.

Before I'd even installed NeoOffice a couple of things stood out to me that seemed slightly better than the OpenOffice.org project. For one, NeoOffice is released under the full GPL license rather than the Lesser GPL, which OpenOffice.org is under. Secondly, they don't have Sun behind them telling them which way to go and they only have one platform to worry about. Also the developers seemed to have an attitude and humour that I could related to more, see the open letter to Sun Microsystems.

After installing the software, the differences are obvious. The OpenOffice.org port is clearly an alpha preview where as NeoOffice is very much a stable release, for example I wrote this blog post in NeoOffice Writer. Also the look and feel of the app is very much more 'aqua'. The icons are nice and the menus feel like os x menus.

As for features I found everything I was looking for. I'm not really a spreadsheet or presentation user so I can't really comment on those but overall, I think if you're looking for an alternative to Word at this point in time, then NeoOffice is the clear choice.

Open Office Aqua Development Preview

2007-06-05T15:55:00.000+01:00

Today I was very excited to hear that the first alpha of the native version of Open Office for mac became available. The site is very clear that this is just a development version and should not be used for real work:
"WARNING: THIS SOFTWARE MAY CRASH AND MAY DESTROY YOUR DATA DO NOT USE THIS SOFTWARE FOR REAL WORK IN A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT"

There is also quite a list of issues still to be dealt with:
"You cannot print
PDF export does not properly work as thetext won't show on the page right
Starting OpenOffice.org from a shared folder does not work
Copy and paste does not fully work
OpenOffice.org will crash after quitting
Some text is not drawn in places like Impress
Impress will not recognise multiple monitors"

Even so I've downloaded a copy and had a quick play with it. Obviously it's quite unstable at present but I'm excited to see progress. If you would like to download the alpha version too, I suggest going to this page as I had some problems getting the torrent from the main site. You will also need a bit torrent client.

Bean

2007-06-04T11:47:00.000+01:00

As you may have read in some previous post, the native version of Open Office for mac is not quite ready. However, if you're looking for an open source word processor then you might want to give Bean a go.

Bean has some really nice features which make it worth using over TextEdit. The main one which most users of TextEdit are annoyed by is word count. What is even nicer is that the word count is live at the bottom of the document, meaning you don't have to go routing through menus like in Word. Another nice feature set is the complete word and define word items. Define word will open up dictionary.app and complete word will try and guess the word you are typing, which can be very helpful if you're not sure how a word is spelled.

Another bonus over TextEdit is that it can open .doc files. This makes it useful even in an office environment where others may be using Word. Also, unlike Open Office at this point, it is in the native cocoa styling with all the features you might expect from a cocoa app.

Find out more and download it from the Bean site here.

Aquamacs

2007-05-02T11:56:00.000+01:00

As I've said before in previous posts, I've been learning the programming language Python recently. Up until a couple of weeks ago I was using Smultron as the editor for the code and then using the interpreter in the command line for the exercises I was doing. Recently though I have started using one of the original free software tools, emacs. There is a native mac build called Aquamacs which I have found very easy to pick up for anyone who has not used emacs before. All the usual OS X keyboard shortcuts still work like apple-s for save as emacs has many, many of it's own shortcuts and 'meta' keys which I won't go into here. One of the main features that I found useful is that Aquamacs comes with its own Python interpreter built in so that I don't have to leave the app to run a test program (there are obviously limitations to this). I don't want to say this is better than Smultron as they both have different features but I think it's worth trying out both if you are looking for an open source editor for the mac.

Adium 1.0.2 released

2007-03-26T12:54:00.000+01:00

"This bugfix release fixes several "favorite" crashes, improves AIM file transfer (again!), speeds up the Chat Transcript Viewer, improves interactions with iTunes and the OS X keychain, and more - a total of 25 significant improvements."
Get the update here.

Smultron

2007-03-22T10:28:00.000Z

From the website:
"Smultron is a text editor...designed to be easy and intuitive to start off with and to become more and more able as and when the user wants it."
I decided to give Smultron a try as I've been wanting to move away from Dreamweaver as my HTML editor because it's fine when my work pays for it, but for home use I can't justify the price. Smultron on the other hand is free, open source and very easy to use. Like the developer says it can become more and more able as the user wants. The advanced features I have only read about at the moment as I'm just using it for HTML and CSS editing mainly but also I've just started to learn the open source programming language Python, so I'm only really using it as a text editor with syntax highlighting.

As you can see from the screen shot, it is a very simple user interface and I found that I could get going with it almost immediately. It has a split view, which is really useful if you are doing some CSS adjustments and need to be constantly referencing the HTML file. Also I know that it can integrate with Cyberduck very easily although I haven't yet delved into that feature. It has a 'Live Find' very similar to the search in finder of 'Filter by Name' in Path Finder, which makes it easy to locate a specific div for example.
The overall look and feel of the application is quite nice with some intuitive features e.g. you can drag and drop files into the side bar to open them. I would recommend this app for sure if you do a lot of HTML editing in the Dreamweaver code view and are looking for an alternative.

For more information and to download the software go to the Smultron website.

OSS Business Case

2007-03-19T12:54:00.000Z

Info World has a good article on the benefits of Open Source software for businesses. There are some good points made here and also some interesting information on the BSA offering rewards to people who report licence violations to them. I'm not sure if there is a similar scheme in the UK but I would be interested to know.

Still waiting for Aqua version of Open Office

2007-03-15T16:09:00.000Z

I'm sorry to report that I had to revert back to using excel for viewing spreadsheets as using Open Office in X11 was just not good enough. Many keyboard shortcuts didn't work and it slowed things right down. I'm eagerly awaiting the aqua version though and I'm checking the site regularly. As soon as the alpha is released I'm going to jump on it.

Cyberduck

2007-03-06T16:05:00.000Z

Cyberduck is an Open Source FTP browser with some excellent features. It is extremely fast and has an easy-to-use bookmarking tab. It also intergrates very well with Smultron (which I will be talking about in a future posting) for the editing of files straight on the server.

There is also a widget available which is great for uploading quickly to test a working html file. The widget is very easy to set up and then works by dragging and dropping.
Find out more on the Cyberduck website.

Open Office for Mac

2007-02-22T10:43:00.000Z

Another high profile piece of Open Source software that I've been looking into recently is Open Office. At the moment there is no native version that runs in OS X, however there is a version that will run in X11. This is not ideal as there are some glitches that can occur, probably because it's not running natively. This is however, an option if you are unable to afford the iwork package or Microsoft's office for Mac.
I'm checking the Open Office site regularly now awaiting the alpha test version. As soon as I have my hands on this I will post again with some more feedback.

Adium

2007-02-15T15:15:00.000Z

"Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more."
I was fed up with having to have ichat and MSN messenger open at the same time and having to switch between the two windows when I was chatting to more than one person. I decided to see if there was an open source solution, and I'm very glad I did. Adium runs flawlessly, looks beautiful and keeps all of my contacts in the same place. Other great features include tabbed chat windows and some really sweet sounds for when people log in and out. I advice anyone who has had the same problem with MSN and ichat to check it out - adiumx.com

Path Finder

2007-02-11T17:05:00.000Z

I thought the first post to this blog should be one of my personal favorite pieces of Open Source software for the mac, Path Finder. Basically this is a finder replacement. It has many of the features which I know some mac users have been crying out for, and some of which I know they are going to implement in the version of finder that is coming out with Leopard, e.g. tabbed finder windows. This software has so much more though as it can be customized for each individual user very easily. I had heard a lot of rave reviews of Path Finder before I actually demoed it, but once I had demoed it, I immediately purchased it (a mere US$34.95 which is about 17 pounds in the UK) and never looked back. I also found that I don't really use my dock anymore. Probably the best way to explain why I prefer Path Finder to finder is to list my personal top five features;

1. Apart from tabbed browsing, which anyone who has every used Firefox will know is a huge time saver, Path Finder has a feature called the 'Drop Stack' which is extremely useful when moving files around. It's a small pane where you can drag any number of files into a 'stack', then drag them back out into another tab. This eliminates the need to have more than one Path Finder window open, ever.

2. Path Finder has a built in terminal pane. This means I can quickly type in and execute any shell scripts with minimum fuss.

3. Path Finder has a built in text editor. You can also create new text and HTML files from inside of Path Finder.

4. Built in image viewer that also views PDFs. This eliminates the need to have Apples preview open or Adobe Acrobat.

5. The search facility in Path Finder is so much more powerful than spotlight. It enables you to hone your search a lot more and also add in if statements.

Try Path Finder out for yourself here - Cocoatech.com

Open Source software for Mac OS X

2007-02-01T18:30:00.000Z

Welcome to the Open Source blog for Macintosh computers. I wanted to set this blog up as somewhere that mac users could come and discuss open source software specifically for Apple computers. I started using macs exclusively a little over a year ago now, but I was interested in the idea of Open Source and the free software movement some time before that. I must also state that I'm not a developer, I am just a user of this software. I do get involved in submitting bugs from time to time and I would like to get into the development side of open source, once I have the time to teach myself how to do it.
If you are new to Open Source and would like to know more then please follow the links on the left.