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.
Tuesday, 18 December 2007
Monday, 12 November 2007
The iPhone and open source
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.
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.
Thursday, 8 November 2007
Leopard incompatibilites
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.
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.
Wednesday, 7 November 2007
Quicksilver
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.
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.
Thursday, 25 October 2007
Welcome to Darwin!
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.
"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.
Monday, 13 August 2007
Adium 1.1 released
Check out all the news here. I haven't installed it yet myself but will be doing so asap.
Thursday, 7 June 2007
Aquamacs 1.0
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
A full list of features and bug fixes can be found on the website aquamacs.org
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