John Calhoun, developer of Glider Pro, has decided to make Glider Pro available for free! Both 9 and X versions are available. Thanks John! Glider was one of the games that was distributed by the now- (and saddly) defunct Casady & Greene. Glider is a fantastic Sim-ish game in which you simply navigate a paper airplane through a house from one end to the other. It's a hell of a lot more fun, and harder, than it sounds.

And now a Cult of LaunchBar™ update: 3.2.12 has been released and it has some minor updates, but one that I feel is important.

• The "Default Web Browser" and "Default Email Reader" preference settings have been removed. Please use the corresponding settings in System Preferences instead, or use the "Open with Application" setting of your LaunchBar configuration.

It's nice to see apps, especially one as vital to me as LaunchBar, use things in the OS that make their life easier to make my life easier. It is such a pain to have every app have it's own way of figuring out what the default net app is. Remember the days before Internet Config? Pah you say, it's not like it takes a lot of time to set preferences. True, but a few seconds here and a few seconds there and pretty soon you are talking more than a few seconds.

I've spent hours looking for this feature inside OS X. Turns out you need an app: Show Desktop - the 'Minimize All' for the Mac Generation. (via the Godlike Alf Eaton)

A MacPython question about modules: the default OS X install of Python is in /usr/bin. MacPython gets installed into /usr/local/bin. If a module (say, for instance, the MySQLdb module) is set to install for the default Python directory, how do I get the module to be recognized by the MacPython install? Does that question make sense? Discuss

In response to customer demands (and many long discussions on the REALBasic mailing list), REAL Software has announced that RB 5.5 will be capable of cross-compiling apps for Red Hat and SuSE distributions of Linux, with other distros being added according to demand. You'll still need either a Mac or Windows box to create and cross-compile the app for Linux. You'll have to wait for the Linux-based REALBasic IDE, but REAL Software says that they intend to make one available in a later version.

RB 5.5 is expected to be released in the first quarter of 2004.

I was having some problems with Mail.app and it's handling of cached IMAP folders. When I would delete all of the messages in a folder, then when I tried to view new messages it would still display old messages that I had deleted from the server. The issue seemed to be that the folders were missing the "special" message that is in all IMAP folders. I had been using mutt and procmail for quite some time before I switched to IMAP, hence none of my folders had the special message that helps keep IMAP clients on the straight and narrow. So if you are seeing odd caching bugs, try deleting the folder and re-creating it through the Mail.app interface, especially if they were just procmail mbox files.

I'm wondering if Panther fixes any of OS X's subtle, but annoying and persistent, problems with monitor-spanning.

(For the record, while this is a gripe post, in general I love how easy OS X makes monitor-spanning. I consider it indispensible.)

I use two displays vertically stacked (my PB internal below and a 17" CRT above, for a 1152x1638 desktop). A lot of these problems are much more noticeable with this kind of setup, which I can only surmise has never been used by any OS X developer inside Apple.

A couple examples:

• with the menubar on the top monitor, open Clock. Drag it to the bottom. Now drag back to the top. Oops, you can't!
• with the menubar on the bottom monitor, open any Cocoa app on the bottom. try to drag its window to the top. Oops, you can't! (There may be Cocoa apps that don't do this and Carbon ones that do, but none that I've tried.)

Anybody running a Panther preview that can check these? Just curious. (Also, for the record, I did report this bug to Apple a couple months back -- the Clock example at least. Haven't heard anything yet...) Discuss

do you know how butt-simple it is to back up your tibook? when i reinstalled my lapdog last, i tried out UFS -- i really wanted to use UFS instead of HFS+ as i was entralled by the possibility of seeing everything in the clear on the command line instead of it being hidden in the resource fork. unfortunately, UFS seemed slower on my box and apps like virtual pc were a no-go. but i digress.

backing up and restoring on my box were really simple. i plugged in my 30GB ipod and installed os x on it (which went smoothly, i just selected it as the drive to install to when the installer asked me). then with a few points and clicks, i got disk copy to create an image of my powerbook's drive and save it to my ipod. click, click, reboot while holding down "T" (to boot firewire target mode) -- instead of your laptop's drive whirring you'll hear the ipod happily clicking away. perfect. when booted, format your laptop's drive, then expand out the image onto the notebook's drive, and voila.

jeez. i remember the hassles i would go through before on my other computers. this is just too easy. to make it even easier, the carbon copy cloner will even schedule the creation of disk images! if anything goes wrong with your laptop, its your fault. these people just make it too easy.

update (7/21/03 23:34): oops, thanks to adam sherman to pointing out that i left out how to restore the disk image to the hard drive. use bombich's carbon copy cloner for that.

I've posted a collection of tips for Mac power users and UNIX users just now discovering Mac OS: Mac OS X for Geeks. (Reorganization coming as time permits. Comments welcome.)

Recently a couple of developers I respect highly have been touting the benefits of Python as a development language so I figured I'd see what it would take to get Python running under OS X (I know 2.2 comes installed but the latest available is 2.3, which apparently works nicely with wxPython). I've posted quick-start links and the code to my first Python util (a dead simple text-based web browser) on my blog. Python looks pretty sweet. Discuss

The G5 Developer Tech Specs [PDF] are available from Apple. If you're a hardware geek this'll be interesting reading for you. (I agree with Wes: having the OS control the fans sounds a little skechy.)

Bill Bumgarner has a nice easy description of setting up ssh tunnels for Apple file sharing (as well as SMTP, IMAP and POP).

It's secure drag and drop, man.