LaunchBar 4.0 beta 3 is out today. Here's my favorite new feature:

All indexing rules now provide a new "Access items via sub-search only" option. Rarely used parts of the index can so be searched "on demand", they no longer affect the regular abbreviation search results. You might e.g. search the Safari History via sub-search by entering "SH<space><abbreviation>"

iTunes 4.5 is out. There are too many big changes to list, you should just go read them for yourselves. Don't get your hopes up too high, the DRM on the store is still in effect.

Update Thu Apr 29 09:20:11 PDT 2004: Just a heads-up, but I'm running into a problem sharing an extremely large library (19,000+ files) with 4.5 that shared just fine under 4.2. Both machines running 4.5 and the library will just not come across the network. A bug report has been filed.

Update 6/11/2004: Update to iTunes 4.6 for the fix.

Leander Kahney hints at the story of the creator of the iPod, Tony Fadell, in Father of the IPod with links to many more tidbits about it's genesis here and there. Interesting stuff.

Another installment in my OS X Python education: got Andy Dustman's MySQLdb module for Python working with the help of this post. You need to edit the setup.py script to help it find the right MySQL bits. Assuming you are using the binary version from mysql.com, it boils down to this:

include_dirs = ['/usr/local/mysql/include']
library_dirs = ['/usr/local/mysql/lib']

XCode vers. 1.2 is now available. Log into ADC and download your own 614 Mb install today.

All you "big iron, big storage" people might want to check out Apple Xsan.

Expand your network horizons with Xsan, an enterprise-class storage networking solution that’s surprisingly affordable. Xsan lets multiple computers concurrently access terabytes of storage on Xserve RAID over high-speed Fibre Channel. Now under development, Apple will ship Xsan later this fall for $999.

There was a flurry of Apple announcements today, and I thought this one might get lost in the glare of all the lens flares coming off the new video tools.

Motivated by responses to the previous post, I decided to try installing mod_python along with apache2 via DarwinPorts. Had some trouble installing DarwinPorts itself, though, which turned out to be Fink-related. The key is to get the Fink bits out of your $PATH while building. I reset my $PATH to a nice simple "/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin". Otherwise, TCL-related problems will hang you up: "Tcl package directory not found. Please specify its location with --with-tclpackagedir." So, ignore that, fix your $PATH and re-run configure. (The real reason I'm posting this is that I suspect I will hit this same problem on a new machine in a year or so and won't remember how I fixed it...)

I know I'm way behind the curve, since Python has popped up in many posts here in the past couple years, but I have renewed my acquaintance with this sweet language and am really enjoying it. I'm poring over the standard documentation, Mark Pilgrim's book and parts of the "Think Like a Computer Scientist" book.

I'm sure there are readers out there who are Mac Python ninjas, and I'd love to hear from you in the Quicktopic. I'll share a few tidbits to get things rolling.

One: you can get a nice little search interface to the documentation by doing a "pydoc -g" under X11 (I've got it aliased to Cmd-shift-P in the X11 Applications menu). Two: while command history doesn't seem to work in the Apple-provided build, it works great in the Fink version (promise you won't make me feel like an idiot if there's some easy way to turn this on in the stock binary, or worse if it works by default and I broke it with some shell customization or other...). Three: there are various nifty-looking GUI toolkits, including PyObjC (more than a GUI kit of course) and wxPython. Four: consider creating a .term file that launches the Python interpreter directly, like this one which I keep in ~/Library/Application Support/Terminal/ and open via LaunchBar (change /sw/bin/python to /usr/bin/python if you're using Apple's build).

Discuss

Dave Brasgalla of The Icon Factory has created an incredible set of 91 Matrix Rebooted icons. Beautiful.

We've mentioned OpenOffice.org a few times when discussing Microsoft Office alternatives, but if you're specifically looking for something that interoperates with Word, there's also Abiword. Until recently, OS X users were stuck with a 1.x build running under X11. But now there's a shiny new Aqua build of 2.1.1 available for testing. AbiWord has a nice tidy interface, and reads and writes files in the formats you'd expect: MS Word, WordPerfect, OpenOffice.org Writer, RTF, etc. Gnu Bob sez, check it out.

And now a LaunchBar 4 beta is available for download. The new features look fantastic, and are far too numerous to list here. The battle for domination of Command-Space is on!