Ars Technica on Tiger

Most sites write reviews. Bo-ring. But John Siracusa at Ars Technica eviscerates and trepanates, rips out the insides and shows them to you, fingers still dripping, and he's done so with Tiger. I'd quote something clever from his article but instead I like the chunk from TUAW just fine:

Yes, we know. Every one else is linking to Walt Mossberg and the WSJ for what he has to say about Tiger.

Grandpa likes it. Move along.

Now let's find out what the power users (untethered by the suit and tie and required registration) think.

And now, the Ars Technica: Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

Wikitosh

Way back when, once upon a time, Steve J and I bounced around the idea of hosting a wiki off the FA: OSX site. It was going to be the definitive community-driven Mac OS resource but because we're busy lazy busy guys and we never got around to it so it isn't.

Which is alright because the folks at Wikitosh had the same brilliant idea but they actually took the initiative. Check it out and pitch in: Wikitosh.

Its a bit rough still, and pretty ugly once you get into it (no doubt that will change) but it's got the foundation for potential.

LaunchBar & 10.3.9

After upgrading to 10.3.9 over the weekend, my LaunchBar installation stopped working. Specifically, it couldn't complete the "Indexing Applications" step of its startup process. I emailed Objective Development and got this in response:

Mac OS X 10.3.9 seems to introduce a new problem affecting LaunchBar's ability to scan for all installed applications. In most cases it seems to help to rebuild the LaunchServices database of Mac OS X. Delete this file:

/Library/Caches/com.apple.LaunchServices.6B.csstore

and restart your computer. Please let me know if this helps to resolve the problem.

Worked perfectly.

bash Tricks

In my continued quest to bring the goodness of the command line to light I present to you Tony Stubblebine's bash Tricks From the Developers of the O'Reilly Network:

History

Bash keeps a history of the commands you've run. My group was already comfortable with the up and down arrows to navigate the history, !! to repeat the last command, and !foo to repeat the last command starting with foo.

Our newest admin had a better way, CTRL-R. That does command auto completion. Repeatedly pressing CTRL-R lets you tab through matching commands.

Home/End

CTRL-A takes you to the beginning of the line and CTRL-E takes you to the end of the line. This is probably basic shell knowledge, but I'm probably (hopefully) not the only person who didn't know it.

Errr... I didn't. For OS X cmd-line junkies this looks like a column to watch.

The NSA and your Mac

The NSA has a guide on how to secure your Mac - who knew? Apple Mac OS X Guide.

Adobe: Let the backlash begin

Adobe, the company second only to Apple in making the Mac platform what it is today, is acquiring Macromedia for $3.4 billion or so. As someone whose professional life involves Adobe software to a significant degree, I think it sounds OK -- though I'm not convinced that Adobe has figured out this newfangled interweb thing yet. If I were a "Macromedia person," I would feel a bit more uneasy. (As far as death matches go, my money's on Illustrator over Freehand and Dreamweaver over GoLive.) But mostly what comes to mind is: will this acquisition make Adobe powerful enough to be widely hated? It will cement their lock on desktop tools for print publishing, web publishing, and pixel pushing. People like Adobe tools, but they also like choice. When the riots start, remember that you read it here first.

200 new features of 10.4 (aka Tiger)

Maybe this is old news but Apple has up a 200+ New Features page describing a whole whack of cool stuff that'll be coming out in Tiger, much of which isn't as flashy as Dashboard but is cool in the "of course!" kind of way:

Pocket Address Book Printing
Print a handy pocket address book to take with you anywhere.

Burnable Folders
Burn a CD or data DVD directly from the Finder by quickly creating a “burn folder” where you can drag and drop the files you want to save.

Dictionary Service
Call up a dictionary definition for any word on-screen with just one click.

Firewall Log
Keep a log of all firewall activity, such as blocked sources, blocked destinations and blocked attempts.

(Via TUAW)

More info about ACLs pleased

From the MacCentral Tiger round-up...

Access Control Lists In the current OS X, you define access to files and folders by setting permissions for the file’s owner, the group to which the file belongs, and others (anyone who isn’t the owner or a member of the defined group). In Tiger, you can use Access Control Lists (ACL) to set permissions—any file or folder can have an associated ACL. For example, an associated ACL would allow you to give your spouse access to your Pictures folder, without going through complex group or permissions tricks.

Can anyone here provide a few more details about what ACLs are, how they work, and if they might, for instance, provide at last a simple way for multiple accounts on the same machine to share a music library, address book, iPhoto library, etc.

TIA
adam

Climbing Tiger Mountain

(Pardon my obscure Eno reference.) Apple's now taking orders for Tiger. Whee! Available April 29.

Sorry for the hiccups, I am currently changing hosting providers. This should be settled down soon.

OS X security vulnerability

Good news: It only affects those of us who use sudo frequently and there are known fixes.

Bad news: Apple doesn't think it's their problem.

Read all about it.