Posts tagged: MACOS

I guess this means that the RapidWeaver developers haven’t been reading my blog.

It’s been almost five years since the release of OS X 10.0.0, and along the way there’s been very little to worry about in the way of malware. That changed last week with the announcement of a trojan that propagates via iChat in a semi-automated way, then a Java worm that attempts to disseminate itself via Bluetooth.

Both of these are relatively innocuous, but there’s not much standing in the way of copycat efforts with more dangerous payloads.

Here’s a very cool little open source module for Cocoa application developers: Sparkle by Andy Matuschak. It allows applications to detect, download, and install new versions automatically. It apparently can be added to a project without any glue code at all. It supports Appcast feeds. It’s got handy features like Skip This Version and Remind Me Later. It can work with .dmg files or .zip archives.

During my brief stint with Cocoa programming I really wanted something like this. As a user, I like it because it makes life on the bleeding edge much more convenient.

It’s not like I’ve received a memo from Steve Jobs or anything, but it seems to me that the arrival of the Intel Macs marks the end of what Apple calls “the best-loved application for the Mac” – AppleWorks.

It’s still shipping with consumer-line PowerPC models (iBook G4, iMac G5, Mac mini), but the Intel iMac and the MacBook Pro both lack it.

AppleWorks, originally ClarisWorks, has had an amazingly long run. ClarisWorks 1.0 was released in the fall of 1991 – almost fifteen years ago. It was a great program in its day, and I certainly mean no offense to anybody who worked on it when I say that I imagine there are enough Krufty Karbon Kobwebs in there to dissuade even the most seasoned Apple application programmer from wanting to attempt an Intel-compatible update.

It’s long been a rule of mine to avoid broadband providers’ installer software whenever possible. (As Mos Def’s character says in “The Italian Job”: I HAD A BAD EXPERIENCE.)

The intrepid Daniel Jalkut recently posted a great dissection of a Verizon “upgrade” script gone off the tracks, explaining why it was so bad and how it could have been even worse – hard-drive-wipingly worse.

It didn’t even stuff a bunch of Verizon marketing bookmarks in there to pretty up the browser. Just a big gaping hole where my bookmarks (in the bookmark bar and menu) used to be…