Some hours ago Mozilla has advertised the release date for Firefox 3! So this wonderful piece of software will be official available on June 17th, 2008. Amazing work was done during the last three years which result in a huge list (approx. 15.000 of them) of new features and improvements. Deb Richardson has written a field guide for Firefox 3 which describes the most impressive ones in detail.

Anyone who is interested in Firefox 3 should also pledge to download Firefox 3 by June 18th. It will help Mozilla in trying to set a world record for the most software downloads within 24 hours. Read more about the Download Day 2008.

Don’t forget: Spread the word around and inform your family, friends, and colleagues!

In February last year I bought my first MacBook with OS X 10.4 alias Tiger installed and I was happy to say “Hello” to the Apple folks. Ever since it was a bit of work and I had to learn a lot until everything worked like expected. But there is still one thing which bugs me when running Firefox or Thunderbird on a fresh OS X installation. Both applications don’t use a reasonable temporary folder. Instead files which are opened by helper applications are stored under ~/Desktop or ~/Download and will not be removed sometimes after Firefox or Thunderbird are closed. This results in a really cluttered desktop or download folder. All the following steps have to be done because there is no way to specify the temporary folder from within Firefox and Thunderbird. Both lack an UI or a hidden preference to change this folder. I cannot say when this will be changed, but there is a reported bug about this issue. But lets go on… (more…)

Hey, what’s up with my Tiger? I didn’t realized it all the last weeks but why there is no keyboard shortcut anymore to cancel a dialog? It was a fine thing to only have to hit the space key. I mainly used it within Lightroom to delete an image from the database. But as I see now, the button hasn’t a small blue border anymore. It’s cumbersome to grab the mouse and navigate to the cancel button.

Does anyone of you also have this problem? I could imagine that this regression was caused by the latest Apple update 2007-009 which also half-killed my OS X installation.

Update: The button I talked about isn’t cancel itself, sorry. What I mean is the optional button e.g. “Delete from Disk” within the following image:

Update 2: See comment 4 for the solution.

Today I got a notification from the Apple update tool that a new update is available. I hit ok, to install the Update 2007-009. After rebooting my system OS X presents a black screen. I like the console on Linux but I’m totally stranded at the moment.

I used dmesg to get closer which module or application is responsible for the behavior but didn’t really find anything for the moment. But probable VMware Fusion could be the reason. After trying to restart from the installation DVD it doesn’t even recognize my keyboard. Holding down the c key doesn’t start the installation procedure. I had to do several reboots to be able to get it running. But no errors were found. It’s enough for today.

If anyone can help me I would be very happy.

Update (20.12.2007): It’s time to respire. After several hours and with the help of some friends I got the problem solved. Now my MacBook is running fine again. But what’s happen? Lets try to explain…

As I have written in the last post I got some trouble with Keychain. All my stored passwords were invisible until I restarted my system. No idea what happened at this point but meanwhile I think its causing all the trouble from yesterday.

I had to start my MacBook in Single User Mode - just holding Cmd+S immediately when booting. I opened the system.log again and found the information that the “Setup Assistant” has crashed. Why the Setup Assistant? I don’t want to setup a new profile! But it looks like that it forwards you to the login screen if a profile already exists. Anyway, if an application crashed the CrashReporter puts a file with log information in /Library/Logs/CrashReporter. For the “Setup Assistant” it’s called “Setup Assistant.crash.log” and looked that way:

Host Name: hostname
Date/Time: 2007-12-20 20:30:04.095 +0100
OS Version: 10.4.11 (Build 8S2167)
Report Version: 4
Command: Setup Assistant
Path: ./Setup Assistant
Parent: sh [2]
Version: ??? (???)
PID: 283
Thread: Unknown
Link (dyld) error:
Library not loaded: /System/Library/Frameworks/SecurityInterface.framework/Versions/A/SecurityInterface
Referenced from: /System/Library/Frameworks/PreferencePanes.framework/Versions/A/PreferencePanes
Reason: no suitable image found. Did find:
/System/Library/Frameworks/SecurityInterface.framework/Versions/A/SecurityInterface: unknown file type, first eight bytes:
0xD9 0xD5 0×05 0xF9 0×20 0xA1 0×63 0xD7
/System/Library/Frameworks/SecurityInterface.framework/Versions/A/SecurityInterface: unknown file type, first eight bytes:
0xD9 0xD5 0×05 0xF9 0×20 0xA1 0×63 0xD7
/System/Library/Frameworks/SecurityInterface.framework/Versions/A/SecurityInterface: unknown file type, first eight bytes:
0xD9 0xD5 0×05 0xF9 0×20 0xA1 0×63 0xD7

Here you can see that there is a problem with the SecurityInterface library. Due to some strange bytes at the beginning of the file it’s not recognized as library. It has to be replaced with a working one. But where can I get it? Running the Darwin console doesn’t give me a chance (or I didn’t found it yet) to mount the dmg of the update. I asked several people if they could send me their file. Here you have to take care about your system. You need a version which fits to your OS X version! If you have a MacBook it has to be compiled for an Intel processor. Otherwise the PPC version is the correct one.

I downloaded the file with my other box and was able to retrieve it via scp from its file system. Now I replaced it locally:

$ CD /System/Library/Frameworks/SecurityInterface.framework/Versions/A/
$ mv SecurityInterface SecurityInterface.bad
$ mv /var/root/SecurityInterface .

That’s all. Now you should reboot your system and login as usual.

To avoid such problems in the future I will make a complete backup of my system files and also store the updates dmg file locally!

I’m really impressed. After nearly one year in using my Macbook I could learn about hidden features of Apple software each day. All of them will give your live more power and also simplifies your work-flow. Today I will tell you some nice features of the OS X address book.

The trigger to have a deeper look at possible address book features was an email I received on Monday. Someone answered the message I sent him a while back and annotates that I used the wrong address. So my first thought was: “Don’t have I set his primary address correctly?” I decided to have a look for. But where can I see what’s the primary address? I cannot find it anywhere. I searched Google and had to read that it’s not possible by default. The address book automatically uses the first entered address as the primary one. Only when you are using distribution lists you can select the primary address of a contact within the edit mode. But that’s not the same. I want to have it set globally. Thanks Apple! (more…)

Yesterday I was really shocked. After reactivating my MacBook from stand-by mode I wanted to burn a DVD with exported pictures. I copied all files into the burning folder and started the process. From now on the whole system was curiously pretty slow. I never had this before. No idea if the burning process was responsible for that. But anyway, let us talk about the real problem…

I opened Adium to check if a friend is online. But instead of getting my contact list a password dialog was shown. Damn, what’s that? Most of my passwords are stored within Keychain. Why I have to enter a password now? Afraid of the thing happened I started the Keychain application and I was taken my breath away. No password, certificate or notes were visible. All entries were completely gone! The only thing I saw was a bright and white background. But that’s not what I wanted to see!

I was ebbed between waiting to finish the burning process or executing a restart immediately. Finally I decided to wait because there is no reason why it should getting worse. While the burning process wasn’t finished I restarted Keychain but without luck. It seems that all my stored sensitive data was lost. But stop! Let’s run a restart first… After taken the DVD out of my drive I did a restart. All the while I hold my fingers crossed. Please, please, please give me back my data… In such situations a restart takes a really long time! I entered my password and opened Keychain after my profile was loaded…

The applications window was shown and what I saw made me really really happy! All the entries were visible again and saved me from hacking them in again. I still have no idea what’s happened here and why they are back again. But I’m glad to have them back and I’m still interested for an explanation.

Anyone of you who had a similar experience? What was your result? Did you get back your stored passwords?

Last Friday Adobe released the third update of its Lightroom software. It’s free again for all registered users. Downloads are available for Mac OS X and Windows.

With Lightroom 1.3 a bunch of known bugs were fixed. Photoshopservices gives a good overview about most of them. There is also a brand new Export dialog available. Under the hood it will offer a fantastic new feature. From now on developers can create export plug-ins which could export images directly to Flickr, Picasa, FTP hosts, or whatever you want. There is a first Export SDK release on Adobe Labs available. Let’s see what developers will spread around.

For myself the auto-write XMP performance speed-up fix comes a bit too late now. I enabled that preference already last week and did a sync for all of my pictures taken since 2003. While it was working I wasn’t able to do anything on my macbook for around two hours due to the high cpu load. And that’s on a dual core!

With the latest fixes to have a better support for Leopard I’m ready to run an upgrade in the next time. I’m really anxious!

Anyone who is interested to buy Lightroom can have a look at Amazon. There it’s available for Mac and Windows and costs 279,99EUR.

I’m really surprised! After years of experience with different Windows and Linux versions it’s getting normal for me to open contextual menus with Shift+F10 or the special context key if a mouse is not available. But yesterday while doing some work on bug 403602 I noticed that there is nothing for OS X? What about handicapped people who aren’t able to use a mouse or even use a screen reader? How do they access the context menu?

I asked several people who are still working on OS X for a longer period of time. But no one was able to give me a hint. So I started searching the web. I got this nice shortcut overview but no system wide shortcut is given. Now, while writing this post, I found this HIG document from Apple. It’s quiet interesting but once again a keyboard shortcut isn’t mentioned.

I’ll stop searching right now and hope that someone, who reads my post, could help me. I would be deeply grateful. Thanks!

It was a long time for everyone, who is interested in Mac OS X, to wait for the upcoming 10.5 release alias Leopard. Even after Apple Inc. announced its brand-new mobile phone iPhone and shifted the release forward further 6 month. But now you don’t have to wait any longer. Since yesterday Mac OS X 10.5 alias Leopard has been in the wild. Its sale started exactly at 6pm and many of the distributors celebrated a “Night of the Leopard”.

With more than 300 new features and additionally bugfixes this is the biggest release of Mac OS X ever launched. Improvements were made for the Finder, the Dock and many more. New applications like the Time Machine or Spaces add missing core features. Feel free to explore all that on the Mac OS X website.

As we know Apple there is no update available for existing Mac OS X users. Only customers who bought a Mac with Tiger in October can get an upgrade for 8,95 EUR. Anyone else has to buy the full version. But they are not too expensive. A single license of Leopard costs 129 EUR while a family license (for 5 members of one household) costs 199 EUR. Both versions can be bought by Amazon. If you order it before December you can even get a coupon over 10 EUR. Just enter following code at the end of your order request: AMZNLPRDAPPL.

Let the Leopard run!

Für die ersten Schritte in Lightroom stellte Galileo Design ein kostenloses Videotutorial online zur Verfügung. Mit 2:42h Spielzeit beleuchtet es alle wichtigen Elemente, um mit Lightroom effizient zu arbeiten und auch entsprechende Ergebnisse zu erhalten.

Während im Shop von Adobe der Preis von Lightroom schon auf 296 EUR gesetzt wurde, ist das Software-Paket für Windows und Mac OS X bei Amazon noch für 186 EUR zu bekommen. Keine Ahnung, wann auch hier eine Preisanhebung stattfindet. Wer schnell ist, erhält es noch zum Einführungspreis.