Safari and a full-fledged omnibar/awesomebar

When the omnibar extension first came out for Safari it wasn’t interesting for me since it supported only one search engine. BUT I’ve just discovered that since the Aug. 3 release (1.3) it has a search provider editor that allows keywords just like Chrome and Firefox. If I want to do a google scholar search, I type “gs<space><whatever I want>”. If I want an IMDB search, I type “imdb<space><whatever I want>”. It’s the only feature I sorely missed on Safari. And while I was using the half-useful KeySearch extension, it wasn’t very good since it can’t be key-activated from the url or search bar (or some other areas too).

Not only that, but omnibar comes as a serious blessing today since Firefox (both 5 and 6 beta) started causing tremendous disk activity on startup, idling! I have to purge the system of Firefox. I won’t go back now. The only thing I miss from Chrome and Firefox is native syncing. Xmarks for Safari is a drag. I only start it once a week or so to backup bookmarks.

If you miss omnibar on Safari, go grab it. I think Safari just became the best browser for Lion.

Mac OS X Lion (10.7)

Mission Control

 

It came out today and I upgraded to it today–after reading some reviews of course. Here are some very initial observations you might not find in most reviews out there.

1. Missions control, which has been criticized by many who had their hands on the developer release, is actually quite an improvement over Expose in my opinion. One advantage is that it groups windows of the same application together, so the clutter is not nearly as brutal when you have lots of stuff open. Another is that it works more like the “present windows” in KDE, whereby all windows on each desktop are shown as if they were expose’d while spaces are open, and when you drag one window to another “space” it sticks in the same location it was on the desktop you moved it from. To get this affect in Snow Leopard you had to view spaces and then hit an additional expose hotkey. Interestingly the arrangement of “spaces” are much like Gnome 3′s, where they are set out in a single row sequence, rather than e.g. a 2 x 2 grid. Not sure I dig it. Other linux window management elements stand out too.
2. Full screen Safari and other apps now, though Safari was much needed. But when they’re full screen, they behave like their own independent “space”, in mission control anyway. Not sure what to think of this. It works, but it doesn’t seem ideal, because there is no way to tell which space a full screen app is associated with. (When you restore to non-full-screen, it goes back to its associated space. But you can’t tell which one from mission control!) Also, when an app is full screen, you can’t access the dock except through mission control. A bit weird.
3. Desktop effects are a bit nausea-inducing. No more graphical indication of which “space” you’ve moved to. Just a smooth but nausea-inducing space transition. There are new open and other effects too. Nothing too crazy, and I think they’re mostly nice.
4. The darkest button elements are a semi-dark grey (e.g. the arrows of the back/forth uni-button of finder/safari/etc.) Over a grey background it does’t work great, if you ask me. The black may have been too dark, but the contrast made it easy to distinguish buttons that can be “activated/depressed/etc.” from ones that can’t. It’s noticeably harder to tell now. E.g. in Safari, can I go back or not? Is lastpass enabled? It’s not super easy to tell.
5. Scrollbars are annoying as hell. In some apps they’re always visible. In some they’re not. It’s the latter that are problematic. When they’re not always visible, they appear only when you do some scrolling gesture/button/etc. But why would you do that if you can’t tell if there’s more to scroll! Stupid–yes. I see they’re trying to free up more screen real estate, but with the growing number of cheap high res displays, even on notebooks, I don’t get it. Leave my scrollbars always visible, jack asses!

Is it worth the $29 CDN upgrade? I don’t know. I don’t notice much of a workflow difference, but I do like mission control. I could certainly live without the upgrade, and I imagine the same is true of most. Then again, at $29, it’s hard not to upgrade.

Finally, proper “cmd-tabbing” on the Mac

If you come from linux or Windows and move to the Mac, you’ll find yourself almost never using cmd + tab for window switching. Why? Because it isn’t really a window switcher! It’s an application switcher, where each application has associated with it a unique “primary” window. So when you cmd + tab it takes you only to the primary window of the application and you can’t switch to other windows of an application using cmd + tab. “Primary” window, you say? Exactly. There is no such thing. If I have open a slew of browser windows, none of them is the primary one. Likewise for most other apps. And so cmd + tab becomes utterly useless.

The only option: replace it. I was too lazy to look before but this morning I took some time and I’ve settled with Witch. It’s a proper window (not application) switcher. I’ve set the hotkey to be cmd + tab so that it replaces the built in (crummy) cmd + tab of OS X. You can have it show only windows on the active space or windows on all spaces. You can have a little overlay on the window icon showing which space it lives on, you can set the size of the switcher overlay and its item entries (icon and text), their color, shadows, etc. It’s pretty configurable. The only thing I find sorely missing is the ability to cancel the cmd + tab by pressing escape. In place of that you can set a cancel button at the bottom of the overlay, which works fine enough, but it’s not as fast or slick as just pressing escape.

The only drawback–it costs 14 bucks (Canadian and I think US). That’s too much to be asking for an application switcher, if you ask me. I’m currently using a trial version, so we’ll see if I feel compelled enough to purchase it. (Coming from linux, I’m almost never compelled to purchase software like this.) If you’ve got better alternatives, leave a post here and let me know!

Mac: Chrome vs Firefox, MPlayer OSX Extended vs VLC

Right off the bat, the winners are Chrome and MPlayer OSX Extended. Why?

VLC uses roughly 10% of my quad core Core i7 (Sandybridge MBP 15″) when idling. That’s unacceptable, especially when I’m running off battery. MPlayer uses nothing. A bonus is that the MPlayer interface is much slicker than VLC’s, and I’ve always preferred MPlayer on KDE over VLC but for some reason I didn’t think it existed for the Mac (because when I did a search the first thing google gave me was some old school, last developed in 2005, version). It’s also much easier to open multiple instances of MPlayer, and the hotkey combos are way better. (Try arrows for 10sec seek in MPlayer vs cmd + alt + arrows on VLC.)

Chrome and Firefox are similar. Firefox cpu usage idling (on a blank page) can fluctuate from 4-9%. It’s small but it’s unacceptable when every other browser I’ve tried (Safari, Chrome and Opera) fluctuate from nothing to 1%. There are some other niceties about Chrome I won’t get into except a new one: It allows you to do voice searches where Firefox doesn’t. (Open google.com in English in Chrome and a little mic will appear in the search box. Click it, speak, it shows up in the search box. I agree: not a big deal.)

There are other considerations that led me to these two winners, but they’re likely very particular to my tastes, so I won’t bother mentioning them.

Apple’s App Store

As someone transitioning from linux to the Mac, the App Store model has really made an impression on me…IN A BAD WAY! There’s all sorts of useful and FREE applications that are small and intended for very specific applications that are free on every platform besides the Mac (that includes Windows) that are being sold for hard earned cash in the App Store. For instance, I wanted something like Aero Sneak Peek, which just so happens to be available for free on a number of linux window managers such as KDE and Compiz (and with Windows 7, of course), but it costs a not insiginificant amount of dough on the Mac (for Hyperdock, anyway). Of course there are worse examples of typically free software being sold on the App Store.

Now I think it’s great that developers can earn a little cash for their hard work, and it actually encourages those who would not otherwise develop apps to develop them. And, yes, some good has come of this. But on average, the apps being sold for hard earned cash are not any better than the ones being developed for free on different platforms. Soooooo. I think if you’ve always been a Mac user you’ll have no problem coughing up cash for these little apps, but if you’re coming from, say, linux, you might even think of switching back!

I’m most open to comments, by the way!

Kubuntu, phonon, gstreamer and vlc

I notice the latest Kubuntu (11.04) uses gstreamer as the phonon backend. The previous release used to use xine. Is there a difference? Yes–a HUGE one. Here it is. Run Amarok and try to scan a track (by pressing the left/right arrows keys or by using the slider). Surprise! You can’t.

There’s a bug filed for this (though I can’t find it anymore). As Amarok’s the default media player for Kubuntu they should have checked this before releasing since this bug is, in my opinion, pretty serious. Most people listen to music and most people scan tracks and most people aren’t going to know that the reason they can’t scan tracks in the latest and greatest Kubuntu is due to the changed phonon backend. I’m now running the VLC backend without any issues. In fact, it’s better, at least cpu usage-wise. Using the gstreamer backend gobbles up a few extra percentages of my cpu when compared with the vlc backend.

Back to Kubuntu 11.04 Natty

Well, I spent a few weeks with Ubuntu 11.04 and that’s that. Unity was interesting but for some reason video performance was incredibly bad which is weird because I thought compositing was done by Compiz and typically Compiz compositing doesn’t slow down my video performance. I know it’s Unity-specific because after installing Gnome 3 and gnome shell, video performance was nice and speedy again using mutter as the compositor–surprising given the comments I had read about mutter vs. compiz performance! Also, I noticed playing back mp3s in either Rhythmbox or Banshee ate some serious CPU compared to playing those very same mp3s in Amarok in Kubuntu.

I like the screen real estate of 11.04 and Unity. Of course, you can already get this effect in Gnome 2 with global menu and compiz (for hiding maximized decorations), but the dock and you can “bump” out of the way is nice. I’m not really digging the Unity panel though, because it requires some lame terminal configuration to show indicator applets that are otherwise not on the whitelist, such Parcellite’s. (I know about Clipit, but…)

Anyway, I *really* missed KDE’s slick-looking and cohesive interface while I used Unity and gnome shell. I really missed my favorite apps (trying not to use KDE/Qt apps in Ubuntu) like Okular, Dolphin, Kile, Gwenview, and some others. Also the lack of GUI configuration in shell is seriously brutal. In fact, I see NOTHING interesting about shell besides some slick but ultimately unhelpful visual effects. That’s a shame because there’s really some potential for making it a slick interface.

In conclusion, I can’t see myself leaving KDE for a seriously long time, if ever.

And oh, KNetworkManager is now playing very nicely with eduroam (and I guess WPA2 Enterprise in general)!

Back to Ubuntu?

I did a usual KDE backports breaking upgrade (to KDE 4.6.2 from 4.6.1) and then instead of doing the routine fix, I just decided to wipe it all (after some backing up) and installing the latest Ubuntu 11.04 beta instead. One of the main reasons is that kde’s network manager (either the plasmoid or knetworkmanager–I guess the former is essentially the latter in a beef-uped plasmoid version) doesn’t connect properly to a lot of WPA2 enterprise encrypted networks, such as eduroam. Well, my university uses eduroam, so…Anyway, one can simply install nm-applet, kill knetworkmanager and run nm-applet. The problem is that having updated with the backports, nm-applet won’t run–it crashes at startup for some unknown reason! I’ve tried everything and nothing works, so that’s that. I basically had to switch to Ubuntu, or to reinstall Kubuntu and never upgrade using backports. So I went with the former.

Unity’s interesting. I kind of like it but I’m not entirely sold on the gnome panel replace nor on certain features of unity such as the lame window key menu and alt+f2, their command runner. I’ve noticed the panel is a bit buggy (clicking on items doesn’t always open up their menu) and so is the dock (sometimes it won’t hide when a window is maximized) but for the most part it’s been quite positive. However, I really do miss Dolphin, Kate, Gwenview and Okular. They’re awesome pieces of “default” KDE software and I’m trying to avoid KDE dependencies so I’ve avoided installing them. Well, maybe I should just forget about worrying about dependencies and install them, since what’s the point of KDE-less purity on a gnome-based DE?

Let’s see how long I can hold out before I go back to my beloved KDE. Oh, and DAMN do I miss the plasma dashboard!

Mac OS X impressions

I just started using Leopard at work. It’s pretty, yeah, but it exhibits some serious usability issues. Here are just some.

1. The plus (+) button is completely unpredictable in behavior. Sometimes it reduces the screen to something unusable or it resizes it to something that does not efficiently display the window contents. I’ve had to completely stay away from it for fear of random behavior.

2. The dock is a space-wasting animated joke. I have it hidden, but sometimes closing the window of an application (without quitting) requires getting the window back by clicking in the dock. Sometimes you can do this in the panel. I want consistency. Either an icon in the panel or one in the dock. I’d prefer the panel, since it’s already always visible and has tons of space for such things as notification icons.

3. Finder is hilarious! Every time I use it I have to laugh (and then cry). There’s no menu option for renaming a selected file. The keyboard shortcut is to press ENTER! Yes, ENTER! One might have thought that would OPEN the file in the relevant application. But that’s obviously not the worst of it. There is no option to sort with FOLDER FIRST. Nor is there any way to have it default to searching FILE NAME instead of file contents, yet there is one to search in folder rather than the whole “mac”, whatever they mean by that (the user’s home folder, I guess).

4. Spaces isn’t very usable. For one, if you’ve one application focused (say a browser) then under certain unknown conditions if you switch to a different space it suddenly focuses a window that wasn’t previously focused. Here’s a predictable issue. Have two finder windows open on Space 1 and 2. If your browser is the active window on 1 and you move to 2 and select Finder as the active window and move back to 1, guess what the active window is. NOT YOUR BROWSER! That’s right, it’s Finder. WHY? I have no idea. I noticed KDE does a similar thing when you sticky windows to all desktops, but that’s NOT what OS X is doing, so what’s up with the behavior?

5. Preview’s really bad. Most pdfs from JSTOR (which are scanned images with a text layer) don’t render well in Preview: shit is ULTRA slow. One pathetic workaround is to save the file from Preview or in most cases from Acrobat 9 Pro. But come on! Both Evince and Okular, etc. render these files JUST FINE.

There’s more problems I won’t mention. I sort of like OS X but not really. I really have grown fully addicted to KDE 4.x (currently 4.6.1). I will be getting Macbook Pro 15″ high-res, anti-glare, but only because it was provided by my work. There are certain things Apple does well such as graphics switching (with the 3rd party provided ability to manually force switching), battery life, effects, design, and general app/UI cohesion. But too much elimination of customizability really hurts a user such as myself. We’ll see how we continue to get along, but I may be dual booting Kubuntu and OS X or at the least running Kubuntu from a virtualbox within OS X.

Stop archiving email, start deleting it again

One nice thing about gmail is that you can archive basically every single email you receive for the rest of your life. The problem is is that if you do so searching becomes more difficult. I noticed this problem the other week and I’ve recently taken to DELETING emails rather than archiving them by default, especially when I know that I’ll never need them. One example is email notifications from Facebook. I have all those messages already stored/archived in Facebook so I don’t need them also in gmail. It might be useful to have them centralized, but I doubt it. Same goes for all sorts of other mail I get. I now only archive what I think I might have use for in the future, and that’s much less than what I was arhicing in the past.

I think people nowadays are more packratty than they used to be and I don’t think it’s all that good behavior. I’m going to try avoiding such behavior like the black plague in the future.