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As of late I have been looking into what ways that I could record a usability session of an application on a Mac. Windows definitely has an edge here with the Morae application from techsmith. This is a feature rich application that captures a usability session as well as make it easy to produce some nice reports. It captures both the screen and if you have a web cam, the subject. There is nothing equivalent for the Mac. However, there are a number of tools available for Mac OS X that can perform most of the functions of Morae separately.

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Amidst all the hoopla of the announcements of the “green” MacBook Pros, the iPhone, and now the new iMac, Apple has quietly been redesigning their site over the last few months. Almost two months ago they unveiled an new look for their computer product section. It is labeled “Mac”, but it includes other things such as accessories and software used with or on a Mac. The nifty interface thing they introduced was a scrolling palette/window in the page that displays all the products. As a new interface element they do something to help users cognitively understand what to do, as the scroll bar goes side ways.

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I finally upgraded my personal system. I had been wanting to get a new Intel based Mac for quite a while now. My previous system was a powerbook g4 which has been a rock solid machine for the past 3 years. Yet since the announcement of the Intel switch I have been drooling over each new system release. As a web developer being able to run Windows and test pages in IE and yet still use a mac for developing has been managed by having two systems sit on my desk. Which is a pain in the buttox and takes up room I could use for… for what I don’t know. I was going to say laying out notes, but I rarely print things out anymore. Well I will have room to put whatever I want instead of a PC.

So I went with the white MacBook. I love everything about it… the keyboard is just fine for me a semi-touch typist. I really do not touch type but every now and then I get going and actually don’t look at the keys. I also like the built in iSight. The remote is cool, but I haven’t really needed it yet. I was originally thinking of getting the black, but after seeing them in the store, I felt the black was too much like the old powerbooks from g3 days or even like many black PC laptops. The white is actually the unique one, glossy case with a grey handrest and screen trim. It is clearly not a PC. If the black had been glossy then I would have been interested. I know it would show smudges and finger prints, but nearly everyone wraps their laptop in a case anyways.

The user interface is of course the same. I am pretty much transferred over to the new system. Just a few minor tweaks to go. I have also installed XP in a virtual space and can pop in and put of Windows when ever needed. Very nice… I tried to install Vista, and actually succeeded, but for some reason it would not connect to the internet. I will try it one more time then give it up… let me say that from what I saw initially… Vista is a disaster. From a usability perspective it is so different from previous Microsoft OSs that it will cause problems. Case in point, I could not get it to connect to the internet. I am very good with computers… I have run, used and configured most OSs including linux. But this was nuts… I could not determine if I was missing the driver or that it wasn’t configured correctly. It just kept telling me how to go about setting up wireless, which I did not want. Oh well I’ll wipe it and install it again and we will see how it turns out…

Well after going over all the possibilities, I could see that the driver was not installed. Since this is a virtual machine (vm) I was going to need special drivers from the vm system. Probably had I actually read the instructions for the vm I would have known I needed to run the tools installer to make that happen. It was just confusing because I did a XP install and it did not need the special drivers. So now I am playing around with Vista a little more and it does look nice to some extent.

Recently, I’ve had conversations with a few of my developer friends who are all a twitter about AJAX. Saying how great it is and all the cool things Google is doing with it. Honestly, after taking a real close look at it, I find it to be hardly more than another buzzword. It simply does not offer anything of real value for web development. Yes, it can make interfacing with certain web applications smoother, and it solves some problems inherent in web applications. However, it introduces a whole set of other problems, that in my opinion, make it widely unsuitable for most work.
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I worked a little more with automator (when I should have been studying regression analysis)… and have come up with a cool new automator. This incorporates an undocumented aspect of automator, so it took some trial and error to figure out. Basically, I wanted something that would allow me to turn a request to view a man page into a pdf file for easy printing and viewing in the gui side of Mac OS X. Only a unix geek could love the man page as it is… for unix newbies though, it can be quite frustrating. Personally, I am use to man pages, but I still like to print some out now and then and converting them to pdf allows me to access them without opening terminal (not that you wouldn’t probably have terminal open anyway).

So I wanted to find a way to make a man page into a pdf. Of course you can do this from the terminal, but where’s the fun in that (plus you have to remember the commands each time you want to do this). There is a free GUI utility called ManOpener that allows you to view man pages easily as well, and is much more featured than this automator tool. But if all you want (as I did) was a man page made into a pdf, then this is what you need to do;

1. Open Automator, from the Library column select TextEdit. From the actions drag “Ask for Text” over to the workflow area.
   
   • In the question field type “Enter man page name?” or something to indicate what you need to enter
   • You can leave the default field empty or enter something that will serve as a reminder of what to enter
   • Check the require answer box
2. Next, from the Library column select Automator, then from the actions drag over the “Run Shell Script” to the workflow after the previous item. Type or copy & paste the following as one line, modifying the paths so that they point to your preferred locations (include the quote marks this time);
   

   man -t $@ > /hardrive/Users/Shared/manpages/$@.ps | echo -n “harddrive:Users:Shared:manpages:”$@”.ps”

   Set the “Pass Input” to “as arguments”
   
   Note: The $@ takes the value entered in the “Ask for Text” and runs it as a shell command. The first part which calls the man page then passes it to a postscript file named with the name of the man you are looking for, then it echoes out the path to the next function. The echoed path has to be in the style of the Mac OS drive path reference which uses “:” instead of slashes “/”.

3. Last select Finder from the Library column and drag “Open Finder Items” to the workflow in the last place. Set the “open with” field to the Preview application. The path passed from the previous action will be opened in Preview converting it into a pdf.

You are ready to test, click the run arrow and try it out. If everything works, the requested man page will be open in Preview at this point. You can either save it or discard it after use. You can get fancy and do things like check for existing ps files or remove the ps file after it is converted. But this gives you the idea of what fun you can have with automator and how it can make working with unix fun. Be sure to save your workflow and make it readily accessible on your dock or wherever you like to put things to be accessed often.

When I first heard about Automator it sounded cool, but I wasn’t sure what I could use it for personally. After I had upgraded to Tiger, I got around to looking at automator and to be honest, I didn’t see anything that would really help me. I looked at the sample workflows and there was nothing that applied to my everyday or even once in a while tasks.

However, the other day I was in need of combining a couple of pdf files. I knew there was a way to do this in Mac OS X, so I set about searching the internet. I thought I had seen a terminal command process to combine pdfs, but I found instead some instructions on how to do it with automator. So I am posting here in case the reference gets lost from somewhere else…

1. First open Automator, select Finder in the Library and drag “Ask for Finder items”, check the multiple option.
2. Then select PDF in the Library and drag “Combine PDF Pages” set to Appending pages
3. Then go back to the Finder listing in the Library and drag the “Rename Finder Items” set things the way you would like here
4. Then drag a “Move Finder Items” and set it to where you would like the new file to end up

Save your workflow and then run it. Pretty cool. Other variations could substitute Get Folder Contents for step 1. Then you can just drop files you want to combine into that folder and run the command. You can include the Sort Finder Items to change the order the pdf files are combined (or you could just rename them in the finder). Now that I have a taste and feel for what Automator can really do, I have something else to play with/do in my non-existant free time. Here is the forum where I found this http://www.macosx.com/forums/showthread.php?t=239682.

My current workplace wants to get started doing podcasting. So I am setting up a podcast rss file. The unique thing here is that it will be dynamically updated. The audio will be saved to the server automatically. Then a script I am writing will check the directory for the 30 most recent files and then pull from a database a title and a description/summary that is entered by the production staff. All of this will be formatted into a rss feed that is usable by iTunes or other podcast aggregating software.
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We’ll I’ve been busy commenting on message boards everywhere that the move by Apple to use Intel is a good thing. And since I have my own part of the web, I figured I should comment here as well since some may know that I am a Mac fan/user. But I am one, who even when it was thought to still be a rumor, was arguing for the move to be made and why it makes sense for Apple to do it.

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Ah, being a Mac user today was a sweet day… Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, announced a New Mac in a Keynote presentation at Macworld Expo in San Fran. This was a totally new creation for Apple, as it is a low end system that people have been begging for several years now. Previously, the low end consisted of the eMac, a system with a built in CRT monitor. The eMac was meant for the education market—hence the “e” in the name, but as Apple’s next lowest costing system was $999 for an iBook (and if you didn’t want a laptop, it was the $1299 iMac), they made the eMac available to the general public.

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