After more than two years with my Nokia 6021, I decided that its time for a new cell phone. The Nokia 6021 was quite limited in it’s capabilities and this time I wanted an all in one wonder with lots of features to play with to help me with my daily business and at least with GPS. Actually I was thinking about getting an iPhone 3G but here in Germany you have to sign a contract with (from my point of view) very bad conditions plus the iPhone 3G seems to have quite some hardware quality issues (bad 3G connections, bad battery runtime, ...) and the software seems to be nothing I’d call rock solid at the moment. This was my impression while reading forums and newstickers. So I decided to better get a Nokia N82 in black.
In this blog entry I want to sum up a view of my experiences with Mac OS X Leopard and the Nokia N82.


First of all, the iSync that comes with Leopard does not know the Nokia N82 which means you cannot sync with an out-of-the-box Leopard installation. Fortunately Nokia provides an iSync plugin that works very well with Leopard. The installation is very easy and after that iSync can sync the addressbook including all categories and even the pictures of your contacts. The calendar gets synced too of course but “whole day appointments” in your calendar are read only on your phone later - no big deal for me but maybe for you.

That worked quite well even out of the box with the Nokia 6021 too (except for the photos of my contacts in my address book).








So, what else can we sync? How about iTunes and iPhoto? I found a software called Nokia Multimedia Transfer on the Nokia webpage and I tried it out. After installation you can start the sync by plugging the phone into the USB port of your Mac, and the phone asks you which protocol you want to use - choose “PC suite” then.
The connection cable for the sync comes with the phone by the way, which is good because the phone has a micro USB socket.

The software is awesome. When you start it, a new folder is created in iTunes called „Nokia N82“ and every playlist you drop into that folder will get synced to the N82 via Bluetooth or via USB. Unfortunately the N82 has only USB1.1 built in and so my 5,5GB of music took about 2 hours to get synced to the phone - thank god I only had to do that once. The changes you do to the folder in iTunes are getting synced the next time you plug in the phone. For some reason the album covers are not shown in the player on my phone, even though I stored them in the MP3 tags but that’s the only bad thing I can say so far.
The iPhoto sync is even easier. The phone is detected as camera and so you can sync the movies and photos from the phone with just one mouse click into iPhoto, Adobe’s Lightroom or Apple’s Aperture (I only tried iPhoto).

Quite impressive isn’t it? But that’s not all Nokia Multimedia Transfer can do. You can even sync your bookmarks from the phone into the safari webbrowser and vice versa. On the phone a bookmark folder “safari” is created where all the bookmarks you have on your Mac are synced into.
Nokia Multimedia Transfer is beta software but it worked very well for me so far. If you don’t want to use it, you can mount the phone as a mass storage device too and it behaves like an external harddisk then. Bookmark syncing is a bit complicate then of course.

The N82 is a 3G (UMTS) cell phone with a built in webbrowser, so you can browse the internet on the phone but with just a few clicks in the network settings of Leopard, you can use the phone as a modem for your Mac too so that you can share the N82 internet connection with your Mac. You need bluetooth activated and the configuration depends on your UMTS provider but for me it was a piece of cake to configure it (nothing to configure actually, just a view clicks in the bluetooth configuration of Mac OS X).

This blog entry was just about N82 and Mac OS X. Of course there is a lot more to say about the phone itself but that will happen in another blog entry.

recode is a command line tool to recode textfiles between different charactersets and usages. I need it to convert plain text into HTML for example. Since there is no MacOS binary available, you have to compile it on your own which means you need the MacOS developer tools to be installed.
Then all you need to do is this:

tar xfv ~/Downloads/recode-3.6.tar
cd recode-3.6
cp /usr/share/automake-1.10/config* .
./configure --disable-nls --mandir=/usr/local/share/man --infodir=/usr/local/share/info/
make
sudo make install

Then you can use recode like this (works on file too of course):

$> echo "<test>" | recode latin1..html
&lt;test&gt;

I use that very often from inside the vim editor

I have installed two new plugins for the Safari webbrowser.
Safariblock is a seamless extension to Safari Web Browser that supports ad-blocking. It is by design an imitation of Firefox's AdBlock extension.
Keywurl is a keyword search extension for Safari (the MacOS webbrowser). It’s quite similar to what the Konqueror webbrowser in KDE provides. You can enter a search term into the address bar of the webbrowser and the plugin takes you immediately to search result. For example you can enter „amazon mind.in.a.box“ to search for mind.in.a.box on amazon or enter „imdb quentin tarantino“ to search for Quentin Tarantino in the Internet Movie Database. Same for youtube, wikipedia, language translator pages like dict.leo org or any other webpage that has a search field.

BTW, the Tales Of Mere Existence videos are really worth a look. I like them a lot, especially the „conversation with mom“ and the „I’m not going to think about her“

PhotoLine is an image editing software compareable to Photoshop Elements but with a lot(!) more and important features like curves and channel mixer that I really missed in Photoshop Elements.
Because Photoshop Elements 2.0, which came with my camera, does not run anymore after my update to Mac OS 10.5, I was looking for an alternative software with similar features. PhotoLine impressed me the most. I have to admit the user interface is not really beautiful and might frighten some Mac users off who are used to use fancy software but once you get used to the ordinary look of PhotoLine and focus on the features, you really have to be amazed. Of course Photoshop CS3 offers even more ( for 1000€ ) but compared to Photoshop Elements, you get a lot more for your money with PhotoLine.
Together with Adobe Lightroom I have some overlapping features now but a very powerful combination of software to edit and organize my photos that leaves no wishes open.
Hm. Reading that text again it sounds like a commercial to me but it really is an impressive software.
The screenshot shows one of the neat filters that are built in called "beautify" with a before/after preview window.

PhotoLine is Shareware and you have to pay 59€ if you want to use it for more than 30 days. Worth every cent and you get a nice PDF manual with more than 300 pages after registering the software.

Circus Ponies Notebook is a software to store all kind of information you get during your daily business living. It looks like a paper notebook and can be used like one. Whenever you see something in the web you want to remember, you can easily copy it into your notebook or you can write notes directly into it. You can add pictures, sounds, PDFs and so on too.

For me it became quite handy for TODOs, quick notes and stuff I simply want to remember and it's just fun to use it because it looks so cute

Notebook is payware. You can try it 30 days for free but then you have to pay $49.95 ( about 33€ ) - quite expensive for what it does but hey, at least it looks cute

inquisitor (deinstalled for keywurl)
is actually not a stand alone software. It's an enhancement for the Mac OS X webbrowser Safari.
While the search field of Safari lets you choose to search in google or yahoo, inquisitor carries that to an extreme. It starts searching while you type and not only in google, but in all webpages you configure. In the screenshot you can see the search result for "mind in a box" - a terrific music project. As you can see, the search result is not just a google result, but also a direct link to their webpage, to their music label, to a page called subKULTUR (never heared of that so far) three reasonable google links and amazon.de (a search engine added by myself to inquisitor)

inquisitor is freeware

ear•ly a•dopt•er - noun - a person who starts using a product or technology as soon as it becomes available.

early adopter is a person who is stupid brave enough to use something that is brand new and unproven with the risk to open pandora's box. In my case it's the latest version of Mac OS X version 10.5.0 (also known as Leopard) which should replace my "old" Tiger version 10.4.10.

So, the first steps were to install Carbon Copy Cloner on Tiger to do the backup of my old installation (I might be brave but I'm not crazy and so a backup was compulsory). CCC is donationware which means the author lets you decide if and how much you want to pay. Here is a nice (german) documentation on what to do to get a bootable backup of Tiger.
People love pictures so here is a screenshot of CCC:

I planned to buy an external harddisk anyway to do backups of my personal data. So I ordered a 250GB version of an external 2,5" harddisk produced by Western Digital to store the backup of my old installation. The nice thing about that disk is, that is has no extra power supply but gets it's energy through the USB port.
Here is a photo (candy bar must be ordered separately)

The backup of my Tiger installation took about 2 hours. Because it's not recommended to work with the computer during the backup, I've watched a DVD during that time (the latest Covenant DVD - you'll see some comments later in the Photo Blog when I'm completely through with it). When the backup was done, I tried booting from the backup on the external harddisk - no problems so far. Booting the backup worked well and the system was just a little bit slower than on the internal harddisk of my laptop.
I've booted the Leopard DVD then and started the update of my Tiger installation. Another 30 minutes later I had a new cat on my MacBook.
Leopard:

The first impression is quite well. The migration of my personal data like eMails, addressbook and so on went flawlessly and It has some neat features I missed in Tiger (like virtual desktops) but there is also a drawback. Photoshop Elements 2.0 that came with my camera does not work anymore Either I have to wait for PSE 5.0 or I have to look out for an alternative photo editing software. Most stuff can be done with Lightroom anyway (which still works fine with Leopard) but sometimes it was nice to have PSE for some retouching.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to discover the new features of Leopard now.

viJournal
"Dear Diary ...." - well it's not really like that but I do write down personal thoughts, impressions, ideas and stuff like that in a text document. Since years I have used a simple text file for that which is encrypted with gpg. Now I stumbled across viJournal which is a journal/diary software that can encrypt the documents too (it uses the blowfish algorithm for that which is a really strong encryption).
Actually I could have lived with my gpg encrypted text document but I have to admit, viJournal is a lot more fancy and the lite version is free (like in "free beer" - so no sourcecode). You can add pictures to your journal and you can cross reference and and and ... actually everything and more a paper diary offers you (and for sure a lot more than a gpg encrypted textfile can handle)

viJournal is donation/payware (20$) but viJournal lite is free

adium
Adium is an instant messaging client which is covering a lot of protocols (no IRC unfortunately).
With iChat, the client that comes with Mac OS, I had some problems with ICQ because my chat partner got everything I wrote wrapped in HTML tags and I did not find an option to turn that off. Later I found out, that a plugin for iChat was needed to filter the HTML out of my messages but I was with adium already then and since I liked it and it's free, I kept it.

adium is open source freeware (GPL)

gnokki
gnokki allows you to communicate with your mobile phone via bluetooth, infrared, USB, cable, ....
While Mac OS already supports the synchronization of the address book and organizer with the phone via iSync, it does not support the download of the SMS from my Nokia 6021. Not even the nokia communication center software for windows is able to do that.
Fortunately there is gnokki - a tool that can read out (and even write) nearly everything from/to your nokia mobile phone. I use it to copy the SMS from the phone to the Mac when the SMS memory of the phone gets full and SMS needs to be deleted to gain free memory in the phone.
There is no binary of gnokki available and so it needs to be compiled from the source code. Mac OS developer tools needs to be installed to get the gcc (C compiler) and then all you need to do is:

./configure --disable-shared --disable-nls --prefix=/usr/local --without-x
make
sudo make install

to compile it. No big deal. I disabled the UI because I don't want to have the GTK stuff installed on my Mac.

The picture shows the download of SMS nr. 50 (I have to admit that not each SMS is worth storing it on the PC but it's nice to have the option )
I think I'm gonna write a graphical userinterface for that as my first Mac OS coding project

gnokki is open source freeware (GPL)

Logitech Harmony Remote
a software to configure the Logitech Harmony remote control (model 555 in my case and the best RC I've ever had). The software is written in java and the download is quite huge (about 55MB). It looks exactly the same like in windows and for some reason, one has to reboot after the installation (maybe so it does not just look like in windows but feels so too).
Freeware (well, makes only sense if you already bought the remote anyway)

xee

Xee is a lightweight, fast and convenient image viewer and browser. Even though the Mac OS comes with a picture viewer, I have installed xee because of it's capability to browse fast through a complete folder of pictures, which is not possible with the "built in" viewer of Mac OS.
Edit: removed on 17.11.2007 - Xee does not support Colorprofiles and I decided that with Leopard such an imageviewer is no longer needed for me.
Donationware

witch
alt-tab behaves a lot more like on windows and linux (bringing windows or subwindows of an application to the front, even if they are minimized in the dock).
Donationware

MenuCalendarClock
the iCal icon with the current date shown in the menu bar.
If you want to see the current date without running iCal or if you run iCal but you want to see the date not just in the dock but in the menu bar too, then this is an answer. There are more ways to get the date in the menu bar but this is the slickest one I found.
Freeware (you have to pay to get access to enhanced features which I don't need)

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.1	managing and converting camera RAW files
Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0	photo editing software (incompatible with Mac OS X Leopard)
Colloquy	IRC Client
Cyberduck	ftp client
Flip4Mac WMV	plugin to play windows media files with Quicktime
GimmeSomeTunes	cover and lyrics widget for iTunes (removed again)
Google Earth	the famous satellite photo atlas
Google Maps Plugin	addressbook plugin to find adresses in google earth
GPG Keychain Access	allow gpg to use the keychain
iScrobbler	last.fm plugin for iTunes
iStat Pro	system monitoring widget
Perian	Quicktime plugin collection to play various formats
Quicksilver	quickaccess for lots of stuff (hard to explain but very useful)
RapidWeaver	webpage design software (used for this homepage)
smcFanControl	fan control software (way better than the original Apple fan control)
Smultron	texteditor
Stuffit Expander	decompress various formats
The Unread	shows new mail in the menu bar (removed again)
Vienna	RSS reader
Wetter	Weather Widget

To change the behaviour of the "Home" and "End" key in Mac OS X follow this hint which makes the keys behave like on most other operating systems. In short ....read more...