10/01/2004 - 10/07/2004

Mac OS X on an Xbox

Finally, a cheap headless Mac? XBox Modification has posted a tutorial on how to install, setup and run OS X on an Xbox. With a list price of just $149 for an Intel P3 733MHz, GeForce 3 graphics, DVD drive, 10GB hard drive, etc, this would seem a rather enticing little hack.

JHOVE - Java-based file validation

JHOVE (pronounced "jove") is a "extensible framework for format validation" written in Java with modules forarbitrary byte streams, ASCII and UTF-8 encoded text, GIF, JPEG, and TIFF images, AIFF and WAVE audio, PDF, and XML; and text and XML output handlers.

As you might imagine, I am quite excited about the PDF module which includes support not only for basic PDF, but also PDF/X and the upcoming PDF/A, but also the JPEG2000 module which should prove helpful with some work we are doing.

Washington State Archives Go Digital

prostoalex writes "USA Today and dozens of others report that Washington state archives went online. Over the past two years project participants scanned 1 million documents issued by state and country authorities. The archive is located in my alma mater Eastern Washington University (go Eagles!) The 800 terabyte storage system was developed by Microsoft and EDS."

The archives are located here...

Of course, I also got all excited about there being another collection of PDF documents online to experiment with....Boy was I shocked to find that the documents are NOT in PDF format, but instead in the less popular and proprietary DejaVu format.

PLEASE write to these folks and get them to redo their archives in PDF!

WXPN's 885 Greatest Hits

Our local public radio station, WXPN, has been taking input from listeners all summer about their 10 favorite/best songs of all time. They've compiled this list into the 885 Greatest Hits...

I've been taking this opportunity to scan the list for songs that I don't have in my iTunes library and purchasing them either direct from iTMS or my other music source, eMusic.

iRider web browser

Was reading an interesting article today and it mentioned the iRider web browser for Windows.

The program has some pretty interesting features including "thumbnail" views of pages that you've viewed AND WILL VIEW - using a "fetch ahead" type of system so that switching from page to page of a site is quick. Interesting, both of these things are available in Adobe Acrobat, but we take them for granted there - having them in a web browser seem pretty logical and worth trying!

So I'm going to give it a look and I'll let you know what I think...

MenuSharing - how could I forget you?

As I was wondering down memory lane, it hit me like a ton of bricks! One of the coolest features ever to come to the world of software integration - MenuSharing.

MenuSharing, for those of you who never experienced it (since it was only ever avaiable on the Mac), is a way to create your own custom menu(s) using the Menu Editor of Frontier and have that menu(s) appear inside of another application - Finder, StuffIt, Netscape, etc. Each menu item had a script attached to it - usually one to do something specific inside that application - but it didn't really matter, it could do anything!

So with Frontier you could not only automate applications - but you could add your own commands to their menu bars, including key equivalents, hierarchicals, etc. I even added MenuSharing to my old OSA Menu product, so that ANY application (esp. the Finder) could become a menusharing client.

MenuSharing had pretty much died away with Frontier itself as a scripting language, when an enterprising programmer (Alco Bloom) reimplemented the server-side of MenuSharing for his URL Manager software - thus enabling him to live inside of Netscape and IE w/o having to hack the OS!

It would be interesting to see a technology such as this come back to life under both Mac OS X AND (for the first time) on Windows...

My life on the Frontier

Although Dave did an audio blog about his thoughts, feelings, etc. on Frontier - I figured I'd add my two cents...

NOTE: I'll probably get this timeline wrong - it's been a while - but the points are there. If you have comments on the timeline, let me know!

Dave first introduced me to Frontier around 1990 when I was working at Software Ventures on the MicroPhone terminal emulation software (remember those things ;), and also helping out my friends at Aladdin on their new company and StuffIt. At that time, Dave was building this programming environment and a key aspect was the ability to leverage other applications - via IAC (InterApplication Communications). So Userland put together the "Userland IAC Toolkit" for developers to use with their apps to be callable from Frontier. Pretty cool stuff for 1990!

Of course, Apple was hard at working on their System 7 and it included the technology now known as Apple events - an OS level IAC mechanism. So the IACToolkit was updated to support both the older technology AND Apple events (handling the internal complexities for the developer).

I worked with Dave and Userland to get IACToolkit support into three products (MicroPhone, StuffIt and the Disinfectant Anti Virus app) as part of a demonstration of the technology at the Apple Developer's Conference in 1991. It was a neat demonstration and got a lot of interest in the technologies and products.

From there, I become a pretty active user of Frontier for use in automating many of my own personal processes including software build systems and communications, and building a lot of little utilities in UserTalk instead of C! While other folks were playing with Hypercard, I was doing useful stuff with Frontier. I was also heavily involved with Apple and the development of AppleScript, it wasn't a place I was productive - Frontier was!

During my time with Frontier, I contributed a bunch of code to Dave and Doug (Baron, the other main developer of Frontier who really doesn't get the credit he deserves!) of which most seems to still be in there! I also wrote a number of heavily used UCMDs (plugins for Frontier) including the TCP UCMD that was later replaced with a "kernalized" TCP module and the StuffIt UCMD, for native compression/expansion facilities. Bottom line - it was a great time and I had a lot of fun!

I think I finally left Frontier behind me, when it left me - moving from a scripting and automation system to one focused on web content management, syndication, etc. There is no question that from a business decision Dave and Userland went the right way - and we have things such as RSS and XML-RPC because of it - but it wasn't where I was going...

But now Frontier has been "freed" and I am hopeful to find the time to get back into using it - and contributing to it!

Frontier goes open source!

Dave Winer, infamous "father of blogging", Mac/Apple harasser, etc., has announced that the software product, Frontier, that he and his company Userland developed has gone open source.

Although I haven't used Frontier in years (since it decided it was a web publishing system and not a general purpose scripting system), I worked closely with Dave on Frontier from pre-release through version 5. So I am quite excited to see it come back to life as it was originally intended, and with access to the code to see how things work under the hood.

A new way to record screens

Interesting open source project, vnc2swf, uses VNC (the remote screen sharing system) to record a screen sharing/control session into a SWF/Flash movie for distribution

Sounds pretty useful for demos and debugging!

Font tools and the new FTMaster

In addition to being a maintainer of the FreeType project, I spend a lot of time working with fonts and text for our PDF and Postscript work. As such, I am always on the lookout for good tools to help debug fonts and font-related issues.

On Unix, I love the open source FontForge program (formerly PfaEdit) - it can open up any font format you can think of, edit them (either manually or programmatically) and then save as the same OR A DIFFERENT format. George Williams does great work - but only for Unix platforms. (OK, I can install X under CygWin, but I've better ways to punish myself ;)

When I'm working on the Mac, I use Font Inspector by Steve Hartwell. Another excellent tool that has saved my butt on multiple occassions. Steve keeps promising me a Windows versions - but nothing yet :(

FINALLY, someone has come out with a tool for Windows that does everything I need - AND THEN SOME - including reading font data directly from PDF files!!! Altsoft's new FTMaster is just what this "doctor" ordered and worth every penny of the $99(US). Of course, that's an introductory price - so get in there before they raise it.

Open/Save Dialog tools for Windows

As a longtime Mac OS user, I have gotten used to having 3rd party add-ons installed that add additional navigation features to the Open & Save dialogs. Products such as Boomerang, Shortcut (which I co-authored with Ray Lau), Action Files and Default Folder (the only one still alive with Mac OS X).

About a year ago, I FINALLY found one for use on Windows - QuickFolders. It has all the features that I like in such a product - favorite files and folders, recently used files and folders, as well as some nice additional features and options including a "map folder as drive" feature! My two biggest beefs with QF are that the company hasn't updated it in almost a year (though they promise me they are working on an update) and that it has some compatibility problems from time to time.

So a few weeks ago, I went looking for a replacement and found PS Hot Folders. Although it doesn't do favorite/recent files, it has a MUCH more flexible favorites system including hierarchical lists with separators! It also doesn't have the breath of extra features that QF does, but one thing that it does that I am getting a lot of use out of is that not only does it appear in Open/Save dialogs, BUT also in Windows Explorer (desktop) windows! Using this feature, I can quickly get to my favorite folders from the "desktop".

Both products are inexpensive and I am actually running them both without any problems. Hopefully either/both companies will improve their products and I could stick with just one - but for now, I have the features and functionality that I missed and am much more productive this way.

Up for a bit of air

Been REALLY busy lately trying to get ready for GraphExpo, so haven't had a chance to update the blog - hopefully a bunch of things in the next few days to catch up.

But we have a new look now - using the updated templates from Thingamablog - pretty nice

looking, including the new calendar feature.