April 2006 Archives

Shrook is a fully-featured RSS and Atom reader for OS X. It seems that a while ago Shrook's author "declared war" on NetNewsWire, and his tactic? Make Shrook freeware. Well, it's a good move. He insists that Shrook is better than NetNewsWire. Is it?

You'll have to be the judge of quality. Having been a NetNewsWire Lite user for years, it's hard for me to give Shrook a fair chance. I am, however, trying. Shrook is a fully featured application to the Lite version of another. I can't say that's not a draw. The interface is a little counterintuitive, I think. NetNewsWire mimics the Mail.app way of thinking - Groups (or mailboxes) on the left, contents of the group (or mailbox) in the top of the main box, and body of that content in the bottom. Shrook is more unorthodox, providing a series of colums which you navigate through. You start with Source, which can be your main library or groups you create - even smart groups - then move on to channel (or all channels in the given group), then items within that channel, then the body. All of this moves left to right, if you can picture it.

Shrook doesn't have much NetNewsWire Lite doesn't have, but one thing it does have is the ability to show web pages instead of the contents of the RSS feed. For me, some of the sites I read only have excerpts where I'd like to read the entire entry in my aggregator. Now I can. There are down sides, too, such as not being able to turn off Previews when showing contents of all channels, but I think that as development moves forward we'll be seeing things get better with Shrook.

In the beginning of every Summer, Burlington is home to the Discover The Jazz festival. The festival lasts a full week, and there will be stages on Church Street, down in Waterfront park, and full on shows in the Flynn Theatre and in City Hall's Contois Club. The festival will run from Friday June 2 until Sunday June 11 this year, and the final show schedule has been posted here.

The Discover The Jazz festival has a special place in my heart since the weekend I attended orientation at UVM coincided with it. In the evenings of my orientation I walked downtown and watched a quiet city turn into a bustle of activity and culture. It was an amazing experience, and easily the most memorable part of the weekend. If you look hard enough, you'll definitely find me downtown a lot during this weekend - something I typically avoid otherwise.

CamiTools vastly improves my experience with Camino 1.0. If you haven't tried it and you do use Camino, I would strongly urge you to give it a try.

At the time of this writing, the current version of CamiTools is 4.4 and the current version of Camino is 1.0. I have come across what appears to be a bug with the Style tab and have reproduced the issue on a PowerMac G5 and a MacBook Pro, both running OS X 10.4.6. In this post I will detail the apparent issue and a workaround which has been tested and shown to work.

Within the CamiTools preference pane there is a tab marked Style. Here you can create a stylesheet that will override default settings for a site and give you a custom display - very handy if you find the functionality of a given site excellent but aren't too fond of some of the colors, fonts, or font sizes that they have chosen.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work. When I have created a style, saved it, checked the box marked 'Active Style', and restarted Camino, I have found the style is not in effect and the checkbox is unchecked.

We can begin recreating the issue by clicking the button marked 'Examples'. This will generate two css files - one for www.google.com and one for "anydomain". For the purpose of this example, we'll focus on the google style (which has been named ct_www.google.com.css). Go ahead and make any edits to the style that you'd like, then check the box marked 'Active Style', click the 'Save Style' button, and restart Camino. Now surf to Google. If it looks different per your styles, apparently this bug does not affect you. I'm interested in hearing from you if this works for you!

Assuming you're like me and the issue is effecting you, we can get started on the workaround. Start by closing Camino and opening up a finder window. In your finder window, navigate to home:Library:Application Data:Camino:chrome (that's ~/Library/Application Data/Camino/chrome for we command line ninjas). In here you'll see a few key files which include userContent.css, camistyle.css, and ct_www.google.com.css. Using your favorite text editor, open up userContent.css. You'll see a line that reads:

@import url(camistyle.css);

This line imports the camistyle.css file. If you open that file you'll see it is empty. If you open the ct_www.google.com.css file you'll see your google style. We can now add an @import line similar to the above to either camistyle.css or userContent.css. Either one will work. It is my guess that the Style tab in CamiTools is supposed to add the line to camistyle.css, so in my implementation I chose to add the following line to camistyle.css instead of userContent.css.

@import url(ct_www.google.com.css);

Now restart Camino and surf to Google. If all went well, you should see your style applied. If you look at ct_www.google.com.css within the Style tab you will see the box marked 'Active Style' checked, further proving my contention that this is the intended behavior.

All of these findings have been reported to the author of CamiTools, and hopefully we'll see a bug fix soon.

The lack of RSS support is one of the major shortcomings of Camino as a browser. Even Firefox has an extension (FeedYourReader) that plays off its live bookmark feature. Yet we lowly Camino users have nothing to speak of. In lieu of any real support, folks have written some nice AppleScripts for CamiScript to discover feeds and open them in your reader.

This alternative seemed better than nothing, so I ran off to the CamiScript Script Repository in search of a script that would work. There before me were three scripts. One worked with NewsFire, another with Vienna, and a third was generic. I use NetNewsWire Lite, the full version of which is supposed to be the most popular RSS reader out there, so the only option that would work would be the generic feed script. But there's a catch. There's a section of your preferences called "Link from other application" and the script requires that you select "Reuses the frontmost window."

I'm a guy who likes to open links from other applications in a new tab, so this option just wasn't going to cut it for me. I decided to poke and prod through some of the AppleScript code in the hopes of discovering the secret to telling NetNewsWire to open the feed. And within the generic feed script I saw the secret. The script actually did nothing more than launch a javascript link in Camino. I puzzled out that AppleScript must still be considered an external application, and that's why the above option was required for the script to work. But a bookmarklet would do the job nicely.

So, without wasting any more of your time with my rambling, I present to you the bookmarklet. Add this link as a bookmark to get the bookmarklet. And the code? Just look at the link's destination to get it.

In a nutshell, the bookmarklet sniffs out feeds then directs you to feed:http://feedurl/. Your browser and reader should then be smart enough to know that url is destined for it and should act accordingly. The neat thing is that we'll probably be seeing more and more aggregators accepting feed: links, not just on OS X but on Windows and Linux too, making this bookmarklet functional on any browser and any platform.

I wish I knew the original author of the script so I could credit them directly, but the best I can do is say where I got it and hope for the best.

This news fills me with disapproval. I just don't know how else to put it. As far as I know, Adium is the only chat client for OS X that is primarily based on Gaim (using libgaim).

And now they're planning to use joscar in their 1.0 release. Of course they'll have to keep libgaim around for anything that's not AIM, ICQ, and .Mac. The reasons are a little bit painful to me, and a little on the lazy side.

First of all, I remember months ago - or maybe even a year ago now - reading a post on their forum from one of the lead developers saying that they'd never break away from libgaim, and that adding joscar or something similar on top of libgaim was unneeded bloat. I agreed.

What features will joscar bring to Adium? The two cited in the blog post are file transfer and Direct IM for the oscar-based services, and "a cleaner codebase," and that they say it's faster.

Allow me to pick this apart piece by piece. First, let's address the speed. I, personally, don't think it works that way - a faster library isn't really going to mean much when it adds bloat to the application. And, frankly, libgaim is plenty fast!

Cleaner codebase is legitimate, but also a little silly. Why? Well, if they need to modify code in one library they're probably going to have to do the mod in both. Now they have to understand two libraries instead of just one, modify two libraries instead of one, update two libraries instead of one, keep track of two libraries instead of one. Doesn't this seem like an awful lot of extra work just to get a cleaner codebase?

And on to everyone's favorite sore spot - file transfers and Direct IM. I'm afraid I'm going to call foul on this one. Gaim 2, and libgaim 2, which are now in their third beta release, include this functionality.

So, Adium developers, what's the real reason you want to switch to joscar? And make it a good one, or don't do it!

Does anyone remember why KFC stopped calling itself Kentucky Fried Chicken? I surely don't, but one day we woke up and it was just plain KFC. It looks like something similar has happened with AOL. Apparently there was confusion about whether AOL stood for America Online or American Online. Did you just roll your eyes? So did I. Of all the excuses to change a company's name, this one is just sad.

[via CNET]

Kevin Smith announced the internet-exclusive trailer of his latest flick, Clerks II. It comes out on August 18 and even before seeing the trailer I could say I'd buy my ticket immediately if I could. Behold, the trailer!

Probably about a month ago now I started playing with Camino, a browser written in Cocoa that uses the Gecko layout engine. Essentially we have the basic strengths of both Firefox and Safari in a neat package. In plain English, Camino is every bit as fast as Safari and displays pages every bit as well as Firefox.

The browser isn't as robust as Firefox, but it's getting stronger. There are a few features I'd like to see added, so I decided to take a few minutes and see where it's going. Unfortunately, the developers have not determined a roadmap for versions beyond its recently released 1.0, but they have provided us with a list of bugs and enhancement requests targeted for versions 1.1 and 1.2. These aren't guarantees, but the most important things to me already seem to be in progress.