AppFresh rocks, Macupdate SUCKS

I discovered this absolutely awesome program called AppFresh, which tracks your Mac applications and downloads updates if it finds any. You won't be able to find it on Macupdate.com, though. Why not? Because they want you to use their lame $20 SUBSCRIPTION-BASED shareware program instead.

Give it a try. Go to Macupdate.com and search for "AppFresh." It will automatically take you to their shareware program instead.

Pretty lame, guys.

Unknown File

After sitting for a couple hours exporting a QuickTime video in Final Cut Express, this is the final result:



Yay, Apple. At least it didn't crash, right?

Bad %%BoundingBox: comment seen!

You've got to love Adobe PostScript, with all their archaic error codes and messed up printing styles. What do you do when your printer babbles, "Bad %%BoundingBox: comment seen!" on a simple letter-sized print job from Photoshop? Just ignore it, mostly. Apple says it's Adobe's problem, and Adobe just says, "Meh." After all, what are you going to do, use something other than Photoshop?

After some more digging, I eventually discovered that I could save the image as a PDF and print from Acrobat. There's your solution, folks, if you wanted one.

Why I love(d) Google Docs

Google Docs is such a useful tool. You can collaboratively edit documents with other people, track the changes one-by-one, and you can also edit the CSS and HTML of each page directly, making it a snap to format code for web pages.

So, what does Google do to "improve" upon their already great example of cloud-based document editing? They remove those features completely. Dammit, Google! What are you going to do next, remove labels and search functions from Gmail?

Chicken-and-egg command-line programs

I'm not against using the command-line per se. I'm against all the crap that goes along with it. For example, Google recently developed the ability to use Google stuff via the Command Line. This is allegedly available for the Mac. Here are their instructions:

Mac

Someone on reddit says that it's available via macports:

• sudo port install googlecl

If it's not there, run 'sudo port selfupdate', then try again.

bodo.tasche reports: "Brew has removed the googlecl package because it is part of pip. To install googlecl without MacPorts, use:"

brew install pip
pip install googlecl

You have got to be kidding. The first line of your installation instructions is quoting what someone wrote on Digg? Yes, I know this is a user-contributed Wiki, but if this is the extent of your documentation, I'm not at all impressed. Anyway, I clicked over to the thread and found it rather amusing:

mjs says, "Ugh, is there any way to get it without hauling in all of py26-gdata py26-distribute python26 gdbm tk Xft2 xrender xorg-libX11 xorg-bigreqsproto xorg-inputproto xorg-kbproto xorg-libXau xorg-xproto xorg-libXdmcp xorg-util-macros xorg-xcmiscproto xorg-xextproto xorg-xf86bigfontproto xorg-xtrans xorg-renderproto tcl xorg-libXScrnSaver xorg-libXext xorg-scrnsaverproto? (Particularly the xorg stuff--I don't see why that's necessary.)"

This is the kind of techno-babble I'm quite happy to leave in the Linux world. Anyway, the commands shown won't work because I don't have MacPorts installed, and I can't install and run MacPorts because I don't have XCode installed. Xcode is available only to registered Apple Developers, is about 2GB in size, and is currently only available for Mac OS 10.6, which I don't have. Of course, the "brew" option (or Homebrew Package Management system as I discovered after digging through thousands of beer-related programs) was just as useless, since it also required XCode. I didn't even bother with "pip."

You see, this is what using a computer was like before someone came up with the bright idea of making them usable back in the 80s. Apparently some people still haven't figured it out. It's a good thing these guys don't make cars. They would all come in a box with mismatched parts and you'd be expected to build it yourself.

So I'm trying to open a shared drive and the Finder just says, "Connection Failed." Fine. I try dismounting the drive, and I get this lovely gem:


The operation could not be completed. An unexpected error occurred (error code -8072). Very helpful. I try Googling the cryptic message and don't get much help. (The first result is a page from Microsoft's web site with a completely different error code.) The shared drive is just fine, of course, since the machine is a few feet away from me. So what's the solution? Force quit the Finder and try again!

Ah, Macintosh love.

Shareware is a waste of time

I figure I haven't tortured myself enough today and decided to try out a piece of shareware crap called FotoMagico. What a waste of time. You apparently can't even try the program without installing a "license." Excuse me, what exactly is the purpose of shareware, anyway? Aren't you supposed to try this out first and then decide if it's worth paying for? Remember the good old days when you could do that? Yeah. neither do I.

Let's just face it — shareware is an absolute waste of time. It's usually crippled in some way, disabling all the useful features or preventing you from saving files, essentially keeping you from trying out the software before you buy it, which was the whole point of shareware from the beginning. (Actually, no, that wasn't the point. The point of shareware was that some individual developers wanted to write software but didn't want to pay for distribution. But I digress.)

At this point, I give up and go hunt for a freeware solution, which is what I should have done to begin with. This isn't always easy, either. Shareware sites usually clutter up the place listing "free downloads," as in you can download it for free and THEN pay for it. I have to filter through these sites and dig my way to the real freeware lurking in the dark out there.