Earlier this month, Gary Vaughan mentioned QuickSilveron his blog. For those of you that don’t know, QuickSilver is a rather neat application launcher (amongst other things) for Mac OS X which allows you to simply launch an application by hitting a key combo, typing in the first few letters, and then pressing return / enter.
Consequently, i cannot remember the last time i explicitly went to my Applications folder to launch an application which wasn’t on my dock. So i guess i’m hooked.
Sadly not all of my computers run Mac OS X, so i don’t have the fortune of being able to use QuickSilver on them. Fortunately, they all run Ubuntu Linux, and you can almost guarantee some nut has made a free open source clone of your favourite app which runs on it.
After a bit of searching, i came across a KDE app called Katapult. It seems to get good write-up’s, so i decided to install it and then try it out.
$ sudo apt-get install katapult
$ katapult &
After starting it up, i got a nice icon which appeared in my system tray. Clicking on it popped up a big “Katapult” icon, which initially confused me a bit. Although after pressing a few keys on my keyboard, i realised it was the input dialog which i could type the name of the application i wanted to launch. For instance, if i typed “ter” and then pressed return / enter, it would launch the gnome terminal – neat!
After looking at the preferences dialog, it became apparent that the proper way to invoke the Katapult input diaog was by pressing “Alt + Space”. In addition, i could change which “Catalogs” (which is where the commands and so on are stored / processed) should be searched, as well as tweak them. Catalogs which were included by default were:
Calculator Catalog (allows you to perform calculations by typing them in)
Amarok Catalog (allows you to select songs from your Amarok library)
Spell Catalog (allows you to spell check by typing “spell “)
Document Catalog (allows you to open documents by typing their name)
Bookmark Catalog (allows you to open firefox bookmarks by typing their name)
Program Catalog (allows you to open applications by typing their name)
In any case, i am definitely going to install Katapult on any Ubuntu Linux desktop machines i administer in the future. It’s such a convenient time saver!
For a while now, i have been following the progress of the open source Haiku project, which aims to re-create BeOS 5. BeOs, for those of you that might not know, was a rather cool operating system developed during the late 90’s.
What amazed me about BeOS is that unlike many operating systems around at the time (and arguably, those around today) it:
Booted up and shut down in mere seconds (no suspend or hibernate trickery needed)
Wasn’t bloated to hell (sadly a trend nowadays)
Did multi-tasking right (e.g. didn’t start choking when one little app decided to do something a bit intensive)
Supported live file searches (before the advent of spotlight & co)
Although of course, it wasn’t all perfect. It did lack a few things, like:
Multiple user support (nowadays the norm)
Good hardware support (e.g. for stuff like 3d cards and network adapters)
Great third party support (apart from what you can find on BeBits)
Regardless, in 2002 Be Inc ceased operations and thus BeOS was more or less dead. That was until the controversial Zeta developed by Magnussoft came along. Controversial as it was often claimed that Zeta was developed without the permission of whoever owned the rights to the source code of Be OS. Safe to say, the nail hit the coffin earlier this year.
Luckily, Haiku is actually coming along quite nicely nowadays. After trying out the latest test image in qemu, i found it to be almost usable, with the exception of:
The networking which i couldn’t seem to get working properly (although the DNS did work, so its probably a qemu issue)
The system started to hang a bit when running one of the demo apps (although on the plus side i could still move the windows around freely)
The sound, which i guess doesn’t work due to lack of appropriate drivers.
Still, considering it was running in qemu with no kernel acceleration module, i thought it was quite responsive. In the future, i hope that the Haiku team will improve stability and hardware support so that developers will seriously consider targeting the Haiku / BeOS platform. Hell, maybe even i’ll try using it more.
Ultimately, i hope that software developers in general stop following the trend of more bloat, slower functionality. Can’t we all just follow examples such as Haiku’s and make something that is simpler and faster without all of the bloat?
SSH Tunnel manager is a rather nifty tool which allows you to manage a list of SSH tunnels, which basically securely forwards ports on your own machine to a remote one.
So for example, if i had an administration control panel running on my web server, i might want to make it so that i could only connect to it locally (so there would be practically no chance of anyone on the internet accessing it).
But i would still want to access it remotely, and the only way for me to do that is make an SSH tunnel which acts as if i am connecting locally on the machine, when in reality i am not.
Any would-be hacker would need to figure out the login details on my SSH server in order to have a chance of accessing the control panel.
Now whilst this app was great, i noticed something a bit disturbing about it. It turns out that its been quite a while since it was last maintained, and thus it it still a PPC binary, meaning if i run it on my brand new shiny Intel mac, i have to let Rosetta run, which is memory hungry and gobbles up precious CPU time!
Luckily, the developer also provided the source code to the application. So the solution was obvious: i needed to recompile this application as a Universal Binary, which means it will run natively on both PPC and Intel mac’s.
This didn’t end up being very hard, i.e.:
Download and unpack the source code
Open the project file in XCode (converting it to the new format)
Replace the ssh executable in the resources with the version from /usr/bin
Set the configuration to “Deployment” and build
Run it and hope it works
Thankfully for me, it built properly (with the exception of a few warnings, though they didn’t look too serious). So now i have a nice and shiny native version of the SSH Tunnel Manager on my mac.
In case anyone doesn’t want to go through the 5 step solution, or perhaps you don’t have XCode installed on your machine, here is a copy for you to download.
Recently i decided to try out OpenLaszlo, the RIA platform from Laszlo Systems. Previously i have tried, but failed to get to grips with it. But the iPhone demonstration on the OpenLaszlo blog spurred my interest again.
OpenLaszlo is a bit like Adobe’s Flex, except that instead of just Flash you can output content for multiple runtimes, such as DHTML or J2ME. This is very interesting as it opens the doors for creating functional web-based applications which can be run on a multitude of devices.
In a way, OpenLaszlo is the perfect solution for creating self-contained Flash or DHTML internet widgets, as a lot of the framework emphasizes the use of AJAX style requests to dynamically update information on the page rather than taking the aging “dumb terminal” approach where you reload the whole page.
Enough of the theory, i decided to try and make myself a little self-contained OpenLaszlo application. Its task was to get the latest updates off of Twitter, a popular web-based chat system.
Unless you have been hiding in the dark these past few weeks, you’ll have heard about Apple’s new product, the iPhone. The which i think is most most striking about this new mobile phone is not the cool multi touch interface, or the springy interface, or even its minimalistic look. Rather, it has a web browser that actually works properly!
Sadly, whilst Apple may have seen the light and put the time and effort into making a good web browsing experience, the same cannot be said for a lot of other mobile device manufacturers.
Just to show you how bad things can get, i decided to try out a few web browsers on my PocketPC device, a Dell Axim X50V. For those of you who don’t know, it is one of Dell’s last PocketPC devices which uses Microsoft’s “Windows Mobile” (otherwise known as Windows CE). It has also got a nice VGA screen, giving 640×480 pixels of real screen estate.
In addition, to make things a bit more interesting i only used the default portrait mode on my device, meaning the resolution was really 480×640 pixels.
