RubyGems just updated to version 1.1.0. Couple of the major changes are “Index updates are much faster now” and “only updates from a latest index by default”. So, time to update.

As Leopard already has Ruby and RubyGems preinstalled (Thanks, Apple!). So the default update way:

$ sudo gem update –system

will NOT work well.

Here is what you should do on Leopard 10.5.2:

$ sudo gem install rubygems-update
$ sudo update_rubygems

Enjoy!

I’ve got my Shinning super cool new MacBook Pro two weeks ago. Everything works fine until recently after some automatic updates.

The MacBook Pro I have is 2.4GHz 15′ version. I am so loving it! But the AirPort problem is really annonying!

For some reason, at the end of the day, pretty much every day, MacBook Pro wireless connection just suddenly stop working with my AirPort Extreme. But at the same time my old MacBook works just fine. Turn MacBook Pro AirPort off and on, and try to connect to my wireless network again and again. Nothing helps. Rebooting AirPort Extreme again and again just helps a little. Some logs on console:

airportd Error: Apple80211Associated() failed -6

_emUIServer Error: airport MIG failed = -6 ((null) port = 45523

Did a google search and found a lot of people do have the same problem and so far there is no good solution yet. Some of them said go back to 10.5.1 actually fix the problem, and this is a suggestion from Apple Genius. Which I think is a solution but it is for away from good. I don’t really want to downgrade as I already installed too much into my Leopard and spent amount of time to make it works smothly as what my MacBook does.

This is really pain!

Spend some more time these two days and did some more tests. Finally have good progress. But couple of the tests is really risky, such as, Leopard told me no AirPort Card installed after rebooting.

Anyway, here is the simplest but working solution:

1. Find your original “MacBook Pro Mac OS X Install Disc 1″, please make sure it is yours, not somebody else’s!
2. copy /System/Library/Extensions/IO80211Family.kext from “Mac OS X Install Disc 1” overwrite to your Macintosh\ HD/System/Library/Extensions/IO80211Family.kext
3. After couple of seconds, Leopard will pick up your changes and your MacBook Pro will link back to wireless network again without any problem!

Yes, you don’t even need a reboot!

If you couldn’t find your original install disc 1, you still can use someone’s if them have the same model as your MacBook Pro. But make sure do a backup for IO80211Family.kext.

Enjoy!

Maxwell Rocatanski suggested Pacifist for whom aren’t as comfortable using the terminal. Thanks MaxWell!

1. Democamp Toronto 17

Democamp Toronto 17 is absolutely another great event again! More than 300 people have attended.

Only want to highlight two here:

• AskItOnline is a online survey system created by Kaitlyn MacLachlan totally on her own. It is a pretty beautiful and useful application. Kaitlyn wins the best demo prize.
• Ignite presentation “The State of Wireless in Canada Sucks” from Tom Purves could be the best ignite presentation in the history of Democamp Toronto so far. Well done, Tom!

Joey Devilla had a very detail post on the schedules, please check it out here. I believe he will post some more tonight soon.

Check out the official site of Democamp Toronto too: http://democamp.info/

2. Adobe Flex 3.0 and Air 1.0

Finally, its On - Flex 3.0 and Adobe AIR 1.0 Are Here!

3. Haxies updated! It works on Leopard!

Haxies - Love it or hate it!

In computing, a Haxie is a term which was coined by developer Unsanity to describe their products. It is a blend of “hack” and “Mac OS X”. Unsanity uses it to refer to “hacks” that are specifically designed for use with its Application Enhancer (APE) software. These are typically small interface and functionality tweaks to the system or existing applications by injecting code into programs as they load.

Until yesterday, all the haxies which come from Unsanity or other companies didn’t work on Leopard, all of them. It is a real pain for somebody who loves these little, cute and useful hack tools, such as me.

After several months hard work, the development team in Unsanity finally bring them back to Leopard today: Enthusiastic Trepidation!

Here are some of them what I use all the time:

WindowShade X. It minimizes your windows on desktop, or shades them.

FontCard. It shows a WYSIWYG font menu for your applications.

FruitMenu. It helps you easily access everything from your menu.

Menu Master. It helps you to create shortcut keys for any menu items of any your applications.

Big day today, by all means!

I am using iPhoto to manage all my pictures as I don’t think I am a photographer or a shutterbug in any way. And iPhoto does have all the features what I really need. So I didn’t pay any attention on Aperture before.

One of my friend was coming to me and asked a question about Aperture 2.0 today. He said he was trying it in another day, but it crashed all the time when he want to export pictures out, even click “Export” preference tab would crash too.

This is really unusual for a software which is came from Apple.

Before ask google, I did a quick look on his log file. Interestingly, before crashing there was one line said something about color pickers. So I opened his ~/Library/ColorPickers and found he has installed pretty much every color pickers what I have mentioned in another post - “Choose your right colors on Mac is not easy - My Mac Serial 1“.

Simply moving color pickers out really solved the Aperture crashing problem. So it is the issue resource then.

Well, we still need some color pickers, right? I put every color pickers back one by one and found “RCWebColorPicker” is the one who breaks Aperture this time.

Anyway, here are some more information:

• Crash while trying to export on Leopard (New bug)
• Export Pref tab causes crash

This the second one of My Mac Serial posts. The first one is about Color Pickers.

What’s Menu Items?

WikiPedia: A Menu extra, menu item, menulet, or status item in Mac OS X is a small icon or sometimes a word that appears at the right of the menu bar. They often provide quick ways to use applications (e.g. iChat) or display information (for example the system clock), or control system-level variables (for example the volume control). There are a number of third party menu items available. Menu extras are similar to items in the Microsoft Windows system tray but are less common.

This is the current Menu bar I have. A little too long, yeah, I know. The resolution of my main screen is 1680×1050, so most of the time it is still OK for me to have such a mass Menu bar.

OK. Let’s talk about them. One by one from left to right:

• Spotlight from Apple.
  Not that much need to be said again. Spotlight had a huge performance improvement in Leopard. The search and index processes are all much faster than it was in Tiger. Two features may be worth a highlight:
  • Spotlight in Leopard can search through your files on your network.
  • Spotlight window is same as Finder window, so you will have coverflow and quicklook too.
• MenuCalendarClock from objectpark.
  The current version I have is for iCal, they do have another version for Entourage if you care. MenuCalendarClock make my life so much easier on handling my schedule and todos. As you can see in the screenshot, everything on your iCal is just one click away. You can simply find your detail events by click the highlighted date and more:
  • Create, update and complete todos
  • Search! through your schedule and todos
• Built-in bluetooth menu item from Apple.
  Nothing special. I keep it just because sometime I have to turn bluetooth off and on again to find my MS Presenter mouse 8000.
• Built-in input source menu item from Apple.
  Nothing special either. I need it so I will know what kind of input method before I am typing.
• These three are all iStat Menus from iSlayer.com.
  It helps me to monitor my lovely MacBook at all the time, so I could know what’s going on in my system and make sure be cooler. The color? Yes, it is pink. Looks pretty, right?
• WeatherPop from weatherpop.com.
  Simple and straight updates you about the weather of the multiple locations you want to know. If you are in USA, you will have a Radar view too, even better.
• SwitchResX from (Miss?) Stéphane Madrau.
  It is extremely helpful if you use extra monitors and you change your locations often. It provides a lot short cuts on the menu, so you easily switch your main display, change resolutions, turn on/off Video Mirroring when you do presentation, save icons position of your desktop, detect displays if nothing happen after you plugin extra monitors and even more. Another very neat feature is it is very easy to change the rotation of your monitor. Of cause you need a monitor which supports this. So I can always turn my monitor from horizontal to vertical when I am reading blogs. Now a day blog posts are getting longer and longer. Such as the one you are reading now.
• Built-in AirPort from Apple and WiFind from TastyApps.com.
  AirPort menu has little improvement in Leopard. It becomes much useful after you install WiFind. WiFind can tell you the signal strength of every wifi network you can reach, and are they open or not. WiFind supports Tiger too, and it integrates even better with AirPort Menu. In Tiger, you will only have one networks list instead of one list plus a submenu list too.
• MUMENU from MacUpdate.com.
  It keeps me always uptodate on my mac applications. It is quite essential for somebody like me as an appaholic. As you can see in the screenshot, it will kindly show the application icons if you already have the application installed.
• Freeze Frame from Elgebar Studios.
  Freeze Frame allows you to completely freeze an application, making it use absolutely no CPU cycles. I keep my applications always open at all the time. At some point I will have severial web pages open with flash in them, it will become annoying as they take a lot of your cpu time. So I can simply freeze my Firefox or Safari when I am doing other things.
• Jumpcut is a opensource application. It is hosted at sourceforge right now. Jumpcut was original created by Mr. Steve Cook from snarkout.org. It is very simple but powerful enough. It provides quick, natural, intuitive access to your clipboard’s history. You can paste from your previous copy by just one click.
• TextExpander from SmileOnMyMac.
  TextExpander saves you countless keystrokes with customized abbreviations for your frequently-used text strings and images. For example, instead of input “February 2, 2008″ you just type “ddate”,TextExpander will automatic change “ddate” to “February 2, 2008″. Yes, it just did it for me again. I really love their tagline for it, “If yor’re not using it, you are wasting time”. And I can tell you, it is true.
• TrackTime from mamooba.
  I am using it to track how much time I spend on every projects, applications and websites. It has a very beautiful timeline interface. It even has some AppliScript APIs, so you can put it into your workflow then every time you open an application it will switch your tracking project too.
• Wallpaper Clock from Jacob Bandes-Storch.
  It shows clock as part of your wallpaper in the most artistic way. VladStudio has more than 100 wallpaper clocks which you can choose from. You can even use them on windows too, by using Chameleon Clock from Softshape. Wallpaper Clock handles one of my screen and another screen is handled by the next one.
• Desktoptopia from desktoptopia.com.
  Desktoptopia is a desktop background manager for the mac that automatically loads and displays designer desktops on your monitor, as often as you wish. desktoptopia.com currenly had more than 200 wallpapers you can use, everyone of them are very high quality and gorgeous. And you can even submit your own.
• PTHVolume from PTH Consulting.
  We all have built-in sound volume control from Apple. But if you have more than one input devices or output devices, PTHVolume make it so much easier to switch between them.
• Adium from adiumx.com.
  No need to say anything. Everybody on mac is using it. Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more.
• Well, finally. Last but absolute not least. Skitch from plasq.
  I took all the snapshots by Skitch except the last one for itself, which it couldn’t do. I couldn’t image how much longer I need to finish this post without Skitch and Skitch.com. Simply grab a comment what I agree with:

I used to think a Mac was not a Mac without QuickSilver. Now it’s not a Mac without QuickSilver AND Skitch. It’s been like growing a thumb for the first time — how on earth did I ever live without Skitch before?! — Chris Messina

That’s it. Wow. Hope you can find something new here.

If you want more, here are some other links:

Britta Gustafson manages a extensive of Menu Items list on http://menu.jeweledplatypus.org/ and a faq page on http://menu.jeweledplatypus.org/meta/. The last updated time for that was 6/16/07, so it is out of date but still pretty complete.

I was thinking about my blogging plan today. At the end I decided to start from talking more Mac things at the beginning as it is easier for me now. So, here is a rough list:

• Menu Items
• System Preferences
• Dashboard Widgets
• Login Items
• QS Plugins
• QuickLook Plugins
• Color Pickers

Then I found an interesting post about Color Pickers was just coming from TUAW.com today. So I “grab” it to here.

A color toolbox

Title is a little confuse. But the content is very valuable and make sure check what people said in comments.

Anyway, I’m not a graphic designer, I couldn’t give any professional opinions. So I just list some of them which I’ve tried and kept.

• Mondrianum
  

  Lithoglyph’s Mondrianum is a powerful plug-in that enables Mac applications to leverage the resources of the Adobe® kuler community

• Paint’s Picker
  

  Painter’s Picker puts an interactive color wheel in almost every Mac OS X application. It adds the ability to choose related colors, such as complementary colors, analogous colors, etc. directly within the color picker. It also adds more precise controls for choosing saturation, hue angle, and brightness. Painter’s Picker is the simplest way to perform complex color selection in almost any Mac OS X application.

• Shades
  

  The Shades Color Picker adds an additional pane to the standard Apple Color Picker. It is designed to help you choose colors by showing you grids of related colors. Shades uses Hue - Saturation - Brightness (HSB) color coordinates which many people find more intuitive than Red - Green - Blue (RGB) color coordinates. To use Shades, you choose a center color, a step size and a color coordinate (one of H, S or B) to hold constant. Shades then draws a grid of related colors.

• RCWebColorPicker
  

  RCWebColorPicker is a simple color picker for Mac OS X 10.0 or higher that displays the red, green, and blue values in HTML-friendly hexadecimal values. It also allows a user to restrict the sliders to only allow the 216 web-safe colors.

• Color Picker Pro, this is a stand alone application, it’s not a color picker.
  

  Color Picker Pro is a small drag and drop savvy application that aids in capturing hex, RGB and HSL color values for use in CSS and HTML production. Pull colors out of application windows, icons, your desktop or anything else that you happen to see on your display. Copy or drag and drop color values to your favorite text based CSS or HTML editing application. Store your frequently used colors, undo and redo color changes or make your colors web-safe at the press of a button. Tailor the format of your hex, RGB or HSL color values to your personal specifications.

• Tangerine, it is a color management tool.
  

  Tangerine color management software provides graphic designers and creative professionals with a unique color workflow experience. Now you can have the color you want, when you want it, how you want it. Tangerine offers new and enhanced color support to OS X.

• Color Schemer Studio
  

  ColorSchemer Studio is a professional color matching application for anyone from hobbyists to advanced professionals.

  Work with a dynamic visual color wheel, instantly explore harmony relationships and even let ColorSchemer Studio intelligently suggest color schemes for you!

• Find more by searching MacUpdate

MarsEdit is the one which I use to create my blog posts. Yes, I am writing this post in MarsEdit right now. I’ve tested some other offline and online blog editors already, and MarsEdit is the best one as far as I can tell.

So, what’s new from 2.0 to 2.1?

1. Search Your Drafts and Entries

Now you can quickly filter your posts and drafts by keywords. Just type a word or phrase into the toolbar search field, and MarsEdit will restrict the post listing to only items that contain the text you’ve typed.

2. Native Tags Support

For supported systems, including Movable Type and WordPress, MarsEdit now offers a field for capsule-style tagging of your posts. It even remembers the tags you’ve typed before, so you’ll be able to reuse them in a jiffy on future posts.

3. Improved Web Preview

MarsEdit’s built-in preview sports a sleek new default appearance, massively enhanced performance, and fine-tuned usability. Now previews update quickly and without flickering or jumping around as you edit your post.

4. Save Drafts To Server

A new Post Status popup in the options pane lets you choose between Published and Draft status. Server support for this feature is somewhat hit-or-miss, so be sure to test with something not too embarrassing!

Links:

Homepage of MarsEdit

Download from official website

More on what’s new

MarsEdit on MacUpdate