Apple Archives - Michael Bianco

Migrating Rules From Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps

Recently I was part of transitioning the email system of a 20+ employee business off of a Microsoft Exchange 2003 server to Google Apps. Moving close to half a million emails to a new email service was a big decision. The transition tools that Google has in place are pretty good, albeit slow for that many emails, Google throttles email transfer to one each second after the first 500. However, the one piece that was missing was a good tool to transition outlook server rules. Many employees used those rules extensively and many had 50-100 rules. Outlook does not have any method in place for extracting those rules…

Lion Frustration Fixes

Installed Lion today, some great improvements, some not so great (iCal… really?), and some frusterating changes than can be fixed. Scrolling seemed delayed and generally choppy on my magic mouse. The scrolling preferences are completed removed from the mouse system preferences. Instead they are hidden in the “Mouse Options” button in the “Mouse” tab of the Universal Access system preference. In the mouse tab you can also remove the scrolling delay. Safari’s cmd+option+l to open the download window was removed! Luckily you can add it back using a script by Daniel Jalkut bundled in a service bound to to the cmd+option+l keyboard shortcut. The new window zoom animation is really annoying…

Create TGZ Automator Service

With Snow Leopard came some nice refinements to automator actions. However, all existing automator actions had to be recreated as services in order to be accessed through the Finder’s contextual menu. One automator action which I used fairly often was the create tgz workflow. I always found that action to be fairly useful so I recreated it as an action. Another unfortunate change with Snow Leopard was the elimination of input managers. This eliminated the convenient F-Script injection functionality that was present in F-Script anywhere. Luckily this functionality has been recreated using an automator service. Nice work!

Apple Mail: Mark as Replied

A while back I added a small file to the source section of this site, MarkAsReplied.applescript. Couple this small AppleScript with MailActOn and you have an easy way to change the replied status of messages. I have another post in which I posted a script to allow the marking of messages as unread. Although these are small little functionality additions to Apple Mail, they have helped keep my different mail accounts organized.

Installing Custom PHP5 In Leopard

Lots of improvements have been made in Leopard, but the built in installation of PHP still lacks some essential packages and extensions (PDO, GD, etc). You could download MAMP or Marc’s package but either of those isn’t exactly a drop in replacement for the built in PHP installation – I’d rather not have two separate PHP installations floating around on my computer. Below is a script to compile PHP as a drop in replacement. I didn’t come up with this completely on my own, these two sources were a great help. You’ll need to make sure you have MacPorts installed in order for the installation of additional modules using the script below to work…

How Much Is Too Much

I like os x because its UI is pretty & functional at the same time. OS X does have it’s fancy visual effects, but in most cases the effects are done well enough that they don’t get in the way of your work. Expose is a great example of this. The zoom effect always take the same amount of time no-matter how many windows you have open, and its done quick enough that it doesn’t get in the way. Sheets are an example of when Apple (in my opinion) slowed things down for the sake of coolness. Don’t get me wrong, I love sheets, I think they are an awesome UI element. Apple just made the default fold out speed way too slow!..

Back From C4

Well, yesterday I came from C4. C4 was the first developers conference I have attended, and it was well worth going. I met lots of cool people: some who already have some apps out, some who havent released anything – yet. The Funny There is, at least for me, two pretty funny & memorable moments of C4. Before Brian W. Fitzpatrick gave his talk on the future of subversion he said “All information in this talk is under the NDA.” I immediately got really excited, I’ve never heard NDA information before, and this was about subversion, software I actually use! He follows that up with “Yeah, it is ‘Not Decided Apon’.” That gave me a good laugh 🙂 Aaron Hillegass was the guest speaker at C4…

WWDC Announcement Thoughts

The announcements this year are not as impressive as last year. Probably the most exciting thing for most people this year is the new Mac Pro: 16GB of RAM, 2TB of storage, dual 64 bit 3GHZ processors. Wow, I want one. I am sort of disappointed with the end-user Leopard features. The time machine idea sounds and looks cool, but I’m wondering how useful it will be and how much it will slow down my computer. The improvements to iChat are very welcome, and the screen sharing feature looks incredible. Spaces looks awesome, finally we are going to get built in virtual desktops. I really don’t use Dashboard or iCal, so changes to those areas of the OS don’t really affect me…

Sliced Dock!

Yesterday my Dock decided it didn’t like the finder, so it cut it off from the Dock. Mousing over or clicking on the Finder icon wouldn’t cause anything to happen. Pretty weird, I’ve never seen this before. A simple killall Dock fixed it, so it must of been a obscure bug with the Dock.

TextMate: Most Advanced Editor. Ever.

If you haven’t tried out TextMate I command you to download it right now. Its the most powerful and flexible editor I have ever used, I’m having trouble understanding how everything works its complicated. The syntax coloring is amazing, its so incredibly customizable. This is the only Cocoa text-editor I’m aware of that has code-folding, which is a very cool feature. The documentation is awesome and the wiki and mailing list are awesome resources too. It has amazing integration with the command line, allowing almost endless customization!

Category: Apple