I’m thinking this couldn’t possibly be this easy but what started out as a relatively simple task turned into a ah-ha moment tonight. Long story short – I came across a brain dead easy way to synchronize just about any application between multiple Macs using free software. Full disclosure, I haven’t yet looked into this on any bigger picture scale but for my needs, it has worked flawlessly. For you and your Macs – caveat emptor my friend.

A little background – I’ve been using Apple’s online tools (formerly .Mac currently .Me) since way back in 2000 when they were quite rudimentary and called iTools (back when they were even free). I still keep an active .Mac account (I don’t think I’ll ever be able to bring myself to call it .Me which just sounds so…lame) and I primarily use this account for purposes of syncing various apps (Calendars, Contacts, Mail, etc). With the iPhone 3GS, syncing is all the more important but one of my favorite aspects has always been the syncing of certain other applications (Apple and Non) like Transmit, Keychains, Dashboard Widgets, Mail accounts and Bookmarks. I always found that syncing function to work (mostly) and I’ve always wondered why more applications didn’t tie into .Mac’s sync services.

Tonight, I’ve discovered an easy solution to this issue that I wanted to sshare. I was an early user of Cultured Code’s Things.app and was happy when the iPhone version of Things arrived (and alsowon an Apple Design Award thank you very much). As expected, the desktop version synced nicely with the iPhone/iPod Touch app. Like a lot of developers, I tend to split my time between multiple Macs and after you get in the habit of routinely using an application, it becomes natural to want it on whatever computer you happen to be in front of and Things certainly felt that way for me. With the syncing already happening between my desktop Mac and the iPhone automatically, I needed to find a quick way to get the Things database to now sync between the two Macs that I work on.

Being the kind of company that seems to anticipate your needs before you do, the fine folks over at Cultured Code had set up fully user editable wiki and sure enough, someone else had a similar need and found a very elegant solution using nothing but free software to do it (not to mention, extremely popular free software (Dropbox) that many of us already have installed on our systems). I took just a few minutes, tried it out, and the problem of syncing Things on multiple Macs was history.

Technically, it’s not at all a very complicated solution and with very minor modifications, you can get it work for just about any Mac applications (disclaimer: I’ve done this with the apps I find it necessary to have sync’d – your mileage may indeed vary – as always back that shit up before playing with any of this). The big hero of the hour is the free software I mentioned called DropBox. For those of you not using it, I highly recommend it. It’s an application that really does have a lot of potential uses. In my case, I have a folder where I frequently save my weekly segments for the MacReviewCast and on the other end, Tim Verporten receives the audio file minutes after I save it locally without me having to lift a finger. Also, we have a group of people that use DropBox to collaborative on files for a book we’re writing and DropBox makes sure we all always have the most recent files. Another common use is for syncing files on multiple computers. Bottom line, you owe it to yourself to go check out DropBox and get yourself a free account. While you are signing up, be a pal and enter my email (powellj@mac.com) as the referrer and they’ll give me additional free space on my DB account.

Back to our story – having said all that, here’s how it works in a nutshell:

Many of your applications hold persistent data in a common location: \ username \ library \ application support \ app-or-company-name \

Inside this folder, you can usually find all your data stored in some common file format which can be anything from a flat text file, sqlite database, xml or whatever. Most applications are hardwired to look for their data in this specific location (in some apps this can be changed, but more – its more hassle than its worth).

You can install DropBox on both (or more) of your Macs to then keep these special data folders (for each app separately) sync’d up on both machines so regardless of which Mac you happen to be at, the data is automatically up to date on all machines. This basically does what sync services in .Mac/.Me does only without the $99/year pricetag (and in my experience, its way faster than .Mac’s syncing). You will need to do all of this in the terminal (until someone takes 5 minutes and writes an AppleScript for it) but I’m thinking that anyone who has the need think in terms of syncing data between multiple Macs and takes the time to read this far, isn’t likely to be the kind of person scared off by a little command line action. (but if you are, be sure to check out Dan Benjamin’s fine new screencast called Meet the Command Line over at PeepCode.

Details, details … (straight from Culture Codes wiki post on the subject) – just know that you’ll have to manually look in ~/ library / application support / XXX / to see the specifics of the files & app you are needing to keep sync’d. Drop me a line if you have questions on it.

This is a “how to” to keep Things in sync between Macs using Dropbox.

• First we make an appropriate folder on Dropbox (you just need to do this on your first computer, and obviously both computers need to have Dropbox installed): mkdir -p ~/Dropbox/Library
• Then we hop into the folder just above where Things stores its database: cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Cultured\ Code
• We now move your existing Things database onto Dropbox (again, just on the first computer): mv Things ~/Dropbox/Library/Things, OR:
• If you’re on the second computer (at work, for example), you need to remove the Things folder: rm -rf Things
• Now we link the Things folder to Dropbox: ln -s ~/Dropbox/Library/Things Things
• Instead of doing the last two steps, another option is to invoke Things by pressing the ALT key and choose the new Library in the Dropbox directory.
Based off the longer version on my article: Synchronising Things using Dropbox Note: This sync solution seems to work fine if you don’t run both Things apps at the same time. However, the one caveat is that scheduled todo’s based on iCal calendars (such as the Birthdays calendar) do not sync correctly. One Things app will have the correct calendar reference, but the other will have a ?. This is possibly because Things uses an internal reference for the calendars, not their display name.

After Things.app, the first application that I really need to keep in sync was Code Collector Pro from M Cubed Software. (Shameless plug – if you work with any kind of code whatsoever you really ought to check out CCP. It is lightweight, extremely flexible and comes with a free web service to share your codebase with others (optional) but if you take nothing else away from this article check out CCP, it absolutely rocks). I modified a few directory and file names but other than that, the instructions above did the trick nicely and now I’ve got up to date copies of all of my source code on either machine and I don’t even have to think about it – it just happens.

Obviously the weakest link in the chain here is the huge amount of trust being placed in DropBox. Technically, a copy of every bit of data is going through their system and that is definitely worth significant consideration. The data is technically stored on Amazons S3 service and Drew from DropBox adds: “We encrypt files using AES-256 before storing the file data on S3, and the underlying transport (for everything) is SSL. (we’ll also be adding the ability to provide your own private key.)”

I’d be curious to hear how this works out for you all. Drop me a line at powellj@mac.com

Most interesting:

If you want to grab the attention of a roomful of hackers, one sure fire way to do it is to show them a new method for remotely circumventing the security of an Apple Macbook computer to seize total control over the machine.

Full Article

Update 9/27/606 Weeks later, this thing has been analyzed to death and as suspected, things aren’t quite what they seem. Even if these guys had a valid point, their techniques and positioning made them considerably less believable. Full story

Care of Lauri Taimila:

I have noticed that many people try to imitate Mac OSX Tiger’s look with their current operating system. No matter is it Windows or Linux. I’m one of those people and this is my atteption to make Ubuntu Linux look like OSX Tiger. I use Ubuntu simply because it is the best distribution of the best operating system. Ubuntu uses Gnome as it’s desktop environment. For this reason the guide is for only for Gnome users. It you are using some other distribution, this guide is still valid in most cases. This guide tries to be as spesific as possible, so that even newbies can follow it easily!

I’ve said it before and I hope that I never get to stop saying it: the Mac community has some of the most damn creative people working in it! How often to you see a really clever user interface implemented in some game and wonder why can’t we get stuff like that in OS itself? One of my personal favorites has today become a reality thanks to the fine folks over at Ars Technica’s Infinite Loop blog which today introduced the world to a small Mac hack called Visor.

Remember in Quake (and many other FPS titles) how you could always bring down a terminal window from which you could enter in cheat codes and such? Well, some clever guys have figured out a great little hack that allows you to have OS X’s terminal window drop down from the top of the screen via a customizable key combo. So you can be working away and need to jump out to the command line for a something and now, it’s just a quick key-combo away. The visual effect is of course, very slick and not to leave well enough alone, they’ve also made it so that you can easily embed any quicktime composer (.qtz) file which will play behind the terminal window (but you do have to adjust the transparency level of your terminal window ahead of time).

You really do have to see this in action to fully appreciate it’s usefulness – so of course they’ve also made a movie to show it off properly. Essentially this is accomplished by creating this as a plugin for SIMBL but it works fantastic and if you use the terminal on anything more than a casual level, it’s a must have in my book. Nice job guys.

Installation instructions and download links here.

The SxSW2006 Behind the Scenes: Developing OS X and Longhorn panel explored the differences between Apple and Microsoft’s new operating system development process from a design perspective. Both of the panelists lead the design of each operating system and are now at Frog Design.

Apple’s OSX Process

* The original goal for OSX was not to change user interface. Apple had acquired Next and OS 8 was on its last legs, they needed stability and had a short timeline.
* Once into the process, the team realized they could get only 95% of the way to replicating OS8 and that Next had some great features that would be lost.
* The design team started exploring what it would be like to start from scratch and worked after hours on conceptual pieces (translucency, animation, visual design).
* At a two-day offsite discussing OSX development plans, the design team was asked to show their concepts as an inspiration piece.
* They were the last speaker to talk and showed animation, new visual design, 32-bit color, alpha channels, and Quicktime in the OS. Everyone in the room laughed. They had enough work to do without ANY UI changes.
* 2 weeks later, Steve Jobs called them OS design team into a meeting. At the time Jobs had no formal title, but he was talking to teams and cutting projects.
* The meeting with Jobs began with Steve calling them amateurs. He hated OS8 and thought they weren’t doing anything worthwhile.
* As the conversation progressed, the design team eventually talked about what we wanted to do and showed some ideas from their concepts. Jobs told them to them to prototype it. They worked day and night and built a demo that included the dock, animation, visual design, video player, and CD player (the start of Apple’s digital hub strategy).
* They spent a whole afternoon walking Jobs through the design. From that point on there was no doubt they would change the UI for OSX.
* For the next one and a half years the design team had weekly meetings with Steve. What he liked went in. What he didn't like had to be redone.
* During that time, Steve was still not an official employee -he didn’t even have a badge.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball today linked to a most interesting piece which puts the recent Mac OSX security vulnerability news into the proper perspective. John writes:

“Great ZDNet UK editorial slams McAfee for trying to scare Mac users into buying their Mac anti-virus software with exaggerated and false claims regarding the current state of Mac OS X security:”

It may be true, as McAfee says, that from 2003 to 2005 the number of discovered Mac vulnerabilities increased by 228 percent while Windows only saw a 73 percent increase. But that’s like saying that in the last decade, deaths caused by choking on ice cream were up by 200 percent while deaths from smoking only went up by ten. Like the ice cream, shining light on McAfee’s claims makes them melt away — when we asked the company how big the risks actually were, it admitted that there was “no significant risk” at the moment.

A most interesting look at KDE in terms of what it might be able to learn from Mac OSX.

As reported by John Siracusa on behalf of Arstechnica today:

Five Years of Mac OS X

A side-by-side test-drive of Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.4 is shocking. The eternal debate is whether this gap exists because 10.4 is so good, or because 10.0 was so, so bad. That said, Apple’s ability to plan and execute its OS strategy is not open for debate. In five short years, Apple has essentially created an entirely new platform. Oh, I know, it’s really just the foundation of NeXT combined with the wreckage of classic Mac OS, but I think that makes it even more impressive. Two failing, marginalized platforms have combined to become the platform for the alpha geeks in the new century.

In that time, we’ve seen four major revisions (10.1 – 10.4) and countless mini-revisions as Apple’s modern operation system came from obscurity to be force to be reconned with. Speaking for myself, it was Apple’s sexy Titanium Powerbook that first caught my eye back in the year 2000 but is was OSX that really got me interested in Apple’s offerings. Time sure does fly as five short years ago I was considering the strange possibility of actually buying a Macintosh computer and trying to actually use it for my day to day work. Flash forward to the year 2006 – You’d be hard pressed to find a single PC in my home or office with the token PC (running Linux of course) quietly sitting in the corner doing its thing but Windows has been banished from my life and I couldn’t be happier because of it. In those same 5 years, Microsoft has shipped, wait, is about to ship…umm, oh yea that got delayed earlier this week to March 2007? Well, in the time Apple has shipped 4 major versions of its operating system – Microsoft hasn’t shipped a single thing in the operating systems area, with the exception of a single service pack a year or two ago.

Vista continues to be delayed (it’s not even enjoyable to poke fun at it anymore as the whole thing is such a big joke) as more and more features continue to be removed from Vista – the future looks brighter than ever for Mca OSX. I honestly feel back for my Windows only acquaintances who must feel just completely left out to dry by Microsoft when it comes to advancing their operating system. I can honestly say that each new version of Mac OSX has brought a fairly substantial number of features that really do change how you work with your computer, making it more enjoyable and letting me get things done faster than ever before. Like I’ve said many times, I’m thankful to Apple for a great many reasons but tops on that list is that they made technology fun for me again. After years and years of dealing with all of the daily bullshit that is life with Windows, getting to sit in front of a beautiful Macintosh everyday is a most pleasant experience that will spoil you. Did I mention how niceely World of Warcraft looks running fullscreen on an Apple 30″ Cinema display? Oh My!!

One of the first things you’ll notice when you walk into an Apple store upon seeing those gorgeous Apple Cinema Displays, is the beautiful yet subtle soft blue abstract background images that Apple has provided since even before Mac OSX but have you wondered how to create something like this for yourself? It’s easier than you might think!

The fine folks over at N.Design Studio have put together a most excellent two page tutorial showing you exactly how it’s done. Even if your day job has nothing to do with the graphic arts, give this tutorial a try, it’s lot of fun and it even gave me an excuse to use my Wacom 12×19 Intous tablet!

<img src=”http://203.98.164.153/~jlpowell/blog/images/macviruscompete.jpg” width=”173″ height=”106 border=”0″ align=”right” hspace=”15″ vspace=”5″ /> Today from Vnunet comes a story describing a freshly proposed Mac hacking challenge following the somewhat questionable hack that is making the rounds this week.

If nothing else, this should be interesting to watch. I hope they do well and bring forth any previously unknown vulnerabilities in OS X. No system is perfect nor has anyone worth a salt ever claimed that about the Mac – the difference here is how the community and Apple respond to such things.

The homeless man on the corner who’s sign proclaims ‘The End is Neigh!’ must have some really well placed sources in the Mac community. Even before I got home from running an errand to the Apple store today, I felt a disturbance in the force and knew that something wasn’t quite right in the world (that would be outside of the approximately 1,095,759,699,251 other things in my life that are completely out of whack but hey, that’s an entirely different, and far less interesting story).

Alas, following last week’s post about the self-proclaimed first official virus for Mac OS X, today comes word of a second bit of code, more aptly categorized as malware for the Mac. Currently we know that it’s a java based proof-of-concept worm that exploits a vunerability in Bluetoth on some Macs that haven’t been updated with the Panther and Tiger Security patches. The worm has never been spotted ‘in the wild’ in addition to the fact that this code, which goes by the name of Inqtana.A has an internal counter that prevents its operation after February 24, 2006. In summary:

Bluetooth is a short-distance, low-speed wireless networking technology used to connect computers, printers, PDAs, smartphones and other devices — it’s become commonplace on the Mac in recent years.

Inqtana.A exploits a vulnerability called Bluetooth File and Object Exchange Directory Traversal: An infected machine could send an Object Exchange (OBEX) Push request to another system; if the user accepted the data transfer, Inqtana.A could then use the exploit to copy its files to start automatically on the next reboot. Once restarted, Inqtana.A could use the host machine to find other devices that accept OBEX Push transfers and try again.

MacWorld magazine has done a really nice job explaining what’s really going on and in the preliminary analysis, it’s no different than what your parents told you as a kid: Don’t take candy from stranger, or its modern digital equivalent, don’t accept unsolicited data sent to your bluetooth enabled PDA, Cell Phone, etc without risking something bad happening. Now, I freely admit that I don’t live in New York City or San Francisco (damn!) — or anywhere that there is a massive transit system where people might otherwise freely exchange data with total strangers (does this really happen?) — it’s almost like handing someone you don’t know your laptop and letting them put in any floppy disk they want (remember those?) — nobody in the right mind would do that. What’s what you say…? Oh!, I forgot! People do stupid stuff everyday! Now, they just have that same ability to do foolish things with a new generation of gadgets and let other people potentially mess up their gear due to their own negligence. New day, different idiot.

This sounds like the technical equivalent of a batch file for Windows bearing a single like: format c:\ only now you can beam it to total strangers, stick an attention getting name on it to trick people into clicking it and before long, you’ve really done a job on a bunch of unsuspecting victims. This reminded me of one of the more humorous tech support events that I experienced in Corporate America. We had a young guy on the marketing staff who managed to completely hose his Windows laptop for this very same reason — he had received an email from one of his friends (or so he thought at the time — apparently unaware that viruses are more than happy to replicate themselves by sending a copy of themselves to everyone in the victims address book, but surely he couldn’t be expected to keep up with the fast evolving world of virus distribution techniques, especially a trick like this one that has only been around for something like 5+ years) but I digress….

He had received the email (and attachment) proclaiming to contain exclusive pictures of / insert name of cute hollywood starlet here / and after clicking on it, that’s when his computer ’started acting funny’. MANY hours later and much work trying to restore and salvage what little of his data remained, he was dying to know if we were able to save those pictures of the / insert name of cute hollywood starlet here /! Just amazing how utterly clueless people can be. The tech support staff advised him to check with some of his friends and clients, just make sure they were people that he knew were in his address book as there was a strong likelihood that they too would have a copy of these exclusive pictures Beware, human stupidity knows no bounds.

From StuffOnFire comes and interesting piece on How To Make a Living as a Mac Programmer. Some solid advice for anyone longing to work in the Mac software market.

…. those who have suffered data loss by way of a hard drive failure

…. and those who will.

No matter how many times you go through it and regardless of how well prepared you are, it still sucks. Little did I know that today was the day the digital gods decided to play havoc with my beloved 17″ Powerbook’s hard drive.

After a morning of very normal use, I closed the lid and went to take a shower. Upon returning to my desk, the laptop was now off and when rebooted, it gets to the grey screen with the Apple logo and would go no more. An hour later, Disk Warrior had finished its work but reported there was not enough room to write a record of what was done (which was odd since the drive contained nearly 20GB of empty space).

Thankfully I regularly worship at the alter of backup and had recently done a full backup upon returning from MacWorld but that still leaves roughly a week of data that had not yet been backed up. Off to my local Apple store, I was in for a surprise as they have recently redone the way the genius bar appointments work and signing in at 1:00pm, the system informed me that there were no more appointments available today. I beg to differ. After waiting at the genius counter for over an hour and watching some of the dumbest people ever to own nan iPod pass by, I listened as the genius called off the next name on the reservations list…Gene? Gene? Last call for Gene….. Umm…right here! (don’t hate me, I was desperate to get the powerbook looked at). After a lot of diagnosis, they concluded that the hard-drive was in the state of a massive failure. We booted it through a separate FW drive and then I was able to mount our 60GB iPod to the laptop and slowly navigate the Powerbooks hard drive and try to get a few choice bits of data off the laptop before it gave up the ghost. Much to my dismay, the Finder would eventually let me navigate my user folder but trying to copy certain folders worked only about 40% of the time.

As it stands, the machine is on its way back to Apple to have the hard drive replaced. Hopefully I will have it back within the week. In all my time with using Macs, I have never seen something like this happen so quickly and without warning. I usually treat this laptop with kid gloves and of all the Macs I use, this is the one I would have least suspected to have a problem. One good note is that I have been threatening to rebuild the laptop for several months now but always had some reason not to but now it looks like I will be getting a brand new drive to build up from scratch.

Interesting read

I have been a Linux/Unix admin for about 7 years professionally now. I actually started off as a Junior Admin at a Linux company. This experience taught me allot, but also got me spoiled. At the Linux company, you were made fun of if you used Windows. We had one machine in the building running Windows, and that was for the Exchange server which we needed for our development team.

This company was writing a email client for Linux, and Solaris that would communicate 100% to exchange (yes before evolution did it, and before exchange 2000). Every desktop in the building was running some distro of Linux. So basically I never had to argue about Linux/Unix stability, ease of use, etc.