Marc Charbonneau’s Blog

Just a quick update for anyone who bought (or is thinking about buying) the new iPod Classic or iPod Nano. I picked one up last week, and it works great with Runner’s Log; no updates needed. Keep in mind that this only applies to the Stopwatch application. The Nike+ won’t work until the next version of Runner’s Log, which should be ready to go sometime early this fall.

Great addition for anyone who uses Smart Playlists to filter songs by albums, rather than the individual song rating. I used to have an (unreleased) Cocoa application to make playlists using the average album rating (along with play count and other attributes), it looks like I won’t need that anymore.

I’ve been using a case sensitive filesystem on my Macs for a few years now, and up until today I would have never, ever thought that this would cause a problem with a non-beta application. Especially a major application like Photoshop CS3 (that’s heavily used by web designers working on servers with case sensitive filesystems, no less). I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, either.

Since I can’t keep using Paint.NET in a VM forever, I guess I’m going to be spending my evening watching re-runs of The Office and reinstalling OSX, after only 3 months of use. Not exactly the best way to spend a Friday night.

Seth Dillingham’s software charity auction is finally live. It includes tons of great OSX applications from all kinds of developers, including my own Runner’s Log. All applications in the bundle come with a fully registered license. If you’ve had your eye on any of these apps, this would be a great opportunity. Of course, all profits go to charity.

You can find more information on Seth’s blog, or view the auction here.

All I can say is, it’s about time. Unfortunately for those of us who have been looking forward to using this on a day-to-day basis, the term ‘beta’ seems very appropriate in this case. In the short time I tried it I noticed several problems, including two crashes when disconnecting from a session.

I finished Runner’s Log 1.0.3 last weekend; have a look at the changelog, or download the new version. 1.0.3 has several new improvements, but it’s mostly bug fixes and cleaning up some old code that I wanted to get out of the way before I started on a bunch of new features I’m planning for 1.1.0.

Runner’s Log is also the featured download in Apple’s Downloads section today. Neat!

Once you grab the latest software update, that is. I always thought it was a bad decision to not include fullscreen in the free QuickTime player, especially given the number of hacks, scripts, and terminal commands that anyone could use to get around this restriction (but still weren’t as convenient as cmd+f). I’m glad to see it’s now free.

It’s great timing too, since Perian (an OSX multi-codec collection) just hit 1.0 a few weeks ago. The two make a great alternative to VLC, which simply won’t stop crashing on either my PowerBook or MacBook Pro.

It looks like VMware Fusion should be available in August, and you can pre-order it now for $39; half off the normal price. Good news for me, since I recently ordered one of the new MacBook Pros and I’m looking forward to finally having some good virtualization options open to me.

VMware Fusion hasn’t really seemed to catch on yet, mainly (from what I’ve heard) because the beta has debugging commands turned on that incur a big performance penalty compared to Parallels. Hopefully this will be solved in the final release. Since I use VMware heavily at work, there’s never been much of a doubt I wouldn’t use it at home on my Mac as well. From what I’ve heard VMware Fusion virtual machines are (or will be) fully compatible with VMware Workstation 6, and that’s something I think will be great if it works well in practice.

I’ve owned a license to Salling Clicker for years, so when I recently bought a new Sony Ericsson w810i phone I decided to see how the two worked together (especially since I can finally use phone events, that control iTunes and other applications when I walk away from the computer or make a call).

There’s a small trick to actually get it working though. At least on my phone (purchased through Cingular), I kept getting a Java security exception when I tried to connect to my PowerBook over bluetooth. After finding a few threads in the support forum, it turns out you can’t send the Salling Clicker application to your phone through bluetooth. Instead, you need to open http://www.salling.com/wap from your phone, and download the application directly from the web. After that, it should work fine.

Given the amount of talk about Coda since it was released last week, there’s not much more I can add except be sure you take a look at the 1.0 release notes. Panic is a great company, and they have a great sense of humor as well.

Update: Looks like they’ve been replaced by 1.0.1.