Obscure but nice Snow Leopard goody: Mac gamma moves to 2.2
In recent years, television, video, and web standards have all settled on a default gamma of 2.2. In Mac OS X v10.6, the Macintosh moves to this common standard
Probably a good thing.
words and things from Edd Dumbill
I'm a tinkerer with technology, and occasionally strike lucky with it. I co-chair the O'Reilly Open Source Convention and I'm in charge of designing O'Reilly's conference software platform, Expectnation.
I've written a few computer books, most recently "Learning Rails", in collaboration with my old friend and co-conspirator Simon St.Laurent.
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Wide Area Bonjour: probably not worth the hassle
I've been experimenting a little with Wide Area Bonjour. Or, if you want the neutral name for it, Wide Area DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD). This is a technology that lets your computer register its IP address and services on a DNS server and make it available for internet consumption, even if you're behind a firewall.
Why would you want to do this? You might want access to files on your home network, wherever you are. Or you might want to use SSH to log in to your machines. Wide Area Bonjour can help you do this directly without the complications of setting up tunnels and so on.
Normal Bonjour advertises services on a local network via broadcast, and is very useful for automatic configuration and detection of services. The benefit of Wide Area Bonjour is that you can locate services even when you're not on your home network.
As implemented in Mac OS X, Wide Area Bonjour does two things: it registers your IP address against a DNS server, and if you have opted to advertise the services running on your Mac, it works with a UPNP or NAT-PMP capable router to expose these to the internet. For instance, if you control the domain bonjour.example.org your laptop might be available as my-macbook.bonjour.example.org.
So, be very careful if you try this: you might think you're safely behind your router's firewall, but if you enable this service, direct internet access to your machines is possible.
If you want to experiment with setting up Wide Area Bonjour, you need access to a DNS server that supports secure updates. Instructions for setting this up are available from the DNS-SD web site.
The story isn't so great for platforms other than Mac OS X. Linux's Bonjour stack, Avahi, is irksome when it comes to accessing resources from Wide Area DNS-SD servers, and lacks the capability altogether to publish services. So, in the main, Wide Area Bonjour remains a Mac-only game.
At the end of the day, if you want to expose services from your home network, the traditional solution of using dynamic DNS and the DMZ or port forwarding on your router is going to be easier to set up and manage.
Back to My Mac
As part of their MobileMe services, Apple have bundled up Wide Area Bonjour with secure IPv6 connectivity and created "Back to My Mac". It's a much easier way to access your home network resources over the internet, although obviously a paid-for service. It's what I'll be sticking with for now. However, it's nice to know how all the bits inside it work!
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David Pogue writes the best overview of Snow Leopard I've read
This year, though, Apple and Microsoft both realized that the pile-on-features model is unsustainable. Both are releasing new versions of their operating systems that are unapologetically billed as cleaned-up, slimmed-down versions of what came before.
Microsoft’s, called Windows 7, comes out in October. Apple’s, called Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, arrives on Friday, a month earlier than announced. (Apple to Microsoft: “Surprise!”)
Apple’s release strategy is highly unorthodox: “Leopard, a k a Mac OS X 10.5, was already a great OS-virus-free, nag-free and not copy-protected. So instead of adding features for their own sake, let’s just make what we’ve got smaller, faster and more refined.”
via nytimes.com
Pogue's review includes some hints and tidbits about features in Snow Leopard that don't make Apple's official publicilty.
It's a fair review, noting the glitches too.
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Evernote and Omnifocus integration wish
I use OmniFocus to manage my lists of projects and next actions for GTD. One of the nicest things about OmniFocus is its integration with Apple Mail. If you use the "OmniFocus: Send to Inbox" service, then your new action in OmniFocus is linked with the mail message's URI. One click and you're back in the original email message, no matter which folder you moved it to.
Now, OmniFocus is not really the place to store supporting reference material for projects, so I've been using Evernote for this purpose. What would make the workflow simpler is if Evernote supported opening a note by URI, the same way that Apple Mail does. That way it would be very easy to cross-link supporting material into OmniFocus, and have it accessible with one click.
This may seem like an edge use case, but one of the principles of GTD is that you should have your supporting materials easily to hand when you need them.
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