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Regular OS X Odyssey readers know that I'm a big windowshading fan, and Unsanity LLC's WindowShade X haxie makes my OS X experience many magnitudes more satisfactory than it would be with just the lame substitute of minimizing open documents to the Dock. Unsanity released the final of WindowShade X 3.0 last week, replacing the 3.0 Public Preview. A cool new feature in the preview release was the minimize in place option which would shrink an open document window to thumbnail size when the yellow "Minimoze" button was clicked. This seemed like a cool alternative to the standard collapse-to-the-titlebar windowshading, but I found that in practise, the thumbnails scattered randomly around the Desktop were not as useful as the titlebars, and after some experimentation I reverted to regular windowshading. However, WindowShade X 3.0 final adds the ability to park collapsed document thumbnails along the side edges or bottom of the screen at your preferences-setting discretion. Now that's more like it, and it makes this option immeasurably more useful and practical. I'm already using it extensively, although I will continue to use the windowshading feature as well, since for some things you still can't beat having the titlebar there with the document name full-size. It's nice to have the choice. 
WindowShade X also allows you to control window shadow settings. When you double-click a window title or try to minimize a window, it will do an action which can be customized to perform the default minimization to Dock or one of 4 alternative minimize styles: WindowShade, Make Window Transparent, Hide Application and Do Nothing. Very cool. WindowShade X is definitely my favorite OS X add-on. I should note that WindowShade X and other Unsanity haxies require a system patch called "Application Enhancer" or "APE" (included in the download). There has been some controversy about APE haxies causing system instability in some instances (see Jonathan Tyzack's letter below). Last week, MacFixIt recommended that if you're experiencing unexplained stability issues, one worthwhile troubleshooting exercise is to disable APE and all haxies. NO doubt useful advice. However, I just had 13 days of trouble-free uptime on my iBook with APE and WindowShade X running.
New in WindowShade X Version 3.0:
System requirements:
WindowShade X is priced at $10.
WindowShade X 3.0 is available for download at:
More information on WindowShade X can be found here:
OS X problem Safari DVD player install on the Pismo Re: Comment and Critique On Ars Technica’s OS X Browser Smackdown OmniWeb and MacFixIt comment on APE and haxies Re: Mac OS 9 Compatibility, Upgrades, and Resources From Connie Hi Charles: wow! -- what a treasure trove -- a veritable wealth of suggestions and insights from you and also the folks who wrote to you regarding the first inquiry -- Now I really have my work cut out for me but it's obviously the right path to follow in order to transition to OSX. Again, Muchas gracias from a very grateful reader --- I'll keep reading if you keep up the great writing! Connie From Jim Dickey Charles, Thanks always for your great work for Mac users. My daughter has a 14" iBook, 700 mhz, 256 MB RAM, that was running OS X 10.2.6. After running a short time, it freezes with a message that says, "You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button..." This message is in English, French, German, and Japanese, and has FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF at the bottom. The computer is frozen at this point with no response at all. I must press the power button, and this turns the iBook off. I've tried everything I know, hardware tests - OK, Macjanitor run (to do Unix housekeeping), DiskWarrior 3.0 run, re-install OS X. The only thing I have not done yet is run the fsck command. Fortunately, I do have AppleCare on the iBook. I live in Japan, and understand that it will be covered here too, I hope. Unless you, or a reader has any idea how to help, I will have to take it in to an Apple dealer here next week. I am pretty sure this is a software problem, but it has me stumped. I'm the one here people call to help with Mac problems, but can't help myself with this one. I have three other Macs (Pismo 400, iBook 800 mghz, iBook 300 mghz, all using 10.2.6 and never have any problems at all). We are definitely fond of portable Macs. Appreciate any advice. God bless,
Jim Dickey
Hi Jim;
What your daughter's machine is manifesting are what is known as "Kernel Panics."
According to Apple, "A kernel panic is a type of event that occurs when the core (kernel) of an operating system receives an instruction in an unexpected format or that it fails to handle properly. "
According to a bit of research digging, I've learned that kernel panics, at least in the 0S 10.2 era, are almost always related to a hardware issue of some sort, with USB hubs getting specific mention along with several other possible culprits, so I'm reasonably sure that in this case it's a USB hub issue.
In Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, David Pogue says that kernel panics are "almost always the result of a hardware glitch."
I've experienced two or three of these with my own iBook, and in my case I strongly suspect that they have been related to USB peripherals. I haven't had any since upgrading to OS 10.2.6 a couple of months ago, but that may be coincidental.
This web page:
1. A directory failure or user accidently moving .kext files that should be left alone. The directory may fail, due to an accident caused by Norton Utilities or Systemworks, which may at random corrupt a directory even when trying to repair it. Norton Anti-Virus will not do this, but Disk Doctor and Speed Disk have a history of doing this.
2. Peripherals that aren't Mac OS X native may cause a kernel panic, ...Mac OS X 10.2.5 has been known to kernel panic at certain USB hubs, and it is recommended you upgrade to 10.2.6 to avoid this issue.
3. RAM and motherboards are the least likely suspect in kernel panics, but if you just have a new system, and or just installed new memory and you get a kernel panic, that's the most likely place to start looking.
Hope this information is helpful.
From Steven Cades Charles-- Thanks--as ever--for the summary of OS X browsers. I operate in Safari almost exclusively, although iCab is my second choice, and I retain Explorer when all else fails with heavily tricked-out pages. My one gripe about Safari is that I often need to save textfiles for classroom use--from the New York Times, for example. Unlike iCab, Safari offers no way to "Save As...." text. What I've learned to do is a standard "Save As" in Safari, and to drag the resulting file to iCab, which then opens the (now) local file. In iCab I "Save As" text, which in turn I can drag to my word processor for further massaging. I'm hopeful that the iteration of Safari in the forthcoming Panther version of OS X will let me skip the iCab step.... --Steve
Hi Steve;
No other browser does text saves as gracefully as iCab does. The Mozillas have a Save As plain text command, but the result is cluttered with html code and junk characters to the point of uselessness. iCab saves text cleanly.
My workaround with Safari is to dump selected text I want to save into DEVONthink using the OS X Services menu. Works great, and the saved material is searchable using DEVONthink's wonderful search engine.
Charles DVD player install on the Pismo From BruceMiller Ragarding the missing DVD player install on the Pismo (because the DVD drive was not in place during 10.2 install), one could simply use Pacifist shareware to extract and install the DVD player individually afterwards from the installer disk. I had the exact same situation with my Pismo installation, and added the DVD player later easily and successfully using Pacifist. Bruce Miller
Thanks, Bruce
Charles
Re: Comment and Critique On Ars Technica’s OS X Browser Smackdown From Jonathan Tyzack Hi Charles, "OmniWeb is drop dead gorgeous, feels and looks like an OS X application, is customizable and has a nice preferences dialog. Unfortunately, there is no tabbed browsing (as I said fatal), as with iCab JavaScript and CSS2 support are incomplete, and it’s slow, with some stability problems. I love the look and OmniWeb is an interesting browser, but I’ve never found any compelling reason to use it. I tend to go for speed (FireBird/Camino/Mozilla/Safari), or convenience/utility (iCab). Recent adoption of WebCore and JavaScriptCore technologies should help." Now hold on a minute, the above may have applied to OW 4.2, but it is no longer the case for OW 4.5 which is only marginally slower than Safari and is as equally compatible with CSS2 and Javascript owing to the use of Apple's WebCore, etc as the code for the rendering engine. In comparison to iCab, there simply is no comparison anymore - iCab continues to languish in its support for CSS etc, OW doesn't. Where they do compare however is in featuritis and featuritis of a good kind: Specific image (ad) filtering, pop-up blocking, excellent cookie management, utilisation of Services, excellent Source Editor, customisable Bookmark checking (to see if a site has been updated), resizable Form Editor window for inputting text into fields (for which you can select your own font style as well), the ability to block Java applets or launch them specifically when clicked, browser spoofing (to let you into sites that would otherwise block your non-IE/non-Netscape browser), etc. It isn't perfect by any means, but it is certainly getting there. As you can probably tell, it is my preferred browser with Safari being my second choice and Camino third. I was an avid iCab fan in OS 9 - I even paid the shareware fee to aid development even though it was lacking in the rendering department - but its OS X counterpart has progressed very little and just doesn't look or feel like an OS X application. The latest version is better (especially the admirable preferences pane), but until version 3.0 arrives... if it arrives... I see absolutely no compelling reason to use it. I think the Ars Technica reviewer's scoring of the browsers is a fair reflection of their usefulness to the "average" computer user. Safari is the best browser for the average user, but I would say that Mozilla/Camino or OmniWeb 4.5 is the better browser for the power user.
Cheers,
Hi Jonathan;
The last version of the OmniWeb browser I downloaded was version 4.2 back in May or June, and I haven't sampled version 4.5 yet.
However, Eric Brangeman has, and he says that "JavaScript and CSS2 support [are] incomplete," and that OmniWeb's "slow rendering and problems with JavaScript, [have]... been improved with the adoption of WebCore and JavaScriptCore technologies, [but] It still lags behind Safari on rendering speed" Certainly, OmniWEb lagged behind Safari in speed in Eric's benchmark comparison.
As for iCab, it's leanness and stability are strongly appealing to me, probably in part because I use relatively low-powered hardware and am on a slow dialup connection. It is just a rock of dependability, supports drag & drop of data into CGI posting engines better than any other browser, and for the things I use it for it's no slower than the "faster" browsers. Then there's the text save issue Steve noted above. As I previously noted, I like its tabbed browsing implementation better than the others as well, and OmniWeb doesn't have tabs yet.
As MacEdition's "CodeBitch" remarked a while back, when you just want to get your work done, iCab is the browser of choice (words to that effect). I agree.
However, different strokes....
Charles
OmniWeb and MacFixIt comment on APE and haxies From Jonathan Tyzack Hi Charles, following on from my earlier e-mail, one feature of OmniWeb that I left out is the excellent support that OmniGroup offer and the ease of "troubleshooting". OmniGroup operates its own Mailing List for each of their applications where you can go and ask questions, offer comments or ideas, bitch and moan. Responses come from other users and also OmniGroup support staff and developers. Also, they quite regularly post responses to posts at the MacNN Software forum. If you are a licensed user of an application, your feedback/crash reports will elicit a timely individual response if needed or appropriate. Sending feedback about an app is as easy as selecting the item from the Help menu and if you suffer a crash 99% of the time the crash log will be caught by the OmniCrashCatcher application, to which you add a few details such as what you were doing when the crash occurred, and it is then deposited in an e-mail to OmniGroup. The latter is a feature that I wish more software developers would adopt as it surely speeds and greatly assists the correction of bugs in OmniGroup apps. On a totally different note, I thought you would like to see this from MacFixIt.com today which, unfortunately confirms my fears from our earlier Haxies discussions: http://www.macfixit.com/ "Margin Note: The dangers of haxies in Mac OS X 10.2.x While Mac OS 9 had an Apple-developed and sanctioned system for extendibility (the Extensions and Control Panel folders), no such add-on architecture exists in Mac OS X. As such, developers have taken to offering "haxies," retrofit modifications that can cause severe troubleshooting problems without the user ever realizing the cause. Many of these add-ons fall under the APE (Application Enhancer) umbrella. Application Enhancer is a utility which - according to its own documentation - a system "which allows for 3rd party modules to modify and enhance the way applications behave and operate..." Many troubleshooting issues received in the MacFixIt inbox that are at first attributed to a Mac OS X incremental upgrade or a disk permissions problem are actually easily resolved by temporarily removing Application Enhancer and restarting. Though APE itself has rarely been the culprit, individual haxies have been over and over again. A system can be completely problem-free with multiple installed and active haxies. But if you are experiencing inexplicable glitches in the Finder or random kernel panics, disable your haxies as a troubleshooting step."
Cheers,
Hi Jonathan;
Thanks for the supplemental OmniWeb info, and I thought of you when I read that piece on APE and haxies on MacFixIt Friday. I guess I'm among the lucky problem-free, but if one is having odd problems, disabling any haxies and APE is no doubt good troubleshooting advice.
Charles
The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here: Note: Letters to Moore's Mailbag may or may not be published at the editor's discretion. Correspondents' email addresses will NOT be published unless the correspondent specifically requests publication. Letters may be edited for length and/or context. Opinions expressed in postings to Moore's MailBag are those of the respective correspondents and not necessarily shared or endorsed by the Editor and/or Applelinks management. If you would prefer that your message not appear in Moore's Mailbag, we would still like to hear from you. Just clearly mark your message "NOT FOR PUBLICATION," and it will not be published. CM
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