Macintosh: Opera and Flash; Wal-Mart and Mac Classic

Two unrelated Mac OSX notes:

Opera and Flash

As I’ve said before, Opera is my new browser of choice.  But I’ve been having problem running Flash in it (no Flash == no YouTube).  At first, I thought it was Adobe’s fault — their Flash 8 player was PowerPC only and I read somewhere that running a Rosetta-powered plugin in a Universal binary application, bad things can happen.  So today I install Flash Player 9 – still no love. So I went to Opera’s site and noted that I was running Opera 9 and the most recent was 9.02.  And in 9.01 they fixed a Java and Flash plugin issue.  I installed Opera 9.02 and life was good.

Sorry Adobe for blaming you unfairly.

Wal-Mart and Mac Classic

We have some out of out of town family that gets their digital prints from Wal-Mart and then sends us a slideshow with PhotoParade.  Yesterday they made another update and Gina downloaded their Mac Player, but it wouldn’t install.  So I tried it and got a strange error list “Will not run on this platform.”    I thought, “Isn’t that what Rosetta is for?”  I googled on how to force an application to run in Rosetta.  When I did a Get Info on the installer, it didn’t say OS 9 application — it said “Classic”.  It’s apparently possible, but not for the faint of hear.

C’mon Wal-Mart and PhotoParade.  Get in the right century!

Best of Mac Freeware

A post I keep coming to again and again is this post at FreeMacWare.com where they list their best of the best. It’s a great list of the really good freeware for just about everything. Just ask Gina how good Pac the Man X is.

My Introduction to CppUnit

I’m having to review C++ so I’m going through some tutorials and books and writing some basic programs to get the feel for it again. As I started this, I thought it would be a good time to really get into unit testing. I googled for “c++ and unit testing” and hit upon CppUnit, which is based on JUnit, which I am familiar with.

I am not a C++ wizard, nor do I play one on TV. So I started with my normal test program — The Sieve of Erastothenes. I understand the algorithm quite well, but it isn’t always trivial to implement. Writing the Sieve was easy — implementing the CppUnit test framework was a little more difficult. I found many examples but this one was the most helpful to me. Most of what I did was copied directly from there.

One thing I didn’t copy was the main function. I changed it to use TextTestRunner which outputs a better report, and the code is shorter to boot.

As an aside, I used XCode to write this. I think XCode is great, though it takes a little to get used to. It has a different sort of feel than Eclipse does. I think I prefer XCode to Eclipse, but then again I haven’t used it as much! One gotcha that took me a long while to figure out is how to attached the CppUnit library to my project. The weird part is that it compiles, thanks to how OSX’s linker works. The linker doesn’t actually do anything until runtime, so the code compiles but you get an error when you try to run the executable. After some hair-pulling and googling, I figured out that I needed to add libcppunit.a to the project — then it ran fine. Yeah, I know — very strange.

Taking OmniWeb for another spin

I grabbed a beta of OmniWeb 5.5 the other day.  A few days later is has replaced Opera 9 as my default browser on OSX.  Why?

• It’s super fast.  My main complaint on OmniWeb 5 was that it was slow.  5.5 beats out Opera and Safari quite easily.
• I can use Emacs keystrokes in it, just like the rest of OSX.  I couldn’t do that in Opera (Opera has a load of it’s own keystrokes and they seem to interfer with each other).
• The tab drawer.  Really.  It’s very, very nice.
• I love having configs per website.  On one site, I may need popups, but on the other I don’t ever want to see them.  OmniWeb makes this extremely simple.
• I actually had a problem with logging into a site (i.e. it wouldn’t log me in).  I filled out a feedback email, and got a nice automated reply stating that someone will get back to me in the next business day.  Sure enough, a real-live QA guy emailed me back and was quite nice.  I sent a trace back and he told me the issue is known.  This kind of support encourages me to by OmniWeb 5.5 when it comes out of beta.
• I just feel more productive in it.

So, really, give OmniWeb 5.5 a try.

NeoOffice for Intel

The latest NeoOffice is now in public Alpha.  The nice thing about this release is that it support Intel-based Macs, so that is a good thing.

This isn’t a full-fledged review, it’s more of a “I needed to write a quick letter, so I used it” type of thing.  The startup is slow, but after that things work well.  I’ve gotten used to OSX’s commands, so it was nice that those are supported.  Things worked like like you would expect for the native OpenOffice build for OSX.  The export to PDF that I used was also painless.

I would like the startup to be faster, but I imagine it will when the Beta and final versions are out. But so far, so good.