Smartphone Debut Helps Palm Beat Estimates - NYTimes.com

I'm pulling for the Pre, and I'm pulling for Palm. Of all the competitors in the smartphone market, it seems like Palm and Google are the only ones with the chops and insight to be a real competition to the iPhone. Everyone else (especially Microsoft, but RIM is included here, too) is resting on the fact that they're already built into many clients' mobile infrastructures.

I'd love to see nothing more than the Pre be Palm's iMac: the product that brought the company back from the brink of a very bad prognosis. Apple needs a strong competitor in the space. More than that, though, consumers need a strong competitor to Apple in this space.

Posted by jehan at 10:30 AM

Apple dropped Safari 4.0.1, through Software Update, exactly two weeks after Safari 4.0 was released. This time, though, they have actual notes!

“This update addresses incompatibilities between Safari 4.0 and certain features in iPhoto ‘09, including Places and Facebook publishing.”

Posted by jehan at 9:32 AM

If you’re the kind of person who has several computers on your desk, and you haven’t heard of Syngery, you’re missing out. Synergy is a slick app that allows you to share a single keyboard and mouse across multiple systems, spanning screens as if they were all a single extended display. In addition, Synergy allows you to share the clipboard between the two computers, which further enhances the single-computer experience. It’s cross-platform, so you can easily span across OS X, Windows, and Linux systems.

Synergy uses a small server-app that hosts the configuration file for any computers in your setup on one primary machine. The server is the machine that your keyboard and mouse will plug into. Additionally, there’s a very lightweight client that runs on each additional computer you’d like to share the server’s KB and mouse.

In my case, I have an XP desktop that I’m using as the server, and the Mini 9 Hackintosh is the only client, at the moment. Of course I have to make things complicated by using an Apple Keyboard and Mighty Mouse. The Mighty Mouse isn’t really an issue, but the XP computer gets a little confused when you’re sending the command and option keys to the OS X computer, and reverses them - it’s worth noting that the command key is, in actuality, a “super” key. To correct this, you simply have to swap the default mapping of the two keys for the OS X computer in the Synergy config file:

section: screens
    OSXComputer:
        alt = super
        super = alt

Furthermore, since Synergy hasn’t been updated since 2006, most of its documentation hasn’t been updated in at least as long. As a result, the documentation for how to setup an auto-launching client in OS X doesn’t really work if you have anything newer then 10.4.

Tiger introduced launchd, which basically eliminated the need for any loginwindow or startupitem hacks. Since Tiger, if you launch a persistent daemon on your own, OS X will pretty quickly kibosh it. Launchd lets you have a persistent daemon, launched with root privs, persistently keeping it open. Very nice.

So, the trick is getting launchd to know that you want to run a terminal line. There’s not a lot of info out there on how exactly to do this, but I came across a blog post in my Googling that supposedly explained how it worked, but the site was down. Fortunately, though, Google has a cache. And I’ll put the meat of the post here.

First, copy the synergyc file to /usr/local/bin/, using the following command.

sudo cp */path/to/your/synergyc* /usr/local/bin/

Create a new file in /Library/LaunchAgents/ called net.sourceforge.synergy2.plist. You’ll need root privs to do this, so use the following command:

sudo pico /Library/LaunchAgents/net.sourceforge.synergy2.plist

In that file, you will want to paste the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>    
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
    "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
     <key>Label</key>
     <string>net.sourceforge.synergy2</string>
     <key>OnDemand</key>
     <false/>
     <key>ProgramArguments</key>
     <array>
        <string>/usr/local/bin/synergyc</string>
            <string>-f</string>
            <string>-1</string>
            <string>--name</string>
            <string>*YOURCLIENTNAME*</string>
            <string>--debug</string>
            <string>WARNING</string>
            <string>*YOURSYNERGYSERVERNAME*</string>
    </array>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

Replace “*YOURCLIENTNAME*” and “*YOURSYNERGYSERVERNAME*” with the screen names of your client and server, respectively, then save the file and you’re good to go. The next time you log in, the Synergy client should launch automatically. The string that launchd will execute will look like this:

$ /usr/local/bin/synergyc -f -1 --name \*YOURCLIENTNAME\* --debug
    WARNING \*YOURSYNERGYSERVERNAME\*

Posted by jehan at 11:13 AM

That pen’s in there for scale. I wrapped the top in a Zagg Invisible Shield, and picked up the rad chrome Apple logo from a thread on a Mini 9 owners forum. It is pretty rockin’. I’ll have some details on how I massaged Synergy into behaving almost-perfectly in a little while.

Posted by jehan at 10:33 AM