Rubénerd Blog

Running the ./configure script from the latest nano tarball on a virgin Snow Leopard machine (my dad’s) I keep running into a problem with UTF-8 support.

Using ncurses as the curses library
checking for use_default_colors in -lncurses… yes
configure: error:

UTF-8 support was requested, but insufficient UTF-8 support was detected in your curses and/or C libraries. Please verify that your slang was built with UTF-8 support or your curses was built with wide character support, and that your C library was built with wide character support.

I’ve built the latest ncurses and slang libraries from MacPorts and have confirmed they were built with UTF-8 support. Only thing I can think of is it’s using the outdated ncurses from the system instead of MacPorts, but other ports such as Midnight Commander are using it. Will keep digging.

For what it’s worth, it builds just fine without UTF-8, but it’s a feature I’d rather have.

An interesting new development since upgrading my Snow Leopard install to 10.6.2, all my custom drive icons have started displaying heavily pixelated. If you think that Starfleet badge looks bad, the SOS-Dan logo I have for my Anime drive looks even worse!

Read this post >

One of the most common uses for the Stacks feature on Leopard and Snow Leopard is to have an icon for the primary hard drive sitting in the Dock; it allows you to navigate most parts of the entire filesystem include user folders, applications and so on. Problem is, you need a separate icon for each drive.

This afternoon though I found a way to have one Stack icon for all your drives: drag the /Volumes folder onto the dock instead! /Volumes is the hidden folder on your Mac’s primary hard drive that contains the mounts for each of your other drives.

To unhide /Volumes so you can drag it onto the Dock:

1. open the Finder
2. click Go to folder on the Go menu
3. enter /Volumes (including the forward slash) and hit Return
4. click the column view toolbar button

Unfortunately, the bad news is List view just displays a series of aliases that launch in the Finder. If you use the Grid view on Snow Leopard though you can now navigate to all the folders on all your mounted drives with one icon.

Finally found the first hardware device that Snow Leopard breaks: The HP LaserJet P1005 printer. Using Bonjour on an AirPort express on two separate machines the same cryptic "Error:-9672" error message. Apparently others are having a similar problem

So far this,not being able to play Matroska video files reliably and some weird font smoothing have been the only problems for me with the Snow Leopard system software. Still it means I’ll have to walk to uni to print stuff. As an early adopter I deserve this of course.

When I turned on my first generation Core Duo MacBook Pro I got in early 2006 this evening the backlight refuses to turn on using the function keys on the keyboard. All other keyboard functions are fine.

If I shine a torch at the screen I can just barely make out the windows and can adjust the brightness slider in the Display prefpanel, but nothing happens. Using an external monitor I can use the machine, but the internal display is still black.

Not sure whether this is a problem with Snow Leopard, I sure as heck hope so but it’s looking increasingly unlikely. I didn’t have the backlight Snow Leopard installation problem, but could this be related?

Things I’ve tried so far and have failed:

1. Resetting the PRAM (three times)
2. Resetting the PMU

This is really serious. I need to take this machine to classes. If it’s a hardware failure and I can only use an external display, I’m in big trouble.

I remember reading on one of the Mac forums I frequent that somebody thought it wasn’t the major changes that Apple makes to it’s software that set it apart from other vendors, it’s the little, less publicised things that make their systems that much more of a pleasure to use in little but meaningful ways. Aside from a couple of of blunders I completely agree.

Case in point, Snow Leopard comes bundled with a new monospace font called Menlo which is shaping (ha, pun) out to be one of my favourite new features. If you haven’t noticed it, launch Font Book.app and bask in its awesomeness!

If you’re on Snow Leopard reading this, you should be able to tell the difference:

This is Monaco, my previous favourite
This is Andele Mono, from the Home Brew Terminal theme
This is Menlo, my new favourite monospaced font!

I’m not a graphics designer so I don’t know the language I’m supposed to use when describing fonts, ligatures, serifs and the like but Menlo is brilliant. It’s as if they took Monaco and Fixedsys from the early Windows and DOS days and made a slightly more "retro modern" typeface. Because each character is slightly shorter, lines of text also seem more evenly spaced. The font smoothing and anti-aliasing also look really good.

I’ve set Menlo as my default font in Terminal.app and TextMate and am thorougly loving it. I’ve also gone ahead and added it to my CSS for this site, so if you’re running Snow Leopard you’ll see it in code samples! Font porn?

code, pre, .mono, .grilled_cheese_sandwich {
    /* Mac, Mac, FLOSS, Windows, All */

    font-family: Menlo, Monaco, "DejaVu Sans Mono",
        "Lucida Console", monospace;
}

As much as I love Linux and FreeBSD desktop environments like Gnome and Xfce, the presentation of fonts and typefaces still keep me looking forward to programming and working on my Mac above all else, though they are improving in leaps and bounds. I don’t consider Windows to be a viable contender with it’s subpar onscreen font rendering.

It’s become a little tradition of mine to break in new operating system installs by tuning into Whole Wheat Radio before I do anything else (Low-Fi, Med-Fi, Hi-Fi). It’s useful because it tests both the sound card and more importantly the network.

Audion is a [relative] dead end

When I installed the newly released Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro and got ready to install Audion to tune into the MP3Pro stream, it occurred to me that Audion is a PowerPC application. Snow Leopard is now an Intel only system, and while you can install Rosetta as an optional extra, the rabid system perfectionist inside of me cringes at the idea of installing an entire extra subsystem for only one application.

I’ve switched to QuickTime for now to play Whole Wheat on my Mac but because it doesn’t have the MP3Pro decoder the quality suffers. Unfortunately, I cannot find anyone still supporting MP3Pro on the Mac.

QuickTime 10

While the quality might not be as good as MP3Pro for the same stream size, at my house here in Adelaide where we have a strict download quota I generally only listen to the Med-Fi stream anyway so quality is less of a concern.

With this in mind, QuickTime 10 that came with Snow Leopard is fantastic, its brand new minimalistic UI is very unobtrusive and fast, and part of me really gets a kick out of being told I’m listening to a Live Broadcast :)

User agent string

One of the great things about Whole Wheat Radio is you can also view who’s listening and where at the same time you are, along with what software they’re using to tune in with.

Because QuickTime is now an important architectural sublayer of Snow Leopard (a dedicated Mac developer may want to correct me on that) the user agent string for QuickTime and other software that utilises it’s resources (such as iTunes) is now a cryptic reference to the OS rather than to QuickTime.

I added information on this along with a screenshot to the Whole Wheat Radio wiki, Jim Kloss might want to just create a redirect instead to QuickTime or to the Mac pages but I figured it was worth explaining so at least there aren’t any red links on the who’s listening page.

Grilled cheese sandwiches

It had to be said :).

There are plenty of more thorough lists online, but I thought I’d keep my own too. So far I’ve been using this software without problems:

• Adobe Air 1.5.2
• Simone’s Gimp 2.6.7
• iMovie HD 6 from iLife 06
• MacPorts 1.8.0 Snow Leopard release (guess that goes without saying!)
• Mozilla Firefox 3.0.13
• Mozilla Firefox 3.5.2
• OpenOffice.org 3.1.1
• TextMate 1.5.8
• TweetDeck 0.26.6

Software I’ve been having problems with:

• Skype 2.8.0.659 works as long as you do not thin the universal binary with ditto as I described in December 2007.

• QuickTime 10 with Perian currently doesn’t support the MKV media container because of a registration incompatibility problem.

• The Intel build of VLC 1.0 works, but for some reason takes upwards of 30 seconds on my machine to load and start playing MKV files. This wasn’t an issue on regular Leopard on the same machine.

• XQuartz 2.4.0 returns an error saying "This update is designed for OSX Leopard Only.".

I’ve been able to compile the following ports from MacPorts without problems:

• lame 3.98.2_1
• ncurses 5.7_0
• ncursesw 5.7_0

For some reason, Apple decided in Snow Leopard to disable graphical configuration of font smoothing (aka sub pixel rendering) and instead rely upon LCDs to report what settings should be used. Problem is, support for this is spotty with some panels and the resulting fonts look rough and pixelated.

On regular Leopard if you open the Appearance prefpane you’re presented with a drop down box where you can choose how heavy font smoothing is applied, as shown in the screenshot above. On Snow Leopard all you get is an ambiguous checkbox saying "Use LCD font smoothing when available" without any option to choose by how much:

Fortunately you can still adjust this manually by opening Terminal.app and entering the following command with an integer between 1 and 4 (representing the 4 previously available options), then re-opening your applications. Easiest way is to enter this, then log out and log back in.

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

Heaven knows why Apple user interface designers decided to remove access to this feature.

My premininary experience with Snow Leopard after getting around to installing has been amazing. It’s most probably also to do with the fact I did a clean install which always helps, but all the applications load instantly or with only one dock bounce even on this 2006 era first generation MacBook Pro! Obviously compiling huge projects or editing video won’t be much faster, but if the machine is feeling this much more responsive I might be able to keep using it for even longer which my wallet will love.

There are also lots of tiny little non-performance related things. When you click the hide toolbar button in the Finder it does a quick animation, and the toolbar itself is spaced out more neatly. When I have my external monitor attached the open windows on it are easier to resize to fit the full height without going over. When you open folders in the Finder using column view they show an open icon. The Homebrew theme in the Terminal uses blue as a selection colour. I’m sure I’ll find more such things.

So far the only bad things I’ve come across is hard drives aren’t shown by default on the Desktop but a quick visit to the Finder Preferences screen can fix that. Also, for some reason the fonts look dreadful and the Appearance preference pane no longer has a drop down menu to select the degree of font smoothing. A visit to the Terminal will fix this, but it’s weird they’d do that.

Now it’s time to put the Dock back on the side and install my applications. Speaking of which I need a cup of coffee. Why doesn’t Snow Leopard do THAT for me still I ask?