Fixing Countries in Address Book: Winfred van Kuijk presents an awesome plugin he has written which addresses (pun intended) two significant issues with OS X’s Address Book multi-country support:

• country names: you no longer have many variations for country names (so: all “United States”, instead of many variations like “USA”, “US”, “United States of America”);
• country address formats: it tells Address Book to use the formatting that belongs to that country (e.g. [van Kuijk’s] default format is for the Netherlands, which means for US addresses that state is missing and zip and city are switched).

Everyone’s favourite uninstaller for OS X, AppZapper, recently generated a bit of a buzz as it metamorphosed into version 2 and acquired a slick new interface. AppZapper also seems to have grown beyond being a simple uninstaller, several pundits are now describing it as an “application manager.”

As an application manager one can view one’s applications in a pretty interface, sort them with various filters and even store their license codes within AppZapper. I have to say that license code management seems to me to be an odd addition to an uninstaller. There’s no synergy between the tasks of uninstalling applications that are no longer required and retrieving licensing details for those that are.

But that’s not my biggest issue with AppZapper. To me, whilst the application itself is extremely useful, the interface is completely redundant and, pretty as it is, it shouldn’t be there at all.

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Now this is a handy little hack. Over on the Mac OS X Hints site, robg has posted a script that will record the CPU usage of a specified process, with a configurable frequency over a configurable period of time. The script dumps the resulting data into a text file for further analysis/graphing.

I really like this. Very handy for debugging and keeping an eye on rogue processes. This script has a much smaller footprint than the Instruments program from the Xcode Developer Tools.

Because I’m a geek I thought it’d be “nice” to use GeekTool to tail -f my system.log onto my desktop. What an eye-opener that turned out to be.
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SheepShaver is a PowerPC emulator that runs under Mac OS X. It started life over 10 years ago as a commercial application for BeOS, but it is now open source and free. SheepShaver is a universal binary, so it runs natively on an Intel machine. SheepShaver lets you run any older system between Mac OS 8.5 and Mac OS 9.0.4.

I know that everybody and his dog has written an AppleScript for extracting currently playing track information from iTunes but, despite a little Googling, I didn’t find any that exactly suited my purposes. So, naturally, I went and rolled my own.

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Well that’s a first. In the four-plus years that I’ve been running OS X, from “Tiger” to Leopard, I’ve never had the operating system bail out on me.

I wasn’t doing anything unusual. Nor was I taxing the machine to any great degree. I was running Photoshop — as can be seen from the screen capture — then I launched the “DigitalColor Meter” and OS X went off to Elysium.

Oh well, there’s a first time for everything.

Now this looks interesting. Recess is a PHP development framework based on the Model-View-Controller principle.

Enabling single-application mode means that you can quickly and easily build a custom list of visible applications, and that list is dynamic. In other words, you can achieve a lot of what you might use Spaces for, without having to switch between spaces or manage which applications show in which spaces.

The main advantage to this single-application mode is that clicking an application in the Dock has always brought all that application’s windows to the foreground. So, when I click Terminal’s icon in the Dock, not only do all other applications immediately disappear from view, I see the window for my local shells, the window for the remote shells on my mail server, and the window for the remote shells on my primary DNS server. These windows are exactly where I want them on the screen and there are no other windows cluttering up the view.

Become the proud owner of a high-end desktop “Mac” without paying the Apple Tax. A very cool project indeed.