A friend recently needed a Fortran compiler, and I pointed her to the useful high performance computing. However, things didn’t work and that’s because the program also needed to Apple’s developer tools – which include a compiler, etc. – to install properly.
Xcode is usually included somewhere when you buy a new Mac. Either a disc image hiding somewhere on the hard drive or on the DVD that came with your machine. If all those things fail, or you don’t want to look around, it’s also available at the ADC site for free. You simply must register for free ADC “Online Membership.” The advantage of downloading is that you will get the latest version. Be advised to make sure you’re getting a version of Xcode that works on your version of OS X.
The latest Xcode runs on the latest OS X, so today that means that Xcode 3.1 works on Leopard only. You should be able to find an older version for Tiger.
At the web site, look for Developer Tools and then Xcode 3.1.
The only real trick after downloading them and installing them is to customize the install, and I only do this to save disk space. But unless you’re going to develop a real Mac OS X app, you don’t need all the documentation and examples. It’ll save you about half a gigabyte. You want to uncheck “Core Reference Library” and be sure that the “UNIX Development Support” is checked.
Tags: apple, compiler, Leopard, unix, xcode — .
The PDF tracking software Papers is now up to version 1.8. It includes support for NASA ADS and other search engines and I have mentioned it in the past now and then.
This update to 1.8 may have happened some time ago, but the program continues to be improved and I think becomes more useful with each update.
Tags: ADS, papers, pdfs — .
Macworld | Editors’ Notes | OS X turns VII – Yes I bought OS X 10.0, and no I couldn’t do much of anything with it – it was too slow. When 10.1 came out a few weeks later though, you could definitely sense the way the Mac was going and clearly it’s been a great ride for Apple and OS X fans over the years. Now we see OS X working it’s way onto iPhones and iPods – no one would have guessed that 7 years ago.
Anyway, so Happy Birthday MacOS X, from all of us here at Mac Singularity.
Tags: apple, OS X — .
Papers now looks to be the killer app for finding and organizing PDFs of journal papers in astronomy. I’ll need to check out the bibtex export ability and such of it, but it was already quite handy and with ADS and arXiv now bulit-in; it’s even better.
Via a comment from the authors on the old Paper post.
As an aside, Macbooks and Macbook Pros dominated the AAS convention in Austin, perhaps even more so than usual. One of these years I should just do an entrance poll into the exhibit hall at AAS and ask people what platform they use. What do you all think, 60-70% Macs now? Surely something like that among laptop usage, but I would imagine there is still plenty of Linux on desktop machines.
Tags: ADS, arxiv, bibtex, journal articles, papers, pdfs — .
Ok, so I’ve obviously been doing a lot of Leopard posts. I’ll try to round things up here.
I should say that if you’re upgrading, uninstall unsanity’s “application enhancer” and be advised that it may be installed by some other utility you use – I think it appears as a preference pane if it’s installed. Old versions seem to cause some problems with Leopard. I stay away from things like Application Enhancer for this reason. Oh, the Logitech Control Center foolishly installs APE and so you may have it without knowing it. I have never installed any 3rd party mouse drivers – I just plug in their mice and it works so I never knew what the drivers would do.
Personally, I think Leopard is a great upgrade. As John Gruber pointed out, it’s almost a death by 1000 cuts approach. Yeah, there are big new features like Time Machine and Spaces but there are lots of small improvements in a lot of ways. The new Network system preference pane, the new Software Update (with a “not now” option for restarts). The most comprehensive review (which still doesn’t touch on everything new) is of course John Siracusa’s at Ars Technica, which also talks about the additional abilities added for developers.
Time Machine makes it absurdly easy for backing up, even with a laptop. Every time I plug in the firewire drive Time Machine immediately starts churning and does a backup and it usually is over in a few minutes. I thought Synk was easy but this is even easier. I like the data detectors ability in Mail for adding events to iCal. Spotlight is much faster. I’m starting to miss features from Leopard when I come to work to my Mac Pro so … that’s usually a good sign. However, stacks are annoying (especially since the icon for a folder in the dock now can be especially meaningless and indistinguishable).
The biggest problem to astronomers is that all this X11 business is annoying for those of us who use X11 a lot. I think in the long term this move to a new codebase, etc. will be positive but for now, for me, the problem with no full screen X11 is a deal breaker. I’m going to try the revert-to-Tiger X11 tonight and see how that works. Hopefully, we’ll see improvements to X11.app shortly in Leopard itself. If you don’t use Leopard full screen, there are still some things are still buggy in Leopard. Namely, there seem to problem with the “Application” menu, an xterm always launches, and some programs (like ds9) don’t like the DISPLAY variable trickery that X11.app now uses. And, X11 doesn’t seem to play nicely with Spaces.
However, the upside is that you can use the Terminal.app to launch x11 programs now without weird crashes about DISPLAY not found or whatever. I think eventually this will go well, but for now Leopard’s X11 has some problem. I wish they had just held back on the changes until everything was up and running.
So, if you’re in the middle of some X11-intensive project, I wouldn’t go buy Leopard and install it today, as you may encounter some unexpected bumps. I put Leopard on my Macbook which pretty much does no IRAF or IDL these days so my astronomical productivity is unaffected.
Tags: apple, Leopard, OS X — .
Updated at the bottom | Second Update
So, here’s the quasi-official word from Ben Byer, one of Apple’s x11 developers on Apple’s x11-users list.
Biggest architectural change in Leopard for X11: Switched from XFree86 codebase (based on, IIRC, X11R6.8) to X.org codebase (X11R7.2)
Biggest user-visible change: launchd support for X11. The only situation where you should need to manually start X11.app is if you are only running remote X11 applications.
The way that this is accomplished is by some slight-of-hand with the $DISPLAY variable — if you look, it should be something like “/tmp/ launch-vbXRyu/:0″. If an X client connects to this, it will actually connect to launchd, which will start Xquartz if needed and pass the client’s socket to the server.
All of that should be invisible to you; the X client library (libX11.dylib) was modified to support this, and all X11 applications link against this library. “DISPLAY=:0″ would still work if X11.app is already running, but it will not trigger X11 to launch.
Two biggest bugs:
Fullscreen support is broken. I know many of you will hate me for this — it stopped working when we switched codebases, and I was unable to get it working again. I’m hoping that some of you developers may be able to help me us fix this. Until then, those of you who need this functionality should be able to use the X11 package from Tiger instead. (Yes, I know you can’t officially download that from www.apple.com — I would like to see that change and am working on making that happen; no ETA. You may be able to find a copy of it lying around somewhere.)
Do not start X11.app from the Dock. It will do strange things — you’ll get two icons. This is due to the aforementioned “launcher” in /Applications/Utilities/X11.app not being the same as the real server, which is now located at /usr/X11/X11.app.
I should also note that the DISPLAY variable mojo doesn’t seem to play nice with darwin ds9, since it looks like the ds9 launch script is checking the DISPLAY variable for something it likes.
You can use Tiger’s X11 on Leopard, and instructions for that have been written up here. Not too complicated but you’ll need a Tiger DVD of some kind.
Update Here is more on the history of Apple’s distribution of X11
Update II A pretty good summary of what’s going on with X11 is found at this post on the Macosxhints forum.
Tags: Leopard, unix, x11 — .
This Leopard review points out something that has troubled me since I first heard of Time Machine:
Unfortunately, Time Machine has a serious problem: there is no way (that I can find) to remove a file from a Time Machine backup. This is a pretty glaring omission. After all, Leopard has a “secure empty trash” feature that lets you throw away files so that they can’t be recovered with forensic tools. What’s the point of erasing a file on the hard drive and then overwriting the disk sectors seven times if Leopard is going to keep a copy of the file in the Time Machine backup?
Agreed. It seems like while handy to have backups, sometimes you just want a file totally gone. Though, I store anything sensitive (like financial items, etc.) on an encrypted disk image. However, if Time Machine is backing things up every hour – it could grab such a file before one has time to copy to a secure disk image. So, while you can turn Time Machine off for specific folders, etc – it’d still be nice to have some way to obliterate all copies of a file from the past, as well as the future.
You can delete all backups though I doubt they’re done “securely” with overwrites. See below.
Tags: backup software, security, time machine — .
