Of course, none of these will be Papers for viewing journal PDFs, but still could be useful. It seems that File Magnet and Datacase both get A- scores for Macs. FileMagnet doesn’t work on Windows, and Datacase gets a B+ on Windows. However, since Mac users are the ones reading this site, the Windows score or compatibility shouldn’t matter too much.

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.

Hmm, this is disappointing. The author of star-map says, in regards to controlling telescopes,

Do you plan to control telescopes with Starmap? This is technically possible to control telescope mounts with Starmap. I have made some successful tests through wifi (Skywatcher EQ6). However, following the agreement with Apple, no public application controlling mechanical devices will be released.

This is a tad surprising, since according to the NY Times this morning:

Instead, [the iFund venture capital fund] is backing, among others, iControl Networks, which is creating an application to let homeowners turn off their lights and alarms at home, as well as monitor security cameras, via their iPhones.

Indeed, iControl is listed in the App store. Perhaps turning off a light is different than moving around telescopes? I can’t say I quite get it.

Update There is at least one other similar program – iAstronomica. This one is $20, rather than $12 for Starmap. Be advised that apparently once you click “buy” that’s it – no warning, no shopping cart – so click carefully.

Update 2 The popular Clear Sky Clock also has an iPhone App version. It occurs to me that, astronomy being something that occurs in remote parts of the country, it may be hard to get online out there. the aforementioned programs carry their data with them, but the Clear Sky Clock will clearly need either EDGE/3G/WiFi to be of use.

Update 3 Indeed, as my commenter notes, there are other apps in this category as well. Uranus (iTunes Link), and GoSkyWatch Planetarium (iTunes Link). I think the app store needs some sort of demo/shareware option, where the program will work for a week or so at least. Hopefully someone will review all of these.

Anyway, so Happy Birthday MacOS X, from all of us here at Mac Singularity.

Also, for people interested in patching X11 to the latest updates ahead of Apple’s official deployment via software update there is a “quick install” script at the XDarwin wiki that should help that process along.

Also this forum at macosxhints contains a summary of a lot of recent developments that have been peculating on the mailing list.

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.

You can buy Leopard from Amazon using my affiliate links and, to borrow a term from Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, make me rich. Amazon’s price is actually better than the higher educational price (which is only discounted to $116, lame – it used to be reduced to like $79 or thereabouts.)

Leopard Single License – $109

Leopard Family Pack – $189

Well, SSH Tunneling (Port Forwarding)[sic] is great, clear, explanation of how to use SSH tunneling to directly connect to an ssh-enabled machine that doesn’t allow ssh connections from people offsite/off-campus, etc. It shows how, even when you can only access the work machine through the “gateway” machine (a situation I face here at UF), that you can setup an ssh tunnel through the gateway machine to access your work machine directly.

The best part about this? I can now use sftp (specifically fugu and its ability to edit external text files in TextWrangler) on my work quad core mac from home. I always knew this sort of thing was possible but … now at last I’ve figured out how to do it!

Update Oh, it gets so much better. Because in addition of using port 22 to forward ssh to your work machine, you can also forward port 548 (appleshare).

So, a variation on the tip from the site would be like so (where work is the Mac on your desk that has ssh and appleshare running (actually for this tip, your Mac only need be running file sharing, not ssh) and gateway is the one machine you’re allowed to ssh into from off-campus.

    ssh  -l myuserid  -L 7778:work:548 gateway cat -

Then minimize this terminal window, and then use the Finder to “Connect to Server” in the Go menu. Enter “localhost:7778″ as the server address and boom, you should see the standard apple file sharing login window for your work machine. Enter your user name, password, and choose what you want to mount. Nice. (I use 7778 here, but you could use 7777. Obviously, if you use 7777 for forwarding port 22, you need to use a different port to forward 548).

 defaults write com.apple.x11 wm_click_through -bool true

Frank Varosi here at UF gave me this tip, which he found at this french site. What this command does is it changes a window manager preference in Apple’s X11. This probably only effects the so-called “Quartz VM” which is the default window manager. If you switched to the enlightenment or some other window manager, my guess is this click-through preference has no effect, but I can’t say for sure.

Personally, I’ve yet to write IDL programs that look for the cursor location, but I figure this may be helpful to others.

Update As a commenter noted, you will have to restart X11 for this to do anything, since it’s changing a preference in Apple’s quartz-vm window manager.

Update II As commenter Josh Shiode noted, the Macosforge X11 (and possibly any X11 with Leopard) requires a slightly different command:

        defaults write org.x.x11 wmclickthrough -bool true