macosx « Irfan’s Corner on the Web

18May/090

Apple Mail Tip: Speed up your Apple Mail

Tim Gaden has documented an excellent tip to speed up Apple Mail.

It involves optimising the SQLite database Apple Mail uses to store indexes and subject lines of emails.

You can check your current 'envelope archive' size by entering this in the terminal:

ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index

Then to optimise it (cleans out stuff that has been marked for deletion but not actually deleted, defragments the structure, etc):

sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum;

Then check your envelope archive size again to see the results…

ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index

It compacted my envelope archive down from 55MB to 50MB — not a huge increase, but the speed difference was dramatic.

In particular, my 'sent mail' folder which had been taking 10 - 15 seconds to open (8,000 items) now only takes two or three seconds.

Read the full post and many informative comments here.

Tagged as: mac No Comments

17Mar/092

Impressive web-development features in Safari 4

Today I stumbled across some impressive web development features in Safari 4 (or are they WebKit features?).

When you right click and select "Inspect Element" the Web Inspector window opens.

SafariWebInspector1

The Web Inspector provides numerous features which facilitate web development. Some features I found useful:

Live HTML and CSS Editing: In the Elements tab, you can browse the entire page source and edit elements as well as CSS styles and preview them in the browser.
Web Page Profiling: Personally, I found the resources tab most useful. In a single view I found out that there are some images on my front page which take a considerable time to load.
Script Debugging: In the scripts tab, you can execute scripts in the page in debug mode.

Before discovering this, I used CSSEdit's web browser. CSSEdit's X-ray mode allows me to edit HTML and CSS and preview on live pages. Anyone aware of some other great web development tools for the mac?

Tagged as: Development 2 Comments

12Dec/080

Good PyObjc Tutorial

I've been looking for a good PyObjC Tutorial. The official Apple one is ages old and not comprehensive enough.

Fortunately the "An Epic Introduction to PyObjC and Cocoa" tutorial, is indeed an epic introduction to PyObjC and highly recommended for anyone planning to get started with Cocoa development in Python.

Tagged as: Cocoa, Development, mac No Comments

29Oct/080

Finders’ WebDAV sucks

The MacOSX 10.5.5's Finder sucks at handling WebDAV. I was at first glad to connect to the WebDAV server, but it can't sustain a connection while downloading something. After the connection is closed, I can't reconnect because Finder assumes that I'm still connected. The only way I can reconnect from finder is to kill the process manually from the terminal, then I can reconnect to the WebDAV server.

I have tried other WebDAV clients too, including CyberDuck, which seems to have some problems of its own. The best client by far is Transmit, so far it has always worked for me.

Filed under: apple, macosx No Comments

26Aug/080

JungleDisk: Backup your data on the Amazon S3 Cloud

I've been thinking for quite some time about creating an online storage system, similar to time machine but instead of backing up against an external HD, it backs up against a cloud service such as aws.amazon.com/s3 S3, in order to provide worldwide availability to my data.

Its a pretty neat idea, and today I realized that it had already been done, and done with class its called JungleDisk. JungleDisk for a low fee of $20 allows you to download a client, it supports Mac, Windows and Linux and allows you to backup using the S3 Cloud.

The OSX client, allows you to seamlessly backup at regular intervals, or/and use your S3 account as a network attached storage device. S3 is cheap: 1GB/month costs only 0.15$. So if I where to backup my home directory, currently 100 something GB, I calculated it would only cost me round £100 to keep it on amazon/annually.

I'm keeping my 1TB external storage for time machine for now, I think JungleDisk would be very useful if I were to move/travel abroad then I could keep my backup on S3, and in any contingencies restore when I'm in need.

Another good online Backup software is Carbonite.

Filed under: apple, macosx No Comments

2Aug/083

Convert MKV to IPOD/IPhone format without using the command line in Mac OSX

Quicktime natively doesn't support MKV, which is becoming an increasingly popular format to exchange videos in.

To achieve the seamless conversion of mkv to ipod format follow the following steps (you need Quicktime Pro for this).

1. Go to this site, and install Perian. Perian is a "swiss army" knife for Quicktime, it supports numerous file formats

2. After installing Perian, open the mkv file in Quicktime (you may need to restart quicktime).

3. Go to File->Export select Movie to Ipod, and your done!

Tagged as: Leopard, quicktime, Untitled 3 Comments

23Jul/080

How Leopard Shows Windows PCs in Finder

Today I realized how Leopard shows Windows PCs in the network in Finder. I found it a little funny.

Picture 1.png

A closer look:

Picture 2.png

Tagged as: Leopard No Comments

21Jun/080

Firefox 3 has problems in some long websites

I love the current release of firefox 3, there is only one thing that is bothering a lot:

Since I've started using firefox 3 I can't properly browse long pages. Firefox 3 seems to stutter when browsing long pages which severely impacts my experience on those websites. I've created this video to show what I mean, I opened reddit and tried browsing using Firefox3 at first, and then Safari. You would notice a stark difference in the really fast browsing in Safari compared to the stuttered experience in Firefox3.

The system I'm using a Macbook pro with 2.4 Ghz, 4GB RAM and Leopard 10.5.3.