The latest non-beta version of Perian ["The swiss-army knife of QuickTime components"]is now available. This easy-to-install preference pane gives Apple Quicktime the ability to play many non-Apple encoded videos: DivX, 3ivx, Flash video, etc. And since QuickTime can play them, that means that apps powered by Quicktime — such as Front Row — can now play all of those formats.

There are other ways to get QuickTime playing those formats, but Perian is easy to install, easy to uninstall, and is under active development.

It’s kind of rude to speak about improving something before it’s even available, but I’m shopping for a new router now, so Apple’s Time Capsule caught my eye yesterday. I’ve been using Time Machine on my Leopard-powered laptop, but I find that I don’t remember to plug in the USB drive often enough for it to be rock-solid backup — so the idea of a wireless backup while I sleep sounds good. [Maybe I should just move my backup drive into my bedroom ... hmmm!]

Synced Apple Software Update
Here’s the killer feature I want: Apple Software Update should use your Time Capsule as a proxy and storage device; all patches you download should be saved on your Time Capsule [for a period of time you specify] and other computers on your network should pull the updates off your Time Capsule instead of from the internet [after checking for newer versions, of course.] This will speed up installs and reinstalls in general [reinstall OSX from CD, hit Software Update, pull all the previously-downloaded updates down from your Time Capsule.]

I’ve wanted this sort of feature ever since I had two Macs on my desk at the same time, but didn’t think it would be easily possible within small networks without a lot of hackery — this seems like the perfect opportunity for Apple to make what seems like a good product even better. Further, this could be used for sysadmins to restrict access to updates until they’ve verified that they don’t cause issues with specific computers or third party software.

Backup to Time Capsule, Reinstall, Migrate
When I told Eleanor about this idea, she immediately thought of a further version: modify the OSX installer to detect Time Capsules, and offer an opportunity to backup/install/migrate in one fell swoop. Configure the options as you want, then walk away for a few hours and come back to your reinstalled OS with all your settings. Maybe it could even look at the Synced Apple Software Updates on your Time Capsule and install them too, if you want…

Sparkle Stuff
Sparkle is an application updating mechanism that is embedded inside many OSX apps – Adium, Cyberduck, and SubEthaEdit, for example. Wouldn’t it be great if the same Synced Update functionality worked for these apps, too? And if there was some global updating application you could fire up that would detect all your Sparkle-using apps and check them for updates all at once, then leave those updates on your Time Capsule so you could quickly grab them on your other computers afterwards? I’d love it.

NetNewsWire is a great RSS client for OSX. It was acquired by NewsGator in late 2005, and since then has continued to improve and be awesome-r.

And now, it’s free, along with NewsGator’s other consumer products, including a RSS client for Windows, an RSS Outlook plugin, and a RSS client for some PDA platforms. NetNewsWire creator Brent Simmons is very pleased with this new direction.

I’ve been a happy paying user of NNW since early 2005, and it’s very cool that more people will be exposed to it from now on.

I tried installing Leopard a few weeks ago on my main production machine. The machine needed a reinstall anyway, to clear up over a year’s worth of cruft, so I figured I may as well upgrade to Leopard at the same time. The first week or more was fine, and then InDesign CS2 spontaneously developed a problem — it would crash whenever the “file open/file save/etc” dialog would open. I switched over to using the “Adobe Dialog” for awhile, but that didn’t consistently fix the problem. I did the usual InDesign fixing steps: deleting preferences, making sure the drives didn’t have errors, etc. Deleting prefs would temporarily fix things, but a few hours later the problem would reoccur.

So last night I backed the drive up, reinstalled Leopard, and reinstalled just CS2 and a few other minor essential apps. It worked fine, again, for a few hours … and then it developed the exact same problem.

Leopard has been [mostly] fine and fun on my laptop, but I don’t have time to dicker around with my main production machine. It’s just not ready for my prime time: whether that’s the fault of Apple or Adobe, I don’t care. I’m reinstalling Tiger now.

Some months ago I posted about deep/safe sleep does not work on my MacBook Pro under 10.4.10. I finally got around to testing it on Leopard today, and surprise surprise, it “works” in an even lesser way than before; there’s no sign at all that it’s restoring from the saved image, and the only part of the computer that works is the power button.

This doesn’t actually bother me all that much, because I very rarely get into a situation where I run my battery all the way down, but I’m sure it bothers some people.

What really bothers me is my DVD-R stubbornly refusing to burn any dual layer DVDs, but it seems like only about 2.3 billion people have this problem, so Apple can’t be damned to fix it.

I’m dorking around with OmniFocus, a new GTD [Getting Things Done] app. Seems pretty slick so far! I’ve found that GTD has yet to survive the extreme time crunches I get into sometimes, but there’s always room to improve productivity.

I didn’t really notice until I upgraded to a new larger monitor a few months ago that the icon for Apple’s Preview application is of a young child holding up a fish. Cue instant revulsion — I don’t like children randomly showing up in iconography that does not directly relate to children. So I jumped into Photoshop and got rid of the young child, replacing him with a delicious redhead. Much better!

However, it would be much cooler if, the first time one launched Preview, it also fired up Photobooth and took a couple snapshots [or let you feed it previously-existing snapshots] and integrated them into the Preview icon, properly blending/blurring them under the thumbtack, and then instantly installing that icon for you.

The first patch is out, and it seems boring but didn’t make my MacBook Pro explode.

The OSX 10.4.11 update brings the final version of Safari 3 [minus webclips!] to Tiger users, and if you have the Windows beta installed, Apple Software Update will offer you Safari 3 for Windows, as well. It doesn’t seem to be available for Windows on apple.com, yet.

So, I think I fixed Wacky Leopard Bug #2, or, at least, the symptoms of it. The fix turned out to be simpler than I expected, as I simply had to reset the Keychain according to Apple’s instructions. Honestly, I’m not sure what this did or why the old keychain wouldn’t work, but in this situation, it’s not a big deal: there were few to no passwords saved on the computer. However, it is pretty strange to me that this situation happened during the bog-simple upgrade of the powerbook, which was running a virtually clean install of 10.4.10 before the upgrade.