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Quick Look Folder and Zip plugins
Quick Look is a beautiful thing, and in my view practically itself worth the cost of admission to Leopard. Unfortunately, the more you get used to it, the more annoying it is when you get to a file format that Quick Look doesn't support. Fortunately, Apple was smart enough to design Quick Look with an open architecture that allows developers to write their own plugins and support more file formats, which Japanese developer Taiyo used to write two excellent plugins.The first addresses a serious annoyance with the default Quick Look implementation on folders. If you invoke Quick Look with a folder selected in the Finder you'll get...a picture of the folder icon. Frankly, that's pretty stupid. Taiyo's Folder Quick Look Plugin fixes this by displaying the folder's contents, which is how it should have been done in the first place. Likewise, Taiyo's Zip Quick Look Plugin displays the contents of zip files.I'm sure we'll be seeing more and more of these expansions of Quick Look in the days ahead, which will make this quintessential Leopard feature that much more useful. Both the Folder Quick Look Plugin and the Zip Quick Look Plugin are free downloads. Place them in your /Library/QuickLook/ or ~/Library/QuickLook/ folders and they should work immediately.[via Digg]
Removing .DS_Store files from archives
The marvelous Shaun T. Erickson tipped me off on a sweet way to remove .DS_Store files from your folders before you archive them. Those are the "invisible" files added by Finder on your Mac. He writes that it doesn't matter whether you zip or tar: if they are in the directory tree, they get picked up by the archive. He suggests running the following command from terminal, substituting the appropriate directory for "your_dir": find your_dir -type f -name .DS_Store -print0 | xargs -0 rm After, just tar or zip up your tree.
Pyro 1.6: Campfire client gains search, drag and drop file transfer enhancements and more
It's been over a year since we first mentioned Pyro, the powerful Mac OS X client for 37signals' Campfire web-based chat service for groups and businesses. While I personally didn't pick up a copy back then since I wasn't a Campfire user, I'm not entirely familiar with every change that has come since April '06. Still, even the most recent list of changes warrants Pyro another mention, especially since I'm looking at using Campfire for a few uses and projects. In addition to already offering a dashboard and central location for all your Campfire chats and displaying message status alerts in the Dock icon, check out what's new in Pyro 1.6: Any file type can be dragged onto Pyro to share in a Campfire chat Pyro will automatically zip a folder or .APP Dragging an image from a web browser will insert a URL for that image instead of uploading it Campfire's new sidebar search field now works in Pyro Support for the new WebKit installed by Safari 3 beta (mentioned on the Pyro development blog) and of course, bug fixes As Campfire's example uses page details, there are a lot of great scenarios for such a slick web app, and Pyro looks like the perfect tool to bring together the coolness of Campfire with the power of Mac OS X. Surprisingly, Pyro is still offered free, and even though Campfire primarily focuses on business users by offering a few paid accounts, it too has a free account with which you can register and tinker around to see if Campfire is right for your use.
Worldwide PS3 releases for the week of June 4th
Move along. Nothing to see here. Remember last week when I said June would be a much better month for game releases? Apparently I was wrong - with regards to the first week, at least. Check it out.US Games No new releases EU Games No new releases Asian Games No new releases Pretend Games Cutlery Wars XXIV: Quest for the Silver Teaspoon Honestly. There's nothing out for the PS3 this week. Anywhere. If you live in my mind, however, you can pick up the latest in the long running Cutlery Wars saga. Some people say that the quality has fallen as the series has continued, but don't let that stop you. Think of the teaspoons.Seriously, though. June will get better. We'll have a couple of games released next week and after that we've got titles like Singstar, The Darkness, Ninja Gaiden Sigma and FolksSoul to look forward to over the coming month or two.
Decompression done right with Unarchiver 1.6
Even though OS X includes a handy contextual menu for zipping and unzipping files, the decompression chores (handled by the BOMArchiveHelper.app tool, originally built for expanding components during software installs) aren't always managed as cleanly as one might like. The default behavior of the expander is to leave the original files intact after processing, leading to a phenomenon termed "zip litter" by a colleague. Blech.If you're seeking a zipless desktop, check out The Unarchiver by Dag Ågren, just updated to version 1.6. Built from the bones of an ancient Amiga decompression library, this Swiss Army knife can handle almost any format you can think of and probably a few you can't -- I'm personally very excited to crack open some DiskDoubler files that have been languishing on my old Bernoulli media. With the exception of the proprietary SITX archives, where you'll still need an instance of Stuffit Expander, this free tool can handle everything else.Thanks, Jeff!
More minor security flaws in Mac OS X
Security-Protocols has discovered a few more minor security issues in Mac OS X that mainly pertain to how the OS and a few of its apps handle images and opening zip archives. From a quick glance through the listed errors, they pretty much amount to crashing an app, though a couple of the Safari issues cause "the application to crash, and or may allow for an attacker to execute arbitrary code."Apple has been notified of the issues and will apparently be fixing them in the next security update. As Tim Gaden at Hawk Wings (where I found this) says: the classic advice of being careful about what attachments and links you open and click on should keep your Mac humming along just fine.
