Pixelmator

I’m not real big on image editing.  I’m not a photographer save for the random family photo, but every so often I need to do a little advanced image manipulation (typically for this site).  There are some great apps for the iPad that will allow you to manipulate photos, but may not be practical if you need to create or combine images.  Photoshop from Adobe will let you do just about anything with images, be it creating something from scratch or touching up photos, but that software requires big money to get your hands on a licensed copy.  If cost is a serious factor for you, there is a Mac OS X version of the open source image editing software GIMP available, but there are some caveats to that as well.

If you don’t mind spending a little money, and by a little I mean $60, then have a look at Pixelmator.  For only $60, there is a lot to it.  The UI is very clean and straight forward and I found it quick to use even with my seriously lacking image editing skills.  The one issue I had right away was the ability to draw basic shapes.  Of course you could try to free-hand sketch of a circle or square, but most of us are not that talented.  Luckily there are forums available to search through and ask questions.  Needless to say, my questions were answered after a quick skim through the forums and documentation.

The current version of Pixelmator is 1.6 (Nucleus) and has some serious improvements over the last version.  One in particular is 64-bit support.  You can download it for free and evaluate if for 30 days however there are a couple things to be aware of while doing so.  Images you save during the evaluation period will have a water mark and once your 30 days are up, you won’t be able to use the application unless you purchase a license key.  So, give it a try if your in the market for some image editing software for Mac OS X.

Update: Just used Pixelmator to create the site’s new logo!  Very cool program!

-Tim

Exposé

While playing with my new iMac this weekend I happened on a feature of Mac OS X Snow Leopard that, surprisingly, I hadn’t come across before.  For the record, I’m not new to Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) and one of the feature I quickly fell in love with in Leopard (10.5) was the introduction of Exposé.  The release of Snow Leopard brought a bit more sophistication to Exposé.  The obvious improvement I noticed was the more intuitive organization of windows upon activation.  To my surprise, Apple went a little bit further and I’ve only just come to realize it.  Exposé will now show the thumbnails of the windows that you have minimized to the Dock.  For all I know, this could have been introduced in 10.5 but it is still awesome regardless.

For those of you who are scratching your head, refer to the screenshot.  If you look closely at the image, you will see what looks like a recessed line towards the top of the image.  The line is the separator for the “maximized” windows (above the line) and the “minimized” windows (below the line).  In the example screenshot, the two thumbnails you see are two applications I had minimized (Screen Sharing and Safari).  As shown, if you move your mouse over one of the thumbnails, Exposé will give you a description of the thumbnail.  Pretty cool, huh?  Now if I can only break my long habit of Cmd+Tab to quickly switch between applications…

-Tim

Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Some of you may remember 10.6.3 breaking iChat on Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server.  Well,  it appears that the recent update to 10.6.4 from Apple yields the same results.  If you find yourself in the same boat as last time, fear not.  A simple fix is available:

sudo rm /private/var/jabberd/sqlite/jabberd2.db

Be sure to stop the iChat service in Server Admin first before you issue the above command.  Once issued, restart the service and you’ll be chatting again in no time.

-Tim

Cisco iPhone App

Every now and again, I like to run a search for “cisco” through Apple’s App Store.  My recent search came across this little beauty of an App.  Cisco has a couple other apps for iPhone on the App Store but this one will get the most use from me even though I have WebEX installed.  The Cisco App provides news, events, product updates, security advisories and more.  The app will also give you the ability to watch some of the product videos typically found at cisco.com.  So, grab yourself a copy if you are interested.

-Tim

I was the first one awake one weekend morning and saw it as a perfect time to have a nice cup of coffee and review some server logs and ensure everything is still working in proper order.  Every now and again, I’ll send test emails from my MobileMe email account to my domain account at timabbott.com.  After making some slight changes, I noticed that my email was not getting through.  A bit worried, I then sent an email from another account and was relieved to find that the message was delivered to my domain account immediately.  The question then became:  Why is my OS X Mail server not accepting mail from Apple?

Recipient address rejected: Service is unavailable;

A quick google of the above message lead me to this post on Apple’s discussion boards.  For those to lazy to click through, the thread discusses the greylisting feature in OS X 6.3 server as a means to combat spam.  While observing Mails behavior, I noticed that the messages I sent from MobileMe weren’t rejected, but simply delayed.  What’s more is that they weren’t stored locally on the server.  To provide that Mail’s spam filtering was the culprit, I temporarily turned off spam filtering.  At that point all email I sent from my MobileMe account was delivered immediately.  Re-enabling the feature caused my email to be delay by exactly one hour, which is was I now believe is the retry timer on Apple’s SMTP servers.  Now, I don’t have a problem with this feature but I do have a concern.  What if an email I want to receive is marked as spam by Mail and the sender’s server doesn’t try to deliver the message again?  Lost mail is my guess.  Luckily the nice folks at the Apple boards had a fix for that as well:

sudo pico /etc/postfix/main.cf

from

smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_sasl_authenticated permit_mynetworks reje ct_unauth_destination check_policy_service unix:private/policy permit

to

smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_sasl_authenticated permit_mynetworks reje ct_unauth_destination permit

So if you are running into the same issue then you basically have three options:

1. Disable spam filtering (bad idea).
2. Disable greylisting
3. Do nothing

Personally, option three has my vote.  I can live with the delay and if I’m informed by an organization that mail to my domain is getting bounced I’ll tell them that it is an anti-spam mechanism and that there server should retry.

-Tim