T=Machine

When you “upgrade” to Lion, be aware that Apple will silently wipe your “auto install / update” settings, and start aggressively downloading every update it can find for every Apple app you use.

In my case, this was gigabytes of data – I really don’t care (and don’t want) “upgrades” to PhotoBooth and other trash that Apple pre-installs. But, because Apple wants to force these on you, they’d already wasted large amounts of bandwidth (on my laptop – on a desktop broadband connection, I wouldn’t care), and reduced my internet browsing for a few days before I found this out.

So … when you upgrade … remember to open “Software Updater”, and change the setting (that Apple has overwritten), back to “don’t check automatically”. Sadly, there’s no setting for “don’t download stuff unless I tell you to” – but at least turning off the auto-check avoids this.

Filed under : fixing your desktop

0 Comment »

Adobe just doesn’t seem to get the message: the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader puts a NEW virus(*) on your desktop, and all the old methods for removing it … don’t work. I previously used this tip from 2010 to remove the virus, while still using the Adobe software installed on my machine, but it no longer works.

With OS X Lion, I’m now trying again with a new approach (through trial and error this seems it might work – but I’ll update this in a few months if the virus still hasn’t come back)

1. Open Finder
2. Search for “Adobe Updater”
3. Should be in an “Adobe Utilities” folder (if they had the chutzpah to call it “Adobe Viruses” I’d at least give them some credit for humour and outright shamelessness :))
4. Delete that app – move it to Trash
5. Empty the Trash (just in case it tries to run while hiding in the Trash – should be impossible, but with the back-door hacks Adobe’s already doing, you never know…)

(*) Adobe’s “Updater” has so far:

1. crashed my laptop (multiple times)
2. caused it to overheat to the point of hardware damage (laptop emits a screeching noise – that’s the hardware’s “emergency shutdown” warning)
3. stolen my internet bandwidth when I’m on 3G modem, costing me money, and preventing me from using my own machine

This app cannot be disabled, the web is full of people complaining and begging Adobe to get rid of it, it’s installed secretly (the user is not informed it exists, let alone asked if they want it), and it has NOTHING TO DO WITH the actual app I installed.

What do you reckon? To me, that sounds closer to a virus than anything else. I don’t for a moment believe that Adobe is unaware of the amount of hatred it instils in their customers…

Filed under : fixing your desktop

1 Comment »

… It removes one of the most valuable features of OS X for laptop owners:

OS x lion WILL NOT recharge a plugged-in iPhone when the lid is closed (after 10 seconds of pretending to charge – just long enough to fool you – Apple cuts the power)

At conferences, on sales trips, on plane trips … I have relied on this feature many many times to recharge a phone off the laptop battery.

Now?

Denied.

No user setting for it (that I can find so far) just … Removed :(

Filed under : fixing your desktop

3 Comments »

Here’s ANOTHER overheating bug in Apple’s OS X.

This time, it’s the BlueTooth simulator built-in to the iOS Simulator (used every day by iPhone and iPad developers). The iOS5 version of the simulator has this crazy BT demon (process “BTServer”) that will sometimes – for no apparent reason – take up 100% CPU usage and melt your machine.

Solution:

1. Open terminal
2. Type: sudo vi “/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator5.0.sdk/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.BTServer.plist”
   • NOTE: the inverted commas are required, it seems
3. Enter your admin password for the machine (the file is locked to all except admin)
4. Use vi to change the 8th line to: <true/>
   • NOTE: the line immediately above should be: <key>Disabled</key>

Filed under : fixing your desktop

3 Comments »

UPDATE: So … it seems Suffusion has (buried deep inside the config) a way of displaying category pages with a higher-level workaround to the WP “missing feature”. Although so far I can’t find a way to set the settings on individual pages (which is what you generally need). So, I’ll leave this post up – it’s a good starting point for customizing Suffusion’s page-of-pages (which is also, it seems, how you would customize its Category pages.

Just to be clear, this is not a bug in Suffision, although it’s an oversight and I hope it’ll be included in a future version. The core problem is in WordPress: people have been requesting/expecting this feature for the past 5+ years, it’s pretty basic, but for now the WP folks haven’t added it.

Problem: List all the posts in a single category

This is VERY frequently requested by WP users: you want to have a Page on your site which lists the posts that are in a single Category.

WP has a very low-level way of doing this – which is very error-prone, hard to maintain (it’s hard-coded to database ID’s!), and requires you to break every single theme you own. Every time the theme is updated, you have to manually re-implement the fix!

Fortunately, there’s a minimal workaround (which is documented in the WP docs now (scroll to bottom)) which still (!) requires some theme editing.

Fortunately, Suffusion already has most of this workaround implemented, so we can make the fix without screwing around with the theme so much. The source code in Suffusion is almost identical to the sample provided by WP – but unfortunately it’s missing a key part. In Suffusion, you CAN list posts on a Page, but you CANNOT filter those posts by category.

Solution: Combine WP’s source with Suffusion, with a bit of safety improvement

So, edit the file “posts.php”, titled (in Suffusion): “Page of Posts”.

Where it has these lines:

$args = array(
	'orderby' => 'date',
	'order' => 'DESC',
	'paged' => $paged,
);

…instead copy/paste the following:

$category_exclusive = get_post_meta($posts[0]->ID, 'category', true );

if( $category_exclusive )
{
$cat = get_cat_ID($category_exclusive);
$args = array(
	'category__in' => array( $cat ),
	'orderby' => 'date',
	'order' => 'DESC',
	'paged' => $paged,
);
}
else
{
$args = array(
	'orderby' => 'date',
	'order' => 'DESC',
	'paged' => $paged,
);
}

Usage

As per WP’s official suggestion … if you want a page to filter by category:

1. Edit the page
2. Select the “Page of Posts” template (this is Suffusion specific; in other themes, it might not exist)
3. Add a “custom field” (scroll down on the edit screen), called “category”, with a value of the NAME of the category you want to be included

Explanation

One major thing here: We are being SAFE and non-destructive to the Suffusion theme.

Critically important is that we ONLY do a “filter by category” if the Page itself requests it. WP’s sample code does NOT have this protection (which is why the code above is slightly different).

This means that the rest of Suffusion (which doesn’t know about our new feature) is unaffected, and works as normal

Filed under : PHP, fixing your desktop, programming

3 Comments »

One of the features of Gmail that I’ve long relied upon is the:

“Default: Reply to all, instead of Reply”

In 95% of cases, this is correct – it’s only rarely that you want to actively remove everyone else from the conversation.

…but this stopped working shortly after Google+ came out. Coincidence? I’m not sure.

Certainly, it’s caused MASSES of problems – people being dropped from email conversations, with associated obvious problems e.g. not hearing that a meeting’s been re-arranged.

I’ve bug-reported it to Google, but going on previous experience, there will be just silence.

Filed under : fixing your desktop

5 Comments »

Today I finally discovered that the iPhone has StreetView.

That means it’s only taken me THREE YEARS to find this secret feature that Google has worked very hard to make sure no-one ever uses.

The best bit? The top two Google results for “iPhone Streetview” were both incorrect, and useless – but claimed to “solve” the problem (one of them was a Yahoo answer, the other a blog).

Eventually, courtesy of this amusingly-titled (yet poor in terms of Google hits) blog post, I found the solution:

1. There MUST be a pin on screen – either because:
   1. you did a search for a place, and Google has found it and created a pin
   2. you tapped the curled paper in bottom right, then pressed the “drop a pin” button (incidentally: instead of letting you “drop a pin”, that button arbitrarily sticks a non-moveable pin in the center of the (now-hidden) screen. Terrible UX and GUI design. Google’s designers: what were you thinking?)
2. The popup that’s attached to the pin has a standard button, and a standard icon – BUT THAT ICON IS NOT AN ICON
   1. …it’s an invisible button…

When we’re building iPhone apps for clients, this comes up typically once on every project: if you want to do custom user-interfaces, do NOT make them look like Apple standard interfaces. Apple has trained 200 million (total number of i* devices) to expect that (in this case: ) “a map-popup has exactly one button”. You are fighting against the work of one of the richest companies on the planet, a company famous for its marketing, interface-design, and visual-obsessions.

Worse is if you then go and break all the standards on what a “button” should look like, so that (in Google’s case), they:

1. Put something in the place that is reserved for a non-clickable icon
2. Used an icon-image instead of a button-image
3. Provided no other ways of triggering the feature…even though this is usually NOT the place the user would want to click to get that feature

I laughed out loud when I discovered this – 3 years it’s taken me to get this to work, and me a professional iPhone developer too! How long is it taking the average “normal” user? If nothing else had convinced me Google is fundamentally f***ed by their refusal to design for anything other than “engineers who are exactly like us (and the rest of you plebs don’t matter)”, this would have nailed it for me.

Filed under : Google? Doh!, android, fixing your desktop, funny, iphone

5 Comments »

Eclipse current version (3.7?) randomly chooses some of the fonts from the System Font settings – this strikes me as rather stupid: you are only “allowed” to customize 90% of the fonts.

Since OS X (10.6.7) still can’t render fonts correctly, when Eclipse grabs the system fonts, they’re often “wrong”.

In Eclipse, you can choose most of your fonts by hand, and choose the font size etc. Combining this with the fixes (1, 1) that force Apple to stop “blurring” every font, you can almost get a useable Eclipse on OS X.

Almost.

Because of the stupid design mistake I mentioned above, the Package Explorer font in Eclipse is “non-configurable”. You want to change it? Give up. Eclipse won’t allow you.

Options

If you’ve used my other fixes for OS X, you’ll have fonts rendering nicely – as long as they don’t get too small.

Eclipse is hard-coded to make the Package Explorer use a stupidly small font. You cannot fix this. It’s a bug in Eclipse that’s been around for a long long time.

On most platforms, this is fine – your system fonts can be resized.

Except on OS X, where the OS has such terrible font-support.

Because of these two bugs (OS X has bad fonts … Eclipse is hard-coded to use small fonts), if you “fix” your OS X fonts to work for most apps, they’ll be broken in Eclipse.

Disabling system-fonts in OS X

The nearest I’ve found is that you can force Eclipse to ignore the *some* of the system fonts, by editing this file:

[eclipse install folder]/configuration/config.ini

and adding the lines:

# Use system small fonts (Mac OS X only)
org.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts=false

Fixing the Log Output window

This one is relatively easy when you spot it: the ADT plugin ignores all the existing fonts in Eclipse, and sets it’s own unique font, for literally one panel only (the coloured log / console pane).

The official name for that pane is LogCat (incidentally, by default, Eclipse hides this pane – even though you absolutely need it while working with Android – you need to go to the Window/Show Perspectives menu and manually add it).

In the main settings for Eclipse … Android, there’s a section LogCat, where you can set the font. This doesn’t actually work – it’s got a bug, and will crash itself – but if you ignore the crash, and restart Eclipse, your changes will be honoured.

What would really be nice

…is if Eclipse added literally one option to their fonts dialog: an option to manually choose the “missing” hardcoded font. Then all would work great.

…or (much more unlikely), if Apple would fix their entire font-rendering system. Over the years, they’ve fiddled with it a few times. They *know* that it’s “technically correct for print-designers, but completely incorrect for many normal users” they *know* that users find it impossible to work with – but their solution so far is to keep removing features and options, and forcing all users to get a mediocre (or plain bad) experience. Hubris, I think.

Filed under : fixing your desktop

0 Comment »

Following my own install-guide from Jan 2011 (because Google didn’t provide one at the time)…

1. Google still doesn’t provide an install guide
2. Eclipse is a *little* clearer on what to download – but only slightly
3. Eclipse.app on Mac OS X is *still* broken
4. ADT is still “hidden” by Google for no good reason (my install guide still works)
5. Google still blocks you from downloading any “Android OS platform” (this is a core part of the SDK that is *not* included in the SDK – you need it to make Android apps)

(also, in passing, I updated the instructions to be a lot clearer / a bit more idiot-proof. I just used them to do a fresh install, and it went smoothly – with fewer problems than trying to use Google’s auto-installer)

EDIT: On the plus side:

1. My install guide spared me waiting for an extra 0.5Gb of Android OS platforms to download (I was able to copy/paste them on the hard-drive, no extra install work needed. Just don’t use the installer!)
2. ADT v 12 is noticeably more stable and better-integrated with the Android emulator – auto-starting smoothly where previous versions needed you to lead them through baby steps on first-run

Which means the key problem from a year ago still holds today:

Google is still effectively blocking you from using Source Control on Android projects

And they wonder why people still prefer the pain of working with Apple…

Filed under : android, fixing your desktop, programming

4 Comments »

Typical. Just as I finally brave the source code to Master of Mana (neé Fall From Heaven; the most popular / succesful mod for Civilization 4), and fix a major bug that’s bothered me for ages … the main server at masterofmana.com goes offline :(.

Anyway, if you’re playing the Fey, and you’re tired of the fact it becomes impossible after a certain point – when you put Faeries onto ships, they self-explode, turning the tile into land (usually Never-Never), here’s the fix. It’s especially bad for True White Faeries – which means “all of your top units” beyond a certain point in the game.

Edit the file:

[C:\ ... path to your Civ4 folder]\Beyond the Sword\Mods\Master of Mana\Assets\Python\Wildmana\Civs\CvFaeries.py

Find the following lines (very near the top):

		if pUnit.isHasPromotion(iPromWhite):
			iSnowChance=20
			if pUnit.plot().getOwner()==-1:
				iSnowChance+=-10
			if pUnit.plot().getOwner()==pUnit.getOwner():
				iSnowChance=-100
			if iSnowChance>CyGame().getSorenRandNum(100, "snow fall"):
				pUnit.plot().setTerrainType(iSnow,True,True)
			if pUnit.isHasPromotion(iPromGreen):
				if pUnit.plot().getFeatureType()==-1:
					if CyGame().getSorenRandNum(100, "Faerie plant trees") <= 75:
						pUnit.plot().setFeatureType(iForest, 1)
			if pUnit.isHasPromotion(iPromTrueWhite):
				pUnit.plot().setTerrainType(iNever,True,True)

		if pUnit.isHasPromotion(iPromTrueGreen):
			pUnit.plot().setFeatureType(iEternal, 0)

and replace them with this: (NB: because Civ4 is scripted in the horrid Python, you're going to have to be careful to get the indentation correct manually; Python is wonderful, except for this one feature - it makes sharing code changes like this much harder than it should be :( IMHO)

		if pUnit.plot().isLand():
			if pUnit.isHasPromotion(iPromWhite):
				iSnowChance=20
				if pUnit.plot().getOwner()==-1:
					iSnowChance+=-10
				if pUnit.plot().getOwner()==pUnit.getOwner():
					iSnowChance=-100
				if iSnowChance>CyGame().getSorenRandNum(100, "snow fall"):
					pUnit.plot().setTerrainType(iSnow,True,True)

			if pUnit.isHasPromotion(iPromGreen):
				if pUnit.plot().getFeatureType()==-1:
					if CyGame().getSorenRandNum(100, "Faerie plant trees") <= 75:
						pUnit.plot().setFeatureType(iForest, 1)

			if pUnit.isHasPromotion(iPromTrueWhite):
				pUnit.plot().setTerrainType(iNever,True,True)

			if pUnit.isHasPromotion(iPromTrueGreen):
				pUnit.plot().setFeatureType(iEternal, 0)

Yep - it's really that simple (insert one line, and re-indent the ones below):

"if you're at sea, don't turn the ground your ship is on into land. Because that will destroy the ship, you, and everyone else nearby"

I'm pretty sure it wasn't intended to do that - it would be an ultra-powerful ability to create land - automatically - instantly for the cost of a cheap ship and a level-1 faerie. If you really want to play that way (if you can be bothered), it's easy to create a Giant's Causeway like that in the current build of the game, making land out of the dead bodies of the Fey. But it's a very dull way to play, and it feels more like an innocent oversight...

PS...

If you're not playing Master of Mana, and wondering why anyone would care about a Mod for a game that originally shipped *almost 6 years ago*, then I strongly suggest you buy yourself a copy of Civ4 + Beyond the Sword expansion (usually bundled together for $30 or less), download MoM, and find out what you're missing.

The modded game is IMHO highly illegal - they stole art liberally from many many copyrighted sources - but the bulk of the content is their game-design, and that's fantastic. Many times better than many games released today - and (partly thanks to the lack of legal assets) the authors charge nothing for it.

The saddest / greatest thing about this IMHO is that 2KGames / Take Two did so little with this modding community. Beyond a few token steps (the dev team made the sensible decision to hire some of the leading mod authors, IIRC) they pretty much ignored it. They're making substantial money out of the mod authors - Civ4 should not still be selling as expensively as it does, and I'm sure this mod is the main reason it does - but they could have made a lot more. Look to Valve, and imagine what might have happened with a little more visionary leadership at Firaxis and Take Two...

Filed under : computer games, fixing your desktop, games design

7 Comments »

Mozilla has “pulled a Microsoft” and put in place a font renderer that makes all text horrible on anything except low-quality monitors. On Windows, you have to “disable hardware acceleration” in the preferences menu (what? you get to choose “slow browser” or “readable fonts”? That sucks).

On OS X … you’re just screwed. Everything is blurry. Some idiot decided to give the world a migraine… The only add-ons I’ve found that let you disable this madness are Windows-only.

I’ll update this post if I find a solution.

UPDATE: using TinkerTool, I’ve been able to globally change some of the OS X fonts, but not the ones that Firefox 5 is using. Still blurry. c.f. Finder, where I can change half the fonts (the time font on the right is Gill Sans, looks great; the font on left is the crappy Apple font that seems unchangeable)

Filed under : fixing your desktop

0 Comment »

Even with version 4, the epic 5-year-old bug that makes Firefox unusable on Mac with any page that uses fancy forms like TinyMCE (these days: an awful lot of them) is still unfixed:

“We’re going to have to back out the core fix to this bug because of bug 620906.”

Sob. And, of course, the main workaround that everyone used to use doesn’t work any more either, since the author of keyconfig stopped updating it – and, as far as I can tell, Firefox still doesn’t let you remove this stupid, broken keybinding manually.

EDIT: yes, I’m annoyed – I just lost a load of data because of this bug *again*.

Filed under : fixing your desktop

1 Comment »

If that’s what you *think* just happened, then check this:

1. Settings App
2. ..Mail, Calendar, etc
3. ….your Gmail account
4. ……the “Notes” slider; is is set to “off”?

If so, flip it to ON, find a working wifi / 3G signal, and your documents will miraculously re-appear.

For most people, there is no way they want Gmail ripping all their private documents off the iPad – but this is apprently how Apple stupidly coded the Notes app.

You don’t get a choice; if that slider is “ON”, all your private stuff is deleted locally and saved to Gmail. There’s no warning, no user-interface to tell you it’s doing this – everything is silent. There’s also – so far as I can tell – no way to “reclaim” your documents and get them put back on the iPad, where they belong. Where Apple pretended they were in the first place.

If you ever accidentally hit that switch, all your documents just vanish.

What happens if you have no network connectivity, or lose 3G signal? Again, it seems you lose your documents.

Moral of the story: never, ever trust software written by a hardware company that refuses software engineering standard practices.

Filed under : fixing your desktop

3 Comments »

…because Apple hates giving customer support, and buried this address deep in their website, in a tiny font where it’s almost impossible to find:

contactus.uk@euro.apple.com

…and they just screwed-up an order we’d made, but all their emails were sent from fake Apple email addresses (“You have replied to a confirmation-only address that cannot accept incoming email.”).

The only alternative they offered was an expensive pay-per-minute phone number. I’m obviously not one of the True Mac Faithful: I don’t agree that *I* should pay Apple to fix *their* mistakes :).

Filed under : fixing your desktop, iphone

2 Comments »

I use regexp a lot, very useful, but OS X has weak support for them – Apple’s products rarely support regexp for search/replace.

In particular, the latest version of Xcode (Xcode 4) has no support, which is tragic. So … I wrote an app that makes it fast and easy to do a search/replace with full regexp support.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/regular-expressions-helper/id429461864

BONUS: it does it all in realtime – so you can see the results as you type (useful if you’re not 100% sure of the syntax you’re using).

It just went live on the App Store, and it’s temporarily at $1 – grab it now, I’ll be putting the price up after the weekend. Here’s a teaser screenshot from the v1.1 that will go up soon:

Filed under : fixing your desktop

0 Comment »

OS X still has some fragility (or bugs?) in kernel-related code, it would seem. I just had my laptop go to 150% CPU usage … with no apps running. “top” showed that the rogue process was the core kernel process (PID 0) – i.e. only way to stop it is to reboot.

But I’ve noticed that some bugs related to the kernel can be “fixed” simply by hibernating and de-hibernating. e.g. with Wacom tablets, early versions of OS X 10.6 would often get “stuck” with the right-mouse-button permanently clicked. (IIRC, that got fixed around 10.6.3 – either by Apple or by Wacom)

So, I tried it today: close laptop lid, wait 1 second, re-open.

Magic! Kernel process un-f***ed itself, and system went back to normal. Many times simpler and quicker than rebooting :).

(EDIT: although … a few minutes later, I’m now seeing 0.5 second delays on keyboard interaction and mouse movement, every few seconds. Seems the OS X kernel is still FUBAR. Gah.)

Filed under : fixing your desktop

1 Comment »

Short story: if you try to do *any* iPhone development with a 1st/2nd/3rd gen Pro or Air right now, you may screw-up your laptop – massive overheating. I did. My Air is now almost unusable – thanks, Apple!

Apple is currently:

1. Forcing all iOS developers to use Xcode 4, even though it only went live 1 week ago
2. Forcing all Xcode 4 users to run OS X 10.6.6., even though it only went live a couple of months ago
3. …and 10.6.6 appears to have an overheating bug

For me, I installed the 10.6.6 update, and immediately my laptop went into massive overheat. Nothing brings the temperature down. Multiple processes are being run on high (up to 100%) CPU that normally do not show up, the load factor is enormous. CPU temperature over 80 celsius, with nothing but a single firefox window open. Sigh.

I believe this is a bug with the much-praised “make OS X use your dual-core CPU to Da Max” that came in recently. Only, that’s a really stupid idea on laptops, especially when running on battery, with no apps that need the CPU)

(NB: that was the same window, with the same tabs, as before I upgraded to 10.6.6 – I saved / restored the session. Whatever’s broken, the 10.6.6. upgrade currently seems the most likely cause)

Sadly, there’s no way out (can’t downgrade) and no way forward (no patches available yet).

i.e. the bad-old-days of Microsoft’s “auto-updates” and the critical bugs they often caused. At least Microsoft had the excuse they couldn’t test all 100,000,000 combinations of hardware – Apple doesn’t. They’ve only got a few hundred to worry about :(.

Filed under : fixing your desktop

9 Comments »

Sob. I just lost about a dozen incomplete/unsaved documents due to a bug in OS X.

Seems that sometimes, for no particular reason, OS X just deletes all your autosave information. (and … there’s plenty of threads about this on Apple.com and elsewhere. No response from Apple so far. Sigh)

No need to comment on this, really; everything that needs saying about an Autosave that doesn’t Auto-save is pretty self-evident.

Only one extra thought: you might as well disable Autosave on any Mac you have access to, at least until Apple fixes the bugs – it seems you *must* use a 3rd party solution instead, so why deceive yourself with the illusion that it’s safe otherwise? :). I wish I’d known this beforehand :(.

Filed under : fixing your desktop

0 Comment »

When you switch on your Mac…

Click on the network icon (e.g. the wifi icon for most people) and click “Turn Airport off”.

Then start Firefox.

Click on the network icon and select “Turn Airport on”.

You will find that Firefox starts up 10-100 times faster, with fewer crashes, and OS X will run faster, with fewer delays for the next couple of minutes.

Why? Firefox caching ain’t doing what it should be doing…although in some cases, I’m still not sure why

(rest snipped while I check in more detail what’s happening)

Filed under : fixing your desktop, programming

0 Comment »

Most professional artists don’t pay for their software (their employers do), and PSD files are the main interchange format for high-end graphics.

But PSD isn’t always possible to open or edit. Adobe’s crappy copy-protection refuses to run on some of my computers, and CS is far too damn expensive for mere mortals, so I can’t always use Photoshop to edit files.

OS X makes this a little easier – it has an excellent built-in image-and-PDF viewer (Preview) which effortlessly (and VERY fast) opens PSD files. It will even export those images to flat PNG, with a 100% success rate. But that’s no use when you’re doing complex graphics (e.g. designing GUIs for mobile-apps) and need to do layer-by-layer manipulation.

Free editors

I’ve tried many editors, both free and commercial, and I’ve found Inkscape (free) and Adobe’s Illustrator/Photoshop (expensive) to be the only ones worth mentioning. Inkscape works great on all major OS’s, too.

BUT … Inkscape still doesn’t support PSD files. This is pretty bizarre – except that Inkscape development has stalled / slowed to a crawl over the last 12 months, and I think they’re suffering the open-source problem of a temporary (long) drout in volunteers.

(interestingly, Firefox is about to release a new version of the browser that displays SVG files natively. SVG is the file format that Inkscape was “invented” for editing – so I suspect Inkscape will see a surge in interest during 2011)

NB: please don’t mention the GIMP. Even the latest version can’t handle simple PSD files – despite that being a “feature” of the app for almost a decade now, it still *doesn’t work*.

OpenOffice: world’s best image-file converter (!)

There are “conversion” programs out there, but they mostly all just use the same open-source backend (ImageMagick), which has long had problems with anything non-bitmap.

Then someone mentioned OpenOffice.

Huh? OO is a word process / excel spreadsheet / powerpoint replacement – why would I use that for a PSD?

Well … it turns out that OO has an excellent PSD importer built in – and, being OO, it happily exports to all major formats.

I tried some simple and complex PSD files, and where GIMP could open them all, but corrupted most of them … and conversion apps converted some, and for others just went blank … OpenOffice opened them all perfectly, and allowed me to save-out to the image-format of my choice.

EDIT: …this isn’t so perfect after all. OO has been collapsing the PSD layers on import for some of the files (maybe all). ARGH! But at least it’s opening files that the supposedly built-for-purpose software (like GIMP) fails on entirely.

Tis a bizarre and strange world – but at least I have a good, relatively quick, way of working with PSD files now, in those few situations where Photoshop isn’t available. And props to OpenOffice for being the one app that makes file import/export do what the *user* wants it to do, rather than propping-up anti-competitive business models and political ideals (which it often feels like the other apps are trying to do).

Filed under : fixing your desktop

0 Comment »