In LA

To use iChatAV, you’ll either need a free .mac or free AIM ID. Here’s how to get an AIM ID and how to set it up for use with iChatAV:

1. Go to www.aim.com in your favorite web browser.
2. 
   Find and click the “Get a Screen Name” link on the AIM web page. Right now it’s at the upper right of the page. Don’t bother with the much more prominent links on the page to install AOL’s lame AIM software.
3. Follow the prompts to make an AIM screen name. Your screen name has to be unique, and you won’t be able to register as your first name alone because there are probably thousands of people who got there first. If you don’t want to end up with the kind of unique but random-number-encumbered and difficult-to-remember screen name that the form will suggest to you, such as “James4258″, you might try include your last name. You can of course skip using your name entirely and do whatever you like. Be sure to choose a password you can remember. You’re not likely to conduct financial transactions over iChatAV, so the password really doesn’t have to be very secure in my opinion.
4. 
   iChat icon
   Find the iChatAV icon in your dock and click it to launch iChatAV. If you have removed iChatAV from your dock, you’ll need to open up your /Applications folder and find it.
5. 
   
   iChatAV will pop up a window boasting of its greatness and regaling you with tales of its many heroic deeds. Hit the ‘Continue’ button.
6. 
   click the image to see a larger version
   Now iChatAV will present you with a form. Click the popup menu and select ‘AIM Account’ so that iChatAV knows you’re entering an AIM screen name and not a .mac ID. Enter all your info, then hit the ‘Continue’ button.
   
7. Time to skip through a few more forms without doing any more setup. iChatAV will provide you with a form to “Set up Jabber Instant Messaging”. You can skip this and hit the ‘Continue’ button. Just hit the ‘Continue’ button to skip through the next form as well, the one that asks “Do you want to turn on Bonjour Messaging?”. The next screen will show you an image of yourself if your computer has a camera, hit ‘Continue’ to skip ahead.
8. Hit the ‘Done’ button and iChatAV will launch. You’ll see a ‘Buddy List’ window. Once you add some buddies to your list, this is where you’ll see that their online and available for a chat. There’s a nice document at Apple which explains how to add buddies to your buddy list, among other tips for using iChatAV.

See you on iChat!

Apple released their web browser, Safari, for Windows a couple of days ago, and since then it has been downloaded over a million times. I’d love to know why all those people downloaded it. Was the reason:

• curiosity
• they’re running OS X on their other computer and like Safari
• features
• performance
• security
• to test web pages for browser compatibility
• because they’re playing the game “Steve Jobs says”

Speaking for myself, I downloaded it out of curiosity, and ran it for a few minutes on Chinese Windows XP running under Parallels Desktop (running an Apple app inside of Windows on a Mac - kind of like making turducken out of fruit and building materials). It seemed fine for browsing, I remember feeling that it looked better typography-wise than IE or Firefox on Windows, but I didn’t quantify that feeling with any testing. A million downloads in two days is a big number, I’d love to know the reason why Jane Doe Windows user would download Safari rather than or in addition to Firefox or IE7. I’d also love to know why Apple released Safari for Windows –does Apple feel that releasing a browser for Windows with a bit of a Mac look and feel will attract more people to switch over to OS X?

A Chinese mac developer named Feng Huajun has made a Chinese pinyin input method for the mac called “Fun Input Toy” (henceforth FiT). According to a blog post I read on the www, it is a big improvement on the standard Mac input method. I don’t know if my Chinese is at the level where I can really tell the difference, but I tried FiT out and it seemed to me that it predicted my input better than the ITABC method that ships with OS X, and it also allowed me to type full sentences at a time.

Those of you who have never tried to type a non-phonetic language into your computer might find that last paragraph to be unintelligible. The basic idea is that, in order to enter Chinese ideographs (characters) from a keyboard that doesn’t have tens of thousands of keys, you instead type in the pronunciation of each character. As you type the sounds of the words, the computer checks these against a database and starts replacing the syllables with its best guess at the appropriate character. A good input method will notice combinations of syllables that make up common words and phrases, and will also remember words you use most frequently and will present those to you first when you are asked to select from a long list of identical sounding words that match what you’ve typed. It all works better than you might think.

For example, to type this phrase that my sister knows well (her standard phrase when she worked at a Chinese hospital for a few weeks), I switch to the FiT input method and start typing the sounds using the pinyin romanization system:

Notice that FiT has guessed each character or phrase as I’ve gone along. If I hit the ‘1′ key, it’ll convert the text I’ve entered to this string of Chinese text “你的小儿是很漂亮”. The other options are there in case when I began typing I really meant to enter one of the other characters that sound like “ni”. If I choose say character #6, FiT will just replace the first character of my text with that choice and will go on to try and match the rest of the sentence:

That’s much more like the experience of using OS X’s built-in ITABC input method, which requires you to choose character or phrase by phrase. It’s very nice that FiT lets you type a lot more, and shows you the options as you type. So if you use a Mac, and enter Chinese, you would do well to try the free FiT input method. Kudos to Feng Huajun for releasing it. It appears to be superior to the input method that came on your machine by default.

I’ve been using Apple’s mail application for a while, and I like it, but it has been getting slower and slower over time. It turns out that the culprit, according to comments on the Hawk Wings blog, is that the “envelope” sqlite database that Mail.app uses can become larger than necessary, full of empty space left behind when objects have been dropped, and a simple command executed in the terminal reorganizes the data structures. The process (which involves the sqlite command “vacuum”) is analogous to defragmenting a disk.

Following the directions on that web site, I quit the Mail application. I then opened Terminal and ran the following optional command so that I could see the size of Mail’s Envelope database before and after the cleanup:

% ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index -rw-r–r– 1 zach zach 42M Mar 6 00:55 /Users/zach/Library/Mail/Envelope Index I then ran the actual cleanup command: % sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum index; That took about a minute. I then again checked the size of the Envelope Index: % ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index -rw-r–r– 1 zach zach 25M Mar 6 01:07 /Users/zach/Library/Mail/Envelope Index

Hot damn! The database dropped in size from 42Mb down to 25Mb. I ran Mail, and it popped up near instantaneously. Wouldn’t you know, it is now lightning fast to open folders full of thousands of messages. Before I “vacuumed” the Envelope index, such a folder might have taken upwards of 10 seconds to open.

If you’re running OS X Tiger and have been using Apple’s Mail application, do yourself a favor and try running the commands to “vacuum” Mail’s Envelope Index. If Mail.app has been slow, you may be shocked by the increase in speed. At the very least, you’ll recover a bit of disk space.

This is a cool hint from lifehacker.com — you can create a del.icio.us search for funny videos in quicktime format, and then subscribe to the RSS feed of that search with iTunes. The end result is that whenever iTunes updates your subscribed podcasts, you get the latest funny quicktime files downloaded automatically to your computer and to your ipod if it’s one of them newfangled ones that play video. Pretty darned cool.

The URL you subscribe to in iTunes looks like:

http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/system:filetype:mov+funny

Well, what do you know. Someone named June Tate wrote a very nice dashboard widget for posting to blogs called DashBlog. So I just installed it, configured it, and now I’m a posting. Purty darned cool, and it even checks spellling while you type…the sort of feature mac apps get with little additional code. Very nice.