In the year that has elapsed since I failed to explain why I was using PINE for email, I’ve switched to Apple Mail. Don’t ask.

Well, it’s been alright, but much to my regret the improved latency due to keystrokes only traveling around my local machine — instead of through the interweb and back as was the case with PINE on a remote machine — makes it almost justifiable. Almost.
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Lately I’ve been working on integrating (or, more accurately, attempting to integrate) the Python scripting language into some plugins for an application we develop plugins for. We’ve wrapped many libraries with varying levels of success, so this one wasn’t going to be much different. Or, so we thought. (more…)

People like their applications to work. Even better, they like them to work, even when things change. For the WinTel world, this isn’t a big deal (Vista aside ;), because the underlying CPU architecture hasn’t really changed, from a program’s point of view, in the past two decades. Unless you have a weird program that’s designed for AMD’s 3DNow! instruction set and you switch to an Intel CPU, or perhaps an application designed for a more esoteric old SIMD architecture, your application should run just fine (as long as your Operating System is ok with it).

Mac OS X doesn’t have the luxury of working on the same underlying CPU though, so things need to be handled a little bit differently. The solution Apple came up with was (more…)

For years, iPhoto users have been stuck using a limited number of email clients to send their photos easily. This was mostly remedied by the iPhoto Mailer Patcher, but it left out non-applescript aware applications because, after all, iPhoto uses applescript to interface with them. One of the more notable omissions is Thunderbird.

Finally, this void has also been filled, via the iPhoto Thunderbird Bridge. It’s still quite primitive, but all the basics are there for iPhoto-Thunderbird integration.

If you’re an iPhoto/Thunderbird user, give it a whirl.

NSSpeechSynthesizer, the Cocoa class responsible for giving applications a voice under OS X, is leaky. Creating and destroying thousands of instances of this class slowly consumes all the available memory in a system, leading to degrading performance and eventual application instability.

The disappointing part is that this bug was first noticed almost two years ago. (more…)

The Kineme Quartz Composer patches now have a proper home at http://kineme.net/, including forums, bug reports, comments, and feature requests — complete with voting!

Along with the new site, a few new patches are available as well based on requests from users.