Some stuff » mac os x

Disable Apple Mail attachment defaulting to inline

admin — Fri, 13 Nov 2015 01:19:50 +0000

Did you know that Apple Mail does the presumptuous thing of sending all images (and maybe other attachment types) as inline attachments, no matter what options you choose in the program, like attaching at the end of message, like making it “Windows-friendly” (as if it’s a Windows problem),…. Nor does any of the very typically low-quality “solutions” you’ll find by misunderstanding Apple users online help, like changing message type to plain text or running that one silly line on the command line

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool yes

Just look at that and think about what it does! None of those do anything at all.

But I found this today after much searching: OS X Mail – disable inline attachments, and it is indeed the only solution that works.

Edit: However, I can no longer recommend this Mail plug-in. Not only does it nag-screen for payment an hour or so after first using it, there is not even a way to uninstall it without manually going through the system. Given how difficult it is to cleanly remove .pkg installations on OS X, I consider this thing to be in terrible taste. Use at your own risk.

user input should take absolute precedence

admin — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 03:25:48 +0000

These and other silly “100% CPU” problems should not happen, first of all:

1. Mac OS X doesn’t know how to stop looping the CrashReporter process on repeated crashing apps.
2. 64-bit Linux kernel doesn’t know how to deal with full swap situation.

But more importantly, given that “100% CPU” situations will arise, why are OS’s designed in such a way that basic user inputs like mouse and keyboard aren’t given precedence at all times? Even just to catch some escape key combo to give the user a chance to correct the offending situation? I don’t believe for a moment that a small amount of computing time cannot be devoted solely to process user input at all times. If your computing resources cannot handle that, then cut out the other crap that’s going on. If the user wants to do something, listen to the user! Simple concept.

lessons from the PC era

admin — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 17:18:25 +0000

It’s interesting to consider the history of the PC and learn some lessons. The landscape of computing that we have now resulted from a sandwiching effect of cheaper and cheaper scientific workstations and more and more powerful consumer hobby kits (some say toys). By the mid 1980s, this trend was recognized and efforts were begun from both sides to capture the computing market. Today we know that the hobby kit lineage won, and as a result, most workstation companies eventually folded in the 2000s, though they survived for a while by clinging to the enterprise. (Incidently, IBM and HP did not, because they were large and diversified enough to do something about it.)

But this is not the whole story.

Look at how hobby kits finally became respectable: not with the ad-hoc hacked-up first iteration legacy which resulted in a 20-year detour through DOS/Windows 3.0, Apple II/Macintosh. People often say that the PC revolution began in 1975, but all the systems commonly used today do not go back that far, they trace back to de novo R&D from the late 1980s / early 1990s that attempted to emulate workstations rather than make toys. Besides NeXTstep, which became Mac OS X, there was NT OS/2, which later became Windows 2000. Even GNU/Linux, which is the most UNIX like of all, came out with its first distribution in 1993. This is remarkable. It means that toys could take over the world, but cheap hardware alone was not enough, blindly ported software wasn’t enough, hacked together software wasn’t enough, it had to be well-engineered software made specifically for the device and its new usage scenarios — something that wouldn’t have been known until people played long enough with the toys.

So today, we have mobile devices that are still consumer toys for the most part. But like an old movie, the gap between mobile devices and PC’s is closing; the case for PC’s and PC companies is increasingly enterprise customers; and attempts to shove a downgraded PC directly into a mobile form factor like Blackberry/Windows PDA’s and netbooks are not working as well as making toys more powerful. Some things don’t change. New usages like electronic payment, geolocation, and image search are clearly emerging from the toys, and there will be a second iteration of development that make mobile devices seriously useful. It won’t be through making them do all the things that can be done now on the PC though — that would be impossible — it will be through making them do things that make things now done on the PC obsolete, because there will be better ways. The next ten years should be interesting.