Now, hard drives and bandwidth may be cheap, but when you have four hundred plus attendees all trying to download the same 175MB PDF at the same time, the venue’s conference manager will drop by to find out what the bleeding eyestalks your attendees are doing and why it’s taking down the entire outbound pipe. Not to mention the network will grind to a nearly complete halt. Whatever you personally may think of net access at conferences, at this point, not providing net access is roughly akin to not providing functioning bathrooms.

So what’s the answer? ShrinkIt is fine if the slides use lots of vectors and you’re running Snow Leopard. If the slides use lots of bitmapped images, or you’re not on Snow Leopard, ShrinkIt can’t help you.

If the slides are image-heavy, then you can always load the PDF into Preview and then do a “Save As…” where you select the “Reduce File Size” Quartz filter. That will indeed drastically shrink the file size—that 175MB PDF goes down to 13MB—but it can also make the slides look thoroughly awful. That’s because the filter achieves its file size reduction by scaling all the images down by at least 50% and to no more than 512 pixels on a side, plus it uses aggressive JPEG compression. So not only are the images infested with compression artifacts, they also tend to get that lovely up-scaling blur. Bleah.

I Googled around a bit and found “Quality reduced file size in Mac OS X Preview from early 2006. There I discovered that anyone can create their own Quartz filters, which was the key I needed. Thus armed with knowledge, I set about creating a filter that struck, in my estimation, a reasonable balance between image quality and file size reduction. And I think I’ve found it. That 175MB PDF gets taken down to 34MB with what I created.

If you’d like to experience this size reduction for yourself (and how’s that for an inversion of common spam tropes?) it’s pretty simple:

1. Download and unzip Reduce File Size (75%). Note that the “75%” relates to settings in the filter, not the amount of reduction you’ll get by using it.
2. Drop the unzipped .qfilter file into ~/Library/Filters in Leopard/Snow Leopard or ~/Library/PDF Services in Lion.

Done. The next time you need to reduce the size of a PDF, load it up in Preview, choose “Save As…”, and save it using the Quartz filter you just installed.

If you’re the hands-on type who’d rather set things up yourself, or you’re a paranoid type who doesn’t trust downloading zipped files from sites you don’t control (and I actually don’t blame you if you are), then you can manually create your own filter like so:

1. Go to /Applications/Utilities and launch ColorSync Utility.
2. Select the “Filters” icon in the application’s toolbar.
3. Find the “Reduce File Size” filter and click on the little downward-arrow-in-gray-circle icon to the right.
4. Choose “Duplicate Filter” in the menu.
5. Use the twisty arrow to open the duplicated filter, then open each of “Image Sampling” and “Image Compression”.
6. Under “Image Sampling”, set “Scale” to 75% and “Max” to 1280.
7. Under “Image Compression”, move the arrow so it’s halfway between the rightmost marks. You’ll have to eyeball it (unless you bust out xScope or a similar tool) but you should be able to get it fairly close to the halfway point.
8. Rename the filter to whatever will help you remember its purpose.

As you can see from the values, the “75%” part of the filter’s name comes from the fact that two of the filter’s values are 75%. In the original Reduce File Size filter, both are at 50%. The maximum size of images in my version is also quite a bit bigger than the original’s—1280 versus 512—which means that the file size reductions won’t be the same as the original.

Of course, you now have the knowledge needed to fiddle with the filter to create your own optimal balance of quality and compression, whether you downloaded and installed the zip or set it up manually—either way, ColorSync Utility has what you need. If anyone comes up with an even better combination of values, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. In the meantime, share and enjoy!

Translations

• Belorussian courtesy Patricia Clausnitzer
• German courtesy Andreas Beraz

Update 2 Aug 11: apparently there have been changes in Lion—here’s an Apple forum discussion of the problem. There are two workarounds described in the thread: either to open and save files with ColorSync Utility itself, or to copy the filter to another folder in your Library (or install it there in the first place, above).

What’s even worse is that the dialog requires mouse input to get past. It would be just within the limits of acceptability if the dialog buttons responded to keyboard input; if I could hit command-O or something to invoke “Open”, then I’d probably keep the safeguard in place, because I could just charge past it with a quick twitch of the fingers. Since I can’t, I want it gone. And of course there’s no “don’t ask me again” checkbox to tick.

After a plea on Twitter, I got pointers to a couple of ways to disable this annoyance (as well as a ton of “oh God, I hate that too; let me know if you find an answer!” replies). The first way is done as a Folder Action. For a variety of reasons, I’m not that thrilled by folder actions, so I gave it a pass. The other approach is to write your own preference file. Ah, much better! (Why is this better? I don’t know. It just intuitively feel like the better approach to me.)

Now, one way is to just disable the warning for all public.item files—which is to say, every type of file. I was tempted, but it turns out there’s a finer grain that can be applied: listing specific file types to be ignored. Better still! That way I can switch this off for the file types that I download all the time, like HTML files, and keep the safeguard in place for file types I almost never download, like executable scripts.

Doing this means you need a list of OS X’s Uniform Type Identifiers, so I dug around to find that listing, which appears to have moved in the not-too-distant past. Here’s the preference file I’ve put together with that listing as a guide. This file lists all of the file types I don’t want to be nagged about.

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
   "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
    <key>LSRiskCategoryNeutral</key>
    <dict>
      <key>LSRiskCategoryContentTypes</key>
      <array>
        <string>public.text</string>
        <string>public.plain-text</string>
        <string>public.xml</string>
        <string>public.archive</string>
        <string>public.image</string>
        <string>public.audiovisual-content</string>
        <string>public.font</string>
      </array>
    </dict>
  </dict>
</plist>

I led with public.text because it encompasses not just regular text files, but HTML files as well; public.xml appears to cover XHTML, though I’m not 100% sure where those files fall. public.audiovisual-content covers all audio and video files, as you might guess. There are probably a few other types I’ll add over time, as I encounter enough resistance on certain types of files that I don’t need to be safeguarded. I’ll probably never add public.script or public.executable to the list; personally, I prefer to be warned about that sort of stuff.

To make the magic happen, save the above file (or your own variation) as ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist. Then log out of and back into your account. Finito.

So if you’d like to get your Mac to be less of a nag about opening downloaded files, there’s how. As the links above show, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants here, so my thanks to those who paved the way. I hope that you will be able to benefit from both their work and my small additions thereto.

Update [13 Mar 09]: Potentially very bad news, folks. I just tried this on my 10.5.6 machine and it failed utterly. As did the Folder Action approach. Older versions of Leopard apparently didn’t have this problem. Anyone else seeing the same kind of thing on their machines? If either way is still working for you under 10.5.6, can you tell us which one it is in the comments? Thanks.

Update [18 Mar 09]: Great news, folks. Ben Millett kindly sent me a copy of his working-under-10.5.6 file and I tried it out, and it worked! The difference seems to be that the version I was using was encoded as “Unicode™ (UTF-8, no BOM)” whereas the encoding of the file Ben sent me is “Western (Mac OS Roman)” (both according to BBEdit). So if your copy doesn’t work, check the file encoding. Next I’m going to experiment with adding file extensions, and will report back if I meet with success.

Plus, I have to use Tiger if I want to play with the Mac version of Google Earth. So there’s that.

Admittedly, I do have Tiger installed on a partition of an external drive, and I’ve played around with it a little bit. Still, that’s a very far cry from upgrading my laptop’s hard drive from Panther to Tiger. I know that any major OS upgrade will mean time and energy spent on managing the transition, including re-installing or upgrading some third-party software. That’s where the “I’ve been busy” thing comes back into play. It’s a lot easier to take the lazy route: the system I have now works, so why mess with it? Then again, that same attitude would have kept me in the Classic OS if I’d let it. At some point, you have to upgrade.

So I put it to the crowd: is Tiger (now) worth taking the plunge?

So my deepest apologies for any misinformation I may have spread. If you see anyone referencing my previous post on this topic, please point them to this one. Thank you.

A followup to my previous post: thanks to the nearly impossible to find Character Palette (and thanks to Todd Dominey for instructions on how to enable and use it), I was able to determine the problem and restore my editing pencils. It turns out that a beta copy of the font “Freight” was what caused the problem. This beta copy of Freight was for some reason convinced that Unicode 9999 is the reference to a Z-caron instead of a pencil symbol. It didn’t do this for 9998 or 10000. Just 9999.

So I removed “beta Freight”, and the pencils returned. Thanks to everyone who helped me out!

Update: there’s more to the story, namely that the copy of Freight in question was a beta, and not the final release, and the final release doesn’t have the problem that bit me. I’ve edited this post to reflect that fact.

<a href="[...]">&#9999;</a>

Ah, Unicode.

The problem is that at some point in the recent past, my OS X 10.3.9 laptop started rendering that character as a Z with a set of rabbit ears on top, whereas my OS X 10.3.9 desktop machine still shows the pencil. I can only assume this is due to a recent software installation on the laptop, possibly one that stuck in a badly structured font or something. Or else an update messed up the Unicode pointers.

Whatever the cause might be, does anyone out there know if there’s a way for me to figure out what font is being used to generate the funky Z, or how I might otherwise be able to track down and destroy it and get the pencils back? Because it’s driving me frickin’ crazy.

Update: the problem is now fixed, as described in the followup entry.

She was pointing directly at the large white logo in the middle of the silver façade of the Apple Store.

I’m thinking that maybe I need to spend a little less time on my PowerBook.

However, there was one thing I didn’t like about John’s hack: he converted the 24-hour time already stored by the widget into 12-hour AM/PM time. I prefer 24-hour time, as do most people outside the United States (which I am not, but never mind that now), and sticking to 24-hour time makes the script addition even simpler. So here’s my quick modification of John’s JavaScript to result in a time like “1450″ instead of “2:50 pm” or “0307″ instead of “3:07 am”.

// Format the time of the last data refresh
var h = object.time.hour;
var m = object.time.minute;
if (h < 10) {
   h = '0' + h;
}
if (m < 10) {
   m = '0' + m;
}
document.getElementById('updatetime').innerText =
   h + m;

Other than that, do everything just like John says to do. Share and enjoy!

Pretty much, yeah.

I know that a zillion electrons have been spilled on this topic, and I’m going to add my own thoughts without the benefit of having actually read what anyone else has said about it. So if everything I say here is a duplication of everyone else’s writing, it’s at least an original duplication, if you see what I mean.

At the core (Ha! I kill me!), it shouldn’t really matter what chip sits at the heart of a Macintosh. Did it bother me when Apple switched from Motorola’s chips to the PowerPC? No. I’ve historically been far more bothered by changes in interface, like the jump from OS 9 to OS X. I have made that transition, but it took me a long time and I still sometimes pine for the old days.

Regardless, it does seem to bother me at some level that I could be running an Intel-based system in the semi-near future. Maybe it’s all those old jeering comments I made about fundamental addition bugs and excessive heat production coming home to roost. Maybe it’s that the hipper-than-thou, apart-from-the-crowd semi-cultishness of the Mac extends down to the hardware layer: now instead of having l33t hardware that I paid good money to get, I’m merely going to have a different OS on the same basic computer as all those boxes out there running Windows, pardon my French.

These are emotional reactions, and I admit that freely. But emotion is bound up in anything we take seriously, and given that it’s the tool with which I create personal wealth, I take my computer very, very seriously.

I’ll step back from that, however, and look at this with a larger field of view. Apple has apparently been maintaining Intel versions of OS X for years now, so it isn’t as though they still have to undertake that conversion. There’s a PowerPC chip emulator called Rosetta that should smooth the transition of software to the new architecture. Sure, the stuff running on the emulation layer won’t be as efficient as software written natively for Intel architectures, but it’s a whole lot better than nothing. (And also makes me wonder why it’s been such a long, hard trip getting a Mac emulator for the PC.)

Here’s the thing, though: this potentially brings the ability to run OS X to the ninety-plus percent of the computing world that has an Intel machine, of which ninety-plus percent are running Windows. The success of iTunes for Windows has demonstrated that Windows users don’t give a flip who wrote their software, as long as it gives them something they want and is easy to use.

So the move has the distinct potential to play to Apple’s strengths as a software developer. It could put the whole iLife suite on desktops everywhere through Intel-compatible OS X or even some other route. It could make it easier for Apple to create a Windows-compatible version of iLife. It might (though I can’t be sure, not being a developer) make it easier for Windows applications to be ported to OS X, thus making switches between Windows and Mac OS a lot less painful. It might even make it possible to have Windows running on Apple hardware, and it’s darned sure going to make VirtualPC a lot less virtual.

I freely acknowledge that most users, even given a choice, will pick the classic Wintel combination—how many buy Linux-driven Intel machines these days? (Yes, it’s more than before, but still not that many.) How many more would buy non-Apple OSXtel machines, even assuming such a thing to be possible? Not many. A lot of the cachet of being a Mac user is having the super-fine hardware, all sleek and well-designed and a heck of a lot sexier than the guy running a Dell Latitude or whatever. (Yes, some PC makers do go sexy, but they’re usually either trampy ripoffs of Apple’s designs, tricked-out Alienware gamer boxes, or Sony Vaios.)

As I said at the outset, intellectually I don’t care whose chip drives my Mac, so long as my programs still run and the performance isn’t slower than I’d have gotten with the PowerPC chip. Emotionally, though, I’ll be breaking my long-standing rule against decorating my computers. After all, I’ll need something to put over the “Intel Inside” sticker.

You may recall that I mentioned sending my PowerBook in for repair. It’s still at the repair depot. Apparently it needs a replacement for a rare component, so its repair is held up by a backorder situation. You’d think they could do the Dell thing and just swap the hard drive into a new machine with the same configuration and send that to me, but I guess that would make too much sense. So my only hopes for getting back up to speed lay with my trusty G4/500 with 384MB of RAM.

The first step: I had to install OS X on it if I had any hope of getting myself back to a semblance of productivity. The only problem was that my boot volume, even stripped down to its essentials, didn’t have enough room to play host to both OS 9 and OS X. I’d originally set up the drive to have a 2GB boot volume—acres of room in the Classic days—plus a 1GB scratch volume and a 22 GB main partition. I’ve been doing drives this way for a decade or so. Unfortunately, my strategy wasn’t sufficient for a Panther-driven world.

So before I could even install OS X, I’d have to repartition the hard drive. That meant shunting everything to my newly arrived OWC Mercury Elite Pro 250GB hard drive, repartitioning the internal HD, installing OS X, running it through a zillion software updates, and then copying over the OS 9 folder so I’ll have it if I need to reboot into Classic.

Joy and more joy. So I did all that over the weekend, starting off with a full Retrospect backup of all the drive volumes and then proceeding to move files around like I was playing a FireWire-based version of Towers of Hanoi. While I was at it, I threw away a good deal of cruft (old installers, log files, that kind of thing) and moved a big heap of old data to a new permanent archival home on my external drive.

I’m happy to report that, in the end, everything came together rather nicely. I’m now up and running with OS X on this aging beast, and while it certainly isn’t as snappy as my 1.25GHz/1GB RAM PowerBook, it’s quite functional.

Why did I just bore you with all that? Because I wanted to share which free packages and extra doodads I’ve discovered are absolutely necessary to my getting back up to speed in OS X.

• Complete MySQL from Server Logistics — I can’t run WordPress locally without MySQL, and this is the package that actually installs correctly.
• CocoaMySQL — a nice little GUI front end to MySQL. Handy for reaching into the DBs and tweaking values, which can be necessary if you do a sqldump on one machine and then jam it wholesale onto another. Which I did.
• Classic Window Management v1.0 — makes the OS act rational again by grouping together windows by process. So if I click on the desktop, all the Finder windows pop to the fore. When I click on a BBEdit window, all the BBEdit windows pop up. None of this interleaved application nonsense. (Which you can still invoke with a modifier key.) Installing this also meant installing APE, but that’s probably a good thing anyway.
• This isn’t really a software install, but it’s free. I also hacked OS X to make Command-N create a new folder, instead of open a new Finder window. More details can be found via my post “Now That’s A Switch“. No, I will not adapt to the OS in this case: it will adapt to me instead, whether it really wants to or not.
• SheetSpeed — if there’s one thing I can’t stand about OS X, it’s the bendy slidy dialog boxes, otherwise known as “sheets”. (Which I sometimes pronouce with more of a “ih” sound than an “ee” sound in the middle, if you know what I mean.) With SheetSpeed, you can crank the slide time down to zero, meaning the sheets just pop into existence and then disappear the instant you’re done with them. You can also slow them way, way down, but doing so for any purpose other than temporary amusement should be grounds for a mental examination.
• Ejector — great for clearing out .dmg volumes. Sure, I could use Exposé to move everything aside and click-drag-toss, but that’s just not my style. Ejector is far more capable than the Eject.menu file that comes with OS X.
• Mouseposé — I’m forever losing my mouse pointer on my Cinema Display. Or I was, until I installed Mouseposé. It’s also very handy for presentations, which will be a lot more relevant when I finally get my laptop back.
• TinkerTool — nice for things like putting the Dock precisely where I want it, and also for tweaking the OS here and there.

In addition to all those goodies, there are the more robust programs, some of them costing actual money (gasp!), that I just can’t live without.

• BBEdit 8.1 — natch.
• SubEthaEdit — this is becoming invaluable to me for remote collaborative document editing. Tantek and I recently worked on a document while physically separated by 2100+ miles, and then worked on the same document while in the same room at SXSW.
• Firefox — of course.
• Thunderbird 1.0.2 — better at IMAP than Eudora 5.2, which is the version I’m using. (I was surprised to discover it’s Carbonized!)
• Transmit — all right, I admit I’m still without this one. I’m a registered user of Transmit 2, and I can’t find an installer for it anywhere. I miss it. In the meantime, Fugu has been filling in. I’d actually consider switching to it if it supported drag-and-dropping. Instead, I just emailed the folks at Panic to see if they can point me to a 2.x installer.
• DragThing — so much better than the Dock in so many ways. Its one failing is that when you minimize windows to its process dock, they don’t appear as tiny thumbnails of themselves. So I use the Dock as a process dock, and DragThing for everything else a dock should do.

Then there are the programs I want to install but can’t find in the form I want, like CalendarClock, which has become a commercial product and is no longer available as donationware. I might have an installer for it on my laptop… not that it does me any good right now.

Anyway, there will undoubtedly be more to come, but I thought I’d share my gotta-have-’em bits with you.

Since then, I’ve gotten occasional e-mail messages from people thanking me for publishing the solution, and that neither Netgear nor Apple seem to know anything about this problem. I got one just today, and thought it was probably time for a follow-up post.

The fix I described isn’t a panacea, I’ve found; I still occasionally find the laptop knocked back to its self-assigned IP address. This behavior seems to revolve around hard sleep/wake events, and iChat might be implicated too. My father has a Netgear 802.11g wireless router and it’s totally smooth for him using an 802.11b PowerBook, but whenever I visit with my Airport Extreme PowerBook the router starts kicking us both off on an infrequent basis.

I’ve found one of two things will fix my router when it ceases talking to the laptop. One is to unplug and replug the router; the thing comes back up in about a second and it always sees the laptop again. The other is to log into the router from a wired computer, go to the UPnP page, and hit “Apply”. I don’t have to change any setting, just hit “Apply”. That fixes the problem too. I do the latter when I’m in my office with my wired G4, and the former when I’m downstairs closer to the router.

Either way, I’m thinking about replacing my 802.11b router with an 802.11g router so I can take advantage of the Extreme access, and I’m thinking the replacement won’t be a Netgear product. Anyone have recommendations for a good Airport Extreme compatible wireless/wired combo router (I need to plug in two CAT5-bound computers) besides an Airport Base Station?

Oh, and no, I don’t have a Bluetooth device with which I can test the Mac’s module. It still bothers me that the computer seems to have lost some of its hardware. I’d sort of like to have it found again. Has anyone else seen this problem, and if you fixed it, how did you fix it?

Update: thanks to Daniel Bergey, whose friends just recently moved to my home state, I’ve solved the problem and the Bluetooth icon is back to normal. See the comments for details and a link to a description of the procedure I followed.

…there’s a better way than ethernet to transfer files between two Macs, using Target Disk Mode. Connect the two Macs together with a firewire cable, with one Mac on and the second one off. Then turn the second Mac on and hold down on the T key. A firewire symbol will come up on the screen of the second Mac, and the HD name will show up on the first Mac, just like it’s an external hard drive. The files can then be transferred at firewire speeds, much faster than via ethernet. (These are condensed instructions, I’d look up the full instructions before doing it… there’s a few little, but important, details, like making sure you drag the icon of the second Mac to the trash before disconnecting or shutting it down).

So I looked up the full instructions, and here they are. They’re not much longer than DeWayne’s summary, actually.

So I imported my entire iPhoto library into iPhoto 4, which only took about 45 minutes. In the process, I discovered that I actually have 4,080 photos so far. There was some weirdness, in that iPhoto 4 claimed to have discovered 234 “lost” images. Under half were duplicates, and the rest were completely blank files with the same names as photos I already had. So I threw them all away, and landed at 4,080 pictures. Once I figured out the keyword interface, which is by no means intuitive (or even very usable), I set about adding metadata to some of my images. The first order of business, of course, was to tag all pictures of Carolyn and organize them into a smart album. Guess how many pictures I’ve take of her so far? We’ll have the answer in a moment, but first, here’s a recent one of her sitting up on her own, which she started doing a couple of weeks ago.

Everything I’ve heard about the improved speed in iPhoto 4 proves to be correct, and possibly understated. This thing screams. It still generates bloated directories, though, given the number of XML files and image copies it’s capable of producing. This is largely so that it can support a “Revert to Original” feature, so any time you take out red-eye or lighten up an image, you end up with both the original and the modified image on your hard drive. The same happens if you do no more than rotate an image.

That’s where iPhoto Diet comes in so very handy. It’s a small application that can get rid of all unnecessary duplicates in your iPhoto library, and it can also delete the originals of all rotated images. It can also wipe out all the originals, replacing them with the modified versions. I ran it on my library before I migrated to the new machine and reclaimed over half a gig of drive space. And that was only getting rid of unnecessary and rotated duplicates, not all originals. I did a lot of red-eye reductions, and those are still around. I also have yet to run the “strip thumbnails” option, which could easily reclaim a few dozen megabytes.

I haven’t really played with the rest of the iLife suite since I don’t have a video camera or a garage band. I may eventually burn some images to a DVD for relatives to play on their TVs. If I can figure out how to use Garage Band, I might try creating some background tracks for use in radio production work. It’s nice to know the options are there.

And the answer to today’s trivia question is: as of this writing, the smart album titled “The Compleat Carolyn” contains 1,832 pictures. At this rate, we’ll have about three thousand pictures of her by her first birthday.

So I did. Since I still have an 802.11b access point (the aforementioned MR814v2) I plugged both laptops into the router and got to work transferring files. Even at 10Mb/second, it took a while to move everything over from one to the other; the iPhoto library alone took an hour to cop. Having close to four thousand images, many of them with red-eye reduction, will do that. Nevertheless, I was up and running within most of a day, and a couple hours of that were figuring out the whole wireless access problem. And six hours of sleeping.

I like the key response on this keyboard. It’s a little snappier than the TiBook. But the coolest thing about the new machine so far? The way that, in a low-light environment, the display will dim down a bit and the keyboard automatically backlights. It’s just so sexy.

(Don’t forget, there’s still a little bit of time left to support the Blog-A-Thon!)