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I upgraded to Mavericks, mostly to get desktop iBooks. It wasn't too bad an experience.

I had to re-set a handful of settings, of course, in particular the nohidden flag so I can see my own goddamn Library folder, honestly what do they think we are fucking two year olds? And, because I do website development, I had to go through the command-line song and dance to re-enable php and re-define /user/Sites as the root folder for the built in instance of Apache, which was exactly as much of a pointless pain in the ass as always but at least no more so. Aside from that, though, this was a remarkably smooth upgrade.

Download of the installer took about ten minutes, and that was only the day after release. Installation itself took about an hour total, and only badgered me for authentication twice, once at the start and once at the end. Nothing crashed afterwards. There weren't even any alarming hang-times.

Of course, I did my homework and updated my Javascript runtime instance beforehand (and even so Vuze was a diva and demanded to update its own local version separately, but that was one of those "hit yes and make tea while you wait for a restart" things, no pain involved). But all my Adobe and similar products lit right up the first time I opened them after upgrade, with no snarls. And I'd already turned off my Calibre notifications, which is currently causing crashes on that one. So everything works and nothing is too weird, though I could do with a few more options for the interface settings of Notes (for which read: any options at all, especially larger font without having to manually select all and increase the font size of every note individually or else edit /Applications/Notes.app/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/DefaultFonts.plist, I mean seriously).

I even quite like the new Calendar, which gives much more sensible views of your schedule at month end-and-start than the old "fake blotter" model.

However.

As I said, I updated mostly to get iBooks on my desktop. And most of iBooks is very well done. The Category (that is, genre) and Collections and Authors all manifest as sidebars from which you can select to see the books in that group, and it's easy to switch back and forth among them. The "shelf" (grid view, rather) discreetly vanishes when you select a book to open unless you click the book's toolbar to get it back, and returns just as automatically when you close the book window. Once you click on the body of the book window itself, the space-bar will page forward/down like any sensible desktop app. There is no page animation, but there is the very briefest instant of slide animation to cue the eyes that a new page has been "turned" to. You can have iBooks display author and title in addition to cover, for each book on the "shelf", which is a definite value-added option. Best of all, you can have more than one book open at a time, a true boon for academics.

Minor gripes: the authors are sorted by first name, not last, which is utterly counterintuitive to me, and you can't change that. The sort options within groups are by title, date-added, or manual, manual meaning literally drag and drop, with no option to sort by author within a genre or collection which is frankly a bit of idiocy. Those are relatively minor, though, and I've certainly seen worse in other reader apps.

There is truly only one unforgivable sin Apple has committed with this app, but it's a doozy: there is no way to access a book's metadata any longer. In iTunes, you could change a book's metadata just like you could change the data of any other file. No longer. If there's a typo in the author's name, or you want to change the category/genre to something more intuitive or useful to you? Tough luck, sucker! There's no way. You can't even hunt down the iBooks folder of book files (which, incidentally, is hidden inside a container so you have to find the container where it's tucked away in a very non-obvious place, right click and tell it to show package contents, and then navigate to the actual book file folder from there) and open the file there to change anything via Get Info, because every book file is renamed with a random alphanumeric string and you can't tell which is which! The intention seems to be to make it as impossible as can be to do anything with the book files except through the GUI, and the GUI has no options for editing any of the metadata. Absolute fail, Apple, absolute fail.

Just to make things even better, just when Apple has figured out how to make Collections and Authors and Categories useful for organization and navigation in the desktop version, the iOS version of iBooks has made them absolutely fucking useless. It used to be that viewing Authors gave you all the authors in your library, and same for Categories. Now? Those views only give you the authors or categories inside whatever Collection you're currently in! Hello, what the fuck good is that going to do me, Apple, you morons? The iOS iBooks has just become nearly un-navigable unless you either a) use only Collections to organize and find things or b) don't use them at all. Can you actually fail any harder on this front, Apple? (Ironically, using the Author 'view' within a collection that you are also viewing in grid/shelf format acts to order the collection by author, the one thing that the desktop version won't do. Are these versions being developed by two mutually feuding dev teams or something?)

So my verdict: use Calibre to curate your ebook collection, and only use iBook to read and annotate it across devices.

So, for several reasons including Adobe's increasing idiocy in re their pricing and distribution model and also the vastly greater ease of getting ahold of them, I'm experimenting with replacing my two biggest Adobe software workhorses with open source alternatives.

So far, this involves one day per app of utter, screaming frustration while mashing buttons and googling documentation and cursing wildly, and a second day where everything starts to make sense and work nicely and I stop wanting to kill the developers with the power of my mind. That's actually a pretty good ratio.

Dreamweaver -> Aptana Studio 3: Aptana is even more powerful than Dreamweaver, in a lot of ways, and incorporates a lot more OS and collaborative development tools like git. Of course, this means it's even more confusing to look at. Once I'd spent the one frustrated and screaming day, though, I found the bits I needed, went and started up my native installation of Apache AGAIN (fuck you so very much, Apple, for turning that off with every OS upgrade and not even giving me a freaking preference pane to turn it on with any more, and did I mention the part about changing the default root folder, seriously, fuck you) and everything worked nicely. Sites, or now Projects, are defined, with ftp upload/download settings in place, I found a black-on-white code color theme (handily named "Dreamweaver" for code immigrants) and the design view, or now Preview, is working smoothly. I like the real-time feedback of the Console pane, too, which gives me command-line reflections of whatever I'm doing when connected to the remote sites. Having the remote site view be its own tab is also really handy.

Photoshop -> Gimp: Now, I actually started out with Gimp many years ago, so I thought this acclimation would go faster. Ahahaha, it is to be laughing. Nope, still one day of utter, screaming frustration and banging on the desk and asking thin air why anyone would ever think that defaulting the Move tool to grab whatever it hovers on instead of the active layer was a good idea. Once I got to day two, though, I found my tools again, remembered where the settings are and to check them the first time, and have decided that I may actually like Gimp's workspace layout better than Photoshop's. Photoshop has resorted to stacking tools on top of each other, and I found that more than a bit annoying. Gimp spreads them out over a lot of different panes, which can be very frustrating at first, but I still like being able to see all my stuff better than having it hidden in a button stack. At any rate, I successfully designed an ebook cover, which involved a lot of layers and text and messing around with growing and shrinking things and tinkering with colors and fonts; it all worked, and I have a cover I'm satisfied with, which seems like a good indicator.

General conclusion: This will work, but you need to be the kind of person who's willing to bang on it and google the forums and, in the final analysis, just click on things until you start getting the hang of it. I strongly recommend starting with a non-vital scratch project, each time, so you don't worry about destroying important work and can try, and erase, and swear at gods and devs as much as necessary.

The only thing I can say about Inkscape is that clicking blindly on stuff until the right thing happens works just as well as it does in Illustrator. I never used Indesign, so someone else will have to review Scribus, but I have a copy on hand at least, should I ever need it. I raise a toast to Adobe putting themselves out of most of their business. *clinks glasses all around*

Okay, the Macgourmet recipe organizer app really is worth paying for. If you have a ton of recipes clipped, and /especially/ if you have a ton clipped from the web, it's kind of glorious. The import function is amazing for supported sites, and a darn sight quicker than typing by hand even for un-supported ones.

As a compulsive organizer, I also kind of love all the fields. There are so many. So much organization! So much metadata! *wallows in it happily* That may actually overwhelm some people, when they first open up the dialogue to put in a new recipe, but I got used to it very quickly, and just skip the tabs that aren't important to me. And you can always just paste everything into one entry in the directions and not worry about entering prep time or servings or notes separately, if that's how you roll.

The categories and list of utensils, not to mention the pre-loaded lists (groups, collections, recipe playlists) need editing to individual needs, but they give you a decent base to start with and the editing process is simple, so that's a definite plus. There are parts that aren't wholly intuitive, but the directions that come with are generally pretty good about explaining the basics. For the rest, when in doubt drag and drop.

Do note, if you get the trial version from macgourmet.com and then upgrade with the Mac App Store version (which is cheaper than the .com upgrade purchase), the two will not talk to each other. You'll have two apps, and the app store version will tell you it doesn't know how to import your recipes from the .com version. Do not panic. Just make sure you manually copy the database file from the .com version into the (very differently located) database folder of the app store version. Voila, like magic, all your recipes and metadata will be there when you re-start.

The sync between desktop/ipad/iphone versions isn't perfect, yet. In fact, at the moment it's pretty pitiful. So you may or may not want to hold off on those, especially if you have a laptop and can just take that into the kitchen with you.

General feel: loving this one kind of a lot.

The short version: it's all fun and games until somebody loses an archive.

And the problem is that most cloud systems aren't really set up for either user-controlled, external backups or staff-produced restores. Not the free versions.

( Longer version )

So I am left with either trusting Firefox's native bookmark-restore or making periodic manual backups which are, of necessity, specific to one device and not available online either. Xmarks comes closest to the functionality I want, and even that doesn't really provide for external backups. This seems to me to be a bit of a blind spot in the whole system.

Some time ago, my Photoshop died. More precisely, it failed to migrate and only exists on the old computer in the other room with the keyboard I don't like. So I have, after many years away, gone to try out GIMP again.

Gimp is a good program. It is genuinely full-featured image editing software. You can do just about anything you need to with it, once you find the right menu/tool.

Alas, Gimp is originally a Linux application and the 'port' for Mac operates in the X11 windowing system. I hate Mac+X11 with a great and mighty passion. It treats all the program palettes and toolbars as separate windows which you must first click on to make active and then select your tool, layer, etc. There is really no excuse for it to exist inside the Mac system except to allow lazy programmers to say that something is ported when, really, it's no such thing and a usability disaster to boot.

The Mac not-a-port does, however, have pleasantly native visuals and is not written in Java like some video players or open source office software I could name. It thereby escapes the half second lag that is the utmost limit of infuriating.

Gimp has a fairly short learning curve if you know Photoshop already, but there will be an adjustment period where you have to hunt for the right tool and sometimes look up ridiculously basic things on the web to figure out, for example, how to clear a selection to transparency. In some ways Gimp gives you more control; it makes fewer assumptions about what the user really wants to do than Photoshop. On the one hand, this means you have to do it all yourself, but on the other it means you have finer control of, for example, the cropping of layers to the visible canvas size. I do find the fact that it does not paste selections in as a new layer a bit trying, though, since that means you must always remember to create a blank layer to receive pastes so you can manipulate them fully.

History is a tab within the same module as Layers, which I find irritating given the click-and-click behavior required by X11, but, on the bright side, Control+Z can be used to back up as far as you like. I've never been a fan of the Mac behavior that Command+Z is both undo and redo for the last action.

Mac users will need to be aware that the Gimp 'port' does not allow use of the Mac keystroke commands. Instead of Command+S you will have to use Control+S. This is annoying, but the cmd vs ctl is the only difference--S will still save, Z will still undo--so it isn't more than an annoyance.

My one ongoing issue with Gimp is the file navigation, which sucks dead rat. Without ketchup. It does not provide for column-view or list-view of files, instead you have to double click through folder view after folder view to get where you're going. And it's ugly to boot.

The quality of the images produced is much of a muchness, though, and if you don't want to or can't shell out six hundred dollars for a new edition of Photoshop, you may want to download Gimp and give it a try.

So, as things stand, the WordPress Categories widget supports altering sort order, post count and dropdown vs. hierarchical display. But it does not support including or excluding categories.

There is a way around this, though, while we wait for it to show up in the core code! (Everyone thank Bricksmith for suggesting this work-around.)

First, you need to download, upload and activate the php-exec plugin. This plugin allows admins to put php code in an entry or widget and have WordPress recognize it as php and execute it instead of just treating it as plain text.

Next, you go to Design > Widgets and put the Text widget where you want the Categories to appear.

Into the Text widget you paste some variation on the following code:

<li id=”categories-1″ class=”widget-categories”>
<h2 class=”widgettitle”>Categories</h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_categories(’orderby=name&hierarchical=true&title_li=&exclude=76,77,78,79′); ?>
</ul>
</li>

Save that and voila, you have a pseudo Categories widget!

In my own case, I wanted to have two Categories widgets, the second one including all the categories that the first one excluded, so I pasted another copy into Text right under the first, with the ID “categories-2″ and the ‘exclude’ changed to ‘include’, and edited my CSS to add #categories-2 everywhere there was a #categories-1.

Caveats: 1) I do not know if it is possible to use this for a dropdown Categories, because that requires some Javascript and I have no idea whether that can be parsed inside a Text widget. 2) What you have is actually a widget inside a widget, codewise. The Categories widget is enclosed inside the li and div of the Text widget. This may cause problems with your CSS styling, depending on how it’s written. If your nested lists look like li li { rules }, this will probably cause problems. On the bright side, if you change it to ul ul { rules } that should fix the problem.

For a full list of the variables you can adjust in wp_list_categories, see the WP documentation.

*sparkles madly* This... this is the best thing since server-side includes.

*pets her new bit of Javascript caressingly* It's barely a dozen lines and it lets me give css classes to different browsers and different platforms. Firefox in PC, Firefox in Mac, IE in all versions, this is brilliant! I can have a line for different link widths in old IE without relying on hacks; it will never become obsolete!

*hearts all over her new script* Darling, where have you been all my life?

I have recently been test-driving a lot of different image viewers, specifically viewers for Mac. My criteria were not the usual ones; normally, when I want to take a quick peek, Preview does fine and if I want more than that, well that’s what Photoshop is for. In this case, I was looking specifically for something to use as a manga viewer.

My priorities, thus, were something that has a large viewing area, something that can easily resize and be set to show images at actual size, and something that can easily navigate among nested folders.

CocoViewX is the winner.

I highly recommend this bit of software to any Mac user who has a lot of folders of manga that she would like to view easily. For one thing, it’s freeware, though I encourage anyone who likes it to toss a buck or two in the author’s donation bin. For another, there are a bunch of settings you can manipulate, to change how you view the pages, and the program will remember all of them–including whether you want to view actual size or fit the window.

Most importantly, from the perspective of a manga-viewer, there is a navigation window down the left side that shows all subfolders and files in any folder you open, and you can navigate among your folders and image files simply by clicking. You can even set it to single or double click, as you prefer.

Altogether, CocoViewX is just about ideal for the purpose. The only way I think it could get much better is to include an option to scale the images by percentage of actual size. However, since I know of no image viewer anywhere that does that, the lack does not detract from CocoViewX’s win.

General Note: One thing I have realized, in the course of testing different viewers on my files, is that any viewer you use should be set to not respect the dpi (dots per inch) of the image file. Apparently, in the course of translating and/or cleaning image files, it is not infrequent for a mis-setting of the dpi to occur that will force your viewer to display the image at a wee, tiny size if you have it set to believe the dpi given by the file meta-information.