Well that’s not exactly true. It’s hard to find, but you can get the developer build of Chrome for the Mac. It’s prebuilt on the Chromium Buildbot Snapshots for Mac Page. Scroll to the bottom and download the latest Zip archive. It contains the app (Chromium) which you just drag to your Applications folder.

After it’s in place, use it to browse to the Official Google Chrome Extensions site. Then check out the Google Quick Scroll Extension, which continues your Google search beyond the results page, right on the third-party pages you jump to.

Punchline is: a few days into the process I have decided not to use Mail App nor the iPhone counterpart. I am using Apple’s Address Book (with MobileMe synching). As for Calendar App vs. Google Calendar I’d say the jury is still out. Here’s what I’ve found…

Email

I wanted to continue routine all my email through Gmail in case the exercise went squirrely. Also I definitely wished to retain my Gmail email address as opposed to switching to a MobileMe one. No problem, Gmail offers an IMAP interface and the Apple mail apps both support IMAP too. One thing I found confusing was that the notion of synching email (via MobileMe) didn’t make much sense. My friends tell me that what is actually synched in that case is mail preferences and settings. The actual email messages are not synched per se since SMTP and IMAP do that job for you.

One thing I really like about Gmail is that I seldom delete emails. I delete emails forwarded from Google groups since I know they are archived on the groups. Basically I delete most stuff that I know is archived and available elsewhere. Also if someone sends me huge photos, I’ll download those to iPhoto and then delete the message. In this way I have managed to use “only” 390 MB of the 6943 MB available to me on Gmail. That’s 5%.

It is not obvious how to continue this practice using the IMAP interface. Some searching yielded a solution: to archive a message from Mail App, just drag it to the “[Gmail]/All Mail” folder. This has the same effect as archiving the message via the Gmail web interface. Problem solved.

Gmail threading is a necessity for me. The iPhone mail app doesn’t offer threading, but Mail App does. Just turn on “organize by thread” in the View menu. If the threading on Mail App worked more like Gmail’s then this would probably be acceptable since I use the laptop for heavy email use anyway.

The problem is that Mail App has a different idea of what threading means (versus Gmail). In Gmail the thread is the fundamental unit. This is not so in Mail App. In Gmail, you can archive a thread. If a new reply arrives on that thread then the whole thread returns to your inbox. This is not the case with Apple Mail. With the latter threads do not span “folders”. So once you archive a piece of a thread (one or more messages), when new messages arrive on that thread you will not see the older ones reappear in your inbox.

One of the truly great outcomes of adopting the threaded approach to email is that you eliminate the need to include original messages in your replies. In fact when you do this, Gmail hides the originals (“folds” them for you). If you assume that your correspondents are also using Gmail threading then it is never necessary to include complete originals in your replies. You end up quoting only small parts of originals and even that isn’t very frequent. So when you look at a thread it’s nice and clean. No redundancies in the replies.

A key Gmail feature that supports this approach is that the thread shows not only messages sent to you but also messages you’ve sent. Without the messages you have sent it can be hard to follow the thread (e.g. if you read it a week later). Because Apple Mail does not “knit” threads back together across “folders” and because messages you send are relegated to the “Sent” folder, you will not see messages originated by you integrated into your threads.

Gmail threading, with its elimination of redundancy and its ability to resurrect full-fledged threads when new messages arrives is critical for me. As a result I’m sticking with the Gmail interface for mail both on my Macs and on the iPhone. On the iPhone I’m using Google’s excellent integrated Google.com for the iPhone. That gives me iGoogle, Gmail with threading and Google Calendar all with iPhone optimized interfaces.

Contacts

All my contacts were in Gmail before getting the iPhone. Since then, I’ve exported them (as .vcf) and imported them to Address Book on the Mac and synched them down to the iPhone Address Book. I’ve configured address book synchronization via MobileMe. Also I set Address Book on my Mac to synch with Gmail (a feature that appears in Address Book after you’ve docked the iPhone for the first time).

Since then I’ve been combing through my contacts using the Address Book app on the Mac and the iPhone one too. Also since my contacts are now driving not just email, but the Phone app as well I’m cleaning up lots of first name/last name issues and consolidating duplicate records. It’s taken a bit of clean up since for some reason there are many duplicates.

This all seems to be working. And it is truly magical to tweak contact information on the iPhone and then see it magically updated (over the Web via MobileMe) on the Mac and in Gmail contacts. I don’t fully trust it yet since there are so many moving parts but the early signs here are very good.

I now have complete contacts available now via Gmail, Address Book App (on the Mac), Address Book App (on the iPhone) and in the Phone App on the iPhone too. It’s often bugged me that Google has not made contact management a first-class application. (I’m continually digging through links in Gmail to get to my contacts). Now I’ve got first-class contact management at my fingertips on my phone and my non-phone computers and it’s integrated not only with email but my telephone as well. This makes me very happy.

Calendar

I’ve set up MobileMe synchronization on iCal calendars but haven’t tried to synchronize between Google Calendar and iCal. Jury’s still out on this one. Essentially I have two calendaring systems at my disposal now. Both Google Calendar interfaces are darn good. There’s the general-purpose browser-based one and the iPhone-specific one mentioned earlier. Since calendar is much less critical for me than email and contacts I suspect this one will simmer for a while.

I love my Macs. But dang it, I’ve encountered a couple annoying Leopard problems that have significantly impacted their value.

First, my old iMac won’t connect via WPA2 to my Airport Extreme since upgrading to Leopard. What am I gonna do—run an ethernet cable across my living room floor. Or should I say: across my wife’s living room floor?!?

Second, this week, my MacBook Pro stopped waking from sleep mode. The solution is simple but devastating – simply turn off Bluetooth…um, and then you don’t have Bluetooth.

What is going on here? I’ve had years of happiness with my OS X Macs. And now I’ve got two men down (out of three). Only the trusty PowerBook is unaffected by any of this.

‘sup Apple? Did you get ahead of yourselves with the sheer pace of coolness?

update June 6, 2008: The good guys at MacForce helped me out w/ the sleep/wake problem on the MBP. The fix was simple: reset the PMU. A no-brainer (but only if you think of it). WPA still broken on the iMac as of OS X 10.5.3.

For the Rails folks out there I thought you’d be interested to know that this time around I chose to use Locomotive for my Rails stack and it has mostly worked very well. Last time I configured a brand new development machine (late ’05) I went through the heck of installing a slew of ports for all the pieces (ruby, gem, gems, app server, web server, etc.) This time around I eschewed the 14 pages of instructions in favor of the single download and got myself some needed RMagick support in the bargain. I had successfully put off installing RMagick for about 18 months (thanks Captchator!) but recently started a project that just had to have RMagick. If you wonder why I’ve been avoiding RMagick then read this.

In moving my development environment from the old machine to the new, mysql didn’t automatically come over the firewire so I had to download and install it on the new machine. I needed to dump the database and move it to the new machine and load it. Turns out that moving that file over was about the most annoying part of this whole process.

So I created the dump on the old machine:

mysqldump -u root -pyour-password-here --single-transaction --all-databases > mysql_backup.sql

And then went into System Preferences/Sharing and turned on Personal File Sharing. On the new machine I saw the shared directory, but the newly created file wasn’t there. All the other files were there. I’ve seen this before and presume it must be some sort of caching or timing issue. Old files show up, new files don’t. And of course there is no way to “refresh” a finder view.

So I switched gears and tried “FTP Access” in Sharing. Neither Transmit nor Interarchy were able to connect via FTP to the old machine. Finally, a friend recommended SFTP (SSH SFTP). And um, after clicking on each option in Sharing I saw that “Remote Login” mentions SSH so I thought I’d run that and sure enough I was able to use SFTP via Transmit to get the file. Whew.

Once the database dump was moved over I simply loaded it on the new database server. Remember a newly created mysql database has no passwords.

mysql < mysql_backup.sql

You’ll notice that logins you brought over don’t work until you restart mysqld. Once you do that, you’re database has been replicated and your various logins and security restrictions will be in effect.

One other odd thing (besides the file sharing annoyance) was that while Locomotive purports to be a Universal Binary application it doesn’t actually work properly after the firewire transfer. It seemed like it was working — the application itself ran and it would actually start certain Rails apps. Problems had to do with RMagick not working (there’s a recurring theme here :) My solution was to reinstall Locomotive and the RMagick bundle afresh. After that everything worked great.

To summarize, here’s the main things I did to move my Rails development from PowerBook to MacBook Pro:

1. run the automatic firewire system transfer to get most of your environment moved over
2. install Apple Software Updates and reboot (you should do this early on with any new machine)
3. install mySQL 5.0
4. dump mySQL database on old machine, transfer file using “remote login” and SFTP, load database on new machine and reboot mySQL
5. install X Code 2.4.1
6. re-install Locomotive (even though it transferred via Firewire):
1. move Applications/Locomotive2 to trash
2. download/install Locomotive
7. install Locomotive RMagick bundle if you need it
8. finally, under the Locomotive Terminal I had to install a few gems for my projects: ruby-debug, chronic

That’s pretty much it. All my Rails projects are up and running on the new machine. A little faster and with 60px less vertical space to work with. Not nearly as bad as it might have otherwise been I suppose.

Bear in mind these are not complete instructions for getting from a clean MacBook Pro to a Rails development environment. This is just about migrating from the PowerPC to Intel with a minimum of pain. It’s been pretty painless so far. Time will tell how well the Locomotive choice holds up. I’ll keep you updated.

When I saw the S3Fox Firefox extension a while back I was encouraged.  Unfortunately, S3Fox has some critical bugs on the Mac. In particular, folder downloads don’t work — apparently because S3Fox is using backslashes in destination paths a la Windows. You end up with empty folders on your Mac.

I was rescued from a serious bout of the crankies by Nolobe’s Interarchy. This Mac-only file transfer application apparently supports lots of protocol standards and lots of interesting automation features blah-blah-blah but what’s important to me is — it has S3 support!  Woo hoo!  So I downloaded the free 14 day trial and used it to browse my S3 buckets. In a nonce I had downloaded a couple hundred megabytes of precious machine images and subversion snapshots. Now they sit on my disk, ready for their final DVD resting place. I can sleep tonight.

Oh, and Interarchy is a lickable OS X app too. I have no idea yet if I’ll prefer it to Transmit (tall order) but for S3 work from the Mac it looks like a must-have.

Well, a nice person at Transmit support answered my question. Interestingly, while perhaps a little non-obvious to the SSH-non-initiate, the solution is actually elegant — do nothing. That’s right, Transmit works directly with the ssh command-line infrastructure. This means if you’ve got your identities (keys and certificates) stored in the ~/.ssh directory you’re good to go. Further, if you’re using an SSH Agent (like SSHKeychain) you’ll never even be prompted for a passphrase by Transmit.
While I like Cyberduck a lot, the edge goes to Transmit — even at a cost of $29.95. Here goes:

1. Transmit is snappier. I haven’t measured file transfer speeds, but directory listing and navigation is definitely snappier than Fugu or Cyberduck. I spend a lot of time navigating around remote filesystems and I don’t move a lot of great big files so reponse time for listings is crucial.
2. Transmit can be configured to edit a file on double click. In Cyberduck you have to select the file and hit command-j to edit it — annoying. Of course in any case, the file must be downloaded — but it’s downloaded to some mystery location where you don’t have to worry about cleaning it up.
3. Transmit supports column view (browser view) just like Finder. Cyberduck does offer a contextual view but it’s more of a Windows-style-double-click-a-folder-to-expand-subfolders affair. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

There are couple shortcomings worth mentioning too:

1. While Transmit offers tab support — innovative among the file transfer clients I’ve looked at — the workflow is a bit clumsy. If you have a configuration saved as a favorite there is no way to quickly and directly open it in a new tab. Instead you must go through four steps. How about an “open favorite in new tab” option in Preferences? Currently you must:
   1. open a new tab (command-t or via File menu)
   2. select the “favorites” tab within that new tab
   3. select the “Favorites” folder
   4. double-click the favorite you want

   On the upside — once you’ve done this once, Transmit remembers that you want the Location tab and the Favorites folder so the middle two steps drop out. Still, one step would be better than two steps.

2. When configuring a new connection for password authentication, Transmit won’t allow paste into password field — you have to type the password from the keyboard. I keep all my credentials in Keychain Access so it’s real easy to get ‘em on the clipboard. Minor one-time annoyance.

All in all I’m enjoying Transmit. It’s been reliable and comfortable. I’m off to pay my $29.95 now…

Control-tab will cycle to the next tab to the right (and wrap at the end).

Page-up and Page-down keys can be used to move to adjacent tabs in either direction (again, wrapping is in effect). Control-page-up (control-fn-page-up on laptop keyboards) moves left. Control-page-down (control-fn-page-down) moves right.

Unless you use ssh on the command line a lot.

Unfortunately, on OS X, the ssh command line tools are not integrated with Keychain Access. This is unfortunate for a couple reasons. First, it means that you have the choice (with the ssh command line tools) to either passphrase protect each key or not. If you decide not to then you expose that key to attack (if someone gets access to your disk).

Now if you do decide to passphrase-protect an ssh key a dilemma arises. You will be prompted for that passphrase each time the key is required for an ssh operation. Every time you ssh to a remote machine, or run scp or sftp, you’ll be prompted. And if you use Subversion over ssh you’ll be prompted (for a passphrase) for each of your remote subversion commands. Ugh.

Until Apple adds direct integration between the ssh command line tools and Keychain Access we have to make due with one of the “ssh agents”. There is a command-line one that ships with OS-X called ssh-agent if you like that sort of thing. I was hoping for a mouse-driven one and went on a little expedition.

The first one I looked at, SSH Agent, is a nice enough Cocoa app but it’s got a fatal flaw. The whole point of this thing is to enable me to avoid entering passphrases. To do that, the app needs to access a passphrase stored in Keychain Access. Well SSH Agent looks like it intends to support that — but unfortunately, the “add to keychain” control is disabled. As a result you have to go to Keychain Access and manually get your passphrase and then paste it into SSH Agent each time you you want to activate an ssh key.

The second Cocoa app I looked at, SSHKeychain fared better in this regard. It integrates nicely with Keychain Access. The interface is a bit quirky but if you follow the directions you should be up in no time. Note that with each of the ssh agents I tested, there were situations where I had to log out (of OS X) and back in to get the ssh command line tools to notice the agent.

Any chance of integrated SSH key management making it into Keychain Access in time for Leopard?

Well I’ve been thinking of switching to Panic Transmit for a while.  The Panic apps are just beautiful and Cocoa-licious. While there is no explicit mention of SSH in the text of the Transmit page, I did notice a picture that showed SFTP configuration, so I decided to give Transmit a try.  Unfortunately there appears to be no way to induce Transmit to do certificate-based authentication.  Apparently only username/password is supported.

Enter Cyberduck.   It’s a Cocoa app like the other two.  Unlike Fugu, this one remembers settings across restarts.  Cyberduck even has a nice little tray that pops out with your site “bookmarks”. And unlike Transmit, this one does a great job with certificate-based authentication — going beyond Fugu’s cryptic command-line escapes and letting me pick the certificate file from a nice file finder.  The other nice thing is that like Transmit, this one supports multiple editors.  Very nice.  Cyberduck: it takes a few more seconds to download (from TLD .ch = Switzerland) — but it’s definitely worth the wait.