Safari now uses a completely different method of storing cookies, which unfortunately means that the only decent management tool I ever found, Cocoa Cookies, doesn’t work any more.

So I rolled my own:

(/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c print
~/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist |
awk '/Domain = / {x++;print x-1,$0}' |
awk '!/mee.nu|amazon/{print $1}' |
sort -rn | sed -e 's/^/delete :/';
echo save;echo quit) |
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy
~/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist

Note that you really don’t want to run this as-is, and probably want something more robust than a shell one-liner anyway. The bits that matter are:

1. run "/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c print" to dump all your cookies in an easily-parsed format.
2. The array of cookies is zero-based.
3. The array shrinks as you delete things from it with "delete :N", so you want to start at the end and work forward.
4. The original file isn't altered until you send a "save".
5. Safari seems to write this file out whenever you get a cookie, and notices when it's changed on disk.

Sad, really. Amazon finally delivers my Aperture 2.0 upgrade, and my first thought upon opening the package is, “wow, this manual smells like a freshly-opened Magic: The Gathering booster pack”. Not those cheap, modern, anyone-can-get-some boosters. The good stuff, from the old days, when people would line up around the block to buy a case, then get back in line to buy another one.

Oh, and I didn’t expect it to work, but no, it doesn’t support my old Minolta A2 in its new tethered mode. That was my second thought.

Please fix Safari’s tooltips. You’ve gotten a little better at making them go away eventually, but they still often do stupid things like this:

The only open tab in my browser is viewing Slashdot, but the tooltip in the tab bar still refers to a site I visited an hour ago. And it wasn’t the most recent site opened in this tab.

I plugged in a freshly formatted external drive, copied a bunch of files to it, and tried to eject it. I couldn’t, because it was in use. Why? Because Spotlight was indexing the contents (specifically, a pair of “gnutar tf” processes were grovelling over the very large archives I’d just copied).

This is now the second major OS release to embed Spotlight into the OS, and there’s still no way to stop it from the GUI. If I didn’t know about “sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/foo”, it could be hours before I’d be able to eject that external drive. This is really stupid.

Also, a big “WTF?” to the person who replaced the Berkeley “ps” command with a SysV-style version in Leopard. After twenty years of practice, my fingers don’t type in “compatibility mode”.

So, with 10.5.2 and SuperDuper 2.5 out, I was finally willing to upgrade my primary Mac.

First problem: it merged down an old version of my Safari bookmarks from .Mac, even though I had sync turned off, and the last sync had reset this machine as the master. Fortunately, it was a merge, rather than a replace, so I didn’t lose anything, and only had a small amount of cleanup to do.

Second problem: I can’t turn .Mac sync back on to reset the bookmarks, and it falsely thinks that I’ve got local iDisk sync turned on as well (something I used to use a lot, but shut off a while back due to .Mac flakiness). The whole .Mac connection seems pretty hosed, actually.

Third problem: Mail.app’s IMAP insists on showing my entire home directory on one of my servers, and walking the tree each time to check for “new messages”; this behavior cannot be overridden from the GUI. It also completely lost track of how to connect to my primary SMTP server, but after the third try I was able to get it to send mail again.

[this doesn’t include the many problems I already knew about from upgrading other machines, of course…]

[…and I’m sure I’ll find more…]

After the MacBook Air, what next?

MacBook Water: splashproof to survive your eXtreme lifestyle, or at least a spilled latté when you show it off at Starbucks.

MacBook Earth: the natural organic sustainable recycled biodegradable cruelty-free dolphin-safe fair-trade computer. 10% of all proceeds are divided equally between Greenpeace, PETA, and BDS.

MacBook Fire: oh, wait, they already make those.

Pretty much every review I’ve seen by someone who has read all of the specs can be summed up as: “this would be a fantastic machine for someone else”. The deal-breaker for me (and I was already lukewarm on the concept) was the lack of ethernet, which means that the spiffy-keen “use the DVD drive on any networked Mac or PC when you need one” feature is crippled by the performance of your wireless network or Apple’s optional USB 10/100 dongle. Suddenly it doesn’t seem so spiffy. Also, if you spring for the outboard optical drive, it ties up your only USB port, and they don’t mention it including a hub.

I can’t see very many people adopting it as a primary machine, which means syncing configurations and data to another Mac. .Mac sync sucked horribly for the entire lifetime of Tiger, and I still see occasional outages for .Mac mail. They claim to have put a lot of work into it for Leopard, but if the Air is really a secondary machine, then they need to add direct sync between Macs as a solid OS feature.

I think the real accomplishment of the Air will turn out to be improving the quality of lightweight PC laptops and tablets running Windows Vista. I expect to see the first round of them in about three months.

[Update: just received an apology for the mistake, an updated license key, and a partial refund to bring my price down to the current $39 promotion.]

[Update: I can’t currently recommend this application, for the simple reason that I made the mistake of buying it four days before the release of 9.0, and they charge $29 for the upgrade. Until March, it’s only $39 for a brand-new license, but if I want 9.0, my total cost ends up being $88, which is more than the app is worth. Worse, the updater offered me the new version without mentioning the fact that it would revert to a trial license and require new payment. Fortunately, I was able to revert to 8.5.4.]

Your file-transfer app, Interarchy, is very nice. I particularly appreciate its solid support for Amazon S3. In the latest version, the thing I like most is the fact that permissions settings for uploads are now an honest-to-gosh preference, rather than being buried in some pulldown menu.

I question your decision to make the new version look like the unholy love-child of Finder and Safari, however, especially since your Bookmarks Bar and Side Bar are only cosmetically related to their inspiration, and share none of their GUI behaviors. It looks like a duck, and it sort of quacks like a duck, but it’s really just a cartoon duck, and not worth eating.

And I haven’t the slightest idea why you thought it would be a good idea to have the first item on the Bookmarks Bar be a menu containing every URL in the user’s personal Address Book. Considering that the user can’t rearrange or remove items on the Bookmarks Bar, you’re wasting an awful lot of valuable real estate on a very marginal feature.