Edenwaith Blog

The first web browser I used was Netscape 3, then soon picked up Netscape 4. During the height of the 90s Browser Wars, I kept a far distance from the other browser, signified by a blue E. When Mac OS X was first released, the choice of native web browsers was fairly limited. While I impatiently waited for Netscape to port their browser to Mac OS X, I searched for alternatives and ended up settling with OmniWeb 4.

This was the beginning of a long relationship with a very functional and flexible browser. I even purchased two licenses for the product, I liked it that much, which is unusual for a product landscape that contains many capable and free browsers. Sadly, the Omnigroup's attention for OmniWeb has waned over the past several years (so they can spend their time on products which actually make money to keep the business alive). I still use OmniWeb as my Power Browser, but as the Web progresses, and new and existing browsers continue evolving, OmniWeb hasn't been able to keep up with the times. I have been experimenting with other web browsers. Safari 5 finally added support for some extensions, but even the extensions seem somewhat limited. Safari is a great browser, which I've used as my Quick Browser when I just want to get in and out, but I miss the flexibility and power that OmniWeb has offered. I then tried Firefox, which is my favorite browser when using Windows. Due to its cross-platform nature, there are a few things which don't feel "quite right". It's a good browser, and the flexibility is good. However, when I upgraded to Firefox 4, I was finding that the browser locked up once a day (an issue I was not seeing with Firefox 3.6). This was getting very annoying, so I took another look at Google Chrome.

I had looked at earlier versions of Google Chrome in the past, but its stripped down, minimalistic appearance initially turned me off. I liked having lots of flexibility and power in my browser. The unified address-search bar seemed to be a step back : that's how OmniWeb 4 used to handle things before OmniWeb 5 added the search bar. However, after using Chrome for the past week, I am greatly impressed. There are many little things which make the browsing experience feel "just right".

Pros:

• Fast
• Minimalistic interface
• Stable — Not a single crash, yet
• Google Translation
• Good HTML5 support — I noticed that OmniWeb 5 was not handling some of the image animations at kickoff.app very well, but Safari 5 and Google Chrome handled it like a charm.
• Accessing downloaded files — Easier to access the downloaded file options than either Safari or Firefox. Somewhat similar to Transmit 4's new approach for displaying the file transfer window.
• Paste and Go — This is one feature I really liked from Opera.
• Adding Bookmarks — Remembers the last folder where a bookmark was saved (unlike Firefox), which simplifies saving many bookmarks.
• Inline PDF Reader — Viewing a PDF on a Mac should not require opening Preview (like Firefox does). Just view the PDF inside the browser.

Cons:

• Somewhat difficult to grab the title bar if there are a lot of tabs
• Bookmarks didn't import from Firefox 4
• No separate search field — Despite this, the unified address-search bar works pretty well, especially since half the time I was doing a search, anyway.
• Tab crunch — If too many tabs are open in one window, the tabs just keep getting smaller and smaller. Safari and Firefox handle this issue better.
• Built-in Flash — On occasions the built-in Flash plug-in runs amock and takes up more than 50% of the CPU and causes my laptop's fans to go into high gear.
• Slow to close — If many tabs are open, Chrome can take several minutes to shut down.

The first update to EdenList for iOS has been released and is available for download to your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.

EdenList 1.0.1 for iOS now can share EdenList files between the Mac and your iOS device (iOS 3.2 or higher required) via the iTunes File Sharing pane.

Future versions of EdenList for iOS will incorporate a native iPad layout and more advanced features for managing your lists.

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the founding of Edenwaith.com.

The Past...

Edenwaith started with two small products, a Javascript FTP site and the text-based RPG/Adventure game Psychomancer.

2002 saw the introduction of Edenwaith's first set of Cocoa-based Macintosh applications: EdenMath and Untar. The next several years saw a flourishing of additional Macintosh applications, ranging across utilities for file archiving, security, mathematics, entertainment, and audio.

While the first decade of the 21st century proved to be a revitalizing time for Apple Inc., its largest successes came not in the form of its core strengths of computers and operating systems, but from new lines of popular mobile devices. Whereas the Web and Internet created an explosion of new interest in the technical world, the same is now occuring with a new breed of mobile devices, namely cell/mobile phones and light-weight tablet computers. Even though Macintosh sales are better than they ever have been (more than 4 million Macs were sold in Q1 2011), these numbers pale in comparison to the number of iOS devices which are now in the market. Apple can claim an installed Mac OS X base in the tens of millions, whereas the iOS base (iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad) is well over 100 million and accelerating at a much higher rate than Macintosh sales. Since iOS is an extension from Mac OS X, it has been a natural progression for many Macintosh developers to transition to iOS. While Edenwaith has mainly focused on developing utilities for Mac OS X, our first foray into iOS development came to fruition last year — EdenList for iPhone. This is just the first step for Edenwaith into iOS development. EdenList will continue to evolve and new products will come to the iOS platform in the next several years.

Looking ahead...

Ten years ago at this time, Mac OS X was still in beta, the original iPod had not even been announced, and mobile phones were more a novelty than a commodity. It can be difficult to even see five minutes into the future, much less five or ten years down the line of a quicksilver industry. Who would have thought in 2001 that Apple would have surpassed Microsoft's market value in the coming decade?

If anything has been learned from the past ten years when trying to make predicitions is not to make predicitions. They are almost always wrong. Yet, for the sake of amusement, let's make some far reaching statements and guesses about Edenwaith's future.

For the foreseeable future, Edenwaith will continue to work on its active Mac OS X products for as long as they are useful and needed. Several of Edenwaith's earliest products (EdenMath, EdenGraph) were designed to fill in the gaps found in a young Mac OS X. However, as Mac OS X matured, some of the usefulness our products was lost as Apple improved upon their OS and associated utilities. The future is murky to determine, but if anything is certain, change is inevitable. Already the wind of change is blowing directly into developers' faces as mobile developers are in high demand, indicating where current trends are leading.

Edenwaith has made its first baby steps into the mobile arena, and we will further entrentch into this space in the coming years with several new products. Hopefully we will turn back in the direction which started Edenwaith: games. There are a number of other ideas brewing, so we'll need to evaluate how feasible these ideas might be before dedicating time and effort into new projects.

Just as the Web did not kill the Desktop, neither will mobile devices eliminate the need for personal computers and web pages. Edenwaith's Mac OS X products are not going away any time soon, but our direction will likely lead down many new paths in the coming decade. Just as Edenwaith has gone through numerous changes in the past ten years, we expect just as many changes in the next ten. It is not unfair to consider that Edenwaith might wear a completely different mask in 2021. Perhaps some of our current products will be still around. Perhaps there will be an entirely new set of products. Perhaps there will be no products at all. Time will tell...

If you have a Macintosh application and you need to check if the OS is running in either 32 or 64 bit mode, here is a code snippet to make that determination.

/* File: check64bit.c
 * Description: Check if the running version of Mac OS X is 64-bit
 * To Compile: gcc -Wall -o check64bit check64bit.c
 * To run: ./check64bit
 */
 
 #include <stdio.h>
 #include <string.h>
 #include <sys/utsname.h>
 
 int main(int argc, char *argv[])
 {
 	int ret = 0;
 	struct utsname uname_info;
 	
 	ret = uname(&uname_info);
 	
 	if (ret == 0)
 	{
		printf("Uname Info\n");
		printf("Sysname  : %s\n", uname_info.sysname);
		printf("Nodename : %s\n", uname_info.nodename);
		printf("Release  : %s\n", uname_info.release);
		printf("Version  : %s\n", uname_info.version);
		printf("Machine  : %s\n", uname_info.machine);
		
		if (strcmp(uname_info.machine, "x86_64") == 0)
		{
			printf("You are running in 64-bit mode!\n");
		}
		else
		{
			printf("You are running in 32-bit mode.\n");
		}
 	}
 	
 	return 0;
 }
 
 

Reference

Edenwaith Gist : https://gist.github.com/edenwaith/8125865

2011 has started off well with two software updates in January. GUI Tar has been updated to address a couple of issues.

• Improved calculation of file sizes listed in the compression table. — Updated with code from the FolderSize tutorial, which returns the correct size for applications which contain additional frameworks.
• Minor UI improvements.
• Optimizations and clean up for a leaner application. — Instead of using old, custom icons originally designed for Untar, GUI Tar now only uses custom icons (which match the current look of Mac OS X's archive icons) for 7z, rar, and taz files. This reduced the number of custom icons contained within the application, which helped to reduce the overall size of GUI Tar.

At this time, this is the only planned release for GUI Tar this year. GUI Tar is a freeware application which has seen infrequent updates in the past several years, and there are no current plans to heavily continue development on GUI Tar in the foreseeable future. If your archiving needs exceed what Mac OS X or GUI Tar can provide, it is recommended that you look for a more appropriate solution (such as StuffIt, BetterZip, or one of the many other archiving utilities available).

A number of people reported having difficulty accessing the new Preferences in Permanent Eraser 2.5.0. Considering that the Preferences was one of the cornerstones for the 2.5 release, this problem needed to be fixed so trying to open the Preferences was not so much of a delicate timing issue. Permanent Eraser 2.5.1 has fixed this problem, so the Preferences window can be opened, even when the initial warning message appears.