Entries Tagged 'Apple' ↓

I had multiple mp3 audio tracks of a lecture. They worked fine in iTunes since I could create a playlist and tracks would play one after another. I moved the tracks to my phone to listen to them on the move, but the phone has some weired sorting method that played the tracks in wrong order. So I needed to combine these tracks in one.

Tried with GarageBand first. Placing one track after another. This got a bit tricky, and somehow did not allow me to add tracks after a particular number of seconds of playback. I don’t know why it happened like that, but importing and adjusting tracks in GarageBand was taking too much time, so I abandoned it.

Did a bit of Googling around to see what else is possible. Found that if I had QuickTime Pro, I could join the tracks into a single file by copy pasting them into a new audio track. I do not have QT Pro so this wouldn’t work.

Found a $10 software called iTunesJoin that could do the trick. Obviously, the task wasn’t worth that money!

And hey, on a forum posting that initially looked useless, I found the gem! You can simply cat mp3 files!

So the following command in Terminal:

cat *.mp3 > newfile.mp3

Will join all your mp3 files in the current directory. It’s a simple file concatenation operation. Multiple mp3 files stringed together work like one big file! Even if they had multiple ID3 tags, it worked for me. I just added a new ID3 tag using iTunes once the file was created.

Later, I also got Join Together on Doug’s Applescript for iTunes library. BTW, this library has tons of useful AppleScripts.

I can happily move the file to my phone now! I just wished Windows XP within Parallels detected my phone!

I always wanted a faster and better search for Thunderbird. If I could find content within emails with Spotlight, it would save a lot of trouble. Even more important if I could search in OpenOffice.org documents using Spotlight, it would really be a boon.

Browsing around some blogs, I found Dennis’s blog. The blog post describes in detail how we can enable Spotlight search for Thunderbird. You can read the post for full details, but the following are the steps:

1. You must have Thunderbird 2+.
2. Enable spotlight search in Thunderbird: Preferences - Advanced - Config Editor - mail.spotlight.enable to true
3. This will convert all mails from default mbox format to individual files.
4. Make sure .eml files are set to open with Thunderbird. You can do that by going to the info of one .eml file, and changing “Open With” application for all.

Next on, OpenOffice documents in Spotlight!

I searched a lot for this on the Apple site, but could not find much. A bit of digging deeper, I figured that the NeoOffice has a plugin for Spotlight - NeoLight - that can allow Spotlight to search OpenOffice.org documents. NeoOffice is actually a native Mac port of OpenOffice. I downloaded the plugin, extracted the mdi importer and placed it in the Spotlight Library.

Invoked a search and voila! All my OpenOffice documents showed up!

I am a happy with my desktop search!

I have become a great fan of QuickSilver after I finally set it up a couple of months back. I am always doing a Command + Space to bring up QuickSilver now, even when I am not on a Mac!

For people who are on Windows, Skylight could be a good alternative. Lifehacker has an article on it, and they found it pretty impressive. Though they won’t ditch Launchy yet.

And for the Linuxers, there is Katapault.

If you are not using any of these yet, I strongly recommend you get one!

The guys at iPhone Dev Wiki have found a way to get serial access to the iPhone bootloader - without opening the case.
Something else from their latest progress report:

We know how to unlock the phone. Unfortunately the commands needed gave “Permission Denied” errors. We did find a reference to a hardware register that causes “Permission Denied” error in the bootloader, but we cannot software patch the bootloader because it is signed.

If all of that does not make much sense to you, don’t worry. Wait for a couple of months. We may just as well be able to install a Linux version on the iPhone! They have done it for iPod, so why not iPhone?

I am going to wait for a couple of months!

But something else on the official iPhone site is more interesting. Apple’s has released a guide to designing web applications for iPhone. There is not much new in it, but it covers the fundamentals well. If you plan to develop applications for the iPhone, you should go take a quick look. The most important things are the screen size and the interaction via fingers! Odd enough, iPhone does not consider itself to be a handheld device! It will NOT take the media = handheld style sheet. It will use the screen one.

Good times are ahead. Mobile phones with VGA resolution (640×480) are coming out, so the troubles with mobile screen sizes when you develop a mobile web app should reduce after a while.

If you are like me, you use X11 on your Mac only for OpenOffice (I am waiting for the native build). But when you start OpenOffice, it also starts X11 - which in turn starts xterm - a command line for X11. I just upgraded X11, and the xterm started coming again. I forgot how I had fixed it last time, so searched for it again. Here’s the perfect solution for doing this. (Taken from a post by Peter on BML)

The default settings for startup under the Mac X11 create an xterm window. This can be annoying if one primarily uses X11 for openoffice or other programs and uses the Mac Terminal program for the command line.

The default settings for startup are contained in the file ‘/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc’. Each user can override this by creating a .xinitrc file in their home directory. One line in this file needs to be changed to remove the launch of the xterm window.

Here are the specific command line instructions for doing this:

cp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc ~/.xinitrc
chmod u+w ~/.xinitrc
sed 's/xterm/# xterm/' ~/.xinitrc > foo
mv -f foo ~/.xinitrc

After this, quit X11 (if running) and relaunch and there should be no xterm window.

Worked like charm!