Archive for June 24, 2013

Monday, June 24, 2013

opensnoop

Bob Rudis (via Jens Alfke):

Leopard ships with something called DTrace that gives developers and administrators the ability to take a peek at what all running code is doing in a flexible and dynamic way. Giving DTrace the coverage it deserves is beyond a simple blog post, but there are some smaller utilities – like opensnoop – that take advantage of the power of DTrace, but on a more targeted scale which are worthy of a minor exposition. The main purpose of the opensnoop utility is to provide a report of file opens as they occur.

Here’s the man page. This seems like a good alternative to fs_usage for certain use cases.

Update (2022-02-08): LOLgrep:

It’s insane how useful opensnoop -t -f "/Some/Path/ThatYouWannaObserveWhoIsOpening/It" is

NetNewsWire 4 Open Beta

Daniel Pasco:

The basic game plan will be as follows:
1. Kick off the open beta
2. Continue our work on sync
3. Start rolling out sync to select beta testers
4. Continue to add cool features to NetNewsWire 4
5. Ship the completed version of NetNewsWire 4, including sync

Here’s what I noticed first:

  1. At first launch, it logged some assertion failures and reported “Your sites failed to import successfully. Enjoy NetNewsWire 4”. A few of my articles showed up under “All Unread,” but the list of sites was completely empty.
  2. The user interface feels foreign, as it only supports a widescreen view, Tab-keying between views doesn’t work properly, and there’s no way to open new (browser) tabs in the background.
  3. A huge number of features have been removed, from smart lists to (nearly all) AppleScript support. Some pruning was due, but this is way too much, and there’s no indication of which features (aside from sync) will be returning.

I’m glad to see that NetNewsWire is still being developed, but this looks for all intents and purposes like a whole new app, at an early stage of development. NetNewsWire 3 is one of my favorite apps ever. This beta is too rough to be part of my daily workflow. Worse, I am less sure after trying it that the app they plan to build will please me. If I didn’t have other apps to work on, this would motivate me to start developing my own RSS reader.

Update (2013-07-08): Public Beta 2 seems to address none of these issues.

Update (2013-07-15): Neither does Public Beta 3.

Update (2013-09-10): Public Beta 7 restores the “Classic” (non-widescreen) layout.

Update (2013-12-03): Public Beta 12 restores the NetNewsWire 3 keyboard shortcuts.

All the Apps Have Been Written

Kevin Hoctor:

After my research, I was sure that I wasn’t the only person unhappy with the state of personal finance packages on the Mac. How many others were in the same pain as I was? If I can cure this pain my life, maybe I can help them as well.

I want to “fix” most of the apps I like, including his.