mathiasbynens has a great github repo of OS X commands to change various system defaults. Some of my favorites:

# Disable menu bar transparency
defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleEnableMenuBarTransparency -bool false

# Disable the warning when changing a file extension
defaults write com.apple.finder FXEnableExtensionChangeWarning -bool false

# Show the ~/Library folder
chflags nohidden ~/Library

This is like a nerdy command line version of Secrets.

Instead of just listening to me complain about Xcode 4.3 in Lion, I thought you might like some backgrounds for your iPhone. I have both lock screen and home screen versions. The images are subsets of the first image described in my entry to the ITT VIS User Group Meeting a couple years ago (and now appears at the top of this blog):

These images show a line-integral convolution (LIC) representation of the global NASA wind velocity data. The first image shows the LIC output, while the second and third images combine the LIC output with the Earth image in the IDL distribution. The fourth image shows the combination texture mapped on a sphere representing the Earth’s surface. Dark colors represent low velocity winds, lighter colors higher velocity winds. All aspects of the creation of the images were done in IDL. The code to compute the LIC was written in C and integrated with IDL using a DLM. The data access was done from NASA’s DAP server using OPeNDAP’s client IDL bindings (another DLM).

Images are retina sized, i.e., iPhone 4/4S only.

The newest Mac OS, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, was released last week. See John Siracusa’s review for a extremely detailed look at the new features in Lion. AstroBetter posted some thoughts on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion along with a comment thread from users about how it has affected specific astronomy packages.

My thoughts from using Lion for a few days on my home computer (I haven’t upgraded work computers yet):

1. IDL seems to work fine, though I haven’t done much on my home computer besides a few sanity tests.
2. Lion is the first Mac OS X update I have thought felt slower than its predecessor. I think it is mostly due to the new window creation animation. The extremely useful Secrets website says that the following should turn off the animation: “defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO“.
3. Spaces have been changed a bit to work with the new Mission Control feature. I had a 2 x 3 grid of spaces previously, but Lion only supports a 1-dimensional array of spaces, so now I have a single row of six spaces. This is what I’m missing the most so far, since my 2-dimensional mental model of the purposes of the spaces allowed quick switching between tasks.
4. Scrolling is, by default, backwards from the current direction, but there is a preference value to change it back to the Snow Leopard way. I suppose if I had a Magic Trackpad I would give the new way a try, but I use a regular mouse with a scroll wheel, so I stuck to the old way.
5. Most people are reporting an easy installation from the Mac App Store, but I had some difficulty. After Lion was downloaded, my Mac rebooted and the installer hung. It reported that it had 33 minutes to go for several hours. I tried again and it appeared to hang again, but I left it going all day as I was at work. When I come back, it had installed. Not sure how long it took, but it was definitely way longer than 33 minutes.
6. Rosetta support is gone, luckily all my applications are native now.
7. The UI is generally more muted and fading into the background, which I really like. On the other hand, iCal and Address Book got the skeuomorphic treatment, which I really don’t like.
8. For a few months, the new version of XCode cost $5. The new Lion version is free again.

Homebrew is a packaging system for Mac OS X, similar to Fink or MacPorts. I have used both Fink and MacPorts, but do not like having an entirely separate system of installs. Homebrew can install in /usr/local like a normal, well-behaved installation.

I installed Homebrew in /usr/local with the recommended commands, except I used sudo instead of changing the owner of /usr/local as shown in the Homebrew docs:

$ cd /usr/local
$ sudo git init
$ sudo git remote add origin git://github.com/mxcl/homebrew.git
$ sudo git pull origin master

Then installing a new formula is as easy as:

$ brew search svn
svn
$ sudo brew install svn

People can contribute new formulas; they are Ruby scripts that do the steps required to build the package.

I haven’t used this a lot yet, but this looks like a good solution to the problem. Any one using this yet?

AstroBetter has an article on on a FITS QuickLook plugin for Mac OS X by the author of the plugin. Looks incredibly useful if you use a Mac and FITS files. QuickLook plugins for more scientific data file formats would be really nice. Any one have an HDF 5 plugin?

I installed Snow Leopard when it came out last Friday and have been using it exclusively since then. The only thing related to IDL that has been a problem for me so far has been that the IDL 6.4 Assistant (the old online help which I still use when working from the command line) requires Rosetta, which is no longer bundled by default with Snow Leopard. The install process rolls your X11 version back a bit and a Snow Leopard update is not available from XQuartz yet, but I experienced no problems from this.

Overall, this was much smoother than Leopard, where it was months before everything was smoothly working again. After upgrading several applications that came out with Snow Leopard updates on Friday also, everything is now working as well as (and in several cases, better than) with Leopard.

UPDATE 9/13: We have had problems installing IDL 7.1 on Snow Leopard; the installer is evidently not Snow Leopard compatible.

UPDATE 9/21: Installing Rosetta should fix the IDL installer issue.

UPDATE 9/28: M. Katz reports on comp.lang.idl-pvwave that IDL 7.1 is two times faster on Snow Leopard.

Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” is available for pre-order from Amazon.com for $29. One of the features of Snow Leopard, is OpenCL, basically a wrapper around CUDA which is emerging as a standard for writing GPU processing code.

I made a few changes to my 1RM Mac OS Dashboard widget. This computes a theoretical one-rep maximum given a weight and number of reps for the lift. This update brings full Leopard compatibility (the “Done” button on the back was screwed up a bit) and a tweak to the formula so that the 1RM of a lift done once will be the same as the weight.

download

Apple’s science page has a collection of Keynote templates. They even have a short video about using the templates. (OK, 3D marble bar graphs are probably not the best, but you were going to make your graphics in IDL and import them anyway, right?)

ITT VIS announced an update for IDL on OS X today:

A new update for IDL on Macintosh computers is now available. The IDL 7.0.4 release adds support for Macintosh Intel 64-bit architecture on OS X 10.5. IDL 7.0.4 also fixes two issues that impacted all supported Macintosh platforms: CR49844 – “Creation of Semaphores Fails under Mac OS X 10.5″, and CR51198/CR51412 – “CURSOR/RDPIX Procedures not Working Correctly on OS X”.

Download, full release notes.