I ran into an interesting problem last night that yielded little to no documentation when I searched Google. The problem involved Mail.app and my ability to search for messages. I'm a adamant user of MailTags, which is a plugin for Mail.app on Max OS X that adds tagging support to e-mail messgaes. MailTags is actually one of those few Shareware applications actually worth paying for. Well, I was trying to run a search for a MailTags keyword and nothing was coming up, but I knew there were messages tagged with that keyword. To make things weirder, when I went into the MailTags preferences and tried to "collect" tags and projects from my message index it would clear out my preference lists. Something was wrong, but I couldn't figure out what. Then I realized that searching "entire message" didn't work as well. At first I chalked this up to a bug in MailTags, but when I uninstalled MailTags I still couldn't search the body of messages. Well, it turns out that Mail.app's search methods utilize Spotlight, and MailTags also depends Spotlight's searching power. A couple of weeks ago I used Onyx to disable Spotlight entirely. See, I hardly ever use Spotlight... the truth of the matter is that I'm a QuickSilver fiend. I've been for awhile, and haven't had much use for Spotlight. I disabled Spotlight thinking it might save a small amount of processing power behind the scenes. I'm sure I was right, but whatever it saved me wound up being negligible in the long run. When I disabled Spotlight I essentially neutered Mail.app of it's search capabilities. Turning Spotlight back on and then reindexing my drive solved the problem, but it turns out this one of those areas where Onyx seems quirky. I suggest if you run into this problem turning to your terminal and entering this into the prompt:

sudo mdutil -i "/Volumes/Macintosh HD"
sudo mdutil -E "/Volumes/Macintosh HD"

In case you were wondering, mdutil is a "Utility to manage Spotlight indexes", and the first line using the "i" flag toggles the indexing on or off for the specified drive (BTW, substitute your drive's name in for "Macintosh HD" as necessary). That second line with the "E" flag erases any existing index and then begins rebuilding the index from scratch. That quick fix, and some time spent indexing solved all of my Mail.app search woes. So, if you are experiencing trouble with Mail.app searching, or any other app for that matter and may have tinkered with Spotlight or other system related settings, consider running the above commands and fixing your Spotlight indexing.

Who let the dogs out?!?!? If you hadn't seen the news yet, Firefox 3 (dogs = canidae, and so are foxes...) has been officially released. This is exciting news for all web warriors, regardless of operating system. While this fox doesn't quite match up to it's brethren, Safari and Opera in terms of CSS3 compatibility and general web rendering features, it is a huge leap forward for operating system performance and optimization. If you're a Mac user you may remember the 1.5 days, where you could go make a pot of coffee while Firefox was starting up. Firefox 2 was better, but still not where Mac users expect their applications to be. Some of us, for a time, used Camino but that's nothing more then a joke... Firefox 3 is a pleasant surprise for Mac folk, who will notice considerably improved load times and Aqua features we simply expect from real mac applications. I highly recommend downloading this new release if you haven't already.

Disclaimer: I still strongly support the adoption of Safari 3.1 and would still recommend it's use over above Firefox 3 due to it's early adoption of new web technologies and overall integration with the OS X world.

Finally, Safari 3.1! For a long time now I've been using a variety of hacks on my install of Safari to make it more usable. Most notably, plugins like Twicetab which offered the ability to double click in the tab bar and open a new tab, or Safari Stand which opened up a series of debug menu options. The new release of Safari now makes all those things unnecessary. Double clicking the tab bar works - just like you would expect it to, and a "Develop" menu bar is revealed by a simple checkbox in the Safari Preferences. This menu bar reveals access to the Web Inspector, Console and best of all new "Disable Caches" option - something every web develop has been patiently waiting (and hoping) for!

I believe all these cool new perks, plus an amazing score of 75 on the Acid3 tests are available for Windows users. Safari has definitely out-done Firefox, it pains me to say that, but it's true. It's fast, usable and now developer-friendly. I remember when Safari 2 came out and it was rumored to be a "legitimate" browser and I just laughed. I used Camino for 95% of my browsing experience in those days, and defaulted to Firefox 1.5 for the rest of it. Firefox 2 was a little faster on the Mac, but not enough to replace my default of Camino. When the Safari 3 betas came out things were promising and I comfortably converted. I've used nightly webkits for development purpose routinely, but I never quite felt comfortable using it as my main browser since I'm really bad about downloading new nightlies. The advent of Firefox 3 pre5 had me reconsidering, since it was finally truly macified, and was fast enough for general usage. Safari 3.1 has made all that bunk now, and I'm happy to say I've even uninstalled most of my hacks.

If you haven't downloaded it yet, run over to http://www.apple.com/safari/ and get it right away.

I love AOL Radio on Mac OS X, even more than iTunes radio. Since AOL Radio partnered up with XM there are more stations and more variety and less commercials. You can literally find anything regardless of your taste. The down side to this wonderful music selection is an ugly side panel that jets out from the side of the application. If it wasn't for this side panel, I think I would be content to use AOL Radio. However, like a good mac user, everything has to be aesthetically pleasing and the side panel just isn't. To say nothing of the fact that most of the time the adds are less then stellar themselves.

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