After some tests, I’m convinced that Adobe’s CS2 apps are incapable of saving PNGs without shifting colors. I tried every combination of Color Management settings as well as input color spaces. No matter what I tried, the designated RGB values I started with were getting shifted when saved as PNG. Saving the same documents as GIFs output the correct colors.

I posted the following to Adobe’s Forums, including my workaround solution:

>Wasted a very frustrating hour with this today. There is definitely a color shift in PNG output that seems consistent across several CS2 apps. I first hit the bug using Illustrator’s
“Save for Office…”, which saves a hi-res PNG of the current Illustrator doc. After that failed a few dozen times (I tried a variety of color management settings, despite being hardware calibrated), I switched to Illustrator’s “Save for Web…” option. This produced exactly the same shift. Identical problems in Photoshop, though lesser when saving directly to PNG and skipping “Save for Web”.

>My solution was to save the Illustrator file as a GIF, then open that in the OS X Preview app, then resave as a PNG. Worked perfectly with zero color shift.

>This is Adobe’s bug, not a problem with the PNG format.

A few friends recently asked about whether or not they should buy a new MacBook Pro or wait a little longer for whatever’s coming next.

My first reaction, conditioned on years of Mac use and purchasing, was, “of course you should wait, there’s likely to be a new chip in the MacBook Pros any day now!”

I think I was wrong. Moreover, I think that whole line of thinking is finished.

We already know what the next chip in the MacBook Pros will be: The Core 2 Duo, probably running at 2.4 and 2.67ghz. None of this is a surprise, it’s all published on Intel’s Processor Roadmap and related documents.

Intel sticks to their roadmap. The roadmap doesn’t show any Core2 Duo chips in laptops before 2007. Despite the rumors, I’ll be surprised to see anyone shipping Core2 Duo laptops in quantity before Halloween (the actual first shopping day of the holiday season). Of course this is all speculation and I may be wrong.

The next CPU Intel designs will not make the previous model obsolete. They work on the principle of incremental progress. Mac users aren’t conditioned to understand incremental progress. Consider:

* The PPC blew away the 68k
* G3s crushed PPCs
* G4s ran circles around G3s
* The G5 was so hot it needed liquid cooling (and was faster than the G4s).
* The first Intel MacBook Pros were 5-10 times faster than the previous PowerBooks.

That kind of repeated beating gets you some learnin’. Thankfully, the days of imminent obsolescence are likely over.

The Core2 Duo is not radically better than the Core Duo. It is incrementally better, in some areas more than others. Compare the charts in this Core 2 Duo vs. Core Duo article on AnandTech. While some application tests do show a 10-15% performance improvement, most reveal 3–5%. Gaming Performance is almost identical between the chips. Also remember that a 10% speedup is equivalent to 0.2ghz of processor speed, something that tends to happen anyway between product cycles or could improve if you learn how to overclock amd fx 6300.

> **The performance difference here is not enough to justify an upgrade if you’re a Core Duo owner**, but for a first time buyer if prices are the same, the Core 2 Duo is simply the right choice.

Some in the higher nerd-echelons have realized the “shortcomings” of the Core 2 Duo and are already lusting after Intel’s next CPU, the mythical Santa Rosa platform. Me? I’m going to stop stressing about processors and enjoy my MacBook Pro for a while without worrying that it will be obsolete tomorrow.

Software however, that’s a whole other story…

Hardware

• Mac Pro with Quad Processors, or at least 2x dual-cores Right!
• New case for Mac Pro, the G5 enclosure needed to be huge mostly for heat management, Intel’s chips won’t need enormous radiators like the G5s did. I’m feeling high-gloss black, maybe. Wrong.
• Intel XServes Right!
• The return of 64bit CPUs. Right!
• Price drop on Cinema Displays, possibly with some new features, most likely a camera. If resolution independence is included in Leopard, higher-resolution may be offered, but I don’t see how they could sell high-resolution displays without supporting scaled UI features in the OS. Perhaps an add-on to 10.4? If there’s a significant surface redesign to the Mac Pro, displays might be redone to match. Maybe dropping “cinema” from the name too. Right! and sort of Wrong. too.
• Possible updates to MacBook Pros. These might include the rumored switch to Core2 Duo chips (obvious, but when? I don’t think Jobs really wants to stand up in front of several thousand developers, ask them how many are now using Intel Macs, then tell them those machines are obsolete. Especially when most of those developers just spent a laptop on admission to WWDC.) Other changes might include a MacBook like drive replacement rejiggering, which I’d welcome, even though gutting a MacBook Pro isn’t nearly as bad as the 15” G4. Right!, basically.
• A new sub-notebook to replace the much-loved 12” PowerBook. It will be significantly pared down, causing much consternation from those wanting a 12” replacement and much joy from those wanting a sub-notebook. (This one is a longshot, but not totally implausible.) Wrong.
• Mac Pros with dual GPUs or paired video cards. Also a shift to NVidia, mostly to appease Intel after AMD bought ATI. (I’m convinced the ATI/AMD purchase will lead to only two hardware choices for PCs; Intel-Nvidia and AMD-ATI. Intel might as well just buy NVidia since ATI’s stuff will likely be optimized for AMD hardware.) Close. NVidia is in, but no paired GPU cards and ATI is still a build-to-order option.

Software

• Subversion becomes part of the base OS X install. If not the base install at least installed with XCode and the Developer tools. (I will be among those cheering this one) Right! it’s in there!
• Resolution Independent displays in OS X (I will immediately start running at 80%, just for the smaller menu bar) Wrong. not yet.
• iChat improvements, demo’ed with Phil Schiller. Right! Right!
• Quartz 2D Extreme will have been cleaned up, renamed and turned on by default. Close.
• Some sort of gaming initiative, to encourage and make game-development easier on Macs Wrong.  although you can learn how to install betfred for your mobile or tablet.  
• Color coding for mailboxes in Mail.app. Wrong. Notes and todos aren’t what I was hoping for.
• Significantly better video handling user experience in iTunes. Wrong.
• Some sort of network-collaborative document framework. Wrong.
• Garbage collection in Objective C. This was sort of leaked a while back. Right!

Nots

• No new iPod, wrong audience and not enough press. Right!
• Virtualization, I thought Apple might do it, but now I’m doubtful. Partly because of Parallels, partly because it kind of undermines the MacOS. (Brent thinks Apple might buy them) Wrong.
• QuickTime Pro license included with .Mac subscription. This will never happen, but it should. An alternative would be a free QT pro license with each iPod or after so many songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store. Wrong. no surprise.
• iTunes Music Store renamed to iTunes Store. Probably not at WWDC, but it will happen. Wrong.
• No iPhone. Not because of any technological hurdles, rather due to the bone-headedness of American wireless carriers. So yeah, this is totally fake. Right!

Misc.

• Either Adobe will demo CS3 on Intel during the Keynote or Quark will be invited onstage to show off XPress. Wrong. Wrong.
• Before the zillion derivitive cards were posted, I would have expected Jobs to pre-empt John Siracusa’s WWDC Keynote Bingo card if events had lined up. Imagine a slide that just said “Bingo” before something good, at which point the crowd, knowing what’s coming, would have gone completely nuts. But now that there are a bunch of variants, the fun is sort of gone. The most reliable “wins” in the original card would be diagonal up from “New kernel in Leopard”, and across from “‘New’ Finder in Leopard”, which just aren’t all that exciting. Wrong., Wrong., Wrong. One guy in front of me did have a card printed out, but no one yelled anything.
• TextMate will win some sort of Apple Design Award. Allan more than deserves it. Right! Go Allan!
• David Watanabe will not win an Apple Design Award. No matter how much he deserves one and how beautiful NewsFire is, David wrote Acquisition and Hell will freeze before he’s invited on stage by Apple. Still, I hope I’m wrong. Right!, unfortunately.

This is a mix of what I think we’ll see and what I’d really like to see, hopefully there will be some crossover. I meant to post this last week, but forgot to (life distractions aplenty). A few things were added after seeing the buzzkill banner this morning. I’ll update this post after the keynote to see how I did.

Apple Support Document 300225: Photo Sync creates iPod photo Cache:

When using iTunes to sync photos to iPod photo, iTunes creates a folder called iPod photo Cache in the top level of the folder you selected for your photos. Picking another folder to sync does not erase the previous iPod photo Cache.

Depending on how many photos are being synced, the hard drive could fill up.

Drag the folder named iPod photo Cache to the Trash or Recycle Bin.

Sure enough, poking around in there I found cache files from 2005. so I moved some of that clutter over from my old PowerBook to the new MacBook Pro.

Juggling free space is always an issue for me, deleting this folder recovered almost 3 GB.

I noticed this folder while showing Disk Inventory X to a friend.

Setting up icon placement and window sizes on a disk image isn’t as easy as it should be. Here’s part of my solution for automating a designed disk image with AppleScript.

Fixing Window Size

According to this thread on Apple’s Installer-dev list, window size isn’t written until there is some user interaction, specifically clicking either the green zoom button or the little resizing thingie in the lower right corner. I was unable to get UI Scripting to dependably click the resizing corner, but I did notice that two clicks on the zoom button, after setting a window’s size, toggles between the set size and the zoomed size. So I specified my desired window size, then had System Events click the zoom button (button 2) twice:

set bounds of window 1 to {50, 75, 580, 680}
tell application "System Events" to tell process "Finder" to click button 2 of window 1
tell application "System Events" to tell process "Finder" to click button 2 of window 1

Forcing .DS_STORE to Record Icon Positions

The Finder’s .DS_STORE files are a bit of a mystery. The binary format is closed and there is no programatic way of forcing these files to update. Some smart people have suggested some harebrained workarounds for dealing with this problem, but I wanted something cleaner and more flexible.

My solution was to start fresh by obliterating any .DS_STORE files that might be on the disk image; this appears in the window-layout script before doing anything else:

do shell script "rm " & quoted form of POSIX path of dmgPath & ".DS_STORE"

Next the window is sized, icons are positioned and background image is assigned. Then the script waits to eject the disk* until the .DS_STORE file has been created (open in Script Editor):

set waitTime to 0
set ejectMe to false
repeat while ejectMe is false
    delay 1
    set waitTime to waitTime + 1
    if (do shell script "[ -f " & quoted form of POSIX path of dmgPath & ".DS_STORE ]; echo $?") = "0" then set ejectMe to true
end repeat
log "waited " & waitTime & " seconds for .DS_STORE to be created."
eject dmgPath

On my MacBook Pro, it usually takes 4 seconds for the file to appear. First deleting the file makes sure that the resulting file contains all the new placement information.

Next the disk image gets run through DropDMG and is ready for uploading. I’m ejecting the disk image before converting because I’m getting filesystem errors when I try converting while the source DMG is still mounted. I don’t remember that happening in the past, but it’s probably a good idea to eject first anyway.

Aaron Harnly’s Letterbox addon for Apple’s Mail.app:

Letterbox is a plugin for Apple’s Mail.app that takes advantage of your widescreen monitor. It rearranges the interface into three vertical columns —so the message pane is to the right of the message list, rather than below.

This makes me so, so happy. I had this working in previous versions of OSX and it was one of the first things I tried after upgrading to 10.4.. Seeing more messages is a big productivity boost for me because things that need attention don’t get pushed out of sight.
I’m glad someone finally got it working, thank you Aaron. I hope he does eventually post the source code, I’m curious to see how he did it (and if it changed from the Ars posting).

update URL updated.

Quark’s got a Universal Binary Beta, what have you got??

Working in CS2 on a MacBook Pro is slow and painful. We will probably need new hardware before CS3 ships, that hardware will be Intel Macs. Hurry up or someone’s gonna take your market.