Written on: 2006/06/28.

A new version of the Yahoo! Messenger for Mac OS X has been released! Download it from here.

A ground-up rewrite in pure Cocoa, the new version sheds 2.x's legacy Carbon codebase. Allow me to walk you through the before and after shots and detail for you how exquisite Yahoo! Messenger Mac's makeover really is. Note: some names in screenshots have been blurred to protect the paranoid.

Before: old and busted (version 2.5.3, a Carbon app, very non native, non anti aliased fonts, crashed a lot)

After: new hotness (version 3.0 beta 1, a Cocoa app, fully native, fully anti aliased fonts, now with less crashing)

In fact, the new version is the best looking chat client I've ever seen for any operating system, looking nicer than even iChat and Adium.

Below are the contact lists for iChat 3.1.5 (left), Adium 0.89.1 (middle), and Yahoo! Messenger 3.0 beta 1 (right)

Strictly speaking, brushed metal apps like iChat are generally hideous. iChat makes up for it by being a pretty awesome app otherwise, but brushed metal looks bad. Adium on the other hand is pure aqua, yet somehow looks worse than iChat. Its problems are in the little things. Scrollbar's too big, too much bordering between the window title, status message, and first group, and no matter how much theme tweaking you do, you just can't seem to smoothen these things out in Adium. Quite frankly, the defaults are far worse than my heavily tweaked setup, so we're giving it more credit than it deserves here I think. Yahoo! Messenger on the other hand employs that snazzy new smooth metal interface introduced in Tiger, and it's perfect for an app like this. Like Adium, Yahoo! Messenger sheds the hideous brushed metal look in favor of something cleaner. But in place of Adium's overbordering, Yahoo! Messenger has a unified titlebar and status message along with cleaner looking group labels.

So in the battle of contact lists, Yahoo! Messenger comes in first place with iChat in second and Adium in third. Let's look at conversation windows next.

Below are the conversation windows for iChat 3.1.5 (left), Adium 0.89.1 (top), and Yahoo! Messenger 3.0 beta 1 (right)

Brushed metal does better for iChat this time around. It's still somewhat obnoxious, but much less so. The text bubbles in iChat are cute, but perhaps a little too cute. There is a certain lack of professional feel to iChat conversation windows, but they definitely look nice. Adium manages to beat iChat slightly here, with its sleeker Aqua interface and more professional looking conversation boxes along with tabbed instant messaging, a feature iChat and Yahoo! Messenger both lack. The Yahoo! Messenger approach seems to try to combine the best of both worlds. The conversations in Yahoo! Messenger are more bubbly, but less cute; more professional. Once again the sleek smooth metal manages to look superior to both brushed metal and aqua. The Yahoo! Messenger conversation window manages to feel more complete; less spartan than iChat's and Adium's while not at all feeling bloated or cluttered, like its 2.x predecessor.

So in the battle of conversation windows, Yahoo! Messenger comes in first place with Adium in second and iChat in third. Now let's talk about miscellaneous miscellany.

Each of the three chat clients has a different way of notifying you of a new message. iChat's method is creative and fairly elegant; it pushes a message on top of everything, without stealing focus. This can get in the way sometimes, but it's generally a pretty good system. In addition, iChat will bounce its dock icon until the new message receives focus. Adium's system is even better, allowing you to have the message window be created in the background. The Adium dock icon duck will then flail his arms at you until you focus the message. But once again, Yahoo! Messenger's approach seems to be the best of both worlds. Like Adium, new Yahoo! instant messages are created in the background. The Yahoo! Messenger dock icon will bounce once, and only once for each message received, then display a red number in the top right corner indicating how many unread messages you have. This is analagous to Mail.app's way of letting you know when you have new mail. Truly an elegant solution.

Also worth mentioning are the sounds, which are definintely quite cool. Usually they're the first thing I turn off in any IM client, but in this one they sound great. Indeed, there are little details all over the client that demonstrate the enormous amount of work that went into it and the keen attention to detail. The update was well worth the 2+ year wait. Yahoo! has truly given a great gift to the Mac community.

To conclude this little review, I must say this is a quite awesome product for only a beta release. I'm proud of Yahoo! for demonstrating that it hasn't forgotten about Mac users and I hope to see this trend continue in the future.

Written on: 2006/06/27.

The detailed ratings statistics for my Star Trek reviews received a major facelift.

Written on: 2006/06/15.

A quick and dirty way to make effective MySQL backups on a Linux (or other modern unixy) web server. This tip assumes you have shell access.

Make a script called mysqlbackup in a handy folder, like ~/bin. Write in it mysqldump -h mysql_server_hostname -u mysql_username --password=mysql_password mysql_database_name > ~/some/folder/somewhere/private/mysql_backup_`date +%d`.sql, filling in of course your database connectivity info.

Now you'll need to make a ~/some/folder/somewhere/private folder. Inside that, make a .htaccess file and write in it Deny from all. Then run crontab -e and write in it 0 3 * * * sh ~/bin/mysqlbackup. This will run the backup script at 3am server time every day.

Here's some reasons why this approach is handy.

Firstly, the entire backup process can be done automatically from within one script file without requiring user intervention. This allows you to generate a backup file automatically using a cronjob. The password in the shell command is in plain text, which does suck, so you might want to chmod 700 ~/bin/mysqlbackup to prevent other users on the server from seeing your password.

Another perk of this approach is it creates ~30 or so redundant backups of your database, but no more than that. Since it makes one for every day of the month, if you should need to restore a backup from 20 days ago, you can do that. But it doesn't fill up all your server's hard drive space either with backups from 10 years ago.

Written on: 2006/05/15.

I have written a retro review of Subspace/Continuum which can be found in my games section. It is being hosted by GameChew.com.

Written on: 2006/04/22.

New artwork. Commence much rejoicing and such.

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