Banshie's Lab

Today I revitalise my Lab with School of Dragons MMO as a native port to Mac OS X.

You can even sign in on Safari and you will be automatically signed in on the App.

Keep Reading for download link.

I have updated my Façade wrapper, in the past I have provided wrappers in the form of a Wineskin bundle/app. I am now providing the wrapper as a Crossover Bottle.

Well it is 6 months later, and I've found some time to stair blankly at benchmarks and watch Hearthstone streams on my iPad.

While testing OpenBroadcaster in a VM I discovered that CamTwist from the host mac registers a video capture device.

For me under Crossover 13 all I had todo was install Steam via the install software wizard, download Loadout via Steam and add "-DX11:0" to the Launch Options.

Here's the direct link to the "Basic Content" which is a required download upon launching Logic Pro X for the first time.

The link resolves to a ProAudioCoreContent10.pkg which can be installed offline/locally, having direct access to this package can save a lot of time if you are installing Logic Pro X on a lot of machines or machines that have a capped download quota (the package is nearly 2GB!)

Like with my Garage Band iOS Compatability Update post I wish Apple had posted this package to their public Support Downloads portal.

Well I had sometime free today to do some benchmarks and this the first VM benchmark I've done with Windows 8.

I had done some basic benchmarks with Windows 8 during the Developer Previews and i found that it performed slightly worse than Windows Vista in 3DMark06.

So with over a year of patches I had hoped that the system had been optimised to 10% better than its predecessor which is how all versions of Windows have been.

Now with clear results in hand it is good that Windows 8 is now performing better than Windows 7, However the performance increase is so meaningless that for me Windows 8 is still to boast a single improvement or feature over that of Windows 7.

Windows 8 only scored 41 points higher than Windows 7 under a DX9 benchmark, at many costs to what I consider crucial aspects of a Windows Operating System.

Windows 7 weighed in at 11GB where Windows 8 was a strikingly fat 22GB. This additional software at a guess I would say is the Metro Modern UI for use on Touch Devices and Hipsters on Traditional Desktops.

Windows 8 boot times have been noticeably improved and this is directly related to the recent EFI support however if Windows 7 was installed in EFI mode there is a good chance that the times would be very comparable. The biggest issue with EFI is that not all hardware drivers are compatible, such as nvidia graphics cards, This is likely to change with the industry push towards the UEFI standard.

Today I Present 3 Apps

These Apps are Platypus'ed scripts that I used everyday to get Steam doing what it ought to be doing, but that's life.

I noticed that in Google's recent (and continuing) redesign of Youtube.

They have completely removed all links to the old subscription view (grid and list view).

This view has long been my only view into Youtube and luckily I've kept it bookmarked.

I've put together a working Feed The Beast Launcher in a "native" .app

The app comes with a new dock icon, and an easy to use DMG installer (just click and drag)

EDIT: I have now switched over to a solution by Industrious One called Musicality

Musicality not only provides the below solution in one dead simple to use app, but also Last.FM Scrobbling it is great app!

Since my last post I now have unlimited Internet, and with that I can join the rest of the world with enjoying the wonders of streaming media.

However I wanted these great new services I find my self using to be as great as the Offline media systems I all ready use (iTunes).

This was realised with OS X Mountain Lion's built in support for Airplay and Yuaoki's (I think that's his name) ChromeLauncherWithExtraAudio.

In OS X MLion Airplay is implemented into the system as a sound device that is accessible by all OS X applications that allow for sound device selection, by default Chrome will only use  the "System Default" sound device, this is where Yuaoki's app comes into play, it allows you to choose any system sound device.

I support multiple macs in my home, so I like to keep software on a network share. This is done mainly because I have a limited quota (110GB/per month), however my home network will almost always be faster than the Internet.

What really annoys me is applications that downloads additional system resources, such as updates and plugins and then provides no way to back up said resources.

One of the most annoying is the iOS compatibility update for GarageBand, this update is not in Software Update or on Apple's Support Downloads Page.

Using Wireshark, I was able to find the download source, which results in a .pkg file, a OS X Software Package file. This should work for any mac, however Apple may change the location of the file in the future.

Skype, I Payed For These Speakers.

A Short How to get Skype to output sound to both speakers on Mac Book Pros.

This can be achieved very quickly if you grab SoundFlower, it is a great "Inter-Application Audio Router Utility".

Once you download and install the app, simply set Skype's Speakers to Soundflower (2ch), then open the application Soundflowerbed.app and using the menu bar and select "Built-in output" under the Soundflower (2ch).

I do also recommend setting the Soundflowerbed.app as a startup item as if the app isn't open then it won't pass audio to the built-in output.

Benchmarking network tools, especially internet tools is difficult.

So much relies on your ISP and the infrastructure between.

That being said these benchmarks were done in a very limited way.

  My test was a 100mb test file hosted by my ISP (for the purpose of testing network speed) downloaded three times by each application and averaged.

These tests may not apply to your situation, also I did not test the full gambit of features offered by each application. This test was to determine which application was the fastest consistently.

  All tests are recorded in seconds, and rounded.

  Transmit

Results;

  Test 1: 203

Test 2: 198

Test 3: 197

Average: 199

  Notes:

Transmit was the first application to be tested, and its first result was 284, this was inconsistently larger then all other tests.

I am not sure of the exact reason but it would seem that the first connection to my ISP server and attempt to download a file was slower, as such the first result was replaced with a new test.

  Forklift

Results;

  Test 1: 197

Test 2: 204

Test 3: 197

Average: 199

  Finder

Results;

  Test 1: 200

  Notes:

I had wanted to test Finder, however it appears that it fully caches all files locally.

  Speed Download

Results;

  Test 1: 197

Test 2: 197

Test 3: 196

Average: 197

  The clear winner is Speed Download with the quickest time and the lowest average time, Speed Download was the only client that maintained a constant high speed. While not an FTP Client in the vain of Forklift or Transmit it keeps up with its name.

I don't like Java, Not at all. I've spent many hours testing a wide arrange of solutions to improve the state of Minecraft on OS X.

I think I've cracked it, at least the best that I can do, I've tested RAMDisks... Third Party Mods... Updated Java Virtual Machines... Updated game frameworks...

None of the above improved the performance of Minecraft in either any noticeable way or with out major draw backs.

The best solution I have now, uses the info.plist file, and the JavaApplicationStub

The first thing to do is open up your Minecraft.app (if you don't have this yet download Minecraft and launch it up at least once) you can do this by right clicking Minecraft and selecting "Show Package Contents" open the Contents folder.

Now, go up to the menu bar (top of the screen) and select the Go menu and select Go to Folder or press ⇧⌘ G (shift command g) and copy paste the following

/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/A/Resources/MacOS/

Once there copy the JavaApplicationStub and press back in Finder, then open the MacOS folder and paste the file replacing the existing file. This one is outdated and cannot start the 64 bit Java included in most Macs.

Go back once again in Finder, and you should see an info.plist, you need to replace this one with the one I am providing in the post title link. Simply download the file, unzip it, and copy it replacing the existing one.

Once you have both the updated Info.plist and the updated JavaApplicationStub you are set to launch up Minecraft.app as you would normally and everything should be running much better.

Extra Notes:

My guide above is what has improved my Minecraft and I have had no problems, however these improvements were designed for the Vanilla Minecraft and I do not have the god powers to make sure it will work for you, please make sure to backup your existing Minecraft before trying my improvements, for any further questions please consult my warranty page

UPDATE

I now have some a version of my start.command that can work with /spaced file/directories/

#!/bin/bash

echo "pwd: `pwd`"

echo "\$0: $0"

echo "basename: `basename "$0"`"

echo "dirname: `dirname "$0"`"

cd "`dirname "$0"`"

Pro tip, if you are looking for the OS X friendly .sh or .bat .command is the extension of choice.

Start your .command with the following code;

#!/bin/sh

cd $(dirname "$0")

The first line tells terminal which interpreter to use, and the second line instructs the terminal to change directory to where the script was launched.

The Working Directory can mean a lot to a shell script, for example without changing the working directory my CraftBukkit server will start using my home directory, this will leave it to assume a new server must be generated.

Some examples;

My CraftBukkit Server start.command

#!/bin/sh

cd $(dirname "$0")

java -Xincgc -Xmx256M -jar ./CraftBukkit.jar

My Source Server start.command

#!/bin/sh

cd $(dirname "$0")