I’m reading lots of positive reviews of Leopard. I don’t know if it will create many switchers but it is definitely getting better reviews than Vista did. Regardless, I’ll be in line tonight at the Irvine Spectrum Apple store. If anybody else is going to be there drop me an email and we can meet up. I am still planning on just doing the “upgrade”. If things get ugly I can do the full erase and install but I really would rather avoid that if possible. I’ll keep you posted.
Continue readingMacWorld has a nice article with several upgrade tips that hadn’t occurred to me. I’m not going to go crazy but I probably will do several of these tips.
Continue reading
Apple released a nice tutorial showing off some of the Leopard features. I finally got a few minutes to watch and it looks good. I initially thought that TimeMachine would not get used since I have a pretty good SuperDuper system in place. However, it looks very slick. Can anyone say redundancy?
The cosmetic stuff in Mail also looks good. It will make every email you send one big fat Mac add.
Check it out.
Between dealing with a large case at the office and other challenges, I’ve had very little time to look at all the new information concerning Leopard. This weekend I do hope to take a good look at the apple preview pages including the list of 300 new features. I only spent 10 minutes looking at it this morning but it looks pretty thorough.
Well I’ve had my head down in a case the last few days and finally got a chance to come up for air to find the Leopard release date is confirmed. I know anybody that is smart about these things will tell you to wait until well after the October 26 release date to install it on your machine. I, on the other hand, plan to install it on the day of release with reckless abandon. Furthermore, while it upgrades my system I plan on running underneath a ladder, with scissors!
I’m particularly happy that Apple has stated they will now by syncing notes with the iPhone. Hopefully this will be the case for tasks as well although I could probably live without that since my current system seems to work pretty well.
Anyway, I am looking forward to producing some new screencasts with interesting Leopard features in just a few weeks.
Lifehacker did a great article where several Mac users submitted shots and descriptions of their Menu Bars. I learned quite a bit looking through them. It was interesting to note how many folks are using MagiCal which I screencasted right here. Check it out
Technorati Tags:
os x, menubar
I’ve never used Vista. I like OS X and really have no desire to learn Vista. Nevertheless everyone I talk to that actually uses Vista doesn’t seem very happy about the experience. This has apparently inspired one guy to make a very funny Vista ad. Check it out.
Continue readingA lot of you have seen my screencast on how to make an encrypted sparse disk image. As I explained in the screencast, sparse disk images grow when add files into them but don’t shrink when you pull files out. As my sparse disk images used to bloat I would occaisionnally make a new one and copy the files into it and discard the old image. Recently however I discovered an automator workflow that compacts an existing sparse image without requiring you to take all those insane steps I used to. So lets walk through it now.
Now some of you may be Automator veterans but for me it is just that funny looking icon I always pass over.
Click on the “Finder” category in the Library column then click and drag “Get Selected Finder Items” from the Actions Column into the work area of Automator.
Click on the “Automator” category in the Library column then click and drag “Run Shell Script” from the Actions Column into the work area of Automator.
Change the “pass input” drop down from “to sdnin” to “as arguments”
Type in the following in the window….
hdiutil compact “$@”
Go to Automator’s File menu and “Save as Plug-in”. Give it a name like “Compact Sparse Image”. Also make sure “Plug-in for:” category says “Finder”.
Using the Workflow
1. Find your sparse image in the finder.
2. Make sure it is unmounted
3. Cntrl(Right)-Click, Mouse down to Automator and run your script.
Now all of the above probably sounds like a lot of work but it really is not. Once you have it set up you can regularly compact your sparse images. Let me know if it works for you.
Technorati Tags:
tutorial, MacSparky, sparse image
A good friend, Gabe Wilson, showed me a very cool trick native to OS X regarding saved files. If you look at the top left corner in the close, minimize, maximize bubbles you may sometimes see a small dot in the middle of the red circle. This dot is telling you something. It means the current document is not saved. So if you press the red button and that dot is in it, very bad things will happen. Cats will live with dogs, the universe may implode, and worse yet, you’ve lost your document.
Now if instead of your dot, you see an “X”, you are good to go. Document saved. You are free to close and move on.
Take a look at this link …
40 Great Free mac Software Aplications
Tim over at Surfbits.com featured this in his MacReview Podcast #116 but I thought it was worthy of an entry here. This site has picked its top 40 favorite free Mac Applications. While I agree with most of the picks, leaving Quicksilver out is just plain crazy.