February 5th, 2008
Now that I’ve installed Windows Vista on a second partition, I realize how Mac OS X can lend itself to certain abuses that would not be tempting on another platform.
Let’s imagine I IM my brother a link to a certain set of pictures on Flickr.
He says he already sent me that link yesterday.
I say get the hell out of here.
He says yeah he did, dammit.
How can a little brother be allowed to be correct? I do a quick Spotlight search in the Finder for logged iChat conversations in the past month whose filename contains my brother’s name and whose contents contain flickr.com.
Surprising to me, there is a hit. I had sent him a link to an Obama rally in Idaho.
As soon as I send the IM describing this incident, another logfile shows up in the search. It’s the log of my current IM. Wow, OS X doesn’t screw around.
No, says my brother, I sent you a link at digg.com. I change the search terms, discover he’s right, and begin to beat him violently. Too bad it’s all in my head since he’s 1,100 miles away.
Incredibly accurate instant search can lead to mild shame when it turns out you are wrong. Just keep an eye out.
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November 11th, 2007
Stacks in the Leopard Dock are totally broken, but here’s a way to clean it up a bit.
I’ve already been using aliases to the enclosing folder, named or date-modified to sort to the top and act like an overlay.
Custom Translucent Icons only sweeten the deal. (I don’t know if that’s the original maker of the icons since they’re from Japan and this is all the English you’re gonna get.)
[UPDATE] It looks like that site is overloaded or dead so here’s a backup of the icons themselves with a Japanese readme.
Here’s how to turn this:
Into this:
Using nothing but these icons:
And both old-fashioned and new-fashioned Mac trickery. (Aliases and a space before a filename to sort to the top are old-fashioned. Unix commands are new-fashioned).
Custom icons have worked the same way on a Mac for as long as I’ve used them. So if you’ve opened a Get Info window and copied an icon anytime since 1990, you know what to do.
The confusing part is remembering to customize the icon of the alias in the folder instead of the folder itself. (so paste the icon on the alias in /Applications that points to /Applications but is named with a leading space so it sorts to the top and appears first in the Dock stack).
The Dock offers to sort by “Date Added” but this isn’t available in the Finder so you’re best off sorting by Date Modified and then changing the modification date of the Downloads alias to some date far in the future so it will always sort to the top.
This unixy business:
touch -mt 202001010000.00 ~/Downloads/Downloads
will change the modification date of a file called “Downloads” that is in the user Downloads folder (in this case it should be an alias to its parent) to New Year’s Day in 2020, so that ought to suffice. I advise then using the Info window to lock the file so you don’t accidentally bring it back to the present. Do the same thing if you want a date-sorted Documents folder or anything else.
Having an alias to the parent folder also fixes the Leopard Dock shortcoming where it’s a hassle to open the folder in a normal Finder window!
The final step is getting the Dock to update. A unix nerd might just kill the Dock process. But this will maximize all your minimized windows and restart your Dashboard widgets.
A Mac nerd might be enjoying the FSEvents infrastructure built into the kernel. Just modify all the folders in any way at all (make an alias to a file then delete it) and the Dock will update instantly.
Christ, what a mess. Dock Stacks are the most idiotic thing about Leopard.
Regarding Apple Computers, Leopard | 1 Comment »
November 9th, 2007
Exclude the Podcasts directory from Time Machine backup! Who cares if all that garbage is lost? After a few weeks it’s worth deleting anyway.
Maybe you can tell I’m trying to back up a 750GiB drive to a 500GiB backup drive.
Or as sane people not threatened by lawsuits might call it, a 698.6GB drive to a 465.8GB drive.
Exclude that Bit Torrents folder too, especially the Incomplete in progress one.
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November 6th, 2007
I use Preview all the time except for the past few days I’ve had Leopard.
But just now I find that it finally supports resizing images!
See you in hell, GraphicConverter!
There’s even the same awesome masking tools (used badly and drunkenly here) as you’d find in iWork 08.
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November 6th, 2007
I knew I’d find some crazy Leopard tricks after a while. Actually I’ve probably found a few, but you read about so much stuff online, who can keep straight what’s what. And who’s whose.
Well I have found one thing I haven’t read about anywhere (unless they already existed in Tiger, but I doubt that).
There are several hidden and non-activated Preference Panes lying in wait in a Leopard installation.
Preference Panes are the icons you click on in System Preferences.
But aside from the default set we’ve all seen, you can add more by downloading them from other developers on the web. Or, now, by finding them on your hard drive.
I found my first by accident, but then I went looking for them. By adding some (again built-in but hidden) search criteria to the Finder spotlight menu, I was able to create a search for files ….
whose filename extension is “prefpane”
and
System files status is “include”. (so Spotlight searches everywhere, not just user-visible parts of the disk). [as long as you're here, don't miss the option to search in "Spotlight Items" so you can do a Finder search or smart folder for items that aren't really files at all like emails, calendar events, visited web pages, etc. To be honest, they are files but that's an implementation detail.]
The results include all the pref panes you normally see in System Preferences as well as any that are downloaded and user-installed, and some that don’t match my installed hardware (Fibre Channel, Ink handwriting recognition).
But there are also a couple additions.
The first PrefPane I found doesn’t even show up in this search since it’s buried inside the application package of “Archive Utility”, the background helper app that is the default handler for most compressed archives (like .zip, .bz2, .tar, etc). If you open the app’s package and install the hidden pref pane, you can access the same preferences screen you get when you launch the app on its own and open the Preferences window.
You can set a surprising number of settings that are probably best left to their defaults, including handling of expanded archive files, destination of expanded archives, and even handling of archived files. If you want your source files to be automatically deleted when you compress them in the Finder, this is how to do it.
Double Click the prefPane to install it. It’s located at
/System/Library/CoreServices/Archive\ Utility/Contents/Resources/Archives.prefPane
•
Another hidden prefPane lies in the DiskImages.framework.
Burrow down into it and you’ll be able to install a PrefPane that gives the same Mounting and Encryption options as Disk Utility. Only now in another location!
At first I thought this was a silly duplication of Disk Utility’s own Preferences window. But then I looked and the Leopard Prefs have been really dumbed down. I haven’t used them much, but this is where the old preferences went to retire!
Find it at
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DiskImages.framework/Versions/A/
Resources/DiskImages.prefpane
I don’t know what’s the best way to represent such long paths here. If I don’t make a line break, it is obscured by the div to the right
•
The Developer Tools also installs but does not activate a Processor prefPane. Many people have seen this before since it’s been installed with the CHUD tools for years. To activate it, navigate to /Developer/Extras/PreferencePanes/
It lets you activate and deactivate various processor features such as napping, caches, and extra cores.
That last one’s not much of a secret but I think my first one or two are. I’ve already entered them in the MacOSXHints.com contest. C’mon, daddy needs a new pair of processors!
Regarding Apple Computers, Leopard | 1 Comment »
November 4th, 2007
If you subscribe to Jeff Atwood’s theory that if you can see your desktop you’re wasting your monitors, then the Leopard Translucent Menu Bar is the worst thing since burnt bread.
But he’s using Windoze where your windows are either too small or full-screen. And in the modern era, that’s too big.
On a Mac, windows resize to fit their content and since the OS can reasonably handle a couple apps running at once, everyone does that.
Sure a full-screen WinNotePad will block your desktop, but even a Mac with 30 programs running will show some desktop. Especially with Exposé and Spaces.
That’s why I’m behind the new menu bar.
Well I’m not really behind it because even if you drag an icon behind it, you won’t see the icon shine through (hmm).
But if you’ve ever struggled to find a complementing color for a particular picture, you might appreciate how some poor guy in Cupertino figured out the right transparency and blur filters to keep a Menu Bar mostly readable with almost any color background, which matches but isn’t exactly your desktop pattern.
I saw this random guy’s desktop somewhere on the web, but it illustrates the point. The menu bar looks right with the background.
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November 4th, 2007
If you hit F8 to look at all your Spaces, you can then hit F9 to Exposé all the windows within them.
But if you hit F9 first, to Exposé your current space, then when you hit F8 to see all the spaces, they are already all pre-Exposé’d. Seems like a minor detail, but even after a lifetime of using Apple computers, I was surprised and delighted someone had planned out this chain of events. (To be honest, I can’t see my iMac keyboard that well in the dark and I hit F9 first by accident).
I do like Spaces, but it will take some time to get used to it. I often forget which space has which app and it is admittedly a new experience to have to move around like this. I wish you could pin individual Finder windows to a particular Space.
How about another. Stuff like Automator actions save themselves as a bundle that includes a PDF screenshot of the Automator workflow. So when you QuickLook, you get to see what it does. (admittedly a bit of a cheat, since a QuickLook importer can also read the file and display it somehow, but this is cheap as free)
On the other hand, several filetypes produced by Apple apps and even the OS itself aren’t supported by QuickLook. Yet. (zip files, weblocs, clippings, even some iTunes Store tv shows, which I find very disappointing and is probably a bug)
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November 3rd, 2007
Here’s some notes after only a couple hours using Leopard:
- Nearly every new app has the white/blue alternating list pattern (since it’s part of the OS and easy to implement).
- I think I will like Spaces but I’m worried that pre-PCI Express Macs like mine will have difficulty with so many open windows. In Tiger I could appreciably improve World of Warcraft performance just by closing windows (not quitting any programs, just reducing the number of windows that Quartz had to store and manage).
- I wanted to like stacks in the dock, but they are pointless and a hindrance.
- AirPort performance seems improved in my apartment where I periodically suffer some sort of radio interference that knocks out the network. Still happens but it’s shorter and sometimes less severe. (probably a broken Baby Monitor).
- New DVD Player is very fussy about a Disk Image I made of the Underworld DVD. I thought the old Tiger player wouldn’t mind it. VLC worked but is a bit crashy.
- People are right, Quick Look is delightful in the Finder, and even Cover Flow has found a use. But now everyone has to make kilo-pixel icons for everything or risk looking shoddy.
- Per-window screenshots capture the window as well as its (embiggened) semi-transparent shadow to a PNG. Gonna see a lot of fancy-pants Mac OS X screenshots on the web from now on.
- Almost every Apple app has a full-screen preview and slideshow mode now. It’s getting insane but I love it.
- General SpotLight searches actually do not seem any faster, unlike what everyone else has been saying. It’s nice they expand to a regular Finder window instead of the silliness they had before.
- New QuickTime Player looks severe. But it also looks just like a new iMac, so that’s that.
- As part of my totally uninformed Virtual Memory musings, something big has changed here. Leopard seems to produce fewer swapfiles in /var/vm but Activity Monitor shows an enormous increase in “Virtual Memory”. Where it used to claim about 13GB of VM being managed, now it’s more than 40GB. There must be enormous amounts of something mapped into memory but not fully loaded. Or perhaps more and/or larger frameworks mapped into every process. I don’t know how Leopard really works, but in theory much of the system is Quad-Binary (32-bbit PPC, 64-bit PPC, 32-bit Intel, 64-bit Intel).
- The entire interface seems much faster but I think part of it is a con. Some things begin to display before they are ready (ie Safari bookmarks display on a fresh launch before they can draw their favicons). This is clearly the way to go since responsiveness is a primary importance. But it’s a change from previous OS X’s where you got the feeling they prized “full correctness” above all else. Hell they were compositing dozens of transparent windows in software on 300Mhz G3’s when OS X first shipped, and thus pissing people off. By comparison Leopard is meant to feel fast.
There’s certainly more but this is what I have noticed in a few hours.
Regarding Apple Computers, Leopard | 1 Comment »
November 3rd, 2007
Oh man another good thing in Leopard is Spotlight searches more stuff (and faster).
Notably it searches Safari history. So if you saw a web site about, uh, well any random thing, and you did nothing more than look at it, now Spotlight can search in that page’s contents even if you never saved, printed, or copied anything. The Browser history can be saved for a week, a month, a year, or forever. I assume it saves only the text content. In one day my Safari history cache is 13MB. Not too bad.
This will be very handy. Dangerous too, perhaps, but that’s what “Private Browsing” is for.
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November 3rd, 2007
I think my favorite feature of Leopard might be Software Update. Yeah there’s always been Software Update since OS 9, but now it can download new updates when they are available (when they bug you about it) but if they require a restart, they have the option of not installing until you restart on your own.
Previously a cunning Mac user could let the Software Update take place and then force quit it to keep working until he felt like restarting. But this might produce an inconsistency between the running software and what was on disk. Not usually a problem but certainly worrying.
Now Software Update takes care of it all. It will download everything and ask if you want to restart. But if you say no, it doesn’t even install the update yet. It waits until you log out on your own. Then it installs the business and even gives you some updates like “Time to update the boot caches!” if you might otherwise be looking at a blank screen for perhaps too long.
I think this exemplifies the benefits of Leopard. There are some new features, but also every last thing in the system has been updated. Everything is more humane, more communicative, more responsive. More better. Even on an old G5.
And I even like the semi-transparent menu bar. (but I don’t like some of the new Dock stuff)
I haven’t read anything but disdain for the menu bar that shows through some of the desktop, but I agree with the theme of Apple’s keynotes that it helps blend in with your desktop background. On a detailed level, it looks like the menu bar is not only semi-transparent, but also running a blurring filter on what’s behind it. Why not!
There’s lots else going on in Leopard but so many others have mused on it already. If I find more that I really like, I’ll talk on it.
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