Here’s a fun little trick! This screencast I made will show you how to pause a window in mid-minimization. This trick really has no value, but it’s always cool to show off to your friends.

When I first got my hands on a copy of Leopard (if I remember correctly I snagged a copy of the beta just before the Golden Master, which was still very buggy) Spaces became my favorite feature (along with Quick Look).

With the recent release of Leopard 10.5.3 Spaces has seen some great enhancements. The most notable one has an excellent write-up by John Gruber over at Daring Fireball. I’m not going to discuss this new feature because I feel that John has done an excellent job at that task.

One feature I would like to discuss is one I discovered today. This feature is much less prominent than the former, however it is still very useful. In 10.5 through 10.5.2 in order to add an application assignment for Spaces, you had to click the plus button and search through your Applications folder to find the application you wanted to add. In 10.5.3 you are now presented with a pop-up list of all of your currently running applications and can quickly add an application assignment. This small enhancement is welcomed with open arms and will save precious seconds while using my Mac.

I'm not normally one to embed random videos into my blog, but this one is different than any other video. It is awesome. Yes, awesome. And it looks like it took a lot of time to create, thus the reasons there is a YouTube video embedded in my blog.



Song is Again & Again by The Bird and Bee. Video created by Dennis Liu

LogicielMac Update is useful app that checks for updates for all of your non-Apple applications. It will automatically check for updates at a set interval anywhere from every hour to every month. The applications with updates will be downloaded and automatically installed.

One of my favorite features is that LogicielMac Update doesn't mind the organization of my Applications folder. It happily replaces the apps in the folder they were in and checks the sub-folders of my Applications folder.

Another cool feature of LogicielMac Update is that it will let you interact with DMG licenses and the finish installing the application. And, if there is an application that you don't want to have updated, just add it to the blacklist and LogicielMac Update won't check for updates.

Overall, LogicielMac Update is a great little application to help keep your applications up to date.

Whenever I try to get some school work done on my MacBook I always seem to get distracted from my task. It just so happens that my favorite web browser (currently Firefox 3 Beta 5) is usually the source of my distraction.

Enter Freedom. A simple little app that conquers a very big problem. Freedom disables your Mac's AirPort and Ethernet for any amount of time between 1 minute to 3 hours. And just to be sure you aren't tempted to quit Freedom to get back your 'internets,' the only way to disable it before it's time is up is to reboot your Mac (or have some Terminal skills).

Needless to say, Freedom can really boost your productivity.

Keyboard short cuts always come in handy and usually improve the speed one can use a computer. Here's two short cuts that aren't too well know for the Finder: Command + up arrow will send the navigation up one level. Command + down arrow is essentially an alternative to Command + O, in that will send the navigation down into the selected folder or open the selected file.

Command + up arrow can greatly improve navigation within the Finder.

The second GB of RAM has come in for my MacBook. I have installed it and OS X recognized it just fine, the way it should. My MacBook is noticeably faster than before especially when I'm multi-tasking with Photoshop CS3 and iTunes open playing a video.

On Thursday, April 3, I received my new MacBook. I sold my old one to a good friend and I bought myself a refurbished MacBook. The Specs are as follows:

• 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• Intel X3100 GMA graphics
• DL SuperDrive
• 1 GB of RAM (soon to be 2GB)
• 120 GB hard drive

It's not the newest MacBook but it was sure quite an upgrade from my old 2.0 GHz Core Duo MacBook. All in all, I am very happy with my new machine, and I'm very happy with the condition that I received it in.

When I ordered refurbished I expected my new MacBook to look slightly used with a few scratches. Imagine my surprise when I took my new MacBook out of the sleeve it was in and saw that it looked practically new! I was very happy with that and I'll definitely buy all of my Macs refurbished for now on. Another plus to buying refurbished (besides the price) is that you don't feel obligated to keep the beautiful packaging that Apple is known for. Refurbished products are just shipped in a plain brown cardboard box so there's nothing pretty to keep.

Now for some things that are different from my old MacBook:

The most noticeable difference is the new keyboard layout. It's the same layout that Apple is using on their new desktop keyboards. When I first saw it introduced I hated it, but I am now beginning to like it after using it for only a few days.

Let's start off with the function keys: I really like having the volume control keys on the left. Because of the volume keys being on the left, they are a lot easier to find in the dark. The new media keys aren't too bad either, but they weren't anything I was missing because I had been using programs like CoverSutra that would let me set system wide hot-keys for iTunes. Also, the media keys only seem to work with iTunes which can be seen as either a feature or a bug. Another change is how the text is printed on the function keys. Functions such as adjusting brightness and volume are now centered on the key and the F1, F2, F3, and so on are now in a small type in the bottom right. The escape key text is also centered and something (I still can't figure out what) is different with the eject key. Those last two changes drove me nuts.

Another difference between the two keyboards is that Apple has done away with the useless num lock function. I never used it and not having the numbers printed along with the letters on the right half of the keyboard makes it look a lot cleaner.

Now for the modifier keys: The  (Apple logo) is no longer present on the command key. It just says 'command' and has the Swedish Campground Symbol. This change saddens me dearly, but it can be seen as good for the new Mac Users. Especially when you tell them to press 'Command so-and-so' and they ask "What's the 'command' key?" Also the 'enter' key next to the right 'command' key has been changed to an 'option' key which is very nice because that 'enter' key was quite useless. The 'control' key is now completely spelled out instead of just saying 'ctrl'. It sure did take me a while to get used to that change.

Finally, the arrow keys: They no longer say 'page up', 'page down', 'home', or 'end' on them, making for a much cleaner look while still performing the same task.

The second thing I noticed was that the fan grill is designed differently. The fan grill used to be very busy and actually looked quite nice with all of the vertical bars. Now the fan grill is more sparse, and I assume Apple made this design change to improve airflow and cooling.

The third thing I noticed is that the iSight is no longer centered vertically in the bezel above the screen and it seems to be a bit smaller. I'm curious to why Apple made that change.

That's it as far as changes I've noticed. Check out some unboxing pics to hopefully clear up what I was talking about.

I have been hard at work (well, it wasn't really that hard) creating Marathon packs for Windows and OS X and I am happy to report that I have gotten both Marathon and Marathon Infinity finished and uploaded for both OS X and Windows. All of the packs include the HiRes Texture packs, AlephOne, and their associated data files. So have at it! Go grab yourself a copy of Marathon.

Marathon, developed by Bungie in 1994, is a pretty cool game. I've just now started playing it on my MacBook and it is pretty addicting. The nice thing about Marathon is that it actually runs really well on my MacBook (2Ghz CoreDuo, 2GB RAM, Intel GMA 950). The other great thing about Marathon is that it's open source and is available for OS X, Linux, and Windows. If you have some time to kill and want to get your hands on Marathon, it can be found at source.bungie.org. If you download Marathon, don't forget to grab the HiRes textures to enhance your experience, they are worth the 222mb download.

That pesky little enter key next to the right command key is quite useless. Apple has even come to the realization this wasted key with the latest versions of their MacBook (Pro) keyboard layouts.

Bring in Double Command. With this free preference pane, that useless enter key can now be something useful, such as a second option key, or my personal preference, a second control key for the ease of changing spaces with one hand.

SimpleToDo is a very minimalistic to-do application developed by Julius Eckert. The only functions are to add a task, and to remove finished tasks. To add to the minimalist approach, everything in SimpleToDo can be manipulated with a keyboard if you're that type of person. Julius even offers a Quicksilver plugin for SimpleToDo so you can easily add a to-do via Quicksilver. If you just haven't found that perfect to-do manager, SimpleToDo is definitely one to check out.

One so-called "feature" in Leopard was that when the user ejected multiple partitions on a single hard disk at once, Leopard would display a dialog warning you that if you eject "Partition A," "Partition B" will be ejected as well. I was somewhat fine with having that dialog displayed, but was a little miffed because Tiger was so nice about things like this that it would just eject both partitions without complaint. But what really pushed this over the edge was that Leopard would tell the user this twice, once for each partition he was ejecting.

Fortunately, and thankfully this so-called "feature" (or what I would like to call a bug) is gone in the 10.5.2 update. Leopard now handles ejecting multiple partitions at once the same way Tiger did; without complaint.

Need a quick way close a Widget and are tired of clicking the + icon in the bottom left corner to get the X's on all of the widgets? All you have to do is hold down the Option key and move your mouse over a widget you want to close and the X will appear. Just click it, and it's gone. Simple as that.

Sometimes when you view an image in Quick Look, it's just too small to see an important detail. So what do you do? Open it in Preview? Probably, but not anymore. When you Quick Look an image, hold down the Option key and click to zoom in on the image, and when you're zoomed in, move around the image by clicking and dragging.

SuperDuper!, my favorite backup app has just had it's latest version released. The biggest fix in 2.5 is that it is now fully Leopard compatible. This update makes me very happy.

While SuperDuper! 2.5 was in development I tried out Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner. I don't like Time Machine because it wants a hard drive larger than the source and the backups that it makes aren't bootable. What I don't like about CCC is that it can't do incremental backups.

SuperDuper! just takes the cake as far as backup software goes and it's totally worth the price.

You may not know this, but in OS X (especially Leopard), the spacebar is a very powerful key. Not only is it the key of choice in the Finder to view a file in Quicklook, it may also be your key of choice in dialog boxes. When a button is surrounded either graphite (as pictured below) or blue, just hit the spacebar and you activate that button, whereas if a button is graphite (as pictured below) or blue just hit the return (enter) key to activate that button.

Hopefully this little tip will help you improve your productivity.

Overall, NetNewsWire is a nice rss reader, but I would rather support the open source community and use the ever improving Vienna. The one feature in NetNewsWire that I would love if I had multiple Macs or was often away from my own MacBook for extended periods of time with web access would be it's syncing feature and being able to log into NewsGator and see my feeds on the web. However, neither of those two scenarios apply to me, therefore syncing isn't a valuable feature that will get me to switch away from the great Vienna.

I guess I could be called loyal, and I am to most of my applications. If there isn't enough to get me to switch, I won't. And I can't ever see how or why anyone would have paid $30 for NetNewsWire, I know I never would have, especially when there was a great open source alternative.

NetNewsWire, probably one of the most popular rss readers for OS X has now gone from a price of $30 to free. Up until now, I have been a hard core Vienna fan which has been free and open source since it's introduction. I've heard that NetNewsWire is a great reader, and I'm willing to give it a try now that it's available for free, so I'm gonna use it exclusively for a week and see how I like it. One feature that I feel I'll enjoy dearly is the ability to sync me feeds to NewsGator's website and view them online when I'm away from my Mac. That may very well be the deal maker for me.

Having my Mac lock when ever my screen saver starts can be a pain when I'm at home and I don't need it to be locked. That is why I enabled an icon in my menu bar that lets me lock my Mac with two clicks. However, the process of getting this in your menu bar is probably not what you would think. First open Keychain Access and then go to the Preferences and check the box that says Show Status in Menu Bar. That will put a little lock icon in your menu bar. To lock your screen just click the lock and select lock screen.

netPong is an awesome little Pong app. But you are probably thinking, "why is 'net' in the name?" Well, with netPong you can automatically link up with a friend on your local network or play alone. However, the coolest feature is how you control your paddle. netPong uses the built in Sudden Motion Sensor in your MacBook or MacBook Pro. Simply tilt your MacBook (Pro) left or right to move the paddle. It takes a little getting used to, but once you get it down, it's awesome. As always, you can always find netPong on the Games page in Macish.

Senuti and VLC are both two great apps and both do totally different things. That's why I've added them to the media section of the Mac Apps. Senuti is a great little app for pulling music off of your iPod (or a friends;) and putting it on your Mac. VLC is one of the best media players available for any platform whether that be OS X, Linux, or even Windows.

I'm also trying out a new little Featured Links section in the sidebar of the blog. Basically it'll have have links to stuff on the site that has been recently updated or links to other sites that I think are pretty cool. Most of the links will stay up for about a week. It's just not going to work out the way I hoped.

I am the proud owner of the MacUpdate bundle that had a bunch of good apps in it worth over $650 for $50. A pretty good deal if you ask me, even if I'm not going to use all of those apps.

I've added a new section in Mac Apps called Deep Tweaking. The apps in the Deep Tweaking section offer extended personalization that would normally not be possible without feeling comfortable in Terminal. These apps can dramatically simplify tasks that would otherwise take some time to do.

Enabling the root user in Leopard is quite easy. Why you may want to run as root is quite beyond me as it is quite dangerous to do so. But, if you must, enable the root user account do the following:

1. Open Directory Utility located in Applications/Utilities.
2. Unlock Directory Utility by clicking the the lock icon and entering your password.
3. Once it's unlocked go Edit » Enable Root User and type in a password, make sure it is secure and memorable.

You have now enabled the root user account in Leopard. A word of caution: Do not use this account as your normal account. It is very dangerous to run as the root user. You can easily render your Mac inoperable if your are mucking about in the file system. This how-to will remain eternally* organized in the tips and tricks section of macish.

*or until I quit paying for hosting

The only reason I've ever wanted to convert a DMG to an ISO is so I can burn that DMG on a dual layer DVD on a Windows machine. Unfortunately, there is no way to convert a DMG to an ISO in Disk Utility. That's where a handy little Terminal command comes into play.

hdiutil convert /path/to/filename.dmg -format UDTO -o /path/to/savefile.iso

Just replace /path/to/filename.dmg with the path to the DMG that you want to convert. An easy way to do that is to just drag the DMG into Terminal.

Then replace /path/to/savefile.iso with the path to where you want to save the file. You may get the .cdr extension at the end of the new ISO, but you can just delete that extension and change it to .iso.

The way Stack in Leopard assume the first icon of whatever is in the folder of the Stack pretty much sucks and looks horrible. However, this is a way to make them a little less ugly. Optica Optima has a beautiful solution with their beautiful semi-transparent icons.
Download the icons.
Mirror on Justin Allard dot com.


Getting the icons to stay at the top of the Stack is the real trick, and involves a little a little Terminal hackery. The following Terminal command is an example of what you may have to type.

cd /Applications
touch -mt 202001010101.01 ApplicationsIcon

What the first command does is change the directory of where you are working, so change it to the place you put the icon. If you don't know the path, just drag the folder to the Terminal after typing cd.
The second command uses touch which changes the date modified of the icon to January 1st 2020. Because of the date change, you can sort the folder by date modified and the icon will remain at the top.
Alternatively, you could just name the icon with a 0 as the first character, and sort by name. Use whatever works best for you.

Credit to Optica Optima and XD.

This little how-to can always be found in the Leopard Tricks section, along with some other tricks.

Are you not a big fan of the new login wallpaper in Leopard? I wasn't a huge fan either and luckily, there is a pretty easy way to change it, and I'll tell you, and show you, how. Just a disclaimer, I am NOT responsible if you screw up your Mac in any way, shape or form. This process worked for me and it should work for you. Also, CoreServices contains some important system stuff, so if you don't know what you're doing, don't do it.

Read the how-to

or

Watch the screencast

SurveillanceSaver is a Quartz screensaver for OS X, but not just any screensaver. SurveillanceSaver pulls live streams for unprotected web cams and displays that as your screen saver. It really is quite neat, and contrary to what I believed, it isn't very processor intensive, which means the fan on my MacBook won't annoyingly spin up.

SurveillanceSaver is currently in alpha 0 (I know, scary isn't it?), but it seems pretty darn stable. Go check it out, it's a free download.

I'm moving stuff around in the Macish section. I've now made two separate categories for Mac Apps and Tips and Tricks. Mac Apps will have all the Mac apps that were in the Macish section. Tips and Tricks will eventually contain tips and tricks for Leopard and Tiger, and maybe even Windows.

I apologize for broken bookmarks to all of my Mac apps pages.

After running a developer build of Leopard for the past week and a half, there is one feature that I have come to hate. Stacks. They can be nice if you just have a folder that you throw a few documents or pictures in here and there, but there really is no use for them, at least the way I used folders in the Dock in Tiger. To me, Stacks have become a nuisance, sure they look pretty, but they don't seem to serve much of a purpose besides looking cool.

Luckily for me, and anyone that reads this that likes how folders in the Dock worked in Tiger, I have found a way to circumvent stacks in Leopard's Dock. What you have to do is create and Alias of the folder you want in the Dock and put that Alias in the Dock. Doing that makes the folder in the dock open up in a Finder window.

I honor of the release of Leopard in just 8 days, I have made a simple countdown widget for Dashboard.

Download it

Leopard is coming. The release date is October 26. Just 10 days from now. I can't wait for the final.

VMware Fusion, my favorite virtualization program for OS X, has it 1.1b. For me, the most important fix is that Air Port will no longer spas out and take up 100% of my CPU. The true test for that will come on Monday when I'm at school. For some odd reason Air Port will only do that at my school and not when I'm at home or at church.

Another new feature that I find pretty cool is that you can now hide the status bar at the bottom of the OS window to gain some screen real-estate.

Keep it up VMware!

Update: I can vouch that the Air Port bug is fixed. It's nice not having to restart it every time I get onto my school's WiFi network.

Today I had the privilege of actually being able to play around with an iPod Classic for a short amount of time. I must say, the GUI is a lot faster than I had previously heard, and it looks very nice too. Coverflow also looks nice on the Classic as well, I just don't see much use for it other than to show off to people. They are also very thin. The 80GB was at least as thin as, if not thinner than my current 30GB 5.5G iPod.

That's two complaints off of my list. Now Apple needs to stop being greedy and not cripple the video out.

The new iPod's have been cracked to sync with Amarok once again. One down on my list of complaints and two to go.

Please bear with the site I linked to. It is experiencing the Digg effect.

Seriously Apple, what the heck!?

When you announced the new iPods I was quite happy to see the 160GB Classic, the new Nanos with video and the Touch. I was leaning toward a touch, but 16GB is just not enough space for me. For a device with a gorgeous screen for video I would actually want to put a lot of videos on it, and that's pretty hard to do with only 16GB of storage space. I would be happy with 30GB of space on the Touch, that's what my current 5.5G iPod is and that holds all of my music and videos with about 4GB to spare. The Touch needs a hard drive and at least 2GB of flash memory to store the applications and OS on and to load up videos and music to.

Because of the small amount of disk space on the iPod Touch, I was considering getting the 160GB iPod Classic. My plan was to re-rip my library as FLAC and store the FLAC audio on the Classic and keep 256kbps AAC files on my Mac and sync them to my iPod Classic.

I would love to do this, but unfortunately with the reports of the iPod Classics being extremely slow with their new GUIs, that partially turned me off from getting a Classic.

Another thing that somewhat turned me off from the iPod Classic, or any of the new iPods for that matter, is that users can no longer sync their iPods with anything but iTunes. This upset me because I may switch to Linux when KDE4 is released, and as most people know, there is no iTunes for Linux. The one program that does work, or used to, is Amarok. Now I may not be able to sync my iPod under Linux, and that would really, really suck.

The biggest turn off from the Classic and all of the new iPods for me personally is that I can't use the video out on the new iPods unless I purchase Apples $50 cable that has a special chip in it that allows the video out to work. Now, I don't normally use the video out too often, but when I do want to use it with my new iPod (that I am now probably not going to purchase) I don't want to replace a my video out cable and spend $50!

Apple, you really need to get your act together.

Vienna, the open source rss reader has just had a major update released today. This update features an entire redesign moving away from the brushed metal look.
Also, Vienna now has the ability to search all of the articles in the reader. Vienna's browser has also been improved upon. When you open new tabs, they automatically size themselves with beautiful animations.

Vienna is my favorite rss reader for OS X, and the best thing about it is that it's open source and free, so if you're looking for a free rss reader for OS X you may want to consider Vienna.

I've added a whole new section to Macish for system monitoring apps, and in that section I have added iStat Menus.

Also, in the Miscellaneous Apps I've added the famous system-wide notification app Growl.

Growl, the system-wide notification system for OS X has now been updated to version 1.1. There are many visual and UI improvements along with several resource usage improvements. Get the latest version of this awesome software, and check out the version history.

Since I've had my MacBook I've been looking for something to keep it from going to sleep when I shut the screen. I had searched high and low and couldn't find a thing that was compatible with the 10.4.

Today my friend introduced me to InsomiaX. It's a simple little app that lets you close the screen of your Mac notebook without it going to sleep.

As soon as I get some free time, I'll put it up in the Macish section, this app is just too handy to not tell you about.

Here's the story: I had a video a little over an hour long of a concert. I wanted to create scenes, or chapters, for each song. I knew that I could do this with iMovie HD, but I did not feel like waiting ten hours for the video to import, so I set out to find an easier and quicker way to add chapters to a video.

I figured that I could do it with QuickTime Pro, but I could find no obvious way in the menus to add chapters to a video. I did a little Googling, and I found a how-to page on Apples website.

Adding chapter tracks is not as easy as one might think, but if you follow the how-to you can get it done. I would have expected an easier way to add chapters, but at least I'm not doing it every day.

I have finally gotten around to adding a Games section to the Macish. Some of the games in there so far are Quinn, X-Moto, and Solitaire XL. When I discover some new games worth mentioning I'll throw them up on the games page. So, go check out the developing Games page and have some fun.

I just got a new 40GB 4G iPod today. I got it at the MacSuperstore in San Louis Obispo. I've been wanting an older iPod to use in my truck, one that I wouldn't have to worry about as much as my 5G iPod. I got this one used for $30. Not a bad deal at all considering that when this first came out is was about $400.

iWork '08 along with iLife '08 has been announced today at Apple's press conference. Apple has put up a free 30 day trial of the brand new iWork '08. I really can't wait to try it out.

As you may know, I have been using the very well built Dashcode beta from Apple to create my widgets. Unfortunately, it has expired. It will be back in Leopard, however. I am looking forward to the final release of Dashcode in Leopard this fall.

Apple has just released QuickTime 7.2 which, most notably adds full screen video support for non-Pro users, as I had predicted

Quicklook, in my opinion, is pretty cool and I will definitely be using it in Leopard. The fact that it can play videos in full screen leads me to believe that Apple may be getting rid of Quicktime Pro. I think it is stupid that you have to pay $30 for full screen video playback; although, a working serial for QT Pro isn't too hard to find.

may happen. Turns out I was half right. Apple still has QT Pro, but they added full screen video to the free version of QT. Also the QT update fixes some major security issues, bugs, and updates the H.264 codec.

iTunes 7.3.1 fixes the bug that some people ran into with not being able to access their music libraries.