Secrets preference panel updated for Snow Leopard
My Clippings November 12th, 2009 by System
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Filed under: OS, Software, Odds and ends
From time to time we have shared hidden settings in applications which can be used to “tweak” an app’s behavior, such as forcing Snow Leopard’s dictionary to reuse the same window or make the print dialog expanded by default. These settings are normally changed using the Terminal.app which can be daunting to some.
Secrets is a (free!) preference panel which has collected a bunch of these settings and made changing them as simple as checking a box or choosing from a drop-down panel of possible choices. It includes settings for about 40 different applications, from Apple applications such as Mail, iCal, iChat, Finder, Front Row, Keynote, DVD Player (and more) to third-party applications including Adium, Audio Hijack Pro, BBedit, EyeTV, VMware Fusion, and TextMate (just to name a few). Some applications have a lot of hidden settings, and some have only one or two.
If you see a setting but don’t know what it does, click it and Secrets will show a brief explanation (these are also available on the Secrets website, but they are easier to read in the preference panel). If you change a setting which requires you to restart the application, Secrets will tell you, and even give you a “Quit This” button. (It’s usually best to make these changes when the app isn’t running.)
Unfortunately at least one of the secret settings from 10.5 doesn’t seem to work in 10.6. That is, the setting to turn HelpViewer into a regular (instead of floating) window. There may be others.
I’m off to explore and see what new goodies Alcor (the developer of Secrets, who you may also know as the creator of Quicksilver) has uncovered.
Thanks to the recently-revived Hawk Wings site for bringing this to my attention. If you use Apple’s Mail.app, Hawk Wings is a great site for tips and information.
Update: We seem to have taken down the Secrets website (oops!) but you can download the preference panel from a mirror (zip) (166kb).
TUAWSecrets preference panel updated for Snow Leopard originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Tags: Apple, cli, email, Google, Inc., Information, IO, Leopard, ma, Mac, man, quick, Snow Leopard, terminal, wind, XP
Apple breaks Atom Hackintoshes with upcoming OS X 10.6.2 update
My Clippings November 5th, 2009 by System
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Filed under: OS Updates, Hardware, Apple
According to OSXDaily, Apple’s next scheduled update to Snow Leopard, OS X 10.6.2, doesn’t support Intel Atom processors. This is no problem for anyone on Apple hardware, because no Mac product runs an Atom. If you’re on a hacked netbook, though, it looks like this is the end of the line for your OS X updates.
Although it’s not confirmed, rumor has it that next update to Apple’s previous Leopard OS (10.5.9) will also knock out Atom support. Until a workaround pops up from netbook hacker circles, Atom machines running 10.6.1 and 10.5.8 should probably avoid upgrading. Is Apple sending a message to users running its software on third-party machines? It seems likely, but it also doesn’t seem like it will do much to stop determined netbook enthusiasts.
Apple breaks Atom Hackintoshes with upcoming OS X 10.6.2 update originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Apple – Operating system – Mac OS X – Intel Atom – Download Squad
Tags: Apple, cli, email, Google, Hackintosh, Inc., IO, Leopard, ma, Mac, man, OSX, Photo, php, Snow Leopard, workaround, XP
With a rebel Dell, Psystar tries more, more, more
My Clippings October 22nd, 2009 by System
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Filed under: Hacks, Mods, Snow Leopard
Psystar, that pesky little thorn in Apple’s side, has released Rebel EFI. According to Psystar, the app, available for $49.99 through the company’s site, “allows for the easy installation of multiple operating systems,” including Mac OS X, on a vanilla PC. Besides bypassing EFI requirements, Rebel EFI can also detect for Mac OS X compatible and incompatible hardware, and automatically download appropriate drivers. Skeptical? No worries: the app is free to try (as an ISO download), with a two hour time limit.
To each their own, and if running Mac OS X on non-Apple specified hardware floats your boat, then you should also be aware of the risks involved. In other words, back up your data if you are attempting such a thing. Second, and more importantly, there’s the issue of licensing: Apple prohibits the installation of Mac OS X on non Apple-branded machines.
Psystar giveth and Psystar must also taketh. One wonders how Psystar will react when people illegally use Rebel EFI, just like Psystar is allegedly misusing Mac OS X, as pirated versions inevitably circulate around the Interwebs.
Thanks to everyone who sent this in.
[via The Loop]
TUAWWith a rebel Dell, Psystar tries more, more, more originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Related posts:Tags: Apple, email, Google, Inc., IO, ISO, Leopard, ma, Mac, man, Snow Leopard
Setting Up Photoshop For Web, App and iPhone Development
My Clippings October 17th, 2009 by System
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Most people who have designed websites or apps in Photoshop will, at one point or another, have had issues trying to match colors in images to colors generated by HTML, CSS or code. This article aims to solve those problems once and for all.
Color Management to Match Colors Across Multiple Devices
In the print world, color management typically involves calibrating your entire workflow, from scanner or digital camera to computer display to hard proofs to the final press output. This can be quite a tall order, especially when the devices use different color spaces — matching RGB and CMYK devices is notoriously hard.
When designing or editing for TV, calibrating the main editing display and using a broadcast monitor are common; these show real-time proof of how the image will look on a typical TV in a viewer’s home. In such a scenario, color management offers many benefits and is highly recommended.
When building Web and application interfaces, the situation is a little different. The final output is the same device that you’re using to create the artwork: a computer display (putting aside for now differences in gamma between Windows, Mac OS X prior to 10.6 and the iPhone, which we’ll cover later.)
There is a catch, though. Even though you’re creating the Web or app interface on the same device that the final product will be shown on, the colors will have various sources: images (typically PNG, GIF and JPEG), style markup (CSS) and code (JavaScript, HTML, Objective-C, etc). Getting them all to match can be tricky.
The Goal
When designing websites or app interfaces, we want to perfectly match the colors that are displayed on screen in Photoshop and that are saved in files with what’s displayed in other applications, including Firefox, Safari and the iPhone Simulator. Not only do we want the colors to look the same, but we want the actual values saved in the files to perfectly match the colors we have defined in Photoshop. Colors should not shift or appear to shift in any way, under any circumstance.
Why Is This So Difficult?
Photoshop applies its color management to images displayed within its windows and to the files it saves. This is a bad thing if you’re working exclusively with RGB images for Web or on-screen user interfaces. With the default Photoshop settings, #FF0000 will actually display as #FB0018, and #BB95FF will display as #BA98FD. The differences are subtle but definitely there.
Related posts:Tags: Build, css, flash, Google, Information, IO, Javascript, Leopard, ma, Mac, man, Photo, php, script, Snow Leopard, video, Vista, way, wind, XP
Psystar, Apple file motions for summary judgment
My Clippings October 17th, 2009 by System
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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Apple Corporate, Hardware, OS
Apple and Psystar have been embroiled in litigation for quite a while now. At the core of the dispute: Psystar modifies Apple’s operating system software so that it can run on its clone machines. It then sells its computers with Mac OS installed to, well, anybody who wants one. As you can imagine, this does not make Apple happy.
Anybody familiar with The Great Clone Crackdown of 1997 will tell you that Apple likes to keep a very tight grip on any device that presumes to run its software. Apple points out that Windows machines are a mishmash of often conflicting hardware and suffer from quirks and errors and incompatibilities that such a set up can bring.
So Apple’s cadre of lawyers descended quickly on Psystar. In July of last year, the company sued Psystar for copyright and software licensing violations, quickly amending its lawsuit to additionally charge Psystar with violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
More than a year later, now that discovery has been completed, the two parties have each filed for summary judgment, which, in effect, asks the judge to rule in favor of the filing party because enough evidence has been shown that either makes or breaks the lawsuit.
Psystar’s argument, and the one covered in its motion, somewhat relies on the “first sale doctrine” which says that any purchaser of a copyrighted product can then take that lawfully-made copy and sell it, so long as no additional copies can be made. For its part, Apple says that when one “purchases” its OS, you are only purchasing a license to use the product. Its Software Licensing Agreement (SLA) quite clearly states [PDF link to Snow Leopard SLA] that the user cannot modify the software to run on a non-Apple system.
The idea that what you are purchasing is a license to use the product is pretty commonplace among software manufacturers, because, the argument runs, you can cut any software company’s profits off at the knees if every purchaser became an owner with free rein to redistribute the software. Apple states that no software company in its right mind would put the money into research and development of any software product at all if that were the end result of bringing its product to market. Groklaw suggests this could have ramifications for FOSS and and the GPL.
Continue reading Psystar, Apple file motions for summary judgment
Related posts:Tags: Apple, email, Google, Inc., IO, ISO, Leopard, ma, Mac, man, OSX, php, quick, Snow Leopard, wind
ScreenSharingMenulet fills a gap in Snow Leopard’s Screen Sharing.app
My Clippings September 21st, 2009 by System
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Filed under: Cool tools
Every “point-oh” version of Mac OS X usually brings some small bit of pain, as I find some little utility no longer works. Snow Leopard has been no exception. I had been using the version of Screen Sharing from 10.5.4 because it had some “hidden” features which I liked. Unfortunately those “hidden” features were also “unsupported” features. When 10.5.5 came out, they were gone, but I continued to use the version of Screen Sharing from 10.5.4 which worked until 10.5.8. Sadly for me, it does not work at all in 10.6.
The biggest drawback of Screen Sharing was the removal of the Bonjour Browser, which showed a list of computers available for Screen Sharing (both locally and via Back to My Mac). Now I had to type them in manually, which isn’t such a big deal when you are trying to connect to a machine on a local network. If you are trying to connect over the Internet, however, you need to use the full hostname, which may look something like this: macbook.yourname.members.mac.com. Plus, it just seems like one of those things that the computer ought to do for me. [Side note, if you are looking for a handy way to see all the Bonjour services on your local network, check out Tildesoft's free Bonjour Browser utility.]
While looking through a bunch of old files in my ~/Downloads/ folder, I found a version of ScreenSharingMenulet. I checked its webpage and saw what I was looking for: “ScreenSharingMenulet 1.7.1 and higher is compatible to Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard.” ScreenSharingMenulet sits in the menu bar along with your other menu extras. Simply click on its icon (shown above) and choose which computer you wish to connect to via a dropdown list. In my testing it worked very well over a LAN although it did not seem to pre-populate with the machines over the Internet. Given the flakiness of Back To My Mac over ther Internet, I can hardly fault this program for that shortcoming.
ScreenSharingMenulet is free (donations accepted) from Stefan Klieme who has several other handy-looking utilities at his website. If you use Screen Sharing a lot, it’s definitely a handy tool to have around.
TUAWScreenSharingMenulet fills a gap in Snow Leopard’s Screen Sharing.app originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Related posts:Tags: Apple, email, Inc., IO, Leopard, Mac, Snow Leopard, way
iSight Screensavers: Interact with your screensaver
My Clippings September 20th, 2009 by System
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Filed under: Humor, Software, Snow Leopard
Some of you may have noticed that some of your screensavers don’t work after upgrading to Snow Leopard. If you’re running a 64-bit instance of the operating system, you won’t be able to use most of your old third-party screensavers because they’re probably not compatible. Many of our favorite screensavers weren’t working… so instead of waiting for the developers to release them in 64-bit, we decided to see what else was out there.
iSight Screensavers from Majic Jungle (the creators of FluidTunes) isn’t new, but it’s something we’ve never covered here on TUAW. It was one that showed up first in our search and ended up killing our productivity for the rest of the day. And the next day. In fact, we’ve not really recovered productivity since we clicked the “test” button in System Preferences.
Majic Jungle has made a killer screensaver that allows you to interact with different effects and filters using the iSight camera, or any webcam attached to your mac. I won’t get into the countless scenarios we created (we’re pretty easily entertained), but here’s a list of interactions from the creators’ site to help explain what it does:
- Fluid – Play with a beautiful fluid dynamics simulation
- Particles – Create magical looking brightly colored particles wherever you move
- Champagne – Immerse yourself in a champagne world and watch as bubbles appear all over you
- Fire – Set yourself or your desktop on fire – in a painless kind of way!
- Water – Ripples appear wherever you move
- Flipping Grid – Can you get all of the squares to flip over together?
- Core Image – Over 30 configurable effects using powerful Core Image filters
iSight Screensavers is Universal Binary and Shareware. If you’d like to remove the watermarks, you can purchase a license for $4.99 — pretty cheap considering my wife and I are more entertained by this than by a $25 night at the movies.
TUAWiSight Screensavers: Interact with your screensaver originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Tags: Apple, email, Humor, Inc., IO, Leopard, Mac, Snow Leopard, way, XP
A squabble over EFI-X
My Clippings September 16th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online
Last year we have spoken about what seemed to be the future eldorado of Hackintosh, the USB key EFI-X.
It made it possible to the owners of PCs (with the specifications close to the Mac) to easily create Hackintosh. It was enough to connect the key before installing completely the standardl Mac OS X.
A little time ago, the company announced that version 1.0 of its key would not function with Snow Leopard and that a new version, 1.1, would be needed.
Tom’s Hardware UK reports the story of the administrator of the blog AsereBLN who was irritated by this news and decided to see what this key contained.
After having removed the black epoxy resin that protected the components from inquisitive eyes, he was surprised to see that it did not have much more than in a banal USB key and than this product should not cost more than 10€ to manufacture; however it is sold for more than 200€.
One may have thought that the price was justified by the software development, but he also decided to decipher the firmware of the key and found there… open source code developed by OSx86 group and hardly any attempt to hide it.
He thus decided to shout about this in a high voice on his blog, and to even propose an open source clone of EFI-X, the EXI-X.
It was learned that the manufacturers of the EFI-X key decided to prosecute him. We will keep you informed of the current situation during this process and we ask you to moderate your remarks in the reactions to this information. We have made some efforts during the drafting of this so that no-one can reproach us, since we have only reported the facts without making any assessment. Make of this as much as you like.
Tags: Hackintosh, Information, IO, Leopard, Mac, OSX, Snow Leopard, XP
How to Build a Hackintosh with Snow Leopard, Start to Finish [How To]
My Clippings September 7th, 2009 by System
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Two years ago, I detailed how to build a Hackintosh for under $800—then covered how to do the same with less hacking. Now that Snow Leopard’s out, we’re revisiting the Hackintosh, building a Hack Pro from scratch for roughly $900.
For folks eager to try a Mac but never wanted to plunk down the high price tag to get it, the Hackintosh—that is, a regular PC tweaked to run OS X—has always been an attractive option. That said, it’s not something you should take on lightly unless you’re willing—even enthusiastic—to build and maintain a PC entirely from scratch. I can’t guarantee it’ll be easy, but if you follow this guide step-for-step (it’s exhaustive) and stick with the same (or at least roughly the same) hardware as I am, I can vouch for a rock solid system that also happens to cost a good deal less than you’d pay for a comparable Mac.
Price Comparisons
Most Hackintosh enthusiasts will say you shouldn’t build a Hackintosh primarily to save money, as it’s more than just an insert-disc-and-click install. Still, I always enjoy looking at the price differences between my Hackintosh and Apple’s current offerings. At the moment, the cheapest Mac in the Apple store is a Mac mini sporting a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 120GB hard drive. For $300 more, I’m running a 3.0GHz Quad-Core processor, 8GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive, and a damn saucy video card. I could have made this build much cheaper by skimping on hardware and still ended up with a great little machine, but I liked aiming for around the $800 price point from my last build—plus I really wanted to make it fly.
The most expensive iMac, by comparison, has only a 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of memory for $2,200 ($1,300 more than my build, but it is built into a monitor), while the cheapest Mac Pro has a single 2.66GHz Quad-Core processor, 3GB of RAM, and a 640GB hard drive—and it costs $2,500 ($1,600 more than mine, though it’s a different and better processor and DDR3 rather than DDR2 RAM). In short, my $900 “Hack Pro” sports nearly as good or better hardware than any Mac that Apple sells short of the $3,300 8-Core Mac Pro (which can, incidentally, get more expensive, but it won’t get much better).
Tags: amazon, Apple, Build, Hackintosh, Information, IO, ISO, Leopard, Mac, OSX, php, Snow Leopard, ssl, Sudo, Unzip, video, way, wind, XP
Windows 7 Will Boot in as Little as 11 Seconds?
My Clippings September 4th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online
For those of you who have tested the beta or the Windows 7 RTM code, this might not come as any surprise. For those of us whose production machines still run Windows XP (Ziff-Davis and Intel, among others) the improved performance of Microsoft’s new operating system is a nice surprise.
One of those surprises was delivered Wednesday, when Microsoft paired a quad-core Intel Core i7 microprocessor with a solid-state-disc drive and what Ruston Panabaker, the principal program manager for strategic silicon partnering at Microsoft, called a generic build of Windows 7. Panabaker fired up the system, and presto! An 11-second boot time.
Sure, this was most likely a fresh build on fresh hardware, and an SSD makes all the difference in the world. But there was a little magic going on behind the scenes, as well
According to Panabaker, the boot process can be parallelized across all
four cores and all eight threads provided by Intel’s hyperthreaded
processor. “It’s an Intel reference design,” Panabaker said. “But with
high-performance hardware, this shows what system manufacturers can do.”
Part of the improved performance comes from the telemetry data that helped Microsoft boost battery life by a significant amount when running on Intel’s next-generation processors.
Other work was done by Microsoft itself, removing “thread locks” that
stalled the system. Intel also works with the Windows 7 scheduler to
migrate threads to idle cores, and then to shut those idle cores down
if there truly is no work to do.
Microsoft has been working with the software ecosystem to take
advantage of the battery-boosting, low-power API. And Intel executives,
like others in the industry, have reported that Microsoft has been
diligent about providing its partners time (about 12 months) to nail
down drivers and the like.
Panabaker did say that there will likely be a Knowledge Base article
listing incompatible hardware, as Apple’s Snow Leopard does. When that
will be released is not known, but it will likely be closer to launch,
he said. One feature that Microsoft plans to include: community
features, which will help users and Microsoft nail down what doesn’t
work, he said.
Tags: Apple, Build, IO, Leopard, Mac, Microsoft, Snow Leopard, wind, XP
