Black Lego desktop

As found at Made in England by Gentlemen.

Leopard: mostly good

It’s not like me to rush into installing new operating systems, but I really was keen to see what Leopard could offer. And anyway, I had a couple of spare Macs lying around with nothing to do. So when the shiny box dropped through my front door last Friday morning, I settled down for a [...]

Instant Spotlight shortcuts with Spotlight comments

So you’re impressed by the faster Spotlight searching in Leopard, and want to try using it more often to find stuff. You find that there’s a folder you want quick access to, but its name is too generic, and gets swamped by too many other Spotlight results. You want your chosen folder or file to [...]

Window management on external displays is broken in Leopard

In Tiger, plugging in an external monitor resulted in all the current displayed windows disappearing for a moment, then neatly appearing on the new display. In Leopard, this no longer happens.
What does happen is a bit of a dog’s breakfast. Some windows make the jump to the new monitor, some do not. There’s no way [...]

Drag-and-drop between Macs with Leopard Screen Sharing

Now don’t get too excited, because this functionality is very limited. If you have Screen Sharing switched on, you can view the desktop of another Mac inside a window of your current Mac. Nothing new there. But what is interesting is that you can drag web location files - the ones with a .webloc suffix, [...]

Upgrading to Leopard

Got my hands on Leopard this morning, and spent a big chunk of the day upgrading my various machines. On the whole, I’m very pleased. Almost everything is working smoothly, and to my great surprise the OS works well on my aging PowerBook, which has a mere 768MB RAM and a 1.67MHz G4 processor.
My list [...]

How to pull the plug

Apple has published a support note informing owners of MagSafe power adapters how they should - and should not - pull the plugs from their Macs.
This, you see, is wrong:

And this is right:

I’m glad that’s been cleared up.

MarsEdit 2 review

MacUser asked me to write a review of MarsEdit 2:
As blogging matures, so do blogging applications. MarsEdit, originally created alongside NetNewsWire by Brent Simmons, is now under the new ownership of Daniel Jalkut at Red Sweater Software. The result is an injection of fresh blood for MarsEdit. MarsEdit 2 benefits from some helpful interface tweaks [...]

New discovery: Quicksilver’s menu interface

Quicksilver’s ace, you all know that. But when switching between an external monitor and your laptop’s built-in screen, it can lose track of where it’s supposed to display itself. You can get round this by trying out the not-often-seen-in-people’s-Quicksilver-screenshots menu interface, which as you might guess, tucks Quicksilver out of the way at the top [...]

This morning’s reviews

Spent the morning playing with, and writing reviews of SketchBox (sticky notes with timers - nicely made, free, recommended) and Conjure (an attempt to make an interactive desktop thingy - it’s buggy and broken, not recommended at all). Next actions: download the new Carbon Copy Cloner, catch up on some email backlog.