Mac Discoveries by Allen Watson

Early Experience with Snow Leopard

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 19:15:29 -0700

I received Snow Leopard Tuesday, September 1, and promptly installed in on a “sandbox” drive cloned by Super Duper, which leaves my actual main drive intact. I’ve been running booted from that external Snow Leopard drive ever since, without any major problems. I selected Customize in the installer, and installed Rosetta so my Carbon apps, like Microsoft Office, would work.

That’s not to say I haven’t had problems. Microsoft Entourage came up, but none of the “Saved Searches” worked; all were blank. And searching for messages did not work. I fumbled around with that for a day or so until I got word, via the grapevine, that I simply needed to use Entourage’s preferences to rebuild the Spotlight cache. I did so, and all was well.

Further possible problems with Entourage: Today, I was simply reading and writing email and Entourage kept giving me the rainbow cursor, preventing me from doing anything. This would happen simply if I clicked on a word to position the cursor. I don’t know what the problem was there.

Another time, Safari was running very, very slowly. I discovered it was taking up about 2.4 gigabytes of physical RAM (by looking in Activity Monitor); I quit it, restarted it, and it came back with normal memory usage. Twice, no three times now, I have had Safari lock up requiring me to force quit. That’s three times in 3 days, so I can live with that until Apple fixes the problem.

I have learned that the Services feature in Snow Leopard has been greatly enhanced. Actually, I would say it has finally been fixed. It was never useful before; now it is. I can manage services in a Keyboard Shortcuts preferences pane, and can turn them on or off, and assign keyboard shortcuts. What’s more, they operate contextually; when I call up the services menu, either in the old way via the application>Services menu, or by Control-click on some window, file, or text, only the services that apply to the object selected show up in the menu. If I click on an image file, only services related to images show in the menu. This is extremely useful. In fact, Apple thinks this is so useful that it now replaces contextual menu plug-ins. If you have a bunch of contextual menu plug-ins, as I had under Leopard, they will be gone in Snow Leopard. There is no longer any such thing as a contextual menu plug-in; you need to find an equivalent service. And note this: you can create your own services using Automator. To learn more, read the Macworld article by Rob Griffiths: http://www.macworld.com/article/142419/2009/08/snowleopardservices.html

Futhermore, there is now simple system-wide text replacement. You can set up a shortcut such as “myaddr” and have it replace automatically with your full address. It only does simple replacement, and therefore is not as sophisticated as Smile on My Mac’s TextExpander, but given that it works in all Cocoa applications (which includes all Apple apps), it’s a nice feature.

In general, things seem a bit zippier. Nothing dramatic that I’ve seen so far. Finder is faster.

Another few days and I think I will install Snow Leopard on my actual main drive. Nothing, so far, would contra-indicate doing so. I’ll report again when I have more to say.

Cleaning Up My Site

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:22:15 -0700

With the changes at Mobile Me regarding websites, I’ve ended up with multiple copies of my blog site, and no way to tell which is active. So, I’m updating in iWeb, and then looking to see which copy gets updated.

Access Bookmarks for Multiple Browsers

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 09:20:06 -0700

AllBookmarks adds a new item to your Mac OS X menu bar giving you quick access to all your bookmarks. All your Safari, Firefox and Flock bookmarks are shown and can be selected. AllBookmarks also gives you accesses to your 1Password 1Click bookmarks so you can navigate to a page, fill the form, and submit it, all with a single click!

The best part is, this program is free! You can download it here:
Download AllBookmarks

Evernote, Better Information Capture

Wed, 7 May 2008 09:37:48 -0700

Capture. Sync. Find. And remember everything.

That’s the motto on the Evernote Beta website. I’ve been using this on an experimental basis and I like it a lot! What’s really intriguing to me is that Evernote will even scan images for text and will index that text, so that you can search for the image using the text it contains. For instance, you can take a snapshot of a sign (suppose it says, “Mount Hood Jazz Festival” on it) with your iPhone, e-mail the image to Evernote, and later search in Evernote for “jazz” and locate the picture of the shirt! You can scan a page from a book, and Evernote will index all the text. Drag and drop files onto Evernote in the Dock; it recognizes txt, html, doc, jpeg, gif, and png. (wav support coming soon). Big drawback; it does not yet recognize PDF files! (Yojimbo does; see below.)

Think of all the ways this could be used. Use your cell phone camera to snap a pic of someone’s business card, and send it to your Evernote account: Bingo! You’ve captured all the information into Evernote. Snap a pic of the page of a book when you are researching and you have a searchable copy of that page. (Searchable but not editable; Evernote does not allow you to copy and paste text out of images.)

Evernote gives you a javascript bookmarklet you can paste into your browser bookmarks that, when selected, will capture whatever web page you are viewing, or the selected text on that page. With Evernote you not only get a desktop application, you also get a web repository that syncs with your desktop application. So you can access your Evernote data from any computer with web access; you just log in. Capture data on your desktop, it syncs to the web; capture data on the web, and it syncs to your desktop! Text, images, even audio can be saved. And if you wish to, you can share some of your clips with other Evernote users.

I have been using Bare Bones’ Yojimbo for saving clippings since it came out, and I still like it a lot. I still find its keyboard shortcut method of clipping text, combined with an AppleScript I downloaded from (I think) Daring Fireball that lets me assign tags as I clip, is easier for clipping just text. And I like being able to “print” a PDF of anything directly into Yojimbo. But Evernote is making me think twice about which is best.

Give Evernote a try; it’s free while in beta.

Great News Aggregator (Mac news+)

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:56:02 -0700

http://mac.alltop.com/

Guy Kawasaki has put together a great news aggregator website: alltop.com. The above URL is just the Mac news page. It includes news from dozens of Mac-centric websites. You can find all the news in one place.

The general URL, alltop.com, lists all the super-categories, of which "Macintosh" is only one.

Acid Test for Mac Browsers

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 19:49:30 -0800

The Web Standards Organization (www.webstandards.org) has a very exhaustive test case called Acid2 for web browsers to determine whether or not they are standards compliant. It has been written to help browser vendors make sure their products correctly support features that web designers would like to use. These features are part of existing standards but haven't been interoperably supported by major browsers. The Acid2 test is supposed to yield an image of a happy face, such as the one above.

Today I decided to try out various Mac browsers on the test. I had just read a blog entry to the effect that Microsoft’s forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 had just successfully rendered the Acid2 test. I wondered how my Mac browsers would fare. So, I tried them. The results follow.

Passed: Safari, Sunrise, Shiira, Omniweb (5.7 beta), Opera
Failed: Firefox, Camino, Flock.

The failures are all Mozilla browers. They produce a result like this:

Pretty pathetic, isn’t it? There is even a little piece that isn’t visible in that image that is way off at the right margin of the browser window.

I always thought Firefox was one of the really good standards-compliant browsers. I guess not! And Safari passes the test, which says good things about it. Some of the others you may not have heard of, like Sunrise and Shiira. Both are very compact apps, and very fast. I’m going to spend more time trying them out now that I know they do a better job than Firefox at rendering CSS.

Super Duper Released for Leopard

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 19:44:28 -0800

I should follow up my last post by mentioning that Shirt Pocket Software released a Leopard-compatible version on February 5, 2008.