Macs

Bitchin’!

Fluid 0.7: ”

Freeware utility that lets you create your own ‘site specific browser’:

Using Fluid, you can create SSBs to run each of your favorite webapps as a separate desktop application. Fluid gives any webapp a home on your Mac OS X desktop complete with Dock icon, standard menu bar, and logical separation from your other web browsing activity.

(Via David Heinemeier Hansson at 37signals; they’ve got icons you can use for Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire, and Highrise.)

“

(Via Daring Fireball.)

I want one of these!

But alas:

System Requirements

MacBook Air computer

Bugger!

First impressions, having just read the spec.

For the record, I like small laptops. And I mean, I REALLY like small laptops. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a sub-notebook I’d actually consider purchasing, be it Mac or PC.

And I can’t see that changing with the announcement of the MacBook Air.

I’m using a 1.83ghz Core2 MacBook with 1.5gb RAM at the moment.

An entry level MacBook Air is running at 1.63ghz and shipping with 2gb RAM.

While there’s not a lot of difference here, it is worth noting that the Air has 4mb of L2 cache on the chip (versus 2mb on the MacBook) and an 800mhz FSB (versus 667mhz on the MacBook). I’m unsure as to how much of a performance increase we’ll see from this. Have to wait and see.

Interesting to see a PATA instead of a SATA hard disk in the Air.

Multi-touch trackpad is a nice feature too. Looking forward to playing with that!

The Air certainly looks the part. It’s small, it’s light, spec is pretty good, looks amazing. Couldn’t ask for more.

Until…….

A: No Firewire.
B: No removal/upgradeable memory.
C: No optical drive as standard (available as an option)
D: No removable battery.
E: Hefty price tag

Any one (or maybe even two or three (at a push!)) of these would be acceptable, but all five really makes me shy away a bit, which is a real shame.

I was really hoping Apple would release a sub-notebook and not the iPhone-esque tablet thing that everyone’s been praying for, so I was really excited to see the MacBook Air release news.

I’m a little disappointed on initial inspection. That may change when I actually have one in front of me.

I’ll let you know when that happens.

Following my post about the excellent Multi-Safari:

Multi-Safari is broken in Leopard, but fear not!
A fix is available from Thomas Aylott.

Nice one!

How many more times are we going to have to endure this kind of crap?
It’s really starting to grate on me.

Amusingly, according to Macworld:

The ad was created by Omnicom Group’s TBWA\Media Arts Lab, but unfortunately has caused some browsers to crash, leading some sites to pull the ad from their online properties.

No mention of which browsers crashed though……

Apple REALLY need to stop doing this.

There’s been a lot of press about the hits and misses in Leopard. But my two fave features seem to be quite low on the list!

1: Airport in the menu bar.
Yes I know it’s been there forever, but it sucked before, and now it doesn’t! Proper realtime updating of available networks, including security status. It should have been sorted a long time ago. Thankfully, now it is!

2: Finder and mounted shares.
This was my most loathed part of all previous incarnations of OS X. Mount a remote volume, put your Mac to sleep and wander to another location. Open it up and watch and wait for the spinning beachball of doom to do it’s thing.
If you’re lucky, you may get a “volume disconnected” message, albeit eventually. You may however have to forcefully reboot your machine to sort it.
This behaviour is now no more, and it’s a joy! In fact, I really like the way Leopard deals with remote servers. Authenticate to the machine, and you instantly have access to all the shares on the machine. No more multiple ‘Command-K’ing to connect to the same server.

It may seem like small fry against the behemoth Time Machine or the instantly cool Quick Look, but in terms of usability, it’s the little things that make all the difference.

I really hate reviews that misinform, and while the Macworld review of Leopard is mostly accurate, there are some gross inaccuracies!

First, if the Dock is on the bottom of the screen (where a lot of people tend to keep it), a stack will display as a curving column of icons or as a rectangular grid, depending on how many items are in the folder.

While this is true of the default behavior, it is easily rectified with a right click -> view as -> grid. Problem solved.
Interestingly, this choice is not available if the dock is positioned on the side. It’s grid or nothing!

For folders where the number of items changes regularly (such as Downloads), you never know which display you’re going to get.

Wrong again. Once again, right click invoked context menu has the answer, which happens to be the same as above!

Furthermore, stacks displayed as columns sort items alphabetically beginning at the bottom of the stack, while stacks displaying as a grid sort items alphabetically beginning at the top left.

Someone really ought to invest in a two button mouse. Context menus are a wonderful thing.

You open a Finder window in Cover Flow mode, then drag the lower-right corner of the window down to see more files. Oops! Watch instead as the Cover Flow icons grow to gargantuan size while the list of files you’re actually trying to expand remains the same size.

And you can then reduce the size of the icons by dragging the bar below them up, thus revealing more icons.

For those who are a couple of generations behind in their hardware, the prospect of a Leopard world is bleak. For one, any Mac with a G3 chip is automatically left out. This includes all of the original translucent iMacs; you know, the ones that helped get Apple back on its feet.

Do what now?!

Other G4s that Leopard doesn’t support include Quicksilver and earlier Power Macs and Cubes released before January 2002; eMacs sold before October 2003; Titanium PowerBooks older than November 2002.

So, machines about as old as G3 hardware then…..

We were able to get an unsupported mini working that way, albeit slowly.

Which is possibly why they’re considered “unsupported”?

There are always going to be casualties in the bleeding edge market. Dropping support for the G3 was an inevitability. It struggled to run Tiger without loads of ram, and Leopard is a whole ‘nother beast.

From Macworld

Put the Finder in all Spaces: While Spaces is a very cool feature, one thing that can get annoying is how the Finder behaves—certain Finder-related events in certain programs may shift your active space to one showing a Finder window. You can avoid this problem by assigning the Finder to every space. In Spaces’ System Preferences panel, click the plus sign to add a new assignment. When the file browser shows up, navigate to /System -> Library -> CoreServices, click on Finder, then click the Add button. Back in the Assignments window, click the Space column next to Finder, and set it to All Spaces. Now you’ll see Finder windows in all of your spaces.

Well kinda……
Porn sites that offer free movies, but you have to install a “codec” to view them.
Sound familiar? All those setup.exe files are back but with a Mac flavour.
Once installed the trojan hijacks DNS and redirects popular purchase sites to sites controlled by the hijacker to extract credit card details.
Now I hardly think this constitutes “open season” on the Mac as Wired would have you believe. Fair enough it’s a development in the “viruses on the Mac” department, but, currently, you would have to be a bit of a muppet to get duped. Macs are not invincible, and they never have been. There’s been plenty of dodgy apps that do dodgy things once authentication has been given. This is nothing new.
And as for this pearl of wisdom from “security researcher” (?) Gadi Evron:

Apple’s day has finally come, and Apple users are going to get hit hard. OS X is the new Windows 98.

Ahuh……