The Author – Bart Busschots
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Oct
29
Second Leopard Update – Spaces Feels Beta
Filed Under Computers & Tech on October 29, 2007 | 5 Comments
One of the first new things in Leopard I’m really giving a run for it’s money is the new Spaces feature. It’s basically virtual desktops the Apple way. If it were not buggy it would be fantastic, even with the few bugs I’m currently experiencing it’s still the first virtual desktop program that I’m actually finding useful. No other virtual desktop system I’ve used places as much emphasis on the relative locations of your desktops. Believe it or not it’s this real feeling of working within a grid that makes Spaces work. This feeling of working in a grid comes from a number of interface elements. The most of obvious of these is the bird’s-eye view of all your spaces brought up by hitting F8. This metaphor is further emphasised by the icon that shows up on the screen when you shift Spaces and by the animation employed to make those switches. Your feel as if your view is sliding from one space into the other. In addition to these graphical cues there are also some interactions that further re-enforce the grid metaphor. Firstly, you can drag a window from one space to another by dragging it to an edge of the screen which borders another Space and hold it for a second. When you do this you move to that other Space and bring the window with you. Secondly, you can navigate around the Spaces use the ctrl+arrow key combinations. This much all works perfectly, however, many other aspects of Spaces are a lot less polished. The rest of this article is dedicated to detailing the bugs I’ve found so far.
[tags]OS X, Apple, Leopars, OS X 10.5, Spaces[/tags]
Oct
28
First Leopard Update – Application Compatibility
Filed Under Computers & Tech on October 28, 2007 | 5 Comments
Since I chose to format my drive before installing Leopard I’ve spent much of today installing and testing software. The news is good, in fact, the news is very good, out of the twenty 3rd party apps I installed nineteen worked. The only thing that didn’t work was the Logitech drivers for my ergonomic keyboard and it turns out that doesn’t matter (more on that in another post). Everything else, including the drivers for my scanner, worked perfectly. Below is the full list of 3rd party apps that I’ve successfully installed and tested on OS X 10.5 Leopard.
[tags]Apple, OS X, Leopard, Compatibility[/tags]
Oct
27
My Very First Thoughts on Leopard
Filed Under Computers & Tech on October 27, 2007 | 1 Comment
My copy of OS X 10.5 Leopard arrived yesterday, so I spent the evening backing up, and then installing. I’m sure I’m going to be posting plenty more about the new cat over the coming weeks and months, but for now, I just want to give you my very first impressions. I have a number of Macs but I’ve only installed Leopard on one for now, that way I can be sure everything I need works before I install it on my Mac in work or the Mac I’m using for my PhD work. So, that means I’ve installed Leopard on my oldest and lowest-specked Mac, my fist generation G4 Mac Mini. This was one of the first Mac Minis to make it into the country so it’s not at all a new machine. It’s a G4 so it’s three processor architectures behind (64 bit Intel, 32 Bit Intel, and G5 PPC), it does however have 1GB of RAM because I was quite forward thinking when I bought it. By anyone’s standards this is an old machine, so, if Leopard runs well on it, it will run even better on modern machines.
[tags]OS X, Apple, Leopard[/tags]
Oct
25
Pipette – Easy Colour Grabbing On OS X
Filed Under Computers & Tech on October 25, 2007 | 1 Comment
I heard about this app on a recent episode of the Nosilla Cast by my good friend Allison Sheridan and my immediate reaction was “this app shouldn’t need to exist”. I’ll admit it’s a strange reaction but bear with me. OS X comes with a built in utility, Digial Colour Meter (which resides in Applications->Utilities), which does literally everything Pipette does, and more! So, there really shouldn’t be a need for Pipette, and yet, there is. Why? Because Apple did an uncharacteristically bad job of making the the Digital Colour Meter intuitive, whereas Charcoal Design (who wrote Pipette) didn’t. Visually the interfaces have the same components, a windows showing the area around your mouse pointer zoomed in to aid precise selection, and a readout of the colour you are currently over. The difference is entirely in the interaction.
[tags]Pipette, Apple, OS X, Freeware, HTML Colour Codes[/tags]
Oct
24
OS X 10.5 Leopard Security Features Explained
Filed Under System Administration, Security, Computers & Tech on October 24, 2007 | Leave a Comment
How Leopard Will Improve Your Security – a great article explaining the security enhancements brought by Leopard in plain English.
Oct
21
Bleezer Test Post
Filed Under Computers & Tech on October 21, 2007 | 8 Comments
This is a test post from within Bleezer to give it a test run. First impressions are not good. It has messed up my categories because it doesn’t support hierarchical categories, or if it does, it’s buggy as hell with WordPress. The GUI feels typical of free software, it feels crude and un-polished. As a Mac user I’m not at all impressed.
Oct
14
Three More Little Gripes With The iPod Touch
Filed Under Computers & Tech on October 14, 2007 | 7 Comments
At this stage I’ve run the Touch through everything I ever do with iPods and have found three additional annoyances to the ones I described in yesterday’s article. Two can be fixed by simple software updates, one cannot. None of these are show stoppers and don’t affect my over-all conclusion that this is a great iPod and a taste of the future.
- Poor Support for Older iPod Accessories – I recently bought an iPod compatible stereo thingy for the kitchen and the touch only half works with it. It charges and the sound comes out but the remote does not allow you to play/pause or go forward/back a track. Not the end of the world, but a bit annoying. I believe the iPhone suffers from the same problem.
- Long Names Don’t Scroll – On my previous iPod when ever it encounters a name that is too long to be displayed the name scrolls so you get to see all bits of it. This works in the menus and on the now-playing screen. The Touch does not do this and it’s a real PITA for audio books in multiple parts.
- No Sleep Timer – This probably only affects a few people but I normally fall asleep to my iPod so I set a 15 minute sleep timer on it. I can’t do that with the Touch so my old iPod now has a permanent place next to my bed 🙂
Update (26 October 2007): As Jon has pointed out in the comments below, you can get sleep functionality, just not in an immediately obvious way.
[tags]Apple, iPod, iPod Touch[/tags]
Oct
13
iPod Touch – First Impressions
Filed Under Computers & Tech on October 13, 2007 | 14 Comments
For people living in the states the iPod Touch is old news by now, but for those of us this side of the pond we’ve only gotten our hands on them this week. What Americans may also not realise is that we don’t have the iPhone over here yet, so for us, this is not just our first taste of the iPod Touch, but of the whole Apple multi-touch thing. I ordered mine the day after the ‘Steve Note’ that announced it and it just arrived today. I’m a little grumpy that it made it in to shops in Dublin before my pre-ordered one arrived but mine is engraved which it wouldn’t have been had I bought it in a shop. Perhaps the engraving makes up for the two or three day delay. Anyhow, for us here in Ireland this is not old news at all, it’s big news!
This review is going to take and odd form. The majority of it is going to be dedicated to pointing out the short-comings of the iPod Touch. That may inevitably lead people to assume I’m not happy with it, or worse still, that I hate it. I’m going to pre-empt that right now by saying that this device is superb. It rocks. It’s the most revolutionary piece of technology I’ve ever held in my hands. This kind of touch-based interface is the future, and man, what a future it is! Before today I thought I probably wanted an iPhone whenever they finally make it to Ireland, now I KNOW I want an iPhone! I’ll come back to some of the good stuff nearer the end of the review, but first I want to start with the not-so-good stuff.
[tags]iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch, Apple[/tags]
Sep
30
Getting Things Done with iGTD
Filed Under Computers & Tech on September 30, 2007 | 5 Comments
iGTD is a donation-ware program which implements the ‘Getting Things Done’ (GTD) philosophy or methodology or what ever it is. However, I didn’t start experimenting with iGTD because it does the whole GTD thing, I started experimenting with it because I wanted a better way of keeping myself organised than a combination of iCal and Stickies! As it turns out though, I quite like the GTD way of doing things. It makes sense to give each task two classifcations, a project to which it belongs, and the context in which the task has to be done. For example, I put an entry into iGTD to remind me to write this post. It is filed under the project “Blog/NosillaCast” and the context “Home”. It’s this ability to see your tasks by both Context and Project that appeals to me.
[tags]iGTD, GTD, Getting Things Done, Apple, OS X.[/tags]
Sep
21
Teleport – Synergy the Mac Way
Filed Under Computers & Tech on September 21, 2007 | Leave a Comment
A long time ago I discussed an easy way to run Synergy on OS X. This is a good solution if you want to use a single keyboard and mouse to control multiple machines with multiple OSes. However, if all the machines you want to share are Macs there is a better solution, Teleport. Teleport does everything Synergy does and some more besides. To be honest, I’m pretty sure Teleport is just Synergy with some Mac-specific features added in. However, they are good extra features and Teleport had the kind of fantastic user interface Mac users have come to demand. The entire program is contained within a System Preferences preference pane. You just install this pane (by double clicking it) and open up two ports on your firewall and you’re ready to go (you have to do this on all machines that will use Teleport).
The big improvements for me over the Synergy option described in my original post are:
- Simple Drag-and-Drop arrangement of displays
- An actual security model and support for encryption
- The ability to sync clip boards between machines
- The ability to transfer files by dragging them from one machine to another (only works well with small files)
- An overlay is displayed the main display when the mouse and keyboard are ‘teleported’ to another display. This overlay shows the teleporter logo, the name of the computer that the keyboard and mouse have been ‘teleported’ to and an arrow showing where that display is in relation to the master. (This feature alone was enough to convince me to switch.)
Teleport can be easily controlled via a menu bar icon and to really sweeten the deal it’s freeware 🙂
[tags]Teleport, Synergy, OS X[/tags]