I’ve been on holiday the past seven weeks (I know, lucky me!), so the Leopard launch has somewhat passed me by. The reviews seem generally positive, but is it worth forking out the AUD $158 for the upgrade?

Here’s what I think of the major new features in Leopard - bearing in mind I’ve never actually used it :

New Finder: I actually like Finder in Tiger, though I know a lot of folks complain about it. The new Finder features do sound like they’d help me find things quicker. I love the idea of browsing files in Cover Flow mode, though I’d like to see how well it performs in practice. The new sidebar looks like a big improvement, as does the new Spotlight - finally, boolean searches, and, from what I’ve read, it’s a lot faster too. Tempting to upgrade just to get a decent Spotlight frankly.

Quick Look: Decent previews of files without having to open them sounds like a great time-saver, though again I’d like to see how “quick” it is in the reality of a cluttered hard drive like mine. Though Apple naturally shows off this feature with movies and photos for the wow factor, I reckon it’ll be most useful for previewing PDFs for me. Would upgrade for this feature if it turns out to be genuinely useful.

Time Machine: Great to see a decent backup feature finally built-in to a desktop OS, but it’s nothing you couldn’t already do with rdiff-backup if you’re technically minded (though TM is of course much prettier and works on a per-app basis too). I already use rsync to do my own backups and am perfectly happy with that, so I wouldn’t upgrade to get TM.

New Mail: Stationery - meh. I use plaintext email, thank you very much. Notes could be a useful feature, especially if they sync with my Palm notes through Missing Sync, but I feel they’d be better in iCal. I like the ability to access them via IMAP though. To-dos in Mail seem a bit frivolous too, but then again, iCal’s RSI-inducing interface sucks so badly that any other way of entering to-dos would be a blessing. Faster searches and RSS are nice improvements, but again, not sure they’re worth forking out for. (more…)

Front Row can be slow as molasses sometimes, particularly when browsing the Movies folder. Sometimes it locks up for over a minute before it moves from one item to the next - presumably while it attempts to render a preview of the movie.

After nearly dying of boredom while waiting to watch a movie one time, I decided to rummage around on the Apple forums, and found the solution: The Perian codec I had installed (0.5) needed updating. I grabbed the latest 1.0 version, upgraded, and restarted the Mac. Problem solved. (It still takes a few seconds to enter the Movies folder, but not the 1-minute-plus that it previously took.)

So if you’re gnashing your teeth wondering why Front Row is taking ages to browse the Movies folder - check your codecs!

I realise that I’m probably in the minority here, but anyway…

The one thing that piqued my interest when I heard Apple was making a phone was the possibility of syncing my iCal calendar events and To Dos with a nice, sexy, Apple-designed PDA-phone. I currently use Missing Sync to sync with my Tungsten T2 - and while both Missing Sync and the Tungsten work, they’re not the most reliable of beasts. And I’d like to have my PDA and phone in one handy gadget. I’m a big GTD fan, so being able to sync events and To Dos is pretty much essential.

Frankly, you can keep your music playback and Google Maps - all I want is a nice way to manage my events and To Dos on the move.

So I was somewhat taken aback to discover that, not only does the iPhone not sync iCal To Dos, but it doesn’t actually have a To Do feature at all! What the…?!

It gets worse. Although it will sync iCal events, it apparently dumps all events into a single calendar. Much like the bad old days with my Tungsten, before I switched from iSync to Missing Sync. Extremely lame.

Come on, Apple - you made iCal, you made the iPhone. Can you not at least get them talking properly to each other?!

All this is probably moot anyway - I live in Australia, so probably won’t get my hands on an iPhone until 2015…

Screenshots are great when you need to illustrate an article, troubleshoot an app, or even just show off your cool  desktop. To take screenshots of your Mac screen, you can fire up the Grab utility (in Applications/Utilities), which does a pretty good job. Or you can use built-in keyboard shortcuts to take instant screenshots at any time:

• To take a screenshot of the whole screen, press Command-Shift-3.
• To capture a selected area of the screen, press Command-Shift-4. The mouse pointer changes to a crosshair. Now drag out a selection rectangle over the area you want to capture, and release the mouse button. (If you decide you don’t want to capture anything after all, hit Esc.)
• To grab a specific window, the menu bar, a menu, or the Dock, press Command-Shift-4 then hit the Space bar. The mouse pointer changes to a spiffy looking camera. Move the mouse over the item to highlight it, then click the mouse button to grab it. (Again, you can press Esc if you want to back out.) You can even capture a pop-up menu like this: right-click (or Control+click) to bring up a pop-up menu, then follow the above steps to highlight the menu and click.

By default, the Mac saves your screenshots as .png files on your desktop (as opposed to Grab’s TIFF files). If you’d rather save the screenshots straight to the Clipboard, ready for pasting into Photoshop or a similar app, hold down Control at the same time. This saves cluttering your desktop with temporary screenshot files.

Unfortunately, neither Grab nor the built-in keyboard shortcuts can capture your mouse pointer as well. (Well, Grab sorta can, but you have to choose from a limited range of pointers in its Preferences; you can’t grab the actual active pointer.) If you need to do this, check out third-party utilities like Snapz Pro, which offers mouse pointer grabbing, and all sorts of other goodies besides.

Finder’s Column View is a bit of a black sheep amongst many Mac users, who tend to eschew it in favour of the more traditional icon and list views. However, Column View has its uses. It lets you see exactly where you are in your folder hierarchy, and it’s great for quickly drilling down through a deep folder structure, as you only need to single-click a folder to open it. You can also use it to quickly preview items such as movies and images.

Here I’ll share a few tips for making Column View a more pleasant experience.

Smart column resizing

One annoying quirk of Column View is the way that long file and folder names get rudely cut off.

You probably know that you can drag a column’s resize handle - that little double bar at the bottom of the column’s vertical divider - to the right to expand a column and view your full file and folder names. But did you know you can double-click the handle to automatically “maximize” the column to fit the width of your longest file or folder name?

Changing default column widths

Talking of resizing columns, you can stretch or shrink all the columns in the Finder window at once by Option-dragging the resize handle of one of the columns.

Even better, Finder remembers this width when opening new Finder windows; Option-drag your columns nice and wide, and they’ll stay that way for evermore.

The same is true with the file selector dialog used when opening or saving files in applications; in this case, Mac OS remembers the column widths on an application-by-application basis. For example, open a file in Firefox with File > Open, and Option-drag a column handle in the file selector to change the width of the columns. The next time you open or save a file in Firefox, the file selector retains your chosen column width.

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You probably know that dragging a file to the Trash icon doesn’t actually delete the file; to do that, you need to empty the trash by:

• right-clicking the Trash icon and choosing Empty Trash
• choosing Finder > Empty Trash, or
• pressing Shift+Command+Delete while in the Finder.

However, you may not know that emptying your trash doesn’t delete the file either! Like most operating systems, Mac OS merely deletes the pointers to the file’s data on your hard drive; the data remains, and is recoverable if you know what you’re doing (for example, if you’re a hacker looking for credit card numbers!).

Really emptying the trash

Luckily, Mac OS provides a way to not only delete the pointers to the files in the trash, but also to overwrite the files themselves with garbage data. To do this, switch to the Finder and choose Secure Empty Trash from the Finder menu. It may take a while to overwrite all the data. Once done, your deleted files really are history.

Apple has a help page about deleting files and using Secure Empty Trash.

Wiping the whole disk

If you’re selling your Mac and you’re extra paranoid, you may want to wipe all the data on your disk beforehand. You can do this using Disk Utility’s secure erase options. More information in this Apple document. The truly hardcore will want to choose the 35-Pass Erase option, which takes forever, but makes the data nearly impossible to recover using current technologies.

Enjoy your privacy!

In my continuing quest to find a way to instantly, reliably turn off the iMac screen and keep it off, I just stumbled across this little gem: Sleep Display. It’s a little utility - in application or widget form - that lets you sleep your Mac screen instantly. None of that “make it sleep in 1 minute” hassle - just open the app, and your screen instantly sleeps. Wonderful - and about bleeding time. (Having said that, I like to lock my display first, so I’ll still probably use the “1 minute” trick - but I’m sure this app will be incredibly useful to some folks.)

Now we just need a way to keep the damn display off. I’ve abandoned the idea of running my DVD backups overnight in the bedroom - spinning up the DVD “conveniently” wakes the display - so I now have to run these during the day. Ah well.

Haven’t moved the iMac into the bedroom yet - that’ll happen in the next month once little Isaac outgrows his bassinet - so I’m not sure what else might cause the display to spontaneously wake in the middle of the night. With a bit of luck it was just the DVD. Time will tell.

Obviously, Apple has a long-standing love affair with the mouse. Fair enough, they’re damn useful things. However, some people prefer to use the keyboard wherever possible. For example:

• My wife prefers keyboard shortcuts, because she has a bad wrist and using a mouse for more than a couple of minutes is agony.
• I prefer keybaord shortcuts, because I find the mouse is slow and imprecise for performing repetitive actions, and my time is important to me. Also, if I perform those actions a lot, it hurts my wrist too.

Macs have always had a bit of a reputation for being poor when it comes to keyboard shortcuts, but one of the things that sold me on the Mac last year was that Apple are supposed to have improved shortcuts considerably in the last few years. Well if the iMac I have in front of me represents an improvement in keyboard support, I shudder to think what old Macs must have been like.

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As Mac users (and friends of Mac users) will know, Mac OS loves splattering hidden metadata files and folders throughout your directory structure. For example, open up a terminal and do an ‘ls -a’ of one of your directories, and you’ll probably see a .DS_Store file in there.

This is all very well when browsing the folder on your Mac, because Mac OS X sensibly hides these from view in the Finder. However try tarring or zipping that folder, sending it across to a Windows machine, then unzipping/untarring the archive file in Windows. You’ll see the .DS_Store file sitting there in Windows Explorer, in plain view. Even worse, if you zip a folder using Mac OS X’s “Create Archive” option, it creates another Mac-specific __MACOSX folder in there too, further cluttering up the archive for non-Mac users.

Naturally, Windows and Linux have no use for such files and folders; all they do is confuse matters for the poor users. This can be a bit of a problem when distributing zip files to hundreds of people, like we do on PageKits.com. Of course, it’s easy enough to write a shell script to recursively scan a folder and remove all these Mac-specific files and folders prior to archiving, but it’s still a bit of a pain.

So I was pretty chuffed to discover CleanArchiver the other day. It’s a nifty little archiving utility that removes those pesky Mac-specific items as it archives. All you have to do is drag your folder to the CleanArchiver icon in the dock, and it does the rest. It can create gzip, bzip2, zip and dmg files, and you can tell it which Mac-specific things to remove and which to leave in. Perfect for zipping up folders to send to your non-Mac-using buddies.

Why is there no way to turn off the screen on an iMac? I mean, properly turn it off?

It’s not something I thought about when I was thinking about buying an iMac - I just assumed it would have such a basic feature. For something that’s generally well designed and usable, this omission sticks out like a sore thumb.

I’m sure lots of people have their own reasons for turning off their computer screens. Here’s mine.

I run 3 types of nightly backups on my Mac (I’m paranoid). One does a rotating backup to DVD. One does an rsync backup to my wife’s iMac. And one does an rsync backup of our server in the UK (in case it ever goes tits-up).

And in a few months’ time, my iMac will be in the bedroom (I’m being turfed out of the office so we can turn it into a nursery for our upcoming wee nipper). So you can see why having the screen off might be a good idea. IN THE BEDROOM.

Here are the solutions I’ve heard from various people:

• Just put the iMac to sleep. Er, then how are the backups supposed to work?
• Turn the brightness all the way down. You’d think that’d work, wouldn’t you? But oh no - unlike Mac laptops, where zero brightness really does turn off the backlight, an iMac’s idea of “zero brightness” is “ever-so-slightly darker than maximum brightness”. Useless.
• Set the display to sleep in 1 minute. There are even scripts available to do this for you (and reset the sleep time back to normal afterwards).

Setting the display to sleep is not a bad approach, apart from two fundamental problems. Firstly, I don’t want the screen to turn off in 1 minute - I want it to turn off now.

Secondly - and more seriously - it’s not reliable. What I mean is, the screen spontaneously and randomly turns itself on. This seems to happen when certain specific activities occur during the backup process - spinning up the DVD seems to do it, as does network activity. (I’m still trying to pin down exactly what triggers set it off.)

As you might imagine, having a gorgeously brilliant white screen is wonderful when you’re working on it during the day. It’s not so nice when it turns itself on at 3AM in your bedroom.

So that’s the current situation. Apart from cracking open the iMac and installing a manual switch for the backlight, the best I can hope for it probably to put a towel over the thing at night. Ridiculous for such an otherwise well-designed machine. If you’re thinking about buying an iMac, and you want it doing stuff with the screen off overnight, I suggest you heed this warning. Memo to Apple: Fix this. Now.

If anyone has a decent solution, please tell me. I would absolutely love to hear it.

UPDATE May 2: Found a way to sleep the display instantly.