I recently reviewed DeskLickr, a nifty, free menu bar app that regularly feeds your Mac desktop with lovely Flickr images. It’s nice enough, but it does have a few drawbacks, as I mentioned in the review.

There’s an alternative to DeskLickr, though, and it’s also free: Desktoptopia. It does a similar job to DeskLickr, downloading new desktop images every few minutes. It installs itself as a preference pane rather than DeskLickr’s approach of a stand-alone app. Personally I like the preference pane idea more. As with DeskLickr, you can set how often it grabs a new image, and also pause the current desktop image or manually fetch a new image.

What makes Desktoptopia great

Desktoptopia’s key difference is in how the desktop images are sourced. Whereas DeskLickr draws its images from public Flickr photostreams, Desktoptopia’s images come from a hand-picked selection on the Desktoptopia website. Users can upload new images, but only the best make it past the selection process. This gets round DeskLickr’s problem of displaying low-quality images, or images that just don’t work well as wallpaper. The quality of the Desktoptopia images is very good indeed, and they nearly all make fantastic desktop backgrounds.

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The next version of the OS X operating system - 10.6 “Snow Leopard” - was quietly announced at WWDC08 at the start of this week. Unlike previous versions, 10.6 will not focus on new features (though doubtless there’ll be a few here and there). Instead, Apple have decided to concentrate on making the OS leaner, meaner and all-round nicer. (Maybe this is how they came up with the name: It’s a slicker Leopard, but they’ve frozen the features. Feature freeze? Snow? Never mind…)

They’ll do this by:

• Making it easier for developers to code apps for multi-core processors, using a technology called “Grand Central”
• Introducing Open Computing Language (OpenCL), which lets applications use the Mac’s GPU (graphics processing unit) almost as an additional CPU
• Increasing the RAM limit to 16 terabytes (16,000 GB) - a limit not likely to be reached anytime soon
• Including QuickTime X, which will run all your latest codecs much more smoothly (so they say)
• Making Safari run JavaScript “up to 53 percent faster” apparently - which will be good for all those AJAX-driven websites
• Reducing the OS’s footprint (i.e. the hard drive space it takes up). This has caused a bit of controversy as many think this means dropping support for PowerPC Macs, but this remains to be seen. Maybe they’ll ship 2 versions: one for Intel, one for PowerPC?

One new feature they are announcing now is full support for Microsoft Exchange using the Exchange Web Services protocol. This will let Mail, Address Book and iCal play nicely with Exchange servers. (more…)

The latest major version of the Firefox web browser - 3.0 - is due out any day now. I thought I’d download 3.0 Release Candidate 2 - which is near as dammit to the final release - and take it for a spin.

I must say, I assumed Firefox 3 was going to be much like Firefox 2, with a few tweaks here and there. Nothing could be further from the truth. With version 3, Firefox has had a major overhaul, both on the inside and on the outside. Let’s take a look.

First impressions

As you can see from the above screenshot, Firefox 3 looks much more like a proper Mac application than Firefox 2 did. It has the Leopard grey gradient toolbar, and the shaded tabs look lovely. (Speaking of tabs, I love the way the tab bar scrolls smoothly left and right if you have a lot of tabs open. Very slick.)

It behaves more like a Mac app, too. It uses Growl to notify you of completed downloads and updates, and it also uses standard Apple keyboard shortcuts such as Cmd-Shift-[ and Cmd-Shift-] to move between tabs. (Personally I preferred version 2’s less finger-twisting Ctrl-Page Up and Ctrl-Page Down, which thankfully are still available.) (more…)

This is a lovely idea. DeskLickr is a free menu bar app that regularly updates your desktop with photos from Flickr. If you’re bored with the same old wallpaper images, it’s a great way to revitalize your Mac desktop.

Feature-wise, the author’s thought of pretty much everything. You can, of course, say how often you want the image to change, and you can also choose New desktop thanks from the menu bar if you don’t like the current image. A grey floating window shows you info on the current desktop image; if this annoys you (it did annoy me) you can choose to have it hideable under other app windows, or stick it right on the desktop. You can also turn it off altogether using the Show info on this desktop menu option.

It even supports multiple displays (you can choose between having the same image on all displays or a different image on each), and you can make it choose a random image each time, or get the latest published image.

Problems, problems

The main problem with this app is that many photos, while they look great on the Flickr site, don’t make great desktops. Reasons for this include:

• They’re just too low-res
• The aspect ratio doesn’t match your screen (especially true of portrait photos of course)
• They’re too “busy” and get in the way of your desktop icons

DeskLickr gives you a couple of ways to mitigate these problems. (more…)

Everyone loves a nice screen saver - they give you something to stare at when you’re bored, and an eye-popping screen saver is a great way to impress your friends and colleagues when they amble past your Mac!

Here, in no particular order, are 10 free Mac screen savers that I love. Installation hints are at the end, if you need them.

Hyperspace

One of my favourite screen savers, written by the very talented Terry Welsh over at Really Slick Screensavers. Take a trip down a wormhole with this psychedelic extravaganza, reminiscent of many a game and sci-fi movie. This one’s pretty CPU-hungry, so if it’s a bit jerky try reducing the Resolution of geometry setting.

Strands

A lovely screen saver from Martin Thorne. Beautiful, ever-changing strands of light move across the screen. Strangely hypnotic in a darkened room!

Filigree

Another saver from Martin Thorne, in a similar vein to Strands. This one features glowing snakes of light darting around the screen. (more…)

My recent comparison of Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion attracted a lot of comments, many of which pointed out a third, free virtualization app for the Mac: VirtualBox. I confess that I’ve been blissfully unaware of VirtualBox, despite it being around for a couple of years. To be fair, the Mac version only came out of beta at the start of this month - at least, that’s my excuse! - and this is the version I’ll review here.

VirtualBox actually comes in two flavours: an open-source GPL edition, and a proprietary “VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL)” edition. The latter is free as in beer, provided of course it’s just for personal use or evaluation purposes. It also has more features than the GPL edition at the time of writing, including USB support and an RDP server for remote access (here’s a full list of the differences). For the purposes of this review I tested the PUEL edition.

VirtualBox supports a wide range of guest operating systems, including most flavours of Windows, many Linux distros, FreeBSD, DOS and even NetWare. VirtualBox includes tools for both Windows and Linux guests. These are called Guest Additions, and work in much the same way as Parallels Tools and VMware Tools - you get smooth graphics and mouse performance, as well as the ability to resize the guest desktop simply by resizing the VM window.

Creating a new VM. VirtualBox supports an impressive range of guest systems.

I gave VirtualBox a spin with both Windows 2000 and Ubuntu 7.10 guests. Installation of both operating systems was flawless. However, the Ubuntu installation process was noticeably slower than with VMware, taking well over an hour to install from the live CD. (more…)

One of the great things about Intel Macs is that you can run Windows on them. Why would you want to run Windows on a Mac? Well, there are many applications - including most games - that are only available for Windows. By running Windows on your Mac as well as Mac OS X, you get the best of both worlds - the loveliness of MAC OS X, and the compatibility of Windows.

There are two applications that you can use to run Windows simultaneously with Mac OS X: Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. How do they compare?

I’ve been using Parallels Desktop since I bought my Mac back in 2006 (in fact I bought Parallels before the Mac!). It does the job well enough, but recently the nice folks at VMware gave me a review copy of VMware Fusion. So I thought I’d give Fusion a quick spin and see how it compares. The versions I’m reviewing here are Parallels Desktop 3.0 (Build 5582) and VMware Fusion 1.1.2 (87978).

Migrating virtual machines to VMware

I didn’t want to muck about installing a fresh copy of Windows, or deal with Windows XP reactivation grief, so I used the VMware Importer to migrate a Windows 2000 Parallels virtual machine across to VMware Fusion. The Importer was a bit ropey - it spent 15 minutes converting the drive before informing me that the VM was suspended, so it couldn’t finish the import - but to be fair, it’s still in beta.

Once I’d successfully converted my Parallels VM to a Fusion VM, I fired up Fusion. I have to say, I’m not a big fan of the Parallels user interface; it always seems odd how it opens new instances of itself for new VMs, and some of the dialogs seem like they were written by someone with English as their second language. I’m pleased to say that Fusion’s UI is a breath of fresh air in comparison, and behaves more like I’d expect a Mac app to behave. (more…)

If you’re a Web coder, Safari 3 offers some really nice debugging features - if you know where to look for them. First, you need to turn on Safari’s Develop menu (hidden by default). To do this, choose Safari > Preferences, then in the Advanced tab check the Show Develop menu in menu bar option. You’ll see the new menu appear to the right of the Bookmarks menu in the menu bar.

The first option, Open Page With, lets you open the current page in any other installed browser - handy for cross-browser testing. The second, User Agent, tells Safari to masquerade as another browser when viewing websites. Safari still renders pages as Safari, but sends another user agent string to the Web server. This can be useful if you’re testing browser detection code, for example.

Call in the Inspector

The fun really starts with the next option, Show Web Inspector. The Web Inspector window is reminiscent of the Firebug Firefox add-on, and shows you the syntax-highlighted markup (or, by clicking the button in the toolbar, the DOM tree) of the current page, the contents of any linked style sheets, the images used in the page (with info), the source code of any JavaScript in the page, and info on any other page elements it finds.

Click the Console option at the bottom left of the window, and you can see JavaScript errors and other messages; click on an error to jump straight to the JavaScript line that caused it (nice). You can also type your own JavaScript commands into the single-line box at the bottom of the console window and see the results appear above - great for finding out the current state of variables and so on. (more…)

I’ve ranted at great length about the usability nightmare that is iCal - and the fact that Leopard’s iCal is, if anything, worse than Tiger’s. One saving grace of Leopard, though, is that Apple have opened up the iCal framework, allowing other apps to create and edit events and To Dos. And sure enough, such apps are starting to emerge. Here’s a quick look at a couple of free To Do applications for Leopard.

FlexTD

One new app I’m currently playing with is FlexTD. This app’s sole objective is to make it quick and easy to enter new To Dos. It installs itself as a preference pane; all you have to do is assign a keyboard shortcut to it. Then, whenever you want to add a new To Do, you press the keyboard shortcut (from within any app) and start typing. It’s fully keyboard accessible, so you can set the calendar, priority and due date easily via the keyboard.

It’s nicely done, but it’s a shame you can’t edit the Note field as you’re creating a To Do, which makes project entry a la GTD a pain.

Anxiety

Another free To Do app is Anxiety. Unlike FlexTD, which only lets you add To Dos, this one also lets you view and edit your To Dos. Well, sort of. You can scroll through your current list of To Dos by calendar and mark To Dos as done, but you can’t edit a To Do’s title or other info; to do that you have to double-click (Arrgh! No keyboard shortcut) a To Do to open it in the dreaded iCal. Also, like FlexTD, you can’t view or edit a To Do’s Note field without switching to iCal. (more…)

Well this review of Mac OS X Leopard could fill a book, so I’m going to wrap things up now. I’ll briefly talk about other new features of note, and attempt to reach some sort of conclusion about the latest Mac OS.

iChat

Apple have added tons of snazzy new features to iChat AV. Major ones include Photo Booth-style effects, the ability to have a picture or movie backdrop, screen sharing, audio/video chat recording, tabbed chats, and iChat Theater - a feature that lets you show movies, Keynote presentations and other media to your chat buddy while you’re talking to them. I haven’t had a chance to use most of these new features yet, but the backdrop effect is quite fun - though the backdrop tends to leak through quite a bit. One simple but nice improvement is that the Buddy List window now allows buddy groups, making it much easier to organize your list of buddies.

Safari

I was already using Safari 3 on Tiger, so there’s not much new here. The only difference appears to be the Open in Dashboard button/menu option that lets you capture part of the current page and save it as a Web Clip Dashboard widget. This is a very handy feature in certain situations - for example, I use it to display the current Sydney weather radar on my Dashboard for quick access, as shown on the right. (Looks like a storm brewin’ in the Pacific!)

However, the widget doesn’t work so well with things like AdSense report pages that require a login. When your login times out, the widget can’t cope with the changed page and freaks out. (more…)