I upgraded to Leopard this past Saturday. Generally a good thing — I love Quick Look and use it far more than I ever thought I would, and I’m a big fan of Spaces as well (Linux window managers have had the same functionality for years, and I’ve missed it terribly — but no longer!). And if my WD Passport external hard drive weren’t acting up, I’d probably be in love with Time Machine, too.

The main downside for me right now is that Blender is now really sluggish, and it blurs the screen at times. I’m not sure what’s up with that — other people seem to be reporting that it runs on fine on Leopard.

Yesterday I pulled open my development site (hosted locally) to work on Blank Slate, but got a forbidden error message. It was rather worrisome (and my Internet connection was acting up at the time), but then I found Working with PHP 5 in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and it solved that problem. Phew. :)

In other news, I finally bought a TextMate license yesterday. Now I just need to immerse myself in the keystroke documentation until I’m as fast as I was in Vim…

Technorati Tags: Apple, Leopard, PHP, TextMate, Vim

This morning I read about Synergy in Mordy Golding’s blog. It’s open source software that lets you move your mouse between computers, without having to use any kind of switch. All you do is plug in the hostnames and voila!

I installed it on my Mac and PC here at work, and it’s working very well. I didn’t expect it to be this easy. :) And I can even copy and paste between the two, which is quite nice.

The only slight disadvantage is that I’ve now kind of lost two of my hot corners on my Mac (but I can still get to them if I move the mouse slowly; I just can’t fling my mouse in the corner anymore, eliminating the usefulness). The mouse movement also feels kind of slow on my PC, but it may just be my innate expectation for it to be thus. :) And if I’m in screensaver mode on my Mac, I can move the mouse on the PC but if I click and hold, the mouse moves on the Mac instead. But that’s not really a big deal — I can’t think of any situations where I’d need to have the screensaver up on my Mac and work on my PC at the same time.

For the moment, anyway, the benefit of not having to have a second keyboard and mouse on my desk far outweighs any disadvantages.

Technorati Tags: Synergy

Discovered Visor a few minutes ago. It’s a cool app which lets you assign a keyboard shortcut to pull down a terminal from the top of your screen. I set my shortcut to Ctrl-\, since Ctrl-F1 (the default) is an awkward combination to type. Note that to install it, you’ll need to install SIMBL first. But it’s not hard. This is really cool. It’s from the same people who wrote Quicksilver. (Speaking of which, I still haven’t started using Quicksilver, but I need to…)

Technorati Tags: Visor, Quicksilver, Mac

This morning I got a link in my e-mail activating my test Google Spreadsheets account, so I’ve been playing around with it. It’s pretty cool, and I even think it’ll work out fairly well for managing my (meager) finances.

The collaboration, with inline chatting, seems cool. I had it open on my Windows box, then forgot about that and opened it in Camino on my Mac. And suddenly, to my surprise, there was a chat sidebar on the right. Easy and unobtrusive. (And yes, I did chat with myself, but only a little bit, I promise. :)) The chats aren’t logged in the Gmail chat archives yet, though. When I closed Camino, the chat sidebar on my Windows box didn’t change (it said I was still there), but I’m sure that’s just a small bug they’ll fix soon.

All the basic functionality seemed to be there (at least everything I need). Simplicity is bliss. Good call, Google.

For some reason it was quite slow in Firefox on my Mac, but in Firefox on my Windows box it didn’t feel slow at all. It was kind of slow in Camino, too, but it’s Gecko-based — go figure. It doesn’t support Safari yet.

So, hopefully it’ll get faster on the Mac. But even as it is, it’s sweet. I love Web 2.0. :)

Technorati Tags: Google, Excel, spreadsheets, Camino, Gmail, Firefox, Gecko, Web 2.0

This morning I read How to Backup Your Mac Intelligently, and I realized that I’m a sitting duck right now. But not for much longer. There was a link to Jungle Disk in the comments (#16), and I realized that Amazon S3 is a really good and extremely cheap way for me to store my data. 15 cents a gigabyte per month is hard to beat. :) With six or seven gigs of pictures and 12 or so gigs of music, plus another gig or two of data, that’s only 21 gigs at 15 cents a month = $3.15 a month. Whoa. That’s cheap. I want to cry for joy. :)

So I’ve installed Jungle Disk and started copying stuff over. It’s working pretty well so far. The only thing I’m wondering about is the buckets — do you have to change the configuration every time you want to switch buckets? Because that’s annoying. I do like Jungle Disk’s integration with the OS X Finder, though. Now to see if I can find a web app that lets me get to my data from any computer, without having to install something like Jungle Disk…

Speaking of backups, I really ought to move my website development files into Subversion. (It would be so nice if Bluehost offered it…)

Technorati Tags: S3, Jungle Disk, Subversion, Bluehost

iCryptex is a funny little satire on both the Da Vinci Code and Apple. I’ve already blogged about what I think of the Da Vinci Code, incidentally. And no, I don’t really care to watch the movie. (I’ve got to read through all those design patterns — no time for movies!)

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, Da Vinci Code, iCryptex

I think my iPod’s dying. In dog years it’s practically a centenarian (I bought it a year and a half ago), so it’s not too surprising. But it is sad. I wonder how much it’d cost to get it fixed… It’ll probably have to wait until later in the summer when I fix my PowerBook. (Though I’m thinking about possibly getting a MacBook or MacBook Pro instead — we’ll see.)

Technorati Tags: iPod, PowerBook, MacBook

The MacBook has been released. Mmm. Looks like the iBook/PowerBook era has ended. ~wipes away a tear~ ;) You know, if it’s going to cost more than $300 or $400 to fix my PowerBook, I may end up just going for one of these babies instead. The only caveat is that I use Adobe Creative Suite 2 extensively (Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign), and I’ve heard that CS2 via Rosetta is noticeably slower. But perhaps it’s still usable. Hmm…

Anyway, I’d noticed the multi-point touchpad bit in the specs for the new MacBook, but it hadn’t quite hit me what that could mean. Greg has:

Multi-point interactions:

• Rotation - rotate objects on screen with the turn of your wrist. Rotate both fingers in a circle.
• Scale/Zoom - move your fingers out from the center or back in to the center.
• Crop a photo - mark the top left and the bottom right corners with both fingers
• Virtual Scratchpad in a music player - spin the record up and down with multiple fingers
• Resize or move an application window with both fingers
• Continuous scrolling - Let your fingers do the walking

I’d seen Jeff Han’s Multi-Touch Interaction Research video several months ago, but I completely forgot about it until now. This is really, really, really cool. I love Apple. :)

Technorati Tags: Mac, MacBook, multi-point

I’ve switched to TextMate for my work development (which is mostly HTML, CSS, and XSLT at the moment, plus Ruby and Python for Beyond). And I’m liking it. Granted, I haven’t read the manual yet and so my fingers are really missing vi keystrokes, but I’m going to learn the TextMate keystrokes. Before long I’ll be setting the keyboard on fire. :) Anyway, the project management stuff is really cool, as are bundles and column editing and I’m sure everything else I haven’t discovered yet. But soon, soon… As far as TextMate’s minimalism goes (interface-wise), that’s fine by me. Vi is minimalist, too, and that’s what I’ve used for years. Make no mistake — I still love vi — but since it’s not a Mac-native app, I sometimes run into issues (with Unicode, for example). TextMate seems easier in that respect, less a pain. We’ll see how it goes, and if it continues to be a good experience, then when the 30 day trial runs out I’ll be buying a license.

Technorati Tags: TextMate, Ruby, Python

I was looking at Mike Clark’s TextMate Cheat Sheet for Rails Hackers a minute ago and saw the Command key sign (⌘, if your font has it). It was the first time I realized that the symbol had to be in a font somewhere (yes, I know, I’m slow :)). And Lucida Grande was the natural font for it to be in. So I went to Finder->Edit->Special Characters and pulled up the Character Palette.

It was different! I’d been using Panther on my Powerbook, so when it came up and had all the Unicode stuff sorted by category, I got goosebumps and started drooling uncontrollably. Then I saw the “By Radical” tab. If only I knew Chinese… But it gets better — they’ve added a Font Variation area at the bottom which shows you the selected character in all the fonts in which it appears. That’s cool. It means I can select a Thai character and instantly see which of my fonts support Thai. I love Macs! :)

Technorati Tags: TextMate, Lucida Grande, OS X, Tiger, Thai