We knew it was coming, and now that it’s finally here, woo! The 10.5.6 update should be dubbed ‘The MobileMe update’. It brings in a whole lot of bug fixes most of which are specific to MobileMe syncing. Of course, we all knew about that as well didn’t we?

Should you update? If you have mission critical data, I’d suggest you keep away from the update until things are settled down. We at SA will gladly put our systems at risk for the sake of our readers. Those of who you have updated, please let us know how it goes. 

There’s a whole list of changes in the Support Article, but here are some of the salient features of this update.

• Contacts, calendars, and bookmarks on a Mac automatically sync within a minute of the change being made on the computer, another device, or the web at me.com.
• Improves reliability of Address Book syncing with iPhone and other devices and applications.
• Improves the performance and reliability of Chess. Yeah, I know!
• Mail: Addresses an issue that could prevent Mail from quitting. Finally!

So fire up Software Update (190MB in my case) or download the standalone update.

Everyone has a love/hate relationship with Spaces. Most of the time it works flawlessly, but there are times when it makes you rip your mac apart (okay, never do that!). Now I don’t proclaim to bring you respite from all of the Spaces-woes, but here’s something that will make it a little better to work with. To understand the core functionality of Spaces, visit Apple’s Spaces page.

Make the Finder appear in all Spaces

While you can add applications to all Spaces, the Finder is nowhere to be found in the Applications folder. So you generally assign it to appear in Space 1, and then move the windows around later on. However, the Finder.app resides in your Macintosh HD » System » Library » CoreServices folder. Just drag the Finder app to your Spaces preferences window, and then assign it to appear in ‘All Spaces’.

Exploiting the Spaces view

We all know that the Spaces view can be invoked by pressing the F8 key, or any other hotkey set in your preferences. However, once in the Spaces view, if you press F9 (or your Exposé All-Windows key), all your windows in all Spaces will fly out. You can then drag and drop those windows among spaces as you will.

And to build upon this tip, if you press C while in Spaces view, all your windows will gather up in Space 1! Next, if you Cmd+drag any application window from one space to another, it will move all the windows from the current Space to the new Space. 

Change the delay for dragging windows between spaces.

This will change the delay time to switch a space after you drag a window to the edge of a screen (you can do that by the way). The default is set to .75 seconds. Luckily, changing it involves a simple terminal command. 

“defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-edge-delay -float 0.5”

The last number (in this case 0.5) is the amount of delay in seconds. To revert the change, enter 0.75 as the value. After hitting return, restart the Dock by entering into the terminal:

“killall Dock”

There are of course a bunch of extenders for Spaces, all of which will be featured in a tasty article right here on SA, but for now we hope these little tips will help you organise your Spaces better.

For most people, the Finder is everything a file manager could be. With Leopard, the Finder received a much needed facelift, along with the addition of some nifty features like Cover Flow, Quick Look, enhanced networking, and a bunch of changes here and there. But it didn’t address a lot of the concerns that the so called “power users” had with the it. In other words, the changes were mostly just skin deep.

Those who have wanted added functionality have had to turn to Path Finder. Recently out with its fifth version, CocoaTech’s Path Finder is everything anyone could ever ask for from a file manager, if that is what you’re looking for. It is a feature overloaded piece of software that leaves no stone unturned in giving you absolutely every single option you could be looking for. I have never used Path Finder before, so I shall explore this in detail rather than just going through what has changed. Will this new application stay in my Dock or am I happy and content with Leopard’s default Finder? Read on for a lengthy review, loaded with screenshots, to get a glimpse of what Path Finder is like. Continue Reading »

With Leopard, Apple has finally made Font Book a good enough default font manager for the Mac. Everything from auto activation to error correction and managing your fonts in different collections is available in Font Book. Here’s a brief run down on what Font Book can do for you. [Ed note: In case you haven’t even noticed its existence yet, it’s right there in your Applications folder. Duh.]

Organising your Fonts
We all have those times when we freak out on fonts. [Ed note: OK, maybe not *all*, but I’m sure at least some of you have experienced *font mania* every once in a while.] Hitting site after site, we amass a huge number of fonts over time. And when it comes time to search for one particular font in that huge collection, we rue our poor font management skills.

But if you use a Mac, you’re lucky, because OS X can handle a lot of fonts with ease. And with Font Book, the basics of font organisation are taken care of for you. Font Book automatically makes fixed width and web-friendly categories, and if you install Microsoft Office for Mac, a separate category is made for that as well. However, you do need to go a little further then this to achieve true font management nirvana. 

The first thing you need to do is create a bunch of categories that bring meaning to your fonts. Let’s start with a Fancy category. You could use the default Fun category for this as well. Grab all those swirly, non-conventional fonts and dump them in that category. You can then safely turn it off to save you a whole lot of resources. Remember, every time you select the Type tool in Photoshop, it renders previews of all available fonts. And the more fonts you have, the slower it will get.

Next, you need a Foreign language category. Chinese, Arabic, and any other non-English fonts you have can be added to this one. And then turn the whole thing off. If you do need to turn on one of those fonts, you can do so without having to turn on the entire category. If you come across an Arabic website, it will show you ‘???’ instead of the Arabic type. Of course, leave those fonts on if you can read Arabic in the first place. You will be surprised by how many foreign language fonts reside in your library. I found 56 typefaces myself, and I’m the sort who never even manages to find his own socks. 

Use your imagination with creating categories. In addition to the default ones, I’ve created categories for my favourite Sans Serif and Serif fonts, a category for Ornamental type and another one for Cursive type. This allows me to quickly choose fonts in any Cocoa application by bringing up the Fonts panel (Command+T). Unfortunately, the Fonts panel will not show up in Photoshop due to its Carbon code.

Remember, though, that turning fonts off is much better than deleting them entirely. Fonts hardly use up any disk space and turning them off is as good as their not existing in your fonts panel at all. Deleting fonts will, in all probability, come back to haunt you in your typographic dreams (and no, I do not have dreams about typography—oh, who am I kidding, I’m a nerd). 

Don’t scamper away just yet, there’s more after the jump… Continue Reading »

Widescreen monitors have taken the market by storm in the last couple of years. Apple’s entire lineup is widescreen and almost every monitor being sold these days is a widescreen one. So why is Apple Mail still designed to work better with monitors sporting a standard aspect ratio?

Thankfully, the WideMail plugin, developed by Dane Harnett, solves that problem, and brilliantly at that. WideMail not only moves your message viewer to the side but introduces another interface element that formats your message headers in a special “WideMail” column. What you are left with is a clean three column layout that makes full use of your widescreen monitor. 

WideMail also comes with a separate preference pane so that you can customise the whole look to your liking. In the General preferences, you can adjust the spacing between the message cells, have them use alternate colours, and add grids lines to them. You can also quickly move your message viewer back to the bottom, its original place, if you feel like. 

The formatting pane allows you to customise the way the WideMail Column is shown. You can remove elements like date and subject, and even adjust the spacing using one of the many little devices in the cloud. And just so you know, the default settings for all this is configured just right so you don’t even have to customise anything. This guy is certainly taking tips from Apple!

Remember, though, that once you install the plugin, you need to enable the WideMail Column and disable the other columns. To do that, you’ll have to right click on the column bar (immediately above your messages) and deselect the columns like Subject, Date, and Sender, and enable the “WideMail Column”. 

What’s more? You could combine this view with the threaded conversations tip I mentioned earlier to make your entire inbox a sleek and organised place for all your conversations.

The plugin, at version 0.5.1, is a free download and requires Leopard for (who uses Tiger anyway?). If you do use it on a regular basis, consider donating something as your token of appreciation and to support the continued development of the project.

Apple has released Java Update 2 for OS X 10.4 or later. The 134 MB update provides improvements to security, performance, and compatibility for Java SE 6, J2SE 5.0, and J2SE 1.4.2. You go through the extensive release notes to learn more about it. Fire up Software Update or grab it from the Apple Support website.

Hold it! Don’t move! Now, slowly move your cursor towards the top left corner of the screen, click the Apple icon, and hit “Software Update”. 

10.5.5 has hit the streets, and you better get that system all primed up with the new code. Apple has been very generous with the details of this update, laying everything on the table with this Support Page. Weighing in at 139MB (your mileage may vary), the update is currently only available via the built in Software Update tool. The standalone download should make its way into the Apple Downloads page soon. 

That’s it for my jabbering, I will stop now. The complete list of details after the jump.

Continue Reading »

Looks like we’re not done with the whole Psystar hackint0sh business. Here’s some very brief history to jog your memory:

Back in April, a very ambitious little company, Psystar, promised a cheap headless Mac tower called OpenMac, quickly followed by a more powerful Mac Pro competitor, OpenPro. Apple didn’t respond and Psystar was shipping these cheap PCs with Leopard preloaded on them. Then in July, Apple got their act together and filed a lawsuit against Psystar and the whole thing then went into motion. Psystar, however, continued to ship the Mac clones and provide updates to its customers (yes, they exist—I was as surprised as you are), including the 10.5.4 update to Mac OS X. 

Now, in a surprising turn of events, Psystar has filed a countersuit against Apple, claiming that the EULA itself is in violation of antitrust laws. The suit claims that Apple inflates the prices for its hardware and the end user license agreement unfairly prevents other companies from competing with alternative systems. 

The law firm representing Psystar, Carr and Ferrel, LLP, had successfully sued Apple in 2006 for patent infringement, which lead to a $10 million out of court settlement. If they keep up to their game and win this one, it would lead a deathly blow to Apple—and a much more severe one than Psystar could ever have done individually. A lot of established companies have eyed the Mac market but have stayed away due to legal reasons. Losing this case would throw the doors wide open.

Released in late May this year, Google Gears is a way for web applications to have the feel and richness of a desktop application. Using the Gears plugin, a web application can cache resources and maintain a database locally, and have enough AJAX running in the background to make you believe it is actually a desktop version. One can, for instance, read RSS feeds in Google Reader without having an Internet connection. 

Up until now the only two browsers that the Gears project ran on were Firefox and Internet Explorer, the former being the only option for the Mac. However, an early beta, which Google warns will most probably break your browser, shows that the good people at Mountain View are looking after their Mac customers. 

The minimum system requirements are Safari 3.1.1 on Tiger 10.4.11 or Leopard 10.5.3, although we’re not sure if it works with the Safari 4 Developer Preview. Also, Safari for Windows and iPhone are still out of the loop. Jeremy Moskovich, a Google engineer, has put up an instructional on how to go about things. 

So if you are the daredevil type and don’t mind messing up your system for the excitement of trying out fledgeling software, here’s a direct download link to the BETA. I repeat that again, it’s in “beta”. And not the Gmail type beta either—this is the real, raw deal. Tread with caution.

After almost nine months with Coda 1.1, which was basically a Leopard compatibility update, Panic has dropped the bomb with a bevy of new features, some nice improvements, and a ton of bug fixes, with the v1.5 update to Coda.

What is Coda? Well, it’s not much—it’s only like the benchmark of awesomely designed mac applications! And having won the 2007 Apple Design Award for best user experience is no joke either. Coda is, as the developers like to call it, a one-window web development application. It combines a site manager, FTP client, code window, world class CSS editor, live preview, and a couple of other things that I won’t even go into. Read up on Shawn Blanc’s review of Coda to know more about what it is capable of. Moving on…

The update brings along integration with Subversion, which allows for team work and a host of other site management features. The Find/Replace feature has been given the royal treatment, which brings it on par with Dreamweaver. Coda can now find/replace text across multiple files throughout a ‘site’ or any local folders. 

And along with Coda’s own set of Books, you can now add your own books into the interface along with cover art. Clips have also been improved, with support for groups as well as exporting options. There’s a whole log of bug fixes and improvements which you can see for yourself in the release notes.

Coda v1.5 is be a free updade for existing users but the price for a new license has gone up to $99, up from $79. If you are into web development and haven’t used Coda, you are missing out on something truly amazing.