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.

Time to rid yourself of the days of storing your files inside of hidden folders. They are not only unsecure, but also tend to get lost when you do a reformat or sell off your Mac (since you’ve hidden the folder so well). Keeping your files inside disk images not only keeps your data secure, but you can easily move them around and store them in places which might otherwise be considered public.

What’s the big deal about disk images?
Disk Utility, which comes built into Mac OS X, lets you create upto 256bit AES encryption, which I’m told is as secure as it gets. So how exactly do these DMGs work? If you have ever installed an application on the Mac, you know what a DMG or Disk Image is. The image is a single file, which once mounted turns into a virtual storage device where you can add, delete or modify files.

Oh wow! Let’s create one then!
To begin, launch Disk Utility (Applications » Utilities » Disk Utility). After launch, go to File » New » Blank Disk Image.

Note, that while the file name of the disk image can be changed later, the Volume name (which is the label shown after mounting the disk image). Continue Reading »

Every once in a while, you accidentally change an application preference, and don’t know how to get it back. Even reinstalling the application (that is, dumping into the trash and copying over the .app file over again) will not solve the problem. 

Luckily, OS X has a central repository for each and every application preference for each user. The best part is, these ‘plist’ files are not important in any way. So merely deleting the respective plist file will make the application create a new plist file with the standard preferences. 

Say for instance I want things the way they were with Preview. I navigate to “Macintosh HD » Users » myusername » Library » Preferences” and delete the com.apple.Preview.plist file. Don’t let the naming convention scare you as the name of the application is all you need to find. If you are hesitant, backup the file before you delete it. Note that this is not a guaranteed method, as there might be other places that preferences are stored, but it doesn’t hurt to try.

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 »

Everyone has used the OS X Color Picker. Whenever you’re working on something and need to choose a colour, this is what pops up. “Not this thing again!” A quick glance through the color picker and you wish you had more control. Well, its there, but perhaps you don’t realise it.

An introduction to the Color Picker
The Color Picker is a very versatile tool that uses up very little real estate and resources and is highly extendible using plugins. Using just the default Color Picker, I shall explore the various options available and how to juice them for what they’re worth.

As you can see, the tool appears to be very plain and useless. Going through the various tabs isn’t going to yield much either. However, the very first tab itself is fully functional and more than enough for most users.

The first thing you want to do is resize the picker. Making the wheel bigger not only lets you eyeball those colors better but will allow the mouse to select finer variations in the gradient. It’s just better. Continue Reading »

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 »

Let’s face it—Macs do have problems. Sure, they don’t crash as often or as horribly as PCs do but incidents of OS problems crop up here and there every now and then. Sometimes, in fact, the only way to get rid of the problem is to do a fresh reinstall of Mac OS X.

Although Time Machine can very well restore your system to a time before you muddled it up, reinstalling the OS can bring some good performance improvements. Going the clean install route entails you having to move all your data from your hard drive to an external drive and then copying it back once you’re done. Of course, you could do an Archive and Install which will leave your document files intact, but what about the application related data that an Archive and Install often messes up? Having gone through this similar situation, I have decided to create a checklist before reinstalling your OS—because you somehow always forget to do one important task which you cannot go back to later on.

1. Address Book and iCal. Just launch each app and back them up. Both apps have Export options right in the File menu. If you are a MobileMe subscriber, your calendars and contacts are synced to the cloud so there should be no worries about losing that data. However, I would still suggest you make backups as MobileMe might corrupt your data, at least in its current flaky state.

2. Your Pictures. Just copy over your iPhoto Library and whatever other pictures you have in your Pictures folder. The iPhoto Library will appear as one big file. You do not want to take the risk even with an Archive and Install. Remember, you can never get the cat to pose like that ever again.

3. iTunes Library. If you have painstakingly set ratings for songs and maintained playcounts, it will hurt to lose all that and have just plain music in your library. Copy over your entire iTunes folder over to an external drive. The iTunes music folder will be in your ~username/Music folder. Copy the full thing over (replacing the one that already exists). [Ed note: For a more detailed and foolproof guide to moving your iTunes Library, check out this article on iLounge.]

4. Fonts. There is always that font that you used in that PSD that you cannot find anymore and the whole thing just backfires on you. So just backup your fonts before you lose them to the wind. If you’re anything like me, chances are that you have fonts strung about all over your system. The best way is to launch Font Book, select all your fonts, and select Export Fonts.

5. Documents. This is a given. If you have mainly small documents, back them up to the cloud. Otherwise just move all your documents—PSDs, PDFs, Word documents, RTFs and everything in between—to your external drive. A manual copy-paste of your entire Documents folder and whatever other folders you might have created in your Home folder will do (provided you remember to copy them back later, of course).

6. Photoshop brushes, actions, swatches and workspaces. It takes just a few clicks but saving all those will get you a long way, especially if you have customised everything to your liking (dual displays, anyone?). Photoshop, of course, just serves as an example here. You need to backup the settings of whatever other pro apps you might be using as well.

7. Let go of some stuff! There is no point in holding on to a lot of things that do not make sense. Give up your wallpaper collections. Let go of those icons. Wash away all those screensavers that you think are cool but never really use. Starting fresh is a really good feeling.

Now what good is this post without giving a little info on reinstalling as well?

To do that, just pop in your Leopard DVD and double-click “Install Mac OS X” on the Window that comes up. If, for some reason, you cannot boot into OS X at all, reboot your Mac and hold down the C key when you hear the startup chime.

After the setup loads, there are three modes for installation:

Upgrade: You can skip this one. It would be used while, say, upgrading from Tiger to Leopard, where it keeps your files and applications intact, while reinstalling the OS. However, it also keeps some of the cobwebs in place, so I’d say if you want to start fresh, do it right.

Archive and Install: This copies all of the files in your Home folder, including Documents, Movies, Music, etc., into a separate folder and installs a brand new OS. This is really useful if you don’t have an external hard drive to backup all those movies. Your archived folder cannot be used as your normal home folder, all account settings are reset and you have to still manually move all files from the archive to your new Home folder. I’d recommend this process but just make sure that you still do have a backup.

Erase and Install: Erases everything from the partition and installs a brand new OS. Simple as that.

Now, in the following step, along with the Install button, there will also be a Customize button. Going into that will give you an option to deselect all the printer drivers and language files from being installed, effectively saving you somewhere close to 6GB! That’s highly recommended if you have a desktop and are not in constant need of printer drivers (although not having them onboard might result in some Windows-style frantic driver hunting if you decide to buy a new printer someday). Language files should be deselected in all cases (assuming that none of those listed happens to be your mother tongue or one that you’re particularly fluent in). This also speeds up the installation process.

That’s it! After installation, you will get the lovely welcome video and proceed on to a fresh OS, and a happier Mac (notice the wider smile on the Finder icon).

For the most part, Safari’s download manager is good enough. The interface is slick, it shows a neat live progress icon in the Dock, resumes most broken downloads and integrates well with the system. However, there are times when you desire a little more, like being completely sure that your huge download will resume or you need to do some scheduling or utilise one of the many more features offered solely by a dedicated download manager.

In this article, I bring you a comparative review of a few of the well known download managers on Mac OS X. There is the feature rich Speed Download 5, which claims to be the ultimate download manager for Mac OS X, and the more simplistic and less ambitious Leech and iGetter. There are a few more here and there, but they are either too old or lack any substance.

Yazsoft’s Speed Download 5
This is a really polished application. It has everything you could want in a download manager and then some. With an interface similar to iTunes, Speed Download sure is easy on the eyes.

Speed Download 5 combines four products — a download manager with auto-resuming downloads, a fully featured secure FTP client, a file sharing utility with full encryption, and complete .Mac/iDisk/WEBDAV connectivity — into one small and easy to use application.

I’m not sure how many of those would fit into your regular downloading schedule, but I, for one, don’t even use half of those features.

When it comes to its downloading capabilities, it does a very good job at resuming them and organising them into various categories. It even has some neat features like Dock badges for current download speed and number of downloads completed. I particularly like how it shows a search icon next to a completed file but only if the file still exists on the drive.

As for the rest of it, however, it’s not of any use to me. I won’t use the FTP client that it features because it’s not designed to be an FTP client. I haven’t tried the iDisk or file sharing features either because they are not really part of my download routine.

Speed Download also has a neat feature for shrinking the window into a simple bar, much like iTunes, so you can have it floating around without occupying too much screen real estate.

One big feature missing in this app is speed limiting. You’d think that with all the features they’ve manage to cram in, a speed limit mode would be included so that you could surf the Internet in peace while files are being downloaded in the background.

All in all, it’s a feature rich application—something that is generally lusted after in a Windows application but is not the only thing Mac users take into consideration. Speed Download does manage to cram in a boatload of features but it does so at the cost of cluttering the interface and crowding the preference list (which is a vertical list, unlike the horizontal ones we are used to on the Mac). Furthermore, a lot of those features are quite redundant and I’d rather not pay extra for them.

At $25 for the full app though, it isn’t all that expensive. There is also a $20 lite version available. Currently, they have an interesting promo going on and if you already have a commercial ftp client or download manager, you can get Speed Download for $15.

Many Tricks’s Leech
This is a much more welcoming download manager. Its interface is very similar to Safari’s own download manager, except that it’s a little more feature rich. More importantly, it supports resuming of broken downloads reliably—which is, after all, the main purpose of a download manager.

It features a browser integration plugin which will automatically download files using Leech while you browse away in your web browser of choice, or you can just drag URLs onto the Dock icon. The Dock icon shows a speed badge and also features a unique indicator displaying how much of the file(s) has been downloaded. This is really good icon design. Partially downloaded files indicate how much has been completed, much like Safari’s partially downloaded files. Unfortunately, there is no speed limiting in this application either.

At €10 (around $15), this application doesn’t have much to offer, yet does what a download manager is supposed to do perfectly well.

Presenta’s iGetter
This one seems to have not shed its Aqua skin. The icons are very jelly-like and the interface looks similar to a lot of Windows applications—very much out of place on a shiny Leopard desktop.

It has all the required features of a download manager and more—resuming broken downloads, accelerated downloading, scheduling—it’s all there. It can also hang up your modem (Modem! So you know how primitive this app is!) or shutdown your computer once the downloads are complete.

However, the interface is so clunky and the preference pane such a nightmare to navigate through that I just cannot whole-heartedly recommend this application, even though it does a fine job as a download accelerator. One of the other things going for it is that it has a speed limit mode, although not the best one in the biz.

At $25 apiece, the price is the same as that of Speed Download.

So, which one gets my vote?
Leech certainly is my download manager of choice. Its simple intuitive interface just goes well with the rest of the operating system and other applications. However, if you’re a heavy downloader, then I would suggest going in for the more powerful Speed Download, assuming that the price difference is not a crucial deciding factor.

(Ed note: My vote, however, goes to iGetter. Sure, the interface is B.A.D., but once it’s setup and ready to go, you really do not need to deal with the interface. Downloads automatically get transferred to it from your web browser and the application stays in the background, doing its job. Once a download is complete, the downloads stack bounces to draw your attention and “safe” files automatically get launched. The acceleration is amazing—in most cases, it utilises the full bandwidth that your Internet connection is capable of.

What makes me prefer it to Speed Download is that it doesn’t intercept downloads from websites which do not support download accelerators and it’s a cinch to disable it if you don’t need it for a while. In my experience, Speed Download is a pain in the rear if you want to have it not download something. Your mileage may vary.)

Apple issued an update to Mac OS X Leopard today, bringing the version number up to 10.5.4. This update fixes various issues (don’t they all?) and improves the performance of iCal, Safari, Spaces and Exposé and also plugs a few of ’em security hole thingies.

It weighs in at less than 100MB (and varies for different configurations) and doesn’t seem to have any new feature additions (or at least none that have been advertised). Check out the complete list of changes, if you’re so inclined, and then get down to it by firing Software Update or downloading the standalone installer(s) from Apple’s website.

Unlike in Windows, the Option/Alt (⌥) key on Macs is not used for the sole purpose of Ctrl+Alt+Del (although that’s a pretty important function when it comes to the PC). The Option key, along with the Command (⌘) key, plays a vital role in keyboarding your way through Mac OS X. Here are ten uses that you might not have known about.

1. Instantly download files/links: A perfect scenario would be if you come across a web page with, say, ten parts to the story. Instead of loading each part in a separate tab and then saving it, just press Option and click on each link. You can get all of those pages in your downloads folder with minimal clicking. Your Mighty Mouse will thank you.

2. Finder—Copy instead of move: When you drag a file from one folder to another on the same partition, it moves the file instead of copying it. If you press Option while dragging the file (get used to dragging-and-dropping instead of right-clicking), however, the cursor will show a plus sign, which means that it will make a copy of the file in the new location instead of moving it. And when you’re dragging files across partitions, holding the Command key before dropping it will move the file instead of copying it.

Continue Reading »