Nixta Sinks

F8 and F9 = Hours of Tartleyesque Amusement

Spaces and Expose work well together. Using F9 (or whatever mapping you have) to show all the current windows has already been useful for years under Tiger (OS X 10.4 for the unitiated). Now that Leopard introduces Spaces, which seems to be hotly debated as to its usefulness, we get a nice visual which is actually remarkably useful. Press F8 to invoke Spaces (if you have it enabled, if not, read up on it and have a play) then F9. See all windows across all spaces and be able to choose the one you want. Works very nicely, thanks.

That said, Spaces has a little way to go yet - it doesn't automatically switch window focus for example, so even though you think you're in the current window of the current space, your keyboard focus may be elsewhere. But it does do some things very right. Windows update in realtime (including video, though Lightroom goes a bit gaga). Preview's Screen Grab works. It covers dual screens, even though it looks ugly as hell...

Damn it. Here's a video that covers it perfectly, and I thought I was being so clever and inventive...

Spaces and Expose working together

Stacks in slow motion are fun for a second or two. Hold Shift while you open or close a stack. In fact, all windows animations of this kind work the same way. Minimize or restore a window with the Shift key held (that also worked under Tiger).

Lastly, and quite usefully for me, a stack for recent applications. Just open up the Terminal app and follow the instructions on that page. Oh, all right, here they are too (all on one line please):

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'

and then type:

killall Dock

Note that it's case sensitive (and there's a typo on the original page - "dock" should be "Dock"). It's best to copy & paste the first line. This will add a new item to the Stacks area of the dock. You can remove it by just dragging it off the dock...

My advice? Wait until 10.5.1 is released. Leopard drops my 802.11 connection from time to time (DMC's too), and that bug with interrupted moves leading to data loss hit me twice (although I was moving Jamie Oliver videos at the time, so it was no great loss). I also encountered two out of three installation problems (one on each of our MacBook Pros). Mine kept ejecting the Leopard install disc until I'd put in a video DVD and then the Tiger DVD. DMC's wouldn't find the internal drive when the machine rebooted into the installer (solution? Just wait). Even Vista does better than that...

Update: The original Google video I used (here) doesn't seem to be available in Europe? Or at least Slovenia (thanks for pointing that out, Tomsk). Very interesting. Reminds me of the difference between videos available for the iPhone YouTube service over those available through YouTube.com. Very very interesting.

Labels: apple, Hints, Leopard, Spaces, Stacks

Yum

I've finally gone Mac.

People will doubtless start calling me a Mac Fanboy soon enough, and at the moment I wouldn't care a jot if they did. It's not all rosy, but it's a different league to XP, not to mention the Vista disaster.

At the weekend, following on from my posts about Adobe CS3 and how the DMC has been patiently waiting for a Universal Binary version of the software she uses extensively and expertly, day in, day out, she and I popped down to the Apple store in Soho and bought ourselves two shiny new MacBook Pros.

I've known for a while, because the DMC has been using an old 17" Powerbook G4 lappy, that Mac OS X is a pretty nice operating system. I've known for a while that it's less frustrating to use than Windows typically is, that the UI is for the most part disjoint from the underlying functionality and will continue to work even if an app has crashed, and that things are just generally simpler, even if there's a slight learning curve to get around a few UI paradigm changes.

But it can be this way for good reason, of course. Apple have the luxury of a single OS/Hardware model. And they have what Bill Gates recently rued as the number one asset of Steve Jobs' that he wished he posessed, which was "taste" ("I’d give a lot to have Steve’s taste"). It looks like it should work, and you're not too surprised then when it does.

I was able to switch now, of course (and to be fair, I haven't totally switched at all - I still have my Windows servers scattered around, but their lifespans are in jeopardy), because of the Intel hardware, Bootcamp, and Parallels. Actually, I haven't even used Bootcamp yet - Parallels works too well for me.

And that's just it. It just works. Everything (so far) just works. Bluetooth on my old laptop would crap out all the time, despite being Dell provided on a Dell laptop. Startup is not much faster than Windows XP, but when you shut the lid, the machine goes to sleep (my XP machine is lucky to do that - there's always a chance that I'll get the dreaded "can't hibernate" error, which I have to wait around to see, and which means a reboot because hibernating is then disabled!), and when you open the lid, it comes back. Quickly. Nearly instantly. Network connectivity is a breeze. You can connect and disconnect USB storage devices easily (if you think it's easy on Windows, you've been risking your data). And it just works. The Finder doesn't pause on random folders for reasons unknown. And the screen quality is fantastic.

I have had two complaints so far. iSight doesn't work in Windows XP under Parallels for me yet, and the wireless network between my Macbook Pro and my D-Link 802.11n router struggles to stay alive if I try to connect at 802.11n (although 802.11g works fine).

What is more interesting to me is that my whole approach to paying for software is already different; because things just work, I seem happy to pay for them. I've bought a couple of third-party apps which I doubt I would have paid for if they were Windows apps: Parallel and the curiously named Delicious Library.

Also of interest is the very obvious effect that having the Intel platform has had on development for the Mac. Filezilla is now available for Mac OS X (albeit in beta form) and more and more applications are being re-coded for Mac OS X. All it takes is a gateway like Parallels or Transgaming's Cider. Clearly more and more development will start to leak across to the Mac.

It's curious then that Apple should try to leak the other way, by porting Safari to Windows. With the iPhone (in particular the keyboard, battery, and developer platform issues), and now porting Safari to Windows, they're playing a risky game. I'm not sure it'll pay off, but at least their other products are careening successfully and thanks to them Apple will certainly not hurt too much if it all falls apart.

Labels: apple, switch, windows