Archive for the 'Apple' Category

Another Thing I Can’t Stand on a Mac: Lag on Dictionary.app Lookup

Before Leopard, everything was fine. I was able to open up dictionary, look up a word, be happy that I learned a new word, and close the window. Done.

Is it just me, or does the Leopard Dictionary.app SUCK in the lookup time? I’m talking about the time from when you find the word you want and opening up the definition. With respect to Tiger, this is unacceptable. Back in those days, it was actually fun (yes, I’m a nerd, figure it out) searching through the dictionary.

Let me know if this is just me, because I’ve tried this on both my macs, as well as a Tiger machine just to see the search lag difference.

I also should go to the Apple forums to see if this issue has been reported.

Reinstalling Leopard on the MacBook Air

If you do a Google search for anything related to leopard macbook air installation or reinstallation, you get all these blog posts about how the included DVDs will only work on a MacBook Air. This is obviously not news… Apple has been including system specific discs for some time… But really, that’s beside the point. This post is for those that are really truly looking to “(re)install leopard on a macbook air”.

This is in the users manual, by the way, on page 46. It looks like that there is an included application to do just this called: “Remote Install Mac OS X”. Thank you, Quicksilver, for making my search for this application that much quicker.

Very Important (and the mistake I made twice): DO NOT try to run the Mac OS X Install Disc 1 through Remote Disc. This is not the right way to reinstall Leopard on your MacBook Air. You’ll just keep putting in your password and restarting your computer wondering why nothing is happening.

It’s taking a ridiculously long time for my MacBook Pro at the “Waiing for MacBook Air to start up…” dialog box, which is highly discouraging. I even bought the Ethernet dongle so that this process would be made at least fast as if I had a USB external DVD drive (Gigabit ethernet isn’t the bottleneck (1 Gbps), it’s the USB 2.0 (480 Mbps)).

Oh. It’s done. Time to go nuts and reformat the thing.

And yes, I’ll start blogging again soon. That’s one of the many reasons why I bought this thing to begin with. Now… if it’ll work as it should, I’ll be very very very happy.

Legend… wait for it… “air”-y.

It has happened. It took me quite a long while to do this, but, I pulled the trigger. Now to spend the rest of the night configuring the darn thing so I can actually start doing some work.

Sidenote: I love Time Machine. It’s just the restoring part that’s a little painful and untrustworthy. Time to do what I do best: Go and bring a machine back to its awesome state after a reformat (in this case, a new purchase).

Another Sidenote: I haven’t posted on the blog using the actual Wordpress interface for a while. Doesn’t seem to shabby, but I still prefer the TextMate bundle.

A Third Sidenote:  Wordpress on Safari doesn’t like to retain html tags in the visual edit mode. That’s why the post before without paragraph tags. What’s the deal…

Bezel HUD: Quicksilver Interface Plugin

I love Quicksilver. That’s all there is to it.

But if you can get away with some tasteful lickability, I’m all for it (as long as it doesn’t kill my machine while trying to look pretty).

BezelHUD is just that. I’ve used Bezel for quite a long time now, and this only adds another layer of that delicious icing to the cake. I do like how it fits into Leopard.

And wow, Julius Eckert also wrote the Showcase interface, too, a plugin I used just to have something other than Bezel to play around with. This guy is on a roll! I can’t wait for the SilverFlow interface, now…

Prism vs Fluid: Local Web Application Management on Mac OS X

Basically it boils down to: Don’t use Prism. Yet. It crashes quite often, and not in the way you’d probably want it to crash: It just eats away at your processor until you realize that while you were listening to music on your headphones that the fans were going insane and the processor was running at 81 degrees. Celsius.

The OMFG screenshot came into being while I was testing out some Fluid Applications (The last three applications were Fluid Applications). It’s been a while since I used it, but it looks like it’s getting better and better. A lot of great things in the horizon… but it’s too bad it isn’t open sourced (See Post Here). I’d love to start messing around with the guts…

More about Fluid

But anyway, it looks great, and feels even better. I love being able to command+tab into a web application. Not only that, I can even see some statuses on the desktop icon itself.

Fluidapp Desktop Icon Notifcation

But of course, the nerdy neat freak in me decided to figure things out over lunch and see if there was a way to change the icons to look a bit better. I don’t really thing a 16×16 pixel icon would do in an Apple environment… After poking at flickr a bit, I found these two lovely icons.

Gmail Icon

Gmail Icon at Flickr: Direct Link

Facebook Icon

Facebook Icon at Flickr: Direct Link

These are actual .icns files, rather than just images. Thanks to autodafe0728, I was able to make two of my most accessed Fluid app’s icon amazing.

How do you actually use these .icns files? Well, you have to pick an icon when you create your Fluid app, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to change it after you’ve created it. So if you already have one, delete it, and just remake this new one after setting the “Icon: ” field to the .icns file rather than the default “Use Website Favicon”.

Enjoy. More on this web application vs. desktop application business later.