Flash on the Mac is painful. Anytime I hit a website that uses flash my CPU usage takes a hit, along with my battery on the laptop. Not good. This is more obvious if it’s video content on Flash, particularly HD video. There are rumblings that Flash 10.1 will address some of the issues but I’m not holding my breath as I’ve always had issues which is frustrating when you look at how good it performs on Windows. So, what to do? For Safari users the answer is ClickToFlash.
ClickToFlash is a flash blocking plug-in for Safari with a few neat features. Firstly and most importantly it blocks Flash content allowing you to choose when you want Flash to run, not when a website wants to. To view the flash content, click on the box seen on the website with Flash inside it and the Flash content is loaded as per usual. This has the benefit of not only reducing CPU drain and increasing battery life but also making websites more readable, removing some of the in your face advertising that’s becoming more and more common. There are some websites though that you will always want Flash to run on so thankfully ClickToFlash has a whitelist which means Flash on those sites will always be loaded.
One other benefit from this plugin is on YouTube. YouTube is a Flash based video site but they have encoded many of their video’s in iPhone friendly H.264 format. ClickToFlash detects if an H.264 format is available and allows you to view that instead of Flash meaning the video is loaded in Quicktime. Happy days as the video looks and plays better.
If Firefox is more to your tastes there are a number of Flash blocking plugins available but the best I’ve found is Flashblock. This works like ClickToFlash without the added H.264 detection. These two plugins combined should give you a far better browsing experience on the Mac.
Mac OS X is a great operating system but there are many settings that aren’t exposed to the user via a GUI, instead requiring typing in a command via terminal. Secrets is a database of hidden settings for Mac OS X. The website allow you to search by application and list all known secrets for that application. It lists the command line entry you need to type which you can easily cut and paste into terminal.
By logging in via a Google account you can edit newly added secrets or add your own. As good as the website is there is a better way of accessing secrets – via a preference pane that is downloadable via the Secrets website.
Once installed the pane can be accessed via System Preferences under Other. You can click on an Application name to view all secrets for that app. Instead of typing via the command line, options are now available via a GUI so they can be easily toggled on/off once you’ve tried them. Secrets don’t just cover the default OS X app’s. There are secrets for many app’s including Transmission, Skype, Fission and many more. From the preference pane you can also refresh the app to make sure your Secrets are up to date.
This one preference pane removes the need for a few other utilities and allows you to access a multitude of settings which were previously hidden. Highly recommended for any Mac owners.
Shownotes
– Snow Leopard
– Thoughts on install and changes?
– Install was painless – around an hour
– On boot SL asked for ‘System Events.app’ – located in /System/Library/CoreServices/ – pointed to it – never had error again
– Expose update nice
– Clearer
– Click and hold in dock – expose for that app on it’s own
– Works with drag and drop of a file
– Allegedly – doesn’t work for me – drag a file to Textmate, windows pop up in expose mode, drag file – nothing. Drag file from finder to window – success. Buggy?
– Hold down space over a window to zoom to a readable size
– Dock – meus changed, stacks updated to scroll through grids, click on folder to drill within stack view, change yellow minimize behaviour so it shrinks to dock icon instead of it’s own icon on RHS of dock – ctrl click or right click on dock or hold and expose to view
– Quicktime – excellent front end
– Screencasting built in which is simple but won’t replace dedicated screen capture app
– Trim similar to 3GS control – very simple
– Cut out many of the Quicktime Pro controls – bundle Quicktime Pro 7 to soften the blow
– Dumbing down app? Similar to iMovie HD?
– Speed – finder, mail, spotlight
– http://gizmodo.com/5345354/snow-leopard-benchmarks
– Big time savings on boot, loading in preview etc. Noticable that on app’s not optimised for Snow Leopard there’s virtually no difference. Should see improvements in 3-6 months?
– 15-20gb of disk space back
– Snow Leopard reports disk size correctly
– http://lifehacker.com/5349204/snow-leopard-reports-hard-drive-capacity-correctly-in-base-10
– In Snow Leopard MacOS 10.6 storage capacity is now reported the way storage vendors specify it: in base 10, not base 2
– New Wake on Demand
– http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/08/wake-on-demand-could-lead-to-appletv-bliss.ars
– Need 2007 (or newer) AirPort Extreme Base Station or a 2008 (or newer) Time Capsule
– Works over wireless if you have a 2009 Mac
– New soft keyboard – http://www.9to5mac.com/snow-leopard-soft-keyboard
– XL iTablet?
– rumours of 13″ and 15″ tablets in addition to 10″. One of them running OS X
– rumour comes from a “100% reliable” source …. hmmm
– “two touchscreen prototypes…shape of large iphone…in a factory in Shenzuen…one of them running OS X” – claims the source
– could they just be internal prototypes or maybe in future devices??? – Smaller, faster O/S
– Malware scanning tool
– Oops
– Only detects 2 malwares but can be updated
– Is that why theres a subtle change in latest mac vs pc ad’s from ‘no viruses’ to ‘without thousands of viruses’
– Preview – selecting text easier and markup PDF’s with comments now added
– One for the future, once apps support it, but Mac OS X now has system-wide, user-definable text substitution—see the Text tab of Language & Text in System Preferences.
– Services and automator updated
– http://www.macosxautomation.com/services/index.html
– http://www.pixelcorps.tv/macbreak235
– Services now application specific
– Use automator, you can create a service
– HDTV ready
– http://www.tuaw.com/2009/08/31/mac-os-x-now-hdtv-ready-with-10-6/
– Software compatibility list
– http://digs.by/7lx
– Lot’s of updates yesterday and today – coda, launchbar, superduper, wiretap studio, pathfinder, omni group app’s
– iStat menu’s came out today – lovely app
– Dan Benjamin – Those of you using Adobe Lightroom under Snow Leopard, get info (command-i) and verify that 32-but is *un-checked* for a huge speed boost
– Biggest improvements still to be seen – switch of 3rd party app’s to 64 bit and the increased performance that will bring
– Issues
– Mail – stops working after a couple of days – shutdown and restart fixes it – may delete accounts and create again
– Flash – older version included so download latest version – http://www.adobe.com/flashplatform/
– Licence and installation
– Needs to be an Intel Mac
– It is an upgrade licence…but you can install from fresh using Snow Leopard without using Leopard disk
– http://www.tuaw.com/2009/09/03/snow-leopard-in-eula-we-trust/
– Recommend AppFresh to check your installed app’s and make sure you get up to date software
– 64 bit computing
– http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137229/What_s_the_real_deal_with_64_bit_computing_in_Snow_Leopard_
– Apple app’s are 64 bit – most others aren’t
– Kernel loads in 32 bit for most users, can force 64 by holding down 6 and 4 on boot – can be flaky
– Foundations now in place for dev’s to move to 64 bit
– Leopard could run 64 bit apps but all core were 32
– Half way – next major OS fully 64 bit?
– Proper Review
– http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars
– John Siracusa – 23 pages, full and factual
– 10.6.1. seeded to testers
Everyone likes the App Store, right? Easy to buy, one click and the app is yours. No credit cards, no fuss – awesome. But how much are these app’s really costing you? If you spin through all your app receipts you can get a total costs but there is an easier way for Mac owners – the free App Store Expense Monitor.
The app runs in the menu bar and show a running total of how much you’ve spent so far on app’s. As you can see from the screenshot my total is £189.25. Ouch. The app scans your application directory and gets the current price of each of the app’s you have installed. While that gives you a rough spend it doesn’t cover the changing prices of app’s over time. However Expense Monitor has that covered as you can edit the price for individual app’s.
Nice little app that is simple and free while being scarily informative. So how much have you spent on iPhone app’s? Let us know in the comments.
There are no shortage of screenshot snapping tools on the Mac but one of the best I’ve used is LittleSnapper from Realmac Software which has recently been updated to version 1.5. LittleSnapper makes it easy to snap screenshots and websites in a variety of ways but more importantly it helps you organise your snaps into collections for easy retrieval.
The capture engine has been re-written for 1.5 and allows for full screen and timed captures. The timed capture is a welcome addition as previous to 1.5 it wasn’t included which was frustrating. You can also snap an area instead of the full desktop and also a window. One nice feature is holding down shift when selecting multiple windows will create a separate snapped image for each window. Hold down cmd when selecting windows and only one image containing the selected windows will be created. The webpage snapping doesn’t just snap what is currently visible – LittleSnapper will snap the full web page which is great for keeping screenshots of inspirational sites as you surf. View the webpage within LittleSnapper and you can select individual elements of the page to snap which is far easier than selecting an area.
Your screenshots and images are held in a local library. Within the library you can organise by type (mockup, illustration, screenshot etc), folders and collections. Each image can be tagged too which makes it easy to find an image in a large library. I have a few collections for blog and website designs that I like and also for podcast album art. One tip is that you can move the LittleSnapper library to a disk location of your choosing. I’ve moved mine to my Dropbox account which means I can share my library across mac’s.
LittleSnapper's editing tools, with highlighting and blurred sections used on the image
The editing tools allow you to crop the snap’s further and also add non-destructive edits like text, boxes, arrows and also the ability to highlight and blur out area’s. These are all available in one easy to use toolbar and are simple but quick to use.
You can export snap’s into local folders, an FTP account, Flickr or to Ember, the partner service to LittleSnapper. At first I dismissed Ember (formally called QuickSnapper) as a poor man’s Flickr clone in that you can upload images, favourite other images, follow other Ember users and make comments on images. Nothing too ground breaking really.
The difference is in the content uploaded and the collections that people are making available. The ember homepage will highlight an image liked by the developers and also give you access to popular images, recent images and also access to to groups of images via tags and collections. The screenshot above shows the homepage and also the ability of LittleSnapper to snap the whole web page, not just what’s visible via the browser.
The content is of more interest. It’s more focussed on web and application design with an abundance of great looking websites and applications being highlighted by the Ember community. Since the update I’ve found Ember to be a great go to site for design idea’s, more so than anything I’ve found on Flickr. It’s also easy to browse around the site by collections, tag’s or user and can be a real time sink.
Ember is free to use and upload to but the free account is limited to hosting three online collections and 30 uploads per month. You also see adverts while using Ember but these aren’t intrusive and for me the free account is more than enough. The pro account costs $24.99 per year and allows unlimited uploads and collections, removes the adverts and also gives you free upgrades to LittleSnapper. It’s important to note that you can use Ember without LittleSnapper and it is well worth a visit if your interested in web or application on any platform.
There are many competing screen capture tools like Skitch, Voila and Snapz Pro but I found LittleSnapper to be one of the best. Used alongside Ember it makes for a great capture and design resource.
Something I’ve not done in a long time, especially after switching to Macs, is customise my desktop. I remember when I had a PC, I used to love tweaking the UI with apps such as WindowBlinds, IconPackager and ObjectDock. I’m reasonably happy with the Mac UI so haven’t had the desire to change much other than a slight tweak to the dock and the menubar icons. But this has all been done without resorting to any drastic changes or 3rd party apps.
Recently I came across GeekTool which is a system preferences module for OS X and can display system logs, unix command outputs and images on your desktop. This information can appear as embedded in your desktop or in front of other windows.
It’s a light-weight app and if used creatively, can allow you to enhance the already elegant OS X visual look. Once installed, it appears at the bottom of your System Preferences. It’s reasonably straight forward to use and you need to be familiar with unix commands.
Groups are listed in a dropdown on the left. You create a group of as many elements as you like and only one group can be active at any one time. An element can be the output of a file, a unix/shell command or an image. Text output (from a file or command) can be formatted to any font, size and colour. When you add a new element, a semi-transparent placeholder for it appears on the desktop, which can be dragged around or resized with the mouse. You can also enter the precise size and coordinates in the window. There is also an option to always display this element on top of other windows.
That is basically, all there is to it. The rest is up to the imagination of the user, how creative they want to get with it. Some examples I have seen display really nice weather output, including graphics. Whereas other examples are so geeked up, with massive file outputs covering the entire desktop, that it looks like a complete mess. I didn’t want to do anything drastic and followed the example from a LifeHacker article to create a nice desktop displaying basic information.
I’ve struggled for a while to find a decent lossless converter and ripper for the Mac – X Lossless Decoder (XLD) is finally an answer for those issues. This is a free app that has a very simple front end that will allow conversion from and to:
(Ogg) FLAC (.flac/.ogg)
Monkey’s Audio (.ape)
Wavpack (.wv)
TTA (.tta)
Apple Lossless (.mp3) [10.4 and later]
AIFF, WAV, etc
The conversion from Flac to Apple Lossless was extremely quick. In fact it was so quick I thought it had failed but I was wrong – the quality is excellent too. XLD also rip’s CD’s in to a lossless format of your choosing and again it does this pretty quickly. With support for MusicBrainz and also tags in Flac I’ve been impressed with just how flexible the app is. The front end is functional but to be honest that’s all you really need. XLD – a very handy tool to have installed.
