Firefox 3.0’s new default Mac theme showed up today in the current trunk nightly (Minefield). The theme is very similar to Safari’s.
A look at the new Coherence Mode feature in Parallels desktop.
HTML mail is bad enough when it works – it’s intolerable when it’s as broken as in Apple’s Mail.app.
Great set of tips for eking out disk performance on MacOS X, like disabling last access time tracking. These are just as useful in non-SSD configs.
I’ve dumped MacPorts for pkgsrc. This quick tutorial helped me get going and this package browser is awesome.
I didn’t realize how much shit I had in my menu bar until I went through and did this:
There is a tried and true uncluttering trick for your home and office used by many professional and highly paid “Organizational Consultants”. It involves taking everything you own, save for the bare essentials, and moving it into storage. For a set period of time, retrieve items from the store when needed. Anything not accessed after said set period of time you likely do not really need and should be disposed of.
I have no idea why I ever had Sync (don’t use), TimeMachine (don’t use), Growl (useless), or Bluetooth (useless) enabled.
Interesting looking prefpane for MacOS X that tweaks some sleep settings:
“Just ‘sleep’ means that the notebook will go to sleep fast, but you loose the ability to change the battery. Just ‘sleep and hibernate’ will wake the computer fast, but sleeping will take ages as the contents of the memory are saved to disk before entering the sleep. MacOS uses ‘sleep and hibernate’ all the time by default. SmartSleep lets your notebook just ‘sleep’ while the battery has a high level. If the battery level drops below a certain point ( default is less then 20% or 20 minutes ) it will switch to ‘sleep and hibernate’. So you have the best of both worlds.”
Right on time.
Free (as in beer). Built on WebKit. Simple. Beautiful.
I think I may finally be able to get rid of Colloquy.
Payware GUI shell thingy for MacOS. This is not a QuickSilver/Launchbar clone. It’s more like a magical bash interpreter that knows things about what’s happening in various Mac GUI applications (like Finder, Safari, etc).
I wonder why newsgator would make this free. Seems like there was a pretty decent slate of paying users. Losing ground to Google Reader? Eventual ad placement? Just wanted to be nice? Weird.
“It all started with Windows Vista”
Absolutely beautiful new Vim port for OS X – sane GUI tabs, multiple windows, client/server mode, fonts look great. Stop building Carbon Vim from source!
Manual page URL handler for Safari (e.g., “man:bash”, “man:sort” in URL box). References to other man pages are hyperlinked very nicely and the pages themselves are formatted quite nicely.
That was quick. IMO, the Mac needs this application more than other platform’s (including Windows) because of its document oriented application switching.
“No important software for the Mac depends on Java.”
Blatant license violation!
Best Open Letter Ever. Add your signature!
About half of these will be well-known to the UNIX hacker but there’s a couple I’ve not seen elsewhere: lsbom, softwareupdate, screencapture, and lipo.
Awesome look at using advanced features of ipfw(8) on OS X.
This is pretty darn close to my configuration but I used the mutt-devel port… Oh, and my ~/.procmailrc is pretty insane also :)
“Essentially, this add Vi command functionality (albeit a small subset) to any (and all) text editors that use the Cocoa text system; e.g., Safari, TeXShop, XCode, etc.”
“Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.”
Vim 7.0.188 Universal and PPC binaries are up.
“But the company’s board of directors balked and ordered the ad withdrawn from its Super Bowl slot. Only the intervention of Steve Wozniak, who said he’d pay for the spot personally if the board refused to air it, saved the day.”
“… but I gave up after optimizing AWT, implementing drag and drop, and trying to make 1,200 pages of crappy APIs do the right thing on the Mac. Then I took a one-week Cocoa training course, and wrote the first prototype of iChat.”
“I hope you can wipe the screen off!” — I fell off my chair.
The original SNL / Steve Jobs skit. This is a classic as far as I’m concerned.
Nails it.
Rock on.
Nice looking Newsreader for Mac OS X (F/OSS with an Apache 2.0 license and public subversion repository).
Seamless window support for rdesktop (and perhaps Cocoa Remote Desktop). Similar to Parallel’s Coherence Mode for RDP.
A Cocoa port of rdesktop. Universal Binary, multiple concurrent sessions, no X11 makes it the best RDP client for Mac on paper.
Holy crap I can’t wait to get my hands on this.
I wanted to like it but…
bout' time
Seriously.
A Spotlight Plugin that imports and indexes Python source code. w00t!
Will be useful if amazon ever decides to ship my stuff.
Notes on stuff that should be backed up and other tips for a smooth upgrade. The comment thread looks promising as well with everyone reporting in with problems and opinion.
“Clutter is a small Mac OS X application that lets you put music CDs on your desktop. You can drag them anywhere. Line them up neatly or put them in piles, it’s your choice.”
Some discussion on turning the new Mac Mini into a Media PC for the living room.
Apple’s Mac Mini product page.
Oh, this is big. $500 Mac Mini.