Tiger users can user Jabber usernames with iChat AV 3.0. What’s the point of that? Well, AOL can’t listen in on you for one. Second, it’s decentralized. Should AOL go belly up, we’d all be fairly screwed. With Jabber, a single service provider can go down or disappear and everyone else can keep jabbering. Jabber also allows for chat gateways. For example, you can talk to MSN users through it. Melvin Rivera has written an excellent tutorial to get this set up. ...
No doubt by now you’ve heard about the Widget security issue. Thankfully, most of the Mac news sites have been fairly even-handed in their reporting. This hasn’t stopped from others on the net from proclaiming this the end of Mac security and that it’s no better than Windows (lots of hyperbole, not much substance). I’ve seen bits and pieces of information on this, but nothing that totally consolidates it yet. The MacCentral article linked probably has the best overview, but I’d like to break it down a little differently. ...
The first of my series of posts on Tiger’s new features finally begins tonight with Spotlight. This post is somewhat long because of the pictures that I decided to include. As such, most of the article is in the extended section. At the same time, those pictures actually make it fun to read even for the not so geeky, so definitely take a look. ...
When I took a screenshot of Safari’s contextual menu last night, I expected that it would be output as a PDF (the default format in Panther). I also wanted to take the opportunity to try out the Flickr upload widget that I mentioned before (which is terribly slick). I wasn’t sure that Flickr supported PDF, so I thought I’d have to convert the screenshot file. Much to my surprise, it was formatted as a PNG file. With that, I just went ahead and uploaded it (and it seems to have worked perfectly).
I don’t think I’m the only one using a Mac that has become really accustomed to using context menus. Until I started using gestures to operate my web browser, I would regularly use the context menu to move back (because clicking the back button is really inconvenient). Safari continually jerked me around by being the only browser that didn’t have back and forward options. It’s one of the most common functions. This finally changed in Tiger and Safari 2.0. ...
I’ve got Mac OS X Tiger installed on the 12″ Powerbook and the MDD G4 Powermac. Let me tell you, it’s awesome. It’s fast and even more multitasking capable (if that’s even really possible). I have a few quick thoughts this morning. I’ll have a much more complete analysis of Spotlight tonight. Spotlight may be more like LaunchBar than I originally thought. It served as a decent replacement until I got LaunchBar installed. However, it isn’t quite the same because it groups by kind and it doesn’t indicate location. That’s bad because when I do a search for a certain application, Spotlight is currently bringing up duplicates that exist on my Panther backup. ...
Okay, so the title for this entry would have been much cooler if Tiger were arriving tomorrow. Tiger Tuesday! I could have had fame and fortune. Instead, I’ll have Tiger one day earlier and be a nobody. Anyway, posting won’t be on the agenda tonight. I hope to cover one Tiger feature a day. The order I cover those features is still up in there air though. Any of you out there interested in seeing my take on a particular feature first, please leave a comment. I plan on taking a lot of screenshots because no one can get enough. ...
My sadness quickly turned into rage last night because I wouldn’t have my toy this weekend. I read at several places, including Macworld’s forums that if you didn’t get your copy of Tiger on time, you could call Apple to get one of three things for free. iLife ‘05 iWork $30 Apple Store coupon Finding this out, I called up and they promptly offered me iLife ‘05. I didn’t hear him offer the other two options, but personally, I didn’t care as that was what I wanted anyway. ...
When Safari 1.3 came out, several plugins broke and were quickly fixed again. That’s cool, but both the PithHelmet and AcidSearch plugin updates were a bit rushed (and with good reason because they were high in demand). For AcidSearch the bug was mostly harmless. When a channel was dragged around in the configuration window, it got turned into a folder. Oops. The author quickly issued an update. However, PithHelmet had a more serious problem. Attempting to set the display of a page element to none after probing the dimensions of that object caused Safari to crash. Mike Solomon has a much better writeup for those technically inclined. Basically what this meant for an end user was that Safari crashed… a lot. It bit me with one site in particular. He issued an update which no longer crashes Safari, but unfortunately doesn’t collapse a lot of blocked elements either (which was one of my main beefs with how OmniWeb handles ad-blocking). It doesn’t happen all the time though, so it’s not going to force me into using Camino or Firefox (for now), but it’s a silly bug that hopefully will get fixed.
Using Xbench, I compared the three disks attached to my Powermac. First, I have the stock drive, a Deskstar 120GXP (80 GB). Disk Test 100.77 Sequential 103.00 Uncached Write 90.65 37.79 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 90.87 37.21 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 170.74 27.03 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 91.39 36.93 MB/sec [256K blocks] Random 98.64 Uncached Write 101.96 1.53 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 100.45 22.66 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 95.93 0.63 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 96.47 19.85 MB/sec [256K blocks] The next drive is a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (200GB) in an OWC Firewire enclosure. ...