After installing Snow Leopard all my CS4 applications displayed the same error dialog above. So I went through the gruesome task of re-installing CS4 and I still got the same error. Even running the Adobe License Recovery utility several times (with several reboots) didn’t solve the issue. It was driving me mad! Fortunately, thanks to a reply to a post in another blog that it was solved.
Here’s how. I had to delete the following folder:
/Library/Preferences/FLEXnet Publisher
When I launched Photoshop it asked me for my serial number and once entered, all the CS4 applications worked perfectly.
So Snow Leopard, otherwise known as Mac OS X 10.6, is released tomorrow and needless to say I’ll have it installed by the end of the day. The downside of a brand new OS is losing all the little hacks I’ve accumulated over the past 18 months with Leopard: Plex; Perian; a minimalist Dock; Google Quick Search Box; Expandrive; and finally Caffeine, the latest install.
There is a lot to look forward to with Snow Leopard as well. Most of the core applications have been re-written in Cocoa and they’re all 64-bit as well. In short it means, Go Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
If you’d like to check wether your favourite application works with 10.6, here’s a quite extensive and informative wiki site and most of the apps I mentioned earlier either work perfectly or need updating. I prefer a clean install with a new OS and then gradually adding extensions.
Gentlemen, rev up those Time Machine backup drives.
After using Caffeine for a couple of hours I was hooked. It’s a free utility that stops your laptop from dimming the screen or going to sleep. How is this useful? How many times have you been watching something on YouTube for the screen to dim? Cue irritated push on the trackpad to get the brightness back.
Caffeine lives in your menu bar in the shape of a cup of coffee. When you want the display not to dim, click on the empty cup which changes to a full cup and et voilà, no more display dimming. When you’re not watching the screen anymore and listening to music whilst working, click on the full cup to drain it and revert the dimming back.
There are plenty of Sudoku games in the App Store but this one is a real “Look at what my iPhone can do!” game. You can photograph a game from a newspaper and Sudoku Grab (iTunes link) will digitise the puzzle… and then solve it for you. It will also let you email it to anyone who has a copy of the game installed on their iPhone.
The developer even posted how his application does it’s magic. Even though I don’t usually play Sudoku, this is enormous fun! Click on the images for larger versions.
It was 1984 and I was 14 when Tron came out. I absolutely loved the film and I think I probably watched it over a hundred times. I was surprised when I felt a little bit excited about the sequel after watching the VFX concept trailer.
It’s released at the end of 2010 and with most of the original cast appearing. From the trailer it appears that Jeff Bridge’s character, Flynn, is perhaps now a baddie! Oh yes: Light cycles, frisbees of death, Master Control Program, glow suits. And it’ll be in 3D.
Here’s a quick tip on how to make the dock in Leopard look less garish. First, switch off the 3D effect by typing the following into a terminal:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock
When the dock relaunches it should look nice and minimalist. I also like to use Dock Dividers to group my applications. As Brandon Kelly, the creator of Dock Dividers, explains: Dock Dividers are little do-nothing apps that you can place in your Mac’s dock to visually separate your apps into groups.
Since you can only have user-generated content on the right side of the Dock, I copied the icon from the application and pasted it onto folders. I named the new “document dividers” with spaces to help me separate folders and documents I like to have there.
And here’s a quick before and after comparison. Enjoy!
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