I found it a bit annoying not to use my current printer with my iPhone or iPad after the new 4.2 software update. Apparently the feature will only work with HP ePrint printers and I didn’t want to buy a new one since I had an Epson multifunction printer connected to my iMac. A google search for a workaround turned up a tip on Steven Troughton-Smith’s blog but that required hunting around and finding a pre-release version of 10.6.5, finding and replacing the files.

However I found a better solution with a bit more searching… AirPrint Hacktivator! Launch the app, click the On button, delete and re-add the printer and that’s it! As you can see from the screengrab above it works perfectly!

The screen on the iPhone 4 is just absolutely, incredibly, indescribably beautiful. It’s compulsive viewing, well once you change the horrible default water drops wallpaper! I tried lots of minimalist graphics and wasn’t satisfied until I settled on The Grid.

Nice, no? The image above is 50% of the actual iPhone 4 resolution. Click on it to see the graphics at 100%.

For my iPad I’ve been cycling through a lot of wallpaper from 50ft shadows. Currently here are my lock and home screens.

As for my iMac I set my Desktop preferences to choose at random some of my favourites from 50ft shadows including this one.

Enjoy!

I’ve been happily using the Mail app in OS X for the past few years. Since I moved to Prime Focus I hit a brick wall when it comes to our corporate email and that brick wall has a name: Outlook Web Access. Slow, lumbering and exasperating as with all Microsoft products. What made the situation worse is that Exchange 2003 is unsupported in Snow Leopard (but supported perfectly well on the iPhone!)

I downloaded and installed a trial of Office for Mac to use Entourage and immediately hated the software. Uninstall and eradicate. After loads of searching I found DavMail, an open source solution for Exchange 2003 and Mail. DavMail sits in between Mail.app and the Exchange server and acts as a bridge. The config instructions need to be followed carefully but it works perfectly. And it has full support for Global Address Lists and iCal events as well.

Thanks to a tip on MacOSXHints, in Snow Leopard if you need to know how much space is available on the internal drive, just highlight the drive icon on the desktop and then press space to invoke Quick Look. It’ll display the drive size and remaining space.

According to John Nack, Photoshop’s Principal Product Manager, all Adobe CS5 applications will be fully 64-bit on OSX! There will not doubt be tons of new features but I’m very impressed with what will go into Photoshop as you can see from this technology demo:

And Adobe will finally kill their incredibly hostile installers and use Apple’s robust PKG format. To add icing on the cake, the licensing errors that many people faced is due for a change as well. With CS5, product licensing will not stop the application from launching and will display a serial number re-entry interface.

The product suite is slated to be released in April 2010.

Since the update to Snow Leopard I find myself using a feature that was introduced in Leopard which I never used very much: Stacks. Finally, I can navigate the hierarchy of a folder or drive in the Dock quickly and easily. In Leopard I usually switched to the View as List option and avoided Stacks altogether. Thanks to this hint on MacOSXhints.com I now have a hybrid view which I really like: a navigable list which looks slick.

Just type this in the Terminal and you’ll see what I mean:

defaults write com.apple.dock use-new-list-stack -bool YES; killall Dock

Click on the image above for a full-sized view. Of course if you’d like to switch back to the default view just replace the YES to NO in the command above.

I was a little bit disoriented with Quicktime X, to be honest. What, no export preferences? Only Sharing to iTunes? The UI looks very nice and the promise of GPU-accelerated playback is theoretically good, but what about 1080p MKV files playing natively? Quicktime X doesn’t recognise anything besides MP4 or iTunes’ M4V files. Perian was a constant presence in Leopard but a second-tier citizen with 10.6. Until now!

Thanks to the info in this thread on the cocoa forge board and the latest version of Perian, this utility will let Quicktime X recognise and play .mkv files. Front Row will happily play AVI files (as long as you have Flip4Mac installed) and SD MKV files but not 720p or 1080 movies unfortunately.

Of course, there’s always Plex which plays all movie codecs flawlessly without the need for Perian.

I’ve been searching Google, combing the Apple discussion boards with no clue or direction on how to fix this bug. Then this morning I had an idea. I thought it must be a Safari plugin… and it was. I’ve been using a flash blocker called ClickToFlash and it was the culprit. When it intercepts YouTube videos it sets them all to Autoplay and they all start playing. Thankfully, it’s been reported as a bug in the ClickToFlash support board.

Once I removed the plugin from the ~/Library/Internet Plugins folder, Safari behaves normally as seen here:

UPDATE: As I mentioned before, there is a support ticket to fix the autoplay bug in ClickToFlash 1.5fc2 and there is now a workaround as well. In the ClickToFlash Settings window, make sure Load H.264 Videos from YouTube is unchecked.

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.