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!
For the past three years or so, I’ve been collecting an eclectic series of desktop backgrounds for myself and I thought it would be a good idea to share this. All my current wallpaper choices are here. Enjoy!
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.
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.
The last few posts here have been very tech-heavy and I feel I need to redress the balance a bit. For years I’ve been an avid Graphic Novel reader… okay, call them grown-up comics if you want to! I still find myself re-reading The Sandman every few months and I must have bought the series a decade ago. Other favourites include a Sandman-offshoot character, Lucifer, pictured above, and Preacher. And let’s not forget the fantastic Watchmen series.
I do have the actual books themselves but also have digital versions on both my iPhone and MacBook Pro using two similar comic viewers: ComicZeal on the iPhone and ComicBookLover on the Mac. Both applications have utilised the best features of the platforms they run on. If I want to have a single page-view on my Mac, I turn the laptop over on its side and ComicBookLover will present the perfect view, thanks to the built-in accelerometer. On my iPhone, ComicZeal will let me zoom in and drag along the panels to read the story. Highly satisfying.
For the past few months, I’ve been dabbling with programming on the Mac but I haven’t had the time to really dive in. I was trying to explain to someone how it worked and realised that I couldn’t really articulate how. Therefore, this will be a series of posts on how I intend to build applications using Xcode, Apple’s free development environment.
There are plenty of excellent guides but I found that they all had one flaw: obsolescence. I would be following a guide until it reaches a point where the window, method or button isn’t there in my version of Xcode. And I come to a screeching halt. Lots of the guides have been written for previous versions of Xcode and haven’t been updated.
Again, I intend to document my journey through development on my Mac and iPhone. I’ll start with writing a simple word processor, SimpleWord.
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.
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!
Dateline is a free application which puts a month-view calendar line on the desktop and it does that beautifully. I love minimalism in applications (well, in everything really) and this app is prefect in that sense. You can customise the colours and width of the calendar, as well as whether the calendar is displayed above all windows or at the desktop level. Double-clicking any date will take you to iCal.
Here’s how it look on different wallpapers on my Mac. Click for a larger view.
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