haniblog

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.

Ever since I installed Snow Leopard, I’ve been battling with a strange bug in Safari. If I go to a website with several embedded videos, they all start playing simultaneously. I’d been in the head of the page with no video present in the current view when suddenly all the audio streams start playing and overlapping each other. Cue heart attack. Here’s what happens:

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.

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.