haniblog

I just wrote another Flame Expressions tutorial on how to animate an element travelling in a perfect circle without having to manually trace a path. Take a look!

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.

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!

If you have an original or a 3G iPhone and upgraded to the latest 3.0 software you must be one happy bunny. Aside from the top-tier features in what has become a brand new phone there are lots of little changes and not-so-obvious features I found. So here’s the Little iPhone Features Guide™ (mini version):

My Number

Entering your phone number in Settings > Phone > My Number will make it visible in the Contacts or Address Book apps. All you have to do is go to the top of your contacts and pull the list down. Above the Search field you should see your number appear. Nice.

Share Contact

Another new 3.0 feature is the ability to send your contacts to someone else over MMS. In the address book there’s now a Share Contact button. Tapping that will bring up the Messages app with the contact information enclosed.

Maps + Compass

This is a 3GS feature only and it’s pretty impressive. Tapping on the “Where am I” icon at the bottom right of the Maps view takes you to where you are using a combination of GPS and WiFi lookup. Tap on it again and the map rotates to show you the direction you’re facing. According to the Apple iPhone how-to pages, Maps will display a cone from the blue dot which denotes the accuracy of the reading – the smaller the angle, the greater the accuracy.

From time to time you may get a strange error whenever the compass is used, like the image below. I have to say I did get strange looks from people when I was waving my iPhone around like a divining rod!

Data Detectors

In the Notes and Mail apps any telephone number or address is automagically recognised. Tapping on a phone number will pop up an alert asking if the number should be dialled. If an address is detected and selected, the Maps app will launch and take you to that address. Very cool.

I’m sure there’s more and I’m keen to try out the Nike+ integration but the 3.0 upgrade is full of changes. It’s always the little things…