If you’ve been listening to MacBreak Weekly (specifically this episode), you’ll know that Leo and many others have had lots of compatability issues with the upgrade. Most of these relate to legacy APIs which Apple has removed from the OS in it’s drive to speed up and slim down the software.

If you’re thinking of installing Snow Leopard, this list is well worth a look before you take the plunge!

You can view the Wiki here.

Unable to mount database

I checked in the MacOS X board on the Skype Community for possible answers. Although nothing worked, I thought one was worth reposting here, as well as my eventual solution.

(if you look at the board, ignore the one about reinstalling the Mac. That’s just crazy!)

The most effective solution on the board (given the amount of people sayin thank you!) seems to be do delete your Skype preferences. To do that…

1. Close Skype
2. From the Desktop, double-click on your hard drive (usually called ‘Macintosh HD’)
3. Navigate to “Library” > “Application Support”
4. Drag the “Skype” folder to the Trash
5. Restart Skype

Pretty simple then.

As I said though, that didn’t work for me. What did was MUCH simpler… I just restarted the Mac, and it all worked fine again!

For those in the dark, Snow Leopard is the new version of Mac OS X. It’s leaner, meaner and MUCH smaller - ie, it takes up much less disk space.

Most of the changes are “under the hood”, so you won’t notice much change. But reports suggest that the new version is more of a service pack. Lots of fixes and improvements, not many new features.

That’s causing some people to suggest it’s a bit cheeky of Apple to be charging for what basically amounts to a service pack, but for 30quid, I’m willing to give it a go.

I will however reserve judgement until I get my copy installed. Full report soon.

It’s dead simple, but I thought it might be worth mentioning as it’s not immediately obvious to switchers from Windows.

Anyway, to right click on MacBook (or any Mac with a sinle button mouse), simply hold down the Apple key and click.

Easy peasy!

New iPhone features include…

• Lanscape keyboard (yay!)
• Peer-to-peer gaming (linking 2 iPods/iPhones over wifi for network games)
• Buy stuff from the iTunes store over WIFI (I thought you could already?)

In addition, iPod Touch users also get the following…

• Shake to Shuffle
• Parental Controls (so you can lock your parents out, presumably?)
• Automatic WIFI login
• Push Notifications even when apps aren’t running
• iTunes Store account creation

There’s even more, as you can see by visiting http://www.apple.com/iphone/softwareupdate/

Sadly, the update costs $9.99 or (£5.99 in the UK) - not too bad, but free would have been better! Definitely worth the update in my opinion.

UPDATE Great article - “iPhone 3.0 Update - 10 Hidden Features“

One thing that Twitter does allow is hash tags. Hash tags allow you to tag a tweet (a Twitter message) with a phrase, allowing other to search for all tweets relating to a certain topic. Examples of popular hash tags include #followfriday, #blogmonday and #startrek.

But you may have noticed… there is no # key on the Mac keyboard!! So how to do you use hash tags? Well…. the # can be found by holding ALT and pressing 3 on the top row of the keyboard (pressing 3 on the numeric keypad doesn’t work).

It’s a small thing, but I’m really glad to have # back in my life….

First of all, always try the usual methods. If you’re mac has an eject key on a keyboard, press that and hold it down for a couple of seconds, until you see the eject graphic on-screen. The second method is to drag the CD icon on the desktop into the Trash. Both of these methods should eject the disc.

If both those methods fail, you can try one of the following…

• Shut down the comput and start it back up whilst holding down the mouse button (the left button if yours is a multi-button mouse). This might take time, but keep the mouse button held until either the disc is ejected or your Mac’s login screen (or desktop) is displayed.
• If you have ToaSst installed, you can try clicking “EJECT DISC” from the Toast menu bar.
• Try the EJECT button in iTunes.
• Open Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility), click on the CD drive in the left-hand pane, and click Eject.
• Some Macs have a paperclip hole on the front into which you can insert a straightened paper clip or a pin to manually eject the disc. Mac Minis DEFINITELY don’t have this.
• Open Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal) and type drutil tray eject <RETURN> to open the CD tray. Close the tray again by typing drutil tray close <RETURN>.
• If your Mac has an EJECT key on the keyboard, restart the computer holding down the OPTION key until the Startup Disk selection screen appears. Release the OPTION key and press the EJECT key.

Hopefully one of the above methods will enable you to retrieve your CD/DVD without too much hassle! And if you’re interested, it turned out there wasn’t a CD stuck in my mates Mac at all - I guess its always worth checking that first

1. Click on the widget that’s dying on you to give it “focus”
2. Hold the APPLE key and press R
3. The widget will do a little an animation, and should be back working within 30 seconds

And that’s it!

OK, so I’m a bit late on this one! Forgive me, it’s been a busy month…

The annual keynote from Steve Jobs @ the MacWorld Expo is usually something to get very excited about. There’s always something very new and very cool announced, and there’s always a big buzz.

This year was the first time I’d followed the buzz via Twitter (we cancelled Sky TV, so I couldn’t watch it on CNBC or anything..). It was quite incredible to watch the volume of Tweets coming through solely regarding MacWorld. “super cool” as Jobs might say.

Unfortunately, Steve didn’t say anything. He pulled out due to his health (get well Steve!) and was replaced by Phil Schillier, who is (apparently) the “Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing”. Nice.

Let’s just say… he’s not Steve Jobs.

Although to be fair, he didn’t really have anything to be Jobs-y about - no real new products, no visions, no slam dunking of the opposition. In fact, the best he had to work with was new version of iLife and iWork. Not exactly the iPhone, really, is it?

Maybe I’m being too hard. It’s not Phil’s fault Apple had nothing cool to show us. All we can do is look forward to MacWorld 2010, and hopefully the return of Steve Jobs!

You can watch Phil’s Keynote speech here.

Apparently, they are trying to break the record for a number of downloads in a 24hr period, so you may want to go download it and contribute to the record attempt.

There’s also an official FF3 launch party in New York, which you may wish to attend. More details courtesy of A VC.

What are you waiting for? Download Firefox 3 now!