Finer Things in Mac

Safari Top Sites no longer blindly runs into hotspot pay walls

David Chartier — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:46:23 +0000

When opening Safari at a pay wall hotspot (Starbucks, etc.) in the past, Top Sites would blindly attempt to check for updates on all of your sites, only to replace them with icons of the pay wall. Now, after version 4.0.5, it waits until you have a connection out to the ‘net before updating the icons. Presumably, some logic was added to verify that an update is coming from the actual URL listed for a Top Site, and not just whatever URL Safari’s updater runs into.

The new Apple Remote and its unibody construction

David Chartier — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:53:04 +0000

Apple’s new remote for MacBooks and Apple TV is nothing revolutionary, but its construction is impressive for a remote. Apple gave it the unibody treatment: besides the three button areas, the IR transmitter, and the battery door on the bottom, there are no glued seams or screws anywhere. It is truly a unibody Apple Remote.

Easily figure out which windows are minimized

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:12:28 +0000

Application windows that are minimized are indicated in the application’s Window menu with a diamond icon. If you have a lot of documents open in an app (say, while working on a project in an image or text editor), and a decent portion minimized, this small mark can be quite useful for tracking down the one you need.

Boot Camp: Easily restart into Windows without changing your Startup disk

David Chartier — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:00:32 +0000

If you run Windows in Boot Camp, you don’t have to change your Startup disk or stick around to hold the Option key every time you restart. A utility called Flipside can perform a one-time restart from Mac OS X into Windows. When you’re finished, simply restart from Windows, and your Mac will boot back into Mac OS X.

Flipside is donationware and should work on any Boot Camp-compatible Mac.

Dock respects custom icons in folder Stacks

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:00:52 +0000

If you add your Home folder to the Dock and have it display as a Stack, the Stack will render any custom folder colors in the Stack (right-click a folder in the Dock and choose the “Stack” option). For example, in the screen shot above, there is a custom color applied to the Documents folder. You can also see that custom folder icon in the Home folder Stack. This appears to work in both 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard.

Mail automatically inserts a comma when pasting addresses

David Chartier — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:00:19 +0000

If you paste addresses into Mail’s To, Cc, or Bcc fields, it will eliminate some tedious formatting duties by automatically inserting a comma and a space between each address. This way you can keep pasting in each individual address one after the other, since Mail is smart enough to separate them properly. Very handy when drafting a message to an email list from addresses that you have to copy from other apps, a document, or your browser.

I am not sure how long Mail has had this feature.

Restore your last browsing session in Safari

Louis C — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:30:52 +0000

Unlike Firefox, Safari doesn’t prompt the user to re-open the last session. But Safari users can do exactly that by going to History > Reopen All Windows From Last Session.

Why Safari doesn’t prompt the user to do this with a popup or offer it as a preference is beyond me.

Billings invoice preview allows multi-touch gestures

David Chartier — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:54:33 +0000

Billings, Marketcircle Inc.’s time tracking and billing app, allows various multi-touch gestures in its invoice preview areas. You can pinch-to-zoom and two-finger-scroll to get a better look at invoice details.

iMovie 09 can use a secondary display

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:00:05 +0000

Once you hook a second monitor up to your Mac, a new item appears at the bottom of iMovie 09’s Window Menu – Viewer on Secondary Display.

Once chosen you have a full screen viewer on one monitor and a simple horizontally split window with Events and Projects on the other. A very productive arrangement indeed.

Time Capsule can archive to an external drive

David Chartier — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:41:08 +0000

Apple’s Time Capsule is a feature-packed router with a built-in hard drive for network storage and Time Machine backups. In case you want to backup your backups, it offers the option to archive the contents of the internal drive to an external drive plugged in through the Time Capsule’s USB port. The router will continue to perform its network and routing duties during the archive process, but you will not be able to do things like restart the router or update its firmware. Fortunately, the Time Capsule handles the archive all on its own; after starting it from the Airport Utility on your Mac, you can sleep, restart, or shutdown whenever you want. You can also start Airport Utility during the archive to check on its status.