• Wired 1997: 101 Ways to Save Apple
  I came across this old article written by Wired way back in 1997 on 101 ways to save Apple. Some are silly, but I’m impressed how many of these actually came true.
• Lifehacker Top 10: Top 10 iTunes Smart Playlists
• Macworld | Hands on with Apple TV, Take Two
  A decent review of the new Apple TV
• Apple Releases Aperture 2
• Flash on iPhone is just around the corner | Gear Live
• Apple applies for trademark extension relating to gaming
• Safari is about to get crazy fast | Computerworld Blogs

For any who has seen my posts on other OSX text editors such as TextMate and MacVim but were unhappy and were looking something with a little more power, extensibility and features, than Aquamacs, the Cocoa port of Emacs is likely for you. Emacs over years (first released and still developed by Richard Stallman since 1976) has built-in many, many features, however some people don’t like that and prefer the quickness of Vim. I myself like to get as much of something as I can get, no matter how much effort and it takes, and Emacs gives me more than Vim can. Another plus for Emacs is that at its core is a powerful implementation of its own Lisp version allowing the initiated to achieve even more power than what something like Vim Script can right now.

Aquamacs gives you all the power of Emacs while giving the beauty of Cocoa allowing Aquamacs to fit right into OSX. Try it out for yourself here.

Adium’s approach to statuses is probably the best I have seen in any instant messenger clients. It functions excellently and consistently across all of your chat applications, although it is a little glitchy from time to time. There are heavy customization preferences in the Advanced pane of Adium’s preferences, and you can maintain an endless list of statuses in the Status pane of the preferences.

I recently discovered an often unheard of feature in Adium’s statuses that makes it possible to take a previously saved status and edit it temporarily. To do this, simply click on Statuses in the menu bar, click on the Adium menu bar item, or Control-Click the Adium icon in the dock and select Statuses. After that, hold down the Option key, and click on the status from which you want to create the new, temporary one out of, and a small window will pop up for you to put the information for the status in.

If you’ve ever used a Sony Ericcson phone, they have a feature similar to this for making calls that allows you to edit a phone number before calling.

Apparently there have been some people who aren’t getting the toggle to have have the translucent menu bar or not when they update to 10.5.2. For those people all you need to do is run this command:


sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables' -dict 'CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE' 0


then restart and the option should appear.

[Via: macosxhints.com]

Another neat addition to Stacks is the ability to choose between different viewing options. Fan is for the smaller folders (a single curving column), and Grid is for larger folders (just a grid of icons on a transparent background). The newest option is List, which is a popup scrollable menu which is used for the largest folders such as your Applications folder.

The default setting for the above viewing options is Automatic which chooses the appropriate setting based on the amount of items you have within the folder, but if you must have the Fan or Grid for the bling-factor, you may choose a different setting.

Finally, there’s the newly added ability to choose how you want the items to be sorted whether it be by Name, Date Modified, etc.

My main complaint about the original Stacks was that the you couldn’t change the icons without some degree of elbow grease (many reviewers seemed to agree). Apparently, we complained loudly enough and Apple listened. All in all, the new Stacks are a brilliant improvement upon an already excellent OS

Note: This is not a mac tip, feel free to skip.

Social news and networking is all the rage, with a new social media site popping up nearly every week. Many of us already use the big sites, so I thought we could share our contact information and make a few friends in the Mac scene.

I’ll go first:

1. Facebook: MacTips Fan Page or Brad Jasper’s Profile (That’s me)
2. Twitter Profile - I just started using Twitter, decided to see what all the hype is about. I’ve heard the true value comes in the form of group discussion. We’ll see.
3. Digg Profile
4. Reddit Profile

I haven’t been very active on any of my profiles with the exception of Facebook, hopefully this begins to change that.

So, what is your social contact information?

If you’re a Firefox user you’re probably always on the lookout for great extensions. ExtremeTech has came up with probably the most useful and genuine list I’ve ever seen. Here’s the link, it is comprised up of four different lists:

1. 10 Best Firefox Web Developer Extensions (listed below)
2. 10 Ways for Better Surfing
3. 10 Useful Information and Reference Extensions
4. 10 Best Media Extensions

I just want to add three that I use constantly; those are the Del.icio.us and the TinyURL extensions, and for frequent forum posters or users of Wordpress and other Internet WYSIWYG editors then I really recommend It’s All Text!. Basically it opens up the current forum in your favorite text editor and then when you save the document it automatically refreshes the form and you’re good to go.

Just in case you can’t find where the new setting is to change the translucent setting in 10.5.2, it’s in System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver and uncheck “Translucent Menu Bar”.

This allows you to go from this:

to this:

This update includes minor bug fixes in Mail and iChat, as well as a bunch of other things. But most importantly, it provides you with the option of disabling the transparent menu bar!

To get the update, open System Preferences and click on Software Update, then click “Check Now”

[via Apple]

A partition is a division of your hard drive. What it does is it takes one part of your hard drive and turns it into another virtual hard drive of its own. Say you have a 120 GB hard drive. You could partition it into a 40 GB drive and a separate 80 GB drive.

To partition a drive, open Disk Utility and highlight the disk you wish to partition. Then click the partition tab and click the “+” at the bottom left corner of the box (not window). Then drag the bar in between the blue section (used space) and white section (free space) to the desired size and click Apply and voíla, you have a partition