DRY: now for updating your status

A quickie: Statz let's you update your status on a variety of IM clients as well as Tumblr, Twitter.

And remember: Don't repeat yourself!

Some not so obvious Leopard features

I've now had some more time to play with Leopard, and I've found a few features that aren't immediately obvious, at least they weren't to me. So, in no particular order:

The slideshow feature in Finder isn't gone. It looks like it has been replaced by Quick Look but holding down the Option (Alt) key when opening the context menu brings back slideshow. I like this much better for viewing a set of pictures or browsing through some movies.

Some Apple applications have special support for Time Machine. This must be described somewhere prominent but I missed it for a good while. Just click on the Time Machine icon in the dock while Mail or Address Book are in the foreground... I like the feature but I don't like the way it is invoked. So far, clicking on an icon in the dock made the application active. Nothing else. Now, however, the result of clicking on an icon in the dock becomes contextual, depending on which other application is active.

Preview now has support for annotations and other markup. Just use the customize toolbar function and have a look around.

There are a few new visualisers in iTunes. And they look good!

Last but now least, change the timezone in one of the dashboard world clock widgets and observe how the hands are animated. I guess, we'll see a lot more gratuitous animations now that core animation has been released.

Don't worry about TimeMachine partitions

When I upgraded to Leopard I also bought an external harddrive for TimeMachine backups. Now, I want to use the drive with two different laptops and because it's quite big I also wouldn't mind keeping some space for a Tiger install to test my software on that. Reading the forums it became quite obvious that each TimeMachine backup should get its own partition, and here's where the agony began: How large should these partitions be? Yes, you can change partition sizes but if you want to keep the contents intact there are severe limitations. So, you starting thinking about the ordering of the partitions, too.

Luckily, I stumbled across another forum thread, in which people discuss copying TimeMachine backups. Somehow, maybe because of all the hard-link magic, I had assumed this wasn't possible but it turns out that the restore facility in Disk Utility can handle it. This means that even if you get your partition sizes wrong initially, you won't lose your backups when you change them later. You obviously need some temporary space somewhere else, though.

Oh, and if like me you did at some point delete that funny .000d8322fed6 (or similar) file in the root directory of your TimeMachine partition, help's here.

Leopard Spots: Quick Look at ZIP Files

The first of the Leopard-specific entries. This site has a Finder plug-in called "Zip Quick Look". You download it, copy it into ~/Library/QuickLook or /Library/QuickLook. Then, in Finder, when you have a ZIP file selected, you can press the SPACEBAR and see something like this:



Way cool.

Leopard Customization Command Line Reference

Just stumbled across this list of command line ways to customize Leopard. Not all are useful (IMO), but others might be interested. I don't believe most of these will work on Tiger, so don't bother unless you've upgraded:

http://macosxtips.co.uk/index_files/terminal-commands-for-hidden-settings-in-leopard.html

Neal's Lint: The Giant Lint Ball

I've been writing about lint recently, and my co-worker Eric showed me this site full of useful lint. There's lots of cool stuff here -- enough to fill your menubar with enough lint to start crowding your menu items off!

Neal's Lint: Delibar

I use del.icio.us to keep track of my bookmarks, and I've installed the requisite buttons in my browsers. But there's a little piece of lint that provides even better access: delibar. It creates a lint item that give you ready access to your bookmarks and, more importantly, instant keyboard access to the list. It also has some handy stuff like the "recent posts" to quickly grab the stuff you've added recently.