Tiger

If you are among the two people who read this blog on a regular basis, you might have noticed my entry Worst. Mac OS X Problem. Ever. from exactly two weeks ago.

Yes, I'm writing this on a Windows XP notebook, it has happened again. Read More

Today will go down in my personal Mac OS X history as the day I've encountered my worst problem with this operating system and my Mac in general. It all started this morning when I got up and sat down at my desk to check up on my emails. Mail did work just fine, but the Finder locked up. After a few minutes, the Finder was still not working again, so I decided to restart it down using the Command-Option-Esc shortcut. It would not restart, so I decided to log out and back in again, which did not work - I clicked the "logout" menu item, but there was no response. So I rebooted my Mac and went off to get bread rolls and milk for breakfast. When I got back to my Mac, nothing was working anymore. Read More

If you install the XCode developer tools (current version 2.1 can be downloaded for free) you get access to the processor preference pane which now offers a menu item you can use to disable your second CPU, in case you've got a Dual-CPU PowerMac.

Since I've installed XCode 2.1 recently, I've noted a small entry labeled "Show Processor Palette" in the menu item's drop down list. If you click it, you get a neat little tool to watch your processor usage (I know, there are some out there with a better feature set, but none are as simple or elegant as this one) with the ability to disable the CPU, as mentioned above. Have a look for yourself:
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While browsing Softpedia's Mac section, a neat little application got my attention. WCode claims to be an application for developing widgets - let's see it there is some truth to that. Read More

All those Panther users out there who do not want to upgrade to Tiger or cannot afford it at this point, there's a light at the end of the tunnel - you may be missing out on Spotlight, Core Image and stuff like that, but at least you can use Dashboard widgets now. Read More

Today, Apple released the first update to Mac OS X Tiger. The update labeled 10.4.1 comes only two and a half weeks after the initial release of Tiger since it has been in the pipe before the new Mac OS X version even shipped. Read More

...my favourite IRC client on OS X, MacIrssi, runs on Tiger. This is already a few days old, actually, but I rarely get to check stuff like that during the week.

Those of you who write their own HTML as opposed to using WYSIWYG editors like Macromedia Dreamweaver know the hassle it is to find a good, free editor to use on a day-to-day basis. I love vim, but let's be honest - it is not the most useful editor for work on HTML files in a GUI environment. One of the better fitted editors is Taco HTML Edit. Read More

I find myself using Dashboard a lot these days, since I like Apple's intention to have information available in the background, accessible with a keypress (or by moving my mouse in the lower left corner of my desktop). Now that it has been almost two weeks since Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) has been released, I found quite a lot of widgets that I learned to appreciate. Read More

Since Apple does not provide a way to delete widgets (other than deleting them in the Finder or in the Terminal), you might find a little piece of software called Widget Manager pretty useful. Widget Manager provides a pretty good way of managing your widget collection and allows you to delete unwanted widgets. Read More

Ok, so I finally know what my first widget will be. I won't let you know it beforehand, but it is certainly going to be pretty neat once it's done. As it is going to have a lot of functionality, it might be a while before I actually finish it - I've got lots of work to do this week, so I might only get around to work on it on the weekend. Read More

As Stephan Meyers reports in an article about his zaptastic widget, Dashboard's easy installation method for widgets downloaded using Apple's own Safari browser might pose a security risk to the average user. Several shortcomings in Dashboard make the situation even worse. Read More