What I like about Snow Leopard

I was hesitant at first to install the new Snow Leopard as I have heard a lot of about the inconsistencies, bugs and quirks of this new operating system from Apple. However, after the release of the 10.6.1 update, it looked attractive enough that I went and bought the €25 upgrade (FTW price!). It was lying another week or two waiting for the right moment, and it finally came some time ago. Here are just a few things that I liked about this years first Snow.

Setting up Snow Leopard for the Web Developer

I recently wrote about setting up a mac for the web developer. However, that was still in the times of Leopard 10.5. With the upgrade to Snow Leopard 10.6 some things have changed, and I wanted to described the problems I had.

Setting up Mac for ease of use

It’s always a though call to install all the necessary (and preferably free) apps on your mac to have a pleasant experience at all times. Fortunately, due to crappy Apple HDD drives, I’ve been going though this quite a lot. Thus, I’ll show you what nice apps you should install right after you start up your mac (if you haven’t done it yet) – they are so worth it…

Setting up Mac for the Web Developer

Leopard comes with tons of stuff for developers, but out-of-the-box it ain’t quite configured to get them running in an instant. This article goes through the configuration process of Leopard and some of its bundled applications, to get the most out of it and create a nice web development environment. I will focus on setting up Apache with MySQL and Perl (and PHP, which I rarely use) plus some recommended apps. If you are a python developer, please share your configuration routine in the comments.

Apple hard disk failures or how I stopped worrying and love the SSD

Ever since Apple tried to pursue mainstream, things went bad for them. It’s not like their computers didn’t crash before — that’s normal. But recently, they started to crash a lot. I had a late 2007 white MacBook with a 160GB hard drive. Well, exactly after 12 months, this drive failed me, a few days before the warranty expiration. It started clicking and died. They changed it for free to an even crappier one — it failed too, a few days ago, exactly after 6 months, and out of nowhere. Similarly, started clicking and just died.

Windows 7 on MacBook first look

Installing Windows 7 RC1 32-bit on my late 2007 MacBook was a piece of cake. Boot Camp manager created a 32 GB partition, installation from the DVD was quick and smooth, and the system was running nicely even without the drivers from Apple. The decision by Microsoft to release an almost complete product for free, with a one-year license, is a great opportunity to get used to the next iteration of Windows systems. Let’s have a look at it.

4 weeks with Safari 4 Beta

Four weeks have passed since Apple released Safari 4 Beta, and I have been using it since. There are things I like about this new browser, and even after this short time I think I couldn’t live without some of the features. On the other hand, a few things are irritating and could be fixed. I’ve been using the previous version of Safari, so the transition was not painful. But even for Apple, who is very picky about user interfaces, Safari 4 is revolutionary.

Extract and change file icons in Leopard

There exists an extremely easy way to manipulate icons in Leopard (and previous OS X versions too), just by using copy-paste between files and folders. Using this technique you can quickly customize your disk items, as well as extract rich graphics for further use or simply inspiration. With just a few clicks you can get these sweet looking designs in an up to 512x512 PNG file. Here’s how you do it.

Display Mac colors as on PC using gamma correction

If you are a web designer, you probably noticed already that colors of your design differ on Macs and PCs. It’s mainly due to the fact that on Macs, the default gamma correction value for LCD displays is 1.8, while on PCs — it’s 2.2. As a result, PCs have deeper blacks, higher contrast and are less pale than Macs. Apple is going to change that in the next iteration of their OS X, but in fact, you could change that yourself, even way back in the Panther times. Here’s how you do it in current Leopard.

Leopard global ‘Open file with’ setting

Apple Mac OS X 10.5, nicely called Leopard, is one of the best operating systems I had chance to work with. The others are Tiger and Panther, 10.4 and 10.3 respectively. You see a pattern here, and although I am very fond of XP and actually kind of like Vista, I’m not an MS fan. But I acknowledge the pros and cons of each of them. One irritating thing Leopard has is that when you select a document to open with a specific application, then even though you choose to always open it with that app, it doesn’t propagate to all documents of that kind. Unlike in systems from Redmond, you have to change that property in the document’s info. I’ll show you where it is.