Mac OS X simplified the font smoothing settings (anti-aliasing) for Mac OS and all apps running within it, but for some the change is unwelcome. If you feel like your screen looks different, or that fonts look a little unusual and text looks different too, it probably does, and the change can be very profound on certain LCD displays.
Want to find out how to see all startup and login app launches and scripts on a Mac? This article will walk through that process. Gone are the days of Mac OS System 9 where all startup items were sitting nicely in a system folder labeled ‘Startup’, now with the Unix undercore of Mac OS X things are a bit more complicated, with some startup and login scripts and apps launching beyond the easily accessible ‘Login Items’ preference pane.
We’ll review where these startup, login, and auto-launch agents, plists, daemons, and applications may reside in Mac OS X. This can be helpful for troubleshooting, privacy, and security reasons.
TTYtter is a rather fun command line based Twitter client. Written in Perl, it’s got all the essential ingredients needed for basic Twitter needs without ever leaving a Terminal window.
Running TTYtter is easy enough, it just needs your login information and off it goes. You can either run it through perl with:
perl /path/to/ttytter.pl -user=username:password
or make the script executable:
chmod +x ttytter.pl
and run as usual:
./ttytter -user:username
Note: if you don’t want to specify a password at the command prompt (security reasons, personal preference, against your marital vows, whatever) just leave it out and specify a username, the TTYtter client will ask for your password once executed.
Typing anything and hitting return will tweet that immediately, those who follow the OS X Daily Twitter stream probably saw my nonsense tweets last night as I played with the script. The actual command structure will be familiar to IRC users, commands are executed with / then the command, /help brings up help and commands, /quit exits the program, /refresh displays all new tweets, /replies shows replies to your tweets, etc.
TTYtter developer home
Download TTYtter now
[ AssimovT @ Google Buzz via Buzzzy ]
If you’re anything like me you’re curious about the beautiful background picture featured on the iPad displays in all the press photos of the original iPad, so I dug around a bit and got some answers about this now widely distributed amazing photograph that was shown as the wallpaper on the first iPad.
The now famous image is titled “Pyramid Lake (at Night)” and is a 2004 photo by photographer Richard Misrach, taken at Pyramid Lake in Nevada.
ArtInfo.com has a pretty good story on the nice picture and Apple’s decision to use it, apparently at the last minute without the artist even knowing himself:
“I was in bed watching Inglorious Bastards when I got a call from Jeffrey FraenkeL, my dealer in San Francisco, and he said, ‘Do you know what’s going on live here?'”
…”The funny thing is that I don’t even have a contract with them yet, so they must have decided on it at the eleventh hour,” Misrach says. “I’m sure they’ll send me one quickly now. But I’m very happy, I’m sure it’s fine, and the terms are good.”
That sounds like Apple’s legendary secrecy at it’s finest, even down to it’s licensing of images. I’m sure Richard Misrach is going to have many more fans and licensing deals in the near future, as Apple has catapulted his work onto the world stage.
According to the photographer, this is the first time he has licensed an image for commercial use in his 40-year career–a deal he agreed to because he’s a fan of the company. ‘What’s funny is that for years I actually used the photo as my own screensaver,” Misrach says. “So I guess they know what they’re doing.”
Apple certainly does have an eye for pleasing imagery, but I haven’t been able to dig up a high resolution image of the picture to use as a desktop. I’m sure in time one will appear with at least the resolution of the iPad at 1024×768.
And apparently we aren’t the only people curious about this stunning image, NPR also wanted to know the story behind it too!
Oh, and if you’re looking for another amazing iPad background picture of a starry sky, look no further than our wallpaper posts.
Update: OS X Daily reader Deadmilkman posted this picture in the comments, it comes pretty close to being a high res version of the iPad background picture. If you look carefully it’s actually the smaller picture just repeated, reflected against each other, and smoothed together with Photoshop, but it looks pretty nice nonetheless.
[ via ArtInfo.com ]
Changing the location of your home directory is pretty easy in Mac OS X, and it can be desired for a variety of situations to store a home folder elsewhere on a Mac, or even on another drive. This is valid and works the same in all versions of OS X.
Facebook opened Facebook Chat up to third party instant message clients by using the Jabber protocol, which means you can now use Facebook Chat seamlessly from inside iChat. That means if you have a Mac with iChat, you can easily talk to your Facebook friends without being logged into the Facebook site, and instead communicate through the iChat app to send messages. Cool huh? Yes, yes it is.
Let’s learn how to set up Facebook chat with iChat, it only takes a few moments.
If you’re a developer (or anyone else) you may quickly get fed up with the Crash Reporter Dialogue box that pops up when an app melts down and crashes in Mac OS X. If you’re pestered by the crash reporter dialog window, then you can quickly turn the window on and off with a defaults command string.
Do note that turning off the Crash Reporter dialog window has no effect on crash reports, which are still visible in system logs and the Console app. It simply stops the window appearing in the Mac OS X GUI.
Mac OS has come a long ways since System 1.0, and there’s no better way to see just how far we’ve come than to look at screenshots. From the earliest years to the latest versions, it’s a journey that is rather remarkable over three decades of development and refinement.
We’ve included some of the great pictures below from earliest versions of Mac OS to now. Then, Francesco Mugnai went further, having compiled quite a comprehensive collection of screenshots that chronicles the evolution of the Mac operating system, it’s a fun walk through time, so check it out if you like to reminisce about the good old days of SE/30’s and LCII’s!
Are you wondering if your Mac is 64-bit architecture or 32-bit architecture? Well you might not be alone. The good news is it’s pretty easy to determine what CPU architecture your Mac is using.
You can either focus on the model year of the Mac, or the CPU architecture and processor chip itself. The most precise measure will be focusing on the CPU.
At its core, the file and folder explorer of OS X known as Finder is essentially an application like any other on the Mac. Accordingly, users can quit the Mac OS X Finder in a few different ways which we’ll cover here, but perhaps the fastest way is to just launch the Terminal app and use the killall command, which is located in /Applications/Utilities/, once the Terminal is open just type or paste the following string at the command line:
killall Finder
Hit the Return key and this will kill the Finder process, which will then automatically relaunch as a fresh new Finder process. This is a common trick to force many defaults commands to take effect, and it can be a valuable troubleshooting technique if the Finder is misbehaving for one reason or another, or just outright crashing. Once the Finder has exited, the Terminal app does not need to stay open and can be quit as usual.
If the command line isn’t your thing, you can also try the Force Quit approach, which is achieved entirely through the more user-friendly GUI.
Read more »
Have an iPhone? Like to use gloves to keep your hands warm in the winter? Annoyed that you have to take your gloves off to use the iPhone? Keep those gloves on, because there’s a really goofy solution that has surfaced out of South Korea!
Yes indeed, innovative Korean iPhone users are driving a 40% increase in snack sausage sales because they’ve figured out the little meat sticks can be used as an iPhone stylus in cold weather… no really. Micro sausages are actually effective to use as a stylus on the touch screen, apparently. And no, we haven’t had a chance to actually try this out.
Read more »
In some situations, you may wish to disable access to the System Preferences on a Mac. Often this is for lab environments or public use workstations, or perhaps for locking down a particular workstation for various reasons. While a common approach is to create a new user account that has limited access to system features and functionality, another method can be utilized with chmod that changes the access permissions to the System Preferences application itself within Mac OS, and when implemented properly all access to System Preferences on the Mac will be disabled and prevented regardless of how its attempted to be launched.
This approach to disabling access to System Preferences uses the command line and involves changing permissions to a critical system level application that is necessary for the proper functionality of all Macs. Therefore this is only appropriate to be used by advanced Mac users.
It’s no secret, I hate Flash. It’s the plastic pink flamingos of the web but worse, it’s crass, it’s loud, it’s obnoxious, it will crash your web browser, and on a Mac it is a literal drag on the machine, sucking up the CPU and memory as if there’s no tomorrow. Adobe really laid a pile of dung with Flash on the Mac, which is probably why Apple won’t allow Flash to run on the iPhone or the new iPad. Anyway, enough of my opinions and ranting about the Flash problem, here’s some solutions:
I am a huge fan of ClickToFlash, the Safari plugin that prevents all Flash from loading unless you approve it. But what if you allow a Flash object to load with ClickToFlash and it goes crazy? Now comes BashFlash, a perfect compliment to ClickToFlash. BashFlash is a little menubar extra that automatically warns you if Flash is taking up too many CPU cycles (usually is) and lets you kill the Flash culprit instantly. Hooray! Your web browsing experience is normal again!
The only bad thing about BashFlash is that it requires a 64 bit Mac, but this is because 64-bit Safari forces Flash to run within it’s own process ID on 64 bit systems (interesting, I learn something new every day!), allowing BashFlash to target the resource hogging process and end it instantly.
Spaces is a really nice feature of Mac OS X that lets you place different windows and applications within their own workspace. Dragging a window to a new Space is just a matter of holding onto the window and pulling it towards the end of the screen.
You may have noticed that there’s a delay when dragging a window to a new space, which is handy for not accidentally dragging windows into a new Space but kind of annoying if you are expecting it to enter a new workspace instantly. The instant switching of workspaces is a lot closer to how these workspace managers, or ‘virtual desktops’ work in the Unix world, and if you have a background of using a Linux desktop you may miss that instant desktop switching.
You can change the timing of Spaces switching rather easily though, using the Terminal.
I ran into the unpleasant 10810 error code recently and couldn’t find any workaround without a reboot. From what I’ve gathered by searching around on the web, Error 10810 occurs when the Launch Services framework has some sort of meltdown, causing the Mac OS X Kernel to run out of available threads for anymore processes to launch. In the event that some process has got errant and is in some infinite loop of launching and hoarding threads, this will cause a rather lovely barrage of error dialog boxes (see screenshot below).
It’s easy to accidentally change directories to something you weren’t intending to (say, accidentally hitting cd and returning home, thus losing your place in a complicated directory structure seep in the file system somewhere), but thankfully there’s a command that will immediately take you back to the previous directory, regardless of what it was. The jump-back to prior directory command is a simple variation on ‘cd’ followed by a single dash (the minus symbol), the syntax looks like so:
Did you know that you can put an iPhone inside a plastic bag and still use the touchscreen? Yes, that’s right, stick your iPhone in an airtight ziplock bag, and you’ll have an instant and amazingly cheap waterproof case for your iPhone. Well, waterproof may be a bit aggressive, and perhaps water resistant is a better term assuming you seal it off completely and are fairly delicate with it, but considering the extremely cheap price it’s hard to beat if you’re in a pinch and need some quick splash protection for the iPhone, whether that’s because you’re poking around in the kitchen or bathtub or simply because you’re spending a day at the beach.
If you need to prevent the Dock icons from changing or being modified on a Mac, you can use defaults command strings to lock down the OS X Dock and prevent any adjustments or changes to how it appears on screen.
