Just Upgraded to Snow Leopard!
I was pretty excited to install Snow Leopard
today, and the upgrade from 10.5.8 went without a hitch, finishing in about an hour. A couple Snow Leopard install tips:
* Be sure to customize your installation to have Rosetta support, as it’s not installed by default anymore.
* If you’re an X-Code user, you’ll probably want to upgrade that separately as well (included in the optional installs directory on the Snow Leopard disc).
Positive Observations: Finder is definitely snappier, so are Preview, Safari, iTunes, and iChat. The new darker default display gamma is a big improvement, looks very nice.
Negative Observations: Wireless connections are dropping randomly and constantly on my MacBook, looks like I’m not alone here, I can sustain a connection longer than a few seconds by not using DHCP and manually entering the necessary TCP/IP settings. Synergy does not work well, if at all, unable to connect, timeouts, and drops (could be related to aforementioned network problems?)
It’s worth mentioning that several of my friends and colleagues have installed Snow Leopard on their machines (upgrades and fresh installs) with no issues.
This is somewhat controversial because it is against the Apple EULA, but apparently you can save $140 if you’re a Tiger 10.4 user and run the 10.6 Snow Leopard upgrade without a problem. To make things even more interesting, popular Mac writer 
A friend of mine that is new to Macs couldn’t figure out how to get a CD to eject, after some frustration he then complained that his MacBook doesn’t have the paperclip hole to forcibly eject a disc from the superdrive. After some discussion I realized he’s probably not alone in his confusion of how eject a stuck disk on a Mac, so here’s a few different ways to do it, ranging from easy to more advanced. If a disk is still stuck in the drive after these methods have been exhausted, you may have an actual hardware problem.
The Hackintosh community is rather controversial but increasingly popular, and some of the most appealing Hackintosh machines are those based around Netbooks, tiny lightweight laptops that fill a niche Apple has yet to dabble in. The Dell Mini 9 has long been the cream of the Hackintosh Netbook crop, but it looks like the Dell Mini 10v is giving it a run for it’s money, the internals are largely the same but it has a 10″ screen. (Note that the Dell Mini 10 and 10v are completely different units with different hardware, the 10v is Hackintosh compatible, the 10 is not). It’s worth noting that installing Mac OS X on something other than Apple hardware is against the Apple OS X EULA, so the legitimacy of the entire Hackintosh movement is dubious at best, but morals aside…
The Mac world is really heating up with anticipation for the upcoming Snow Leopard release, due this Friday. 
Making a RAM disk prior to Mac OS X was quickly accomplished through a control panel, or you can make one from the command line too, but since OS X this ability has been lost without 
The best thing about a sour economy are the price wars that benefit consumers, and in this case 
, or better yet pick up a useful companion book like 
. The price was also dropped 10% on the 
. Sweet!
I have an external drive partitioned in various ways, one of the partitions is formatted to FAT32 and I don’t need access to all the time. So how do I keep that from showing up needlessly when I plug the drive in? Using the command line to create an /etc/fstab entry and a bash script, you can do precisely this, thanks to a tip I found on 
, and the 
Apple’s QuickTime is the go-to Mac OS X app for video playback, but there’s more to QuickTime Player than meets the eye. You can rewind and fast-forward movies, increase the audio level beyond the slider limit, and even scrub frame by frame through the movie like you can in Final Cut Pro! Check out these 15 useful and largely hidden keyboard shortcuts for QuickTime Player, they are sure to improve your QuickTime movie viewing experience… and you’ll probably learn something new!
Microsoft officially stopped developing Internet Explorer for Mac’s a few years ago, but you can still download and run Internet Explorer on your Mac using either an older version of the software or a few different tools. We’ll cover how to run Internet Explorer under Mac OS X using a tool called WineBottler, which allows you to run windows apps like IE6, IE7, or even IE8 on your Mac. Now I don’t know anyone that wants to run Internet Explorer 6 for personal use, but if you’re doing any kind of development work for the web, you likely are required to check for IE6 compatibility. Many Mac users install Windows in VMWare or Parallels to get the ability to check their work in IE, but that’s not needed thanks to WineBottler. WineBottler is dependent on Wine to be able to run Internet Explorer 6, IE7, or even IE8 on your Mac and it’s included in the WineBottler download package.
If you’re like me you tend to have 10,000 windows open at once on your Mac while you work and multitask, thanks to Expose this is not a particular problem in Mac OS X. But, there comes a time when you don’t want to use Expose to either clear the screen or select a specific window, you just want to move some of the background clutter around, to access the Desktop or something of that sort. Easily done! Hold the Command key and select a Window titlebar in the background to move it around elsewhere and clear up space, now you can access that JPG on your desktop easily without having to hide all windows!
