How do You Use Spaces?

Posted on January 6, 2008

And more importantly, I suppose, are you using Spaces? Even before Leopard, there were a number of virtual desktop managers for the Mac, but to be honest, I never really gave them a try for more than a day or two before Spaces. And now, I love it. This is how my MacBook Pro is set up:

The center screen is primarily for Safari. I use it to surf the web, and occasionally, for FTP or TextEdit. This keeps me somewhat focused on whatever I’m reading/writing with minimal screen clutter. The right screen is reserved for iChat, Adium, and Twitteriffic. It’s a sort of communications center. That way, if I want not to be distracted by IMs I can just ignore that screen, and i can keep all the clutter of multiple chats on one screen. Finally, the left screen I use for actual productivity. Photoshop, InDesign, Pages, Illustrator, etc. all go here. This one is for apps that require just one window, that I want to concentrate fully on working on.

Making sure that windows stay organized and where they’re supposed to be in Spaces is simple thanks to the anchoring system in System Preferences -> Exposé/Spaces.

Just add a new assignment, pick an app and pick the window you want it to go in and it’ll generally stay there, except for the occasional fuckery (like when you drag an assigned window to another space, it sometimes does goofy things. iChat is often guilty of this.)

That’s the system I’ve got worked out, anybody have a layout they’d like to share?

Moar Leopard Notes

Posted on December 23, 2007

(See what I did there, it’s a LOLcats reference in the title)

A) Font Book sucks. Not sure if it’s always sucked, as I haven’t used it much, or if it just sucks under Leopard. I’ve acquired a lot of fonts over the years, and a lot of them are not so good. So I thought I’d whittle down the collection a bit. However, if I remove a font/collection using Font Book’s command, a lot of them reappear after a minute or two. After some fiddling, I’ve worked it down to having to hit cmd+R to Reveal the font in Finder, cmd+delete to delete from Finder, cmd+w to close the Finder window, and then switching back to Font Book where the font disappears after a second. Not nearly as efficient as hitting “delete”, but it gets the job done.

B) Font preview in Finder rules. Not only can you preview fonts in Quick Look, which is nice, but the font is also represented by its icon in Finder. It even previews well in a full-size Coverflow-view Finder window. That is the sex

Things I Love About Leopard #1

Posted on November 15, 2007

Drop down menu (courtesy of Spaces). Notice the window behind it. So subtle I almost missed it before. The blurring of the background window is awesome, gives the menu a slightly translucent effect. Very cool.

Leopard First Impressions

Posted on November 1, 2007

Over at Wind the Frog DB asked some questions about Leopard. I was going to post answers to his and others’ questions in the comments section, but some how it turned into a whole fucking essay, so instead I’ll just post the thing up here.

The dock on the right or left…works ok?
Yes the look of the dock changes when you’re side dockin’. It reverts to a transparent dark bar similar to the previous dock. Check my Skitch for a screenshot. There’s a hidden preference if you want the dock in the bottom but prefer the new-old transparent dark bar. Oh, and when you’re side dockin’ stacks doesn’t fan out in the cool manner. But that’s livable.

Anyone test the audio/video quality with iChat?
Haven’t done video/audio chat yet, I’d have to do my hair first. I am tempted though because I want to test the new chat recording feature. iChat still disconnects randomly but at least now it automatically reconnects.

Coverflow/Preview work ok? Or is it real dodgy?
I haven’t used Coverflow either, because the only use I really see in it is browsing porn/random images folders. For seeing what documents are I hit space bar and that brings up QuickView right away. Which is another awesome feature. Works like a charm. Preview.app has gotten a lot better at loading quickly and handling multiple documents/images at once. And you can resize images within the app now. About f’ing time.

On the Intel machines, can you tell it is faster?
The OS on the whole does run faster, though that’s always been the case with OSX. The newest version always runs a li’l zippier than the previous. Also: Me and my MacBook Pro are rockin’ 64-bit I was just impressed how fast the installation was compared to installing Tiger and Panther.

Anything else you would like to add?
Safari resizes images to fit the window and zooms to full size with a double click. That is a feature that I rather missed from Firefox. Now if somebody would make proper adblocking for Safari so I don’t have to look at NSFW ads on FaceBook (which I’ve already complained to them about). And I totally love resizable text input boxes. Perfect for when WP gives you a small space to type in and I have to write up a big post like this.

Last.fm’s client needs to be updated because you can’t switch off showing it in the dock, and it hangs when you quit the program fifty percent of the time which annoys me, but I’ll get by ’til they update it. Also, InDesign was totally borked thanks to the upgrade, although I’m hopefully going to be finding a workaround for that next week.

Paul said: I read that the iLife was a backwards step for iMovie and/or iDVD in terms of functionality, otherwise I might be upgrading too.
Yes you can still get the previous version of iMovie after the upgrade, or if it’s already installed, ‘08 leaves it on the system. I would say that it’s not so much a step down for iMovie as it is a step left. They completely rewrote it so that it’s a different program. I think they’re trying to push iMovie as the program for the unwashed non-tech saavy masses who know nothing of video editing, and want to push the more experienced people (i.e., the people complaining about iMovie ‘08) to upgrading to Final Cut Express. iDVD isn’t so much worse as it is that Apple hasn’t really upgraded iDVD in the past two revisions. They just pack in a couple new themes and call it good. I’ve only used iDVD once in the past three and a half years of owning a Mac.

I think that’s all I got for now. I might have more later, or possibly a video of a monkey washing a cat. Who knows!

© Copyright MacFags.com • Powered by Wordpress • Using a modified version of the Detour theme created by Brian Gardner.