A New Mac Tip Every Day

A big problem with how 10.5 handled screen shots is that it would automatically call every new screen shot “Picture 1.png”.  The problem with that is that I often cleaned my desktop and moved the screen shots to the relevant folders.  Some folders already contained screen shots and the names always being the same, I would always get the problem of files wanting to overwrite each other.  10.6 handles screen shot naming a lot more elegantly.  It actually names the files “Screen shot date time.png”.  The date and time portion of these new file names will ensure that screen shots will never have the same name and overwriting won’t be an issue anymore.

Website design is almost done…

QuickTime X (in 10.6) doesn’t use the “Command – 1″, “Command – 2″ and so forth for 50%, 100%, 200%, etc.  The way resizing now works is with “Command +” to increase the size and “Command -” to decrease the size.  This new way actually makes a lot of sense, because more and more video is in a large format like 1080p.  On smaller laptops, the 100% was larger than the whole screen and even the 50% size took a lot of space.  Of course, it was always possible to resize using the mouse, but having predefined sizes accessible through keyboard shortcuts is a lot more useful.  With the new shortcuts, it doesn’t matter what the resolution of the source video is.  It will simple increase or decrease the size based on what is displayed on screen.

About the new website, I finished setting up the studio today.  I also upgraded the Mac Pro that will be used in all the shots to 10.6.  So there is still some work to be done tomorrow including finishing the new website design, but hopefully it will launch Monday or Tuesday.

And to everyone who haven’t upgraded to 10.6 yet, don’t worry, I have great Leopard tips coming as well.

I installed 10.6, finally!  I am quickly going through what’s new (a lot, but also a lot more than what Apple makes it out to be).  The first feature (or is it a bug fix) I noticed is that it is now possible to rename files in a folder that contains many movie files.  It sounds weird said that way, because it is always possible to rename files, but there was a bug in 10.5.  Leopard had to generate all the icon thumbnails before it was possible to rename a file.  The problem in 10.5 is that every time the Finder had generated another thumbnail, it would reset the renaming operation.  It didn’t only apply to video files, but they are the ones for which creating the thumbnails takes a while, so in 10.5, the problem mainly appeared in folders with numerous video files.  It finally seems that this is fixed in 10.6.  This in itself made the 10.6 upgrade worth hundreds of dollars to me!

By the way, if you have been following my tweets, you’ve probably read that I am setting up a permanent studio for filming future mac tips.  If everything goes as planned, the new website (completely redesigned) with new video content will be launching next week.  All the content will be available here on this site, as well as on iTunes as a podcast.  I am also working on another website/podcast with more tips, training and tutorials that I also hope to launch in the next couple of weeks.  Stay tuned!

It is probably because I have a Mac Pro, but SoundSource is one of the first application I install after a clean install.  The way it worked in the past as a plugin was no longer compatible with 10.6.  The developers have rewrote it as a standalone application that is now finally compatible with Snow Leopard.  You can download the latest version of SoundSource here from MacUpdate.

The new feature called OpenCL that is coming in Snow Leopard looks very promising.  Once applications are updated to take advantage of this extra power, we should see an amazing performance increase.  According to Apple, the only GPUs that are compatible with OpenCL are:

• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 9600M GT, GeForce 8600M GT, GeForce GT 120, GeForce GT 130, GeForce GTX 285, GeForce 8800 GT, GeForce 8800 GS, Quadro FX 4800, Quadro FX5600
• ATI Radeon 4850, Radeon 4870

You can test the performance increase using “OpenCL Benchmark”.  This benchmark application will actually compare the time it takes to process data with the CPU and then the GPU.  The only downside is that the benchmark requires 10.6.  Here is a download link for “OpenCL Benchmark”.

The decision of upgrading to 10.6 on Friday is often dependent on what applications are compatible with the new OS.  We rely so heavily on our computers that downtimes are not always an option.  A pretty extensive list of everything that is compatible and also the applications that won’t run on 10.6 is available at http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/ The applications with a green check mark are tested as being fully compatible.  The ones with a red “x” are reportedly not working and the ones with a yellow symbol have compatibility issues.  After a quick glance at the list, the applications that might make me delay the upgrade are ForkLift, iStat Menu and Dropbox.

There are many free ebooks available on websites such as Project Gutenberg. One of the best file format to choose is EPUB. You can then read this content on your Mac using the application Stanza (it is listed as a shareware, but it works for reading books without a license). The huge advantage of using the Mac version of Stanza is its compatibility with the free Stanza iPhone/iPod Touch application. To transfer a book to your iPhone, you open the book in Stanza Desktop, go to “Tools” and check “Enable Sharing”. Then, on your iPhone in the Stanza application, navigate to “Shared Books” and select the name of your Mac. The Stanza Desktop application will ask you to allow the transfer and that’s it!

It was easy to upgrade the hard drive in a few generations of MacBooks/MacBook Pros. Of course, that all changed with the new models with built-in batteries. Usually, any SATA hard drive works in Macs, but this isn’t the case recently. A batch of 7200rpm 500GB hard drives come with a free fall sensor that works very much like Apple’s sensor. The problem is that both sensors interfere with one another. The result is slowness and redundant spinning beachball. Apple released a fix, but it only applies to laptops that include these drives from Apple, not when the drives are installed after market. It seems right now that the only solution is avoiding these new drives with the free fall sensor.

As you might know from my posts and tweets, I am a big fan of Dropbox.  It is just so convenient for syncing important data across multiple Macs.  It just works, unlike iDisk!  I just use the free 2 GB, because I don’t put large files in Dropbox anyway.  What I just recently discovered is that it is possible to earn more space (up to 3 additional GBs) by inviting friends.  Every time a friend installs Dropbox using your invite, both your friend and you get an additional 250 MB.  Here is my invite link if you want to join Dropbox and get an additional 250 MB.

A Safari plugin called “GrowlSafari” can add Growl compatibility to Safari even though it is an Apple application.  Growl is just too useful for working in another application and getting immediately notified of finished downloads, etc.  The “GrowlSafari” plugin is actually included with the standard Growl “dmg”, but it is not installed by default.  It is hidden in the “Extras” folder of the “dmg”.