Archive for the ‘Mac OS X’ Category:
07 Feb
Ein Freund und ich haben kürzlich unsere MacBooks getauscht. Er bekam mein 2006er 15″ MacBook Pro und ich im Austausch dafür die kleinere, aktuelle 13″-Version des MBP. Bis dahin ist das Ganze ja noch nicht wirklich spannend… 
Lange Rede, kurzer Sinn: ich habe in der Vergangenheit schon ein paar Mal Solid State Disks (SSD) im Einsatz gesehen und war vollkommen platt, wieviel mehr Geschwindigkeit die bei der alltäglichen Arbeit rausholen können. Beim Tausch der MBPs haben wir auch die Festplatten umgebaut. Ich habe meine 320 GB-Western-Digital-Festplatte (5400 rpm)
mit ins neue Gerät migriert, er hat seine 64 GB-SSD in das “alte” Gerät eingebaut.
Was soll ich sagen? Das alte MBP rennt damit wie ein Gaul auf Steroiden. Wir haben keine “echten” Benchmarks gefahren, aber: sein OS X war deutlich schneller hochgefahren als das mit dem aktuellen MacBook Pro der Fall war. Firefox benötigte auf dem 2.0-GHz-MBP mit SSD gerade mal 3 “Animiertes-Dock-Icon-Zeiteinheiten”, während das hübsche Icon beim 2.53-GHz-Modell immerhin 9 Mal durch die Gegend hüpfte, bis ich mal ein Firefox-Fenster zu sehen bekam.
Natürlich sind das keine wissenschaftlich fundierten Messungen, aber es beeindruckt ungemein. Jetzt weiß ich zumindest schon mal, worauf ich mal ein wenig spare — und hoffe auf fallende Preise im SSD-Markt. Die Intel X-25M mit 160 GB
sieht ganz brauchbar aus und ist mir schon von mehreren Seiten empfohlen worden.
Image: “My new buddie” by Fredrik Smedenborn. CC-licensed.
08 Nov
Adobe makes a good job of promoting its new version of their Flash Player 10. They seem to have removed almost every single link to the previous version on their website and all old links redirect to the download of version 10.
This might be great if you want to run their latest software, but if for some reason you need a specific older version, you’re gonna be quite upset, e.g., you want Flash on a legacy operating system such as Windows 98/ME, Mac OS X < 10.4, or older Linux/UNIX OSes.
In my case, there is a web site that has been programmed in such a bad way that it is simply broken and unusuable with the latest version of Flash Player 10. I don’t use the service of that website on a daily basis, but I wanted to install Flash Player 9 on top of a Windows installation in a VM.
You can find the installation files for the legacy Flash Player 9 download on Adobe’s TechNote site. Please keep in mind that Adobe may (and surely will) stop releasing any [security] updates for those old versions of Flash.
Of course–after I eventually found the download link and installed the old Flash version–I remembered having a moldy Ubuntu Live DVD somewhere in my drawer… And I bet it has Flash Player 8 or 9 installed…
19 Oct
Well, my MacBook Pro is about 2 years old now and I’ve had… a total of 5 batteries exchanged so far. Of course, Apple has the famous Battery Exchange program that was… recently closed. Grrr.
I hope Apple was only screwing up with their batteries in the past and hopefully does a better job with the recently introduced new MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks.
And if it’s not the battery or some fancy charging-related logic board problem, it must be me who is using the MBP so excessively that all batteries are dying nearly at light velocity.
Update: creativebits and TUAW have both mentioned articles on how to treat your laptop’s battery best. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what I did with this battery (fully charge it, drain it, keep it at 50% charge when stored for a longer period of time, etc.). Didn’t help 
15 Jul
Gerade ist mir aufgefallen, dass mein Einkaufswagen im iTunes Music Store mittlerweile mit allen Rechnern synchronisiert wird, an denen ich meinen iTMS-Account freigegeben habe — was leider dazu führt, das die teilweise etwas unkompatiblen Musikgeschmäcker von mir und V. zusammengewürfelt werden.
Ist das ein neues Feature, was vielleicht im Zusammenhang mit dem iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store eingeführt wurde? Dieses Verhalten war mir vorher noch nie aufgefallen.
Muss gleich mal testen, ob auch die heruntergeladene Musik dann synchronisiert wird oder ob ich die Dateien nach wie vor per CD-RW oder USB-Stick hin- und hertragen muss.
18 Jun
After you’ve all upgraded to Firefox 3, you might also want to try out the firefox-mac-pdf extension, too.
It displays PDFs “inline” (inside a browser window) instead of downloading and/or opening it in Preview.app or Adobe Reader. Great extension!
(via macosxhints, TUAW, and others…)
14 Feb
I use Monolingual from time to time to reconquer some of the hard disk space on my MacBook Pro (sorry, some parts of that post are in German). The tool has been quite helpful: hey, it gave me 2 more gigabytes for … spreadsheets! 
Note that using Monolingual is kind of messing around with Mac OS X system files — do it at your own risk. It may brake your system, shave your cat or crumble on your keyboard. You’ve been warned.
Nevertheless, some Mac applications really don’t like their languages to be stripped from the .app package! Keep in mind that you should never ever remove the English language (en) from applications as it may be used as a language default.
I couldn’t find a list with applications having trouble with Monolingual, therefore I try to compile one here. Feel free to post additions in the comments section below.
List of Mac OS X applications known to have some trouble after Monolingual was used:
- Almost all Adobe products (Acrobat, Creative Suite) for OS X. Acrobat needs to repair PDF browser preview and PDF printer. Repair process hangs. Updates don’t work anymore.
- Skype (version < 2.6). Crashes during start-up. Version 2.7.0.195 beta seems to work without any problems, though.
- Cyberduck. Crashes when trying to establish a SSH/SFTP connection. Needs to be re-installed.
- Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird. Automatic (incremental) updates fail.
27 Jan
I always wondered what would happen if my backup disk I used for Leopard’s Time Machine feature ran out of space.
Yesterday I finally found out (and yes, I realized that it has been mentioned in the manual, also)…
As I have set up my backup partition on an external Firewire drive to exactly the same size as my hard disk inside the MacBook Pro (160 GB), that means that I’ve been producing about 60 GB of changing data since I installed Leopard and ran Time Machine for the first time in the end of November. Wow.
31 Dec
It’s the small things that make OS X so outstanding… such as this dialog box which appears when you perform software updates on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) running from battery power. Nice
29 Dec
Finally, I’m back with the road-warriors again. The last weeks, my MacBook Pro and I were bound to my desk because it was running without a battery. It had died (the computer just went out when the battery’s capacity reached about 30%), so I had to leave the battery at the Gravis store in Munich (as Apple does not [yet] have any official stores in Germany, Gravis IMHO is the best choice).
Since I bought my MacBook Pro in 9/2006 I’ve had 3 replacement batteries so far. This is the forth one. I hope it actually stays alive a little longer than a few months. And (just in case) I was able to buy another Apple battery on eBay for a quite affordable price, so I might now be able to (at least half-way) compete with a certain Thinkpad owner who coded during the whole flight from Germany to San Francisco…
11 Dec
Today I stumbled upon a blog post in Hawk Wing’s blog which was written in 2005 but is still up-to-date: even with the latest version of Mail.app included in Mac OS X Leopard, you are able to use multiple e-mail addresses for one POP or IMAP account.
Within the mail account settings you will have to provide a comma-separated list of your e-mail addresses (e.g. me@example.com, mickey@example.com, donald@example.com) and then you can choose the address you want to use as the sender’s address from a pop-down menu in the “New Message” window. Nice
More tips for Mail.app can also be found on Apple’s support pages.
