If you own a recent MacBook (Pro) or just returned from the Apple store where you bought an Apple Magic Trackpad
This update will enable “inertia scrolling” (a.k.a “momentum scrolling”) on your MacBook’s trackpad:
That is so awesome. My Logitech MX Revolution mouse
You know how it is with geeks. Give them something shiny, new with buttons and fancy sound effects (“swooooosh”) and they’ll love it. Same goes for software: give them a piece of code glued together that perfectly serves its purpose — awesome.
One of the applications I really love and use all the time is the Firefox web browser.
Unfortunately, things turned out to be a little nasty on OS X since Firefox reached version 3.6. When I first upgraded, I noticed a bug that caused Firefox to open two windows when a link was clicked in another application. Not nice, but I could have lived with that until it’s fixed.
Next, Firefox stopped working at all after I updated some add-ons. I tried to reproduce the problem and wanted to boil it down to a particular defective add-on. To be honest, I suspected Weave Browser Sync to be the culprit. I even tried starting Firefox with a fresh, empty profile and installed 2 or 3 other add-ons, several times in various order. Kaboom. No need to mention that even the Firefox nightly build was crashing on me. The solutions described in a related bug report unfortunately didn’t help either.
The sad solution to my problem: I was downgrading to the latest version of the “old” Firefox 3.5 branch, namely Firefox 3.5.9. It does not have all the fancy new features of 3.6 and support ends in August 2010 but at least it’s working. I’ll try 3.7 4.0 when it’s stable and hope the problem has been fixed then as others describe the same issue in various posts in the Mozilla forums.
Update: The problem seems to be fixed in Firefox 4.0 beta 1.
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)
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
Image: “My new buddie” by Fredrik Smedenborn. CC-licensed.
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…
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 
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.
After you’ve all upgraded to Firefox 3, you might also want to try out the firefox-mac-pdf extension, too.1
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…)
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:
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.
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
