Posts Tagged ‘OS X’
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…
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
08 Nov
Well, just a few days ago I learned about a massive data loss bug that seems to have existed in OS X for quite a while: when you’re moving files from/to a volume (such as a mounted SMB share, a USB stick or a hard disk drive) and this volume suddenly gets unresponsive for whatever reason, the files you were moving are gone. Lost. Forever.
I just experienced a short (lasting only a few milliseconds) power outage at my home. Short enough for me to barely notice it, long enough for my external hard disk to power down and—guess what—being ungracefully unmounted.
I’m still quite lucky that the files I lost will be recoverable (even if it takes some effort and time). But nevertheless: a file system operation called “move” should copy and delete (cp && rm) with the word “and” representing a logical conjunction… So if copying fails (for whatever reason) it should definitely leave the original file in its place!
As Tom (who seems to have discovered that problem in the first place or at least made it public) wrote:
Apple, please FTFF […]
In contrast to my wish of Java 6 on the Mac: Java would be nice to have (perhaps in a few months, sometimes in Q1/2008). Losing data due to a buggy file system implementation is a serious problem which needs to be taken care of now!
Update (11/16/2007): The Mac OS X 10.5.1 update is said to fix this bug:
Addresses a potential data loss issue when moving files across partitions in the Finder.
I have verified the correct behaviour: moving a file now operates transactional: OS X copies the original file to the destination volume. When that volume is suddenly disconnected, a partial (corrupted) file remains on the destination volume but the fully intact original is still there. After being successfully copied (and only then!), the original file will be deleted.
07 Nov
13949712720901ForOSX
Oh mighty Steve! Give us Java 6 for OSX. Now. ASAP.
06 Nov
Logitech, an industry leader in the computer peripherals market, provides an application called Logitech Control Center (LCC) to support their keyboards and mice under Mac OS X.
LCC internally used Unsanity’s Application Enhancer (APE) which unfortunately is not yet supported within OS X version 10.5 (Leopard). APE was one of the reasons why users weren’t able to straight-forwardly upgrade their Tiger installations to Leopard, ending up with some kind of blue screen once the installation was finished and they wanted to boot into their shiny new OS. Instructions for removing APE (highly recommended before upgrading to Leopard) can be found on the Apple support website.
So far, the special keys (“iTouch”, “Search”, “Shopping” etc.) on the Logitech keyboards can’t be used with Leopard. But at least most of the Media Control buttons (skip forward/backward, play/pause and the volume control) actually work and those are almost the only special keys I need on that keyboard.
What bothered me was the fact that the key binding for the Windows/Option and the Alt/Apple/Command keys were mixed up: on my MacBook Pro, the order of the keys (from left to right) is Control, Option, Command. The Logitech keyboard uses the same labels on the keys but with the factory settings of OS X, the Windows key acts as Apple’s Command key and the Alt key is used as the Option key. This is quite strange because you’re always hitting the wrong keys when you’re often switching between “docked” mode (using an external keyboard when you’re working on your desk) and “road warrior” mode when you’re using the MBP’s internal keyboard.
Luckily, with Leopard you’re able to change the key bindings within the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane of OS X’s System Preferences individually for each keyboard that is connected to your Mac (see the screenshot below). The Logitech keyboard shows up as “USB Receiver” in the keyboards list. After selecting this from the list, just change the binding of the Option and Command keys to each other’s function and voilà — it’s working.
Logitech keyboard picture by bargainmoose, CC-licensed.
31 Oct
Finally I also got my copy of the newest, freshest, shiniest OS X version ever… I don’t know how Apple does it, but I’m one of the guys who is always excited about new Apple products.
Although I read about best practices for installing Leopard on several web sites (most of them recommended either the archive and install or the clean install option), I wanted to give the update option at least a try — some of my friends confirmed that it seemed to work pretty well.
In the beginning, the installation ran very smoothly. I was upgrading from OS X 10.4.10 with all the latest updates installed. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to login after the reboot. My MacBook Pro hung at the point where the Leopard introduction intro should appear.
So I decided to wipe out the internal hard drive of my MacBook Pro, performed a clean installation of Leopard and transferred my old applications and files using the Migration Assistant during the second phase of the installation from a backup I had created with SuperDuper! before. (note: it took almost 3 hours to copy all that stuff from my external Firewire drive — I really have to clean up…). But that gave me at least some time to further clean up the apartment I just moved into.
17 Jul
Happy iCal day everyone!
Today’s the day the iCal icon in Mac OS X doesn’t change when iCal is started — the static icon always displays July, 17 although the date changes to the actual date when iCal runs. I wonder if Apple finally finds a way to display a dynamic, up-to-da(y)te icon in Leopard. Until then, I keep MagiCal in my menu bar which does a perfect job.
(via: hildi, whose blog post reminded me of iCal day a few hours ahead of my [local] time…)
