1FPS|by David Chartier

About half a year or so ago, I switched my Mac OS X Dock to the right side of my screen since most of my daily activities involve reading vertical pages of text. I also chose the right side of my display instead of the left because Mac OS X is designed to place any connected drives and new files (downloads, screenshots, etc.) over there. Less mouse traveling between the left and right sides of my display, whether on a 13-inch MacBook Air or my Mac Pro’s 24-inch display, makes me happy. But there’s a subtle catch to moving the Dock to the right side of the display, and I forgot that I discovered a very simple fix for it a few days later.

Right after you move your Dock to the right side, you’ll probably notice that it overlaps any drives and icons that Mac OS X has already aligned over there. While you can manually move and realign those files, I found that right-clicking the desktop and choosing Clean Up to be more efficient. Not only will this command do all that tedious work of realigning your icons for you, but it seems to make Mac OS X take notice of the Dock’s new position and size, and remember it in the future. New files you download or otherwise place on the desktop should obey the new boundary and stay out from underneath the Dock, and you get less mousing to do between your most frequently used apps and desktop items.

I wrote about Many Tricks’ Leech OS X download manager back in May, but I’ve been using Speed Download for a while and didn’t see a reason to switch over. Leech is a good download manager with a simple, unique UI that I recommend, but it didn’t have any must-have features when I wrote about it.

Today I decided to give Leech another spin since Many Tricks has issued a few new features and fixes since its debut. While I’m not positive I want to switch over yet, I definitely think this searchable History menu that mimics Leopard’s system-wide Help menu search field is a smart feature, and I don’t remember it being in the 1.0 that I wrote about. If you keep Leech hidden or close its window while it’s working, this is certainly an easy way to look through all your downloads without having to reactivate a full window. Smart.

I say “half-supported” because even though Mac OS X comes pre-installed with a boatload of printer drivers and it can automatically grab plenty more off the Web, it doesn’t work 100% with every printer. Take ours for example: we have a cheap Epson Stylus CX4800 all-in-one. Now I like to exclude printer drivers when wiping my Macs and reinstalling Mac OS X to save a few GB of space, but Mac OS X pulled down drivers for the printer just fine the first time I plugged it in. Printing and customizing most jobs works just fine, but the Mac OS X cannot, however, check the printer’s ink supply levels without installing software from Epson.

Even after installing Epson’s software, though, using the straight “Supply Levels” options from the Printer Utility or anywhere else still doesn’t work; I’m presented with a dialog saying “Information Not Available” and a link to buy supplies for my printer from the online Apple Store (which is admittedly handy). If you’re in the same boat as I am and you’ve installed your printer’s extra software, there may be an extra trick involved in checking your ink supply levels.

First, get to your printer management app by printing something or by double-clicking it from the Print & Fax System Preferences pane. To get to your printer’s ink supply levels (and assuming you’ve installed any extra software from your printer manufacturer), you may first need to open the Printer Utility:

In my case, Epson’s Printer Utility looks strikingly similar to this:

This is where I can actually get to a status monitor that accurately displays the remaining ink in my printer’s cartridges, as well as perform those other debatably useful tests and maintenance routines.

This process may be obvious to some, but it was darn hard to find in my opinion and exceptionally cryptic, especially considering that a “Supply Levels” menu option sits right above the Printer Utility option.

I don’t know if this will work for all printers, and it may be the case that your printer manufacturer simply doesn’t make drivers or a utility like this for Mac OS X. In my experience, Mac OS X can get ink supply levels from the broad majority of printers out there, so I guess our CX4800 is just stuck riding the short bus.

In any case, I hope this helps you to save a few prematurely thrown-out ink cartridges, as well as the bucks spent on them.

I don’t remember that being there in the original 10.5 Leopard release, though I haven’t bookmarked anything in Safari in a while (I use del.icio.us and a couple apps and plug-ins for everything these days). Pretty cool move, and a great way to turn people on to Mail’s new RSS abilities.

No, the headline isn’t a typo. Chris switched for his primary operating system. I heard somewhere that he bought a MacBook Air, but I did watch part of his Mac Pro unboxing (which I believe is his new primary machine) just to comprehend it. I mean, it’s Chris Pirillo.

Obviously a happy customer, Chris has penned 50 reasons to switch. Now Chris isn’t the kind of guy to regurgitate the hype of Apple’s “Get a Mac” commercials; he is both a power user and an informed home user, and every one of his 50 reasons shows it. He gets all the wonderful little details‚Äîwhich really aren’t so little once you actually understand and use them‚Äîthat make Mac OS X such a fantastic operating system. Many of these are the same details that would cause me to choose a 4 year old Mac running the latest generation or two of Mac OS X over a brand new $3,000 Windows PC any day. No joke.

Whether you’re sitting on the fence, a brand new Mac users, or perhaps even a seasoned veteran, Pirillo’s list contains some juicy nuggets for everybody. I recommend at least a glance.

Bonus points awarded for the way he ended his well-rounded post: “And now, I‚Äôd like to challenge any Windows enthusiast to publish 50 Reasons to switch from Mac OS X to Microsoft Windows.”

Wakoopa is yet another social networking-ish kind of web app that does something I actually find kind of useful. It runs as an unobtrusive Menu Bar app tracking which apps you use and for how long, then lets you visualize it in interesting ways. Wakoopa’s site tallies the stats from all its users, Windows and Mac alike, so you can see top apps and related apps you may be interested in (though exactly how Wakoopa builds these relationships between applications is beyond me).

Now my graph above is a bit skewed, as I forgot that I’ve only been running Wakoopa’s tracker on the Mac Pro, which I use mostly for motion graphic work and games. Since I’ve been out of school for the past month and focusing on writing for Ars, nothing motion graphics-y is on this list.

The other aspect of Wakoopa’s tracking I’m not sure of is how widespread its tracking abilities are. I think it taps into Mac OS X’s core process tracking services so it should be able to see everything, but I don’t know how it differentiates between, say, an idle app sitting in the Dock or a Menu Bar utility like Twitterrific or MoodBlast that’s always running but used infrequently.

Still, I think this kind of computer usage and statistics tracking service is a fascinating tool for watching exactly what one is up to. I think I might register a separate account for my MacBook Pro in order to cleanly track my usage between the two machines.

I hope the Wakoopa team is working on easier and more effective ways of sharing one’s usage statistics with embeddable code or a widget for websites and communities outside its own.

I firmly believe that people who love Flash apps don’t know a thing about the power and integration of the OS they’re using. Even Windows users have better tools available to them than Flash offers, but Mac OS X? Don’t even get me started.

Yes, I totally get the benefit to developers because they can develop in one platform but create an app for all three major OSes. That’s great, and I thoroughly appreciate chances to do less work.

But looking at Flash and its new extensions like AIR and Flex from a user’s perspective (though admittedly a power user), the compromise just isn’t worth it.

Mac OS X offers rich, system-wide tools that developers can build into their apps (and most do) for checking spelling and (now in Leopard) grammar, saving highlighted text to notes, and moving information to and from other applications. For example: when reading news in NetNewsWire, I can strike a keyboard shortcut to send the URL of the headline I’m reading to Twitterrific for sharing with my friends on Twitter. I can drag URLs or text from any other application into Yojimbo, a program for organizing and archiving files, PDFs, serial numbers, and more. When replying to someone in a forum using Safari, I can select my last name and tell Safari to learn its spelling, which will tell every other program to learn it too.

Stuff like this is absolutely invaluable to getting work done with a computer (that’s right: they aren’t just for porn anymore!). But these any many other features get thrown out the window with Flash because it lives in its own world; it doesn’t hook into any of these awesome things Mac OS X does. I don’t know if this is because Adobe’s Flash team all uses Windows (though I wouldn’t doubt it) and therefore doesn’t get to enjoy great tools like this or what. I only know that the advantages of Flash (and I do recognize that there are some) pale in comparison to the tools that have been right under our noses for a lot longer than Flash has.

Whenever I run a Repair Permissions operation from Disk Utility under Mac OS X 10.5.1 Leopard, I receive what looks like the same batch of worrying feedback on both my Mac Pro and MacBook Pro. Anyone have some insight into what’s going on here?

Check out the feedback:

Warning: SUID file “usr/libexec/load_hdi” has been modified and will not be repaired.

Warning: SUID file “System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DiskManagement.framework/Versions/A/Resources/DiskManagementTool” has been modified and will not be repaired.

Warning: SUID file “System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DesktopServicesPriv.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Locum” has been modified and will not be repaired.

Warning: SUID file “System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Install.framework/Versions/A/Resources/runner” has been modified and will not be repaired.

Permissions differ on “private/var/log/secure.log”, should be -rw——- , they are -rw-r—– .

Warning: SUID file “System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Admin.framework/Versions/A/Resources/readconfig” has been modified and will not be repaired.

Warning: SUID file “System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Admin.framework/Versions/A/Resources/writeconfig” has been modified and will not be repaired.

Warning: SUID file “usr/libexec/authopen” has been modified and will not be repaired.

Warning: SUID file “System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/OwnerGroupTool” has been modified and will not be repaired.

Warning: SUID file “System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAgent” has been modified and will not be repaired.

User differs on “System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/lib/jvm.cfg”, should be 0, user is 95.

User differs on “System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Libraries/classlist”, should be 0, user is 95.

I get what some of this is telling me, but what’s with all those “warning SUID… will not be repaired” chunks? Is something wrong with my machines? Or is this just a problem with Leopard still being a new OS?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

Macs seem to sell themselves (and users help) | Greg Reinacker’s Weblog

Greg Reinacker, founder of NewsGator, switched to a Mac about a month ago after being a die-hard Windows users since 3.0. He blogs about some of his experiences here, offering a couple personal “it just worked” anecdotes that are textbook cases for why people are finally appreciating the Mac. His thoughts on why so much of this is happening just in recent years though were particularly interesting:

I think Apple is in the middle of a bit of a perfect storm at the moment. People I’ve talked to, while not necessarily disillusioned, are not generally impressed with (or excited about) Vista. It seems there is no “wow” factor making the average Joe want to take that step, unless he’s buying a new machine where it comes already installed. And even then, I’ve got some friends (Tom is one of them) who have new laptops with Vista, and are trying to figure out how to switch back to Windows XP. So while usage remains obviously strong, I think loyalty to Windows is waning.

NewsGator, if you aren’t familiar, provides RSS apps and services for big business all the way down to itty bitty consumers like you and I. Guys like Greg Reinacker don’t switch lightly, but when they do, you almost always see them post “breath of fresh air” stuff like this after taking some time to actually get to know Mac OS X.

Here’s another one of Reinacker’s posts from when he first picked up his Mac, exploring some of the initial reasons for the decision. This stuff is fascinating.

“Open in TextMate” from Leopard Finder ‚Äì The Pug Automatic

Henrik Nyh created an AppleScript you can place in Leopard’s Finder toolbar to open the the files of the currently selected folder in TextMate as a project. Handy:

Clicking the toolbar icon now opens the selected file or files if there is a selection; otherwise it opens the current directory. You can also drag-and-drop files to the icon to open those.