Filed under: Snow Leopard

A new "hack" for Finder is in the works, and it's pretty darn cool. TotalFinder adds tabs, Visor-like functionality and a few other goodies (with more on the way) to your plain, vanilla Finder setup. If you're skittish, though, don't jump just yet. TotalFinder is alpha, and not in that way that developers label software just to be safe. It's really, really alpha. TotalFinder runs as a SIMBL plugin, too, which can (in some cases) cause some system instability in and of itself. However, if you've got the apples for it, it's a very cool new way to soup up your Finder.

In its current state, it does a few simple -- yet amazingly useful -- things, starting with adding tabs to Finder. Honestly, we got tabs in Terminal before Finder? This catches us up a little bit. The Visor feature (which is optional), assigns a hotkey that makes your tabbed Finder window slide onto the screen and disappear when you're not using it. It's take-or-leave for me at this point; it's cool, but it takes a lot of getting used to, especially for window-to-window file dragging within Finder. You can't currently drop files onto other tabs, so some problems arise in that situation. The other features include preventing .DS_Store file creation and sorting file listings with folders grouped on top.

For now, I'm sticking with Path Finder for my souped-up Finder needs, but TotalFinder has the potential to bring Finder into its own after years of relatively few improvements. You can grab a copy to try out (for free) at BinaryAge, and note that it comes with an uninstall script that will wipe it clean off your system if you don't like it.

[via Smoking Apples]

I recently wrote about Ross Carter's Snow Leopard Creater Code discoveries and his solution, LaunchCodes. It turns out there were a few issues with the initial implementation, such as Apple Events not being passed along. Normally when you find a file in Spotlight, a PDF for example, opening it launches Preview and the query that was used to locate the file shows up in the search field in Preview. This was no longer working in LaunchCodes, though Ross says he's working on that right now. In the meantime, Michel Fortin has produced Magic Launch, and it solves the majority of the issues that have been presented.

Magic Launch installs as a System Preferences pane, and you can drag and drop applications to it to register their file type. Then, you can choose a default application, but optionally specify that it should launch in it the application which created it, when possible. Probably the coolest feature, though, is the rule handling. Similar to rules in Mail.app, you can set up a series of criteria to determine when a different app should open the file. You can have multiple rules, and each rule can check things like file location, file name or extension, text contents, hex contents and/or ASCII contents. That's pretty nifty, and goes beyond the default functionality that was available before we even needed apps like this.

Magic Launch is free to try out, and costs $14US for a license. If you're still finding documents annoyingly launching the wrong applications, go download it and give it a try.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard introduced a lot of under-the-hood changes and many are not very obvious. One such change is to the authentication requirements for logging in remotely via SSH.

In 10.5 logging in remotely via SSH was a pretty standard affair. In 10.6, however, security has been beefed up a bit to require case-sensitive login credentials. While this requirement has already been imposed on passwords, Snow Leopard now requires a case-sensitive user name as well.

In other words, when logging in via SSH, Snow Leopard differentiates between the username "aron" and "Aron." This threw me for a loop for quite some time and is another one of the numerous reasons I have held off upgrading my Mac mini to 10.6.

"I've been wondering if Apple, on their Jan. 26th product announcement, won't start to differentiate OS X to include OS X Mobile, OS X Touch, OS X Desktop & OS X Server. But rather than discreet versions of the OS, it is a spectrum where features of one version can slide up and down the scale depending on the functionality of the hardware platform it's running on. It seems to be moving in that direction whether a formal acknowledgment is made or not."

"Just a thought, but if the new Apple tablet ran straight iPhone OS, then it would probably be released in June with annual iPhone update... meaning that the Mac tablet will probably run a cross between Mac OSX 10.6 and iPhone OS or just Mac OSX 10.6.

Apple really won't release something unless it is speedy enough. They don't even let you run a background app or multitask on the iPhone due to speed issues. If they wanted to make a speedier tablet it would make sense that they would [deliver] a hybrid of the two operating systems, allowing better speed, battery, and more functionality than the iPhone, yet something not as relatively bulky as Snow Leopard."