A German site, Apfeltalk.de has posted screenshots of the forthcoming version of Mac OS X, 10.6 (a.k.a "Snow Leopard"). Most of the screenshots show off the Safari 4 developer preview that will include the "Save as Web Application" option in the File menu.
The website also shows off the next version of Address Book.app that will bring Microsoft Exchange support to the Mac platform. We do however have to speculate about the System Preferences.app screenshot that shows two Time Machine icons with one labled "Dock" and another labeled "Time Machine" -- this seems out of place and unlike Apple.
You can see all of the screenshots (before Apple's legal team gets a hold of them) on the Apfeltalk.de site.
Over on the Office Google Mac Blog they're calling attention to simple little application from Google Mac Team member David Phillip Oster called AppMenuBoy. Basically, it will allow you to get one click access to all your applications by clicking on its Dock icon.
David designed it to function like folders on the Dock did back in the good old Tiger days, when you could simply drag your Applications folder to the Dock to get a basic launcher. Though the 10.5.2 update improved things to some degree from the original Stacks behavior in Leopard, AppMenuBoy "shows only applications, follows aliases, and if a folder contains only an application, it silently 'hoists' that application in the menu so you don't have hierarchical menus that contain only a single icon."
We first wrote about Quay in November. It extends the Leopard dock in a number of very useful ways. For instance, it will pop up on both sides of the dock (Apple only permits this on the right), and even displays software version numbers plus memory and CPU stats on running applications. It's super handy.
Changes to version 1.1b3 include
Option-command-clicking on a running app displays application stats
Shift-command-click opens the contents in the Finder
It works properly with FileVault
The help menu can be printed
Quay requires Mac OS 10.5 (10.5.2 is recommended) and costs €7 (around $10US - give or take). Note that only two Quay items will work on an unregistered copy.
With the advent of Mac OS X Leopard, people seem to be taking the initiative to "hack" their dock and change the image that defines what it looks like. If you don't want to pay money for an application like Panic's CandyBar, then look no further than Dock Library. For freeware, Dock Library has a very simple, clean interface, it's almost Apple-like in it's appearance. Dock Library allows you to import dock styles downloaded from sites like LeopardDocks. Just click a dock style, click set dock, type your password, and your old dock will be replaced with the new one.
It's almost April, so they're having a good, old-fashioned Easter Egg Hunt. Several articles on the site will be littered with colorful eggs. Keep track of which eggs appear where between today (Feb. 25) and March 18, then email your findings back to the folks at MN. You can read the full details here.
The BookEndz Dock is a cool product. In our previous review, Mat said, "The MacBook model looks particularly nice with a built-in 5 port powered USB hub and both VGA and DVI connectors...and [makes] moving a MacBook (Pro) between locations with many different peripherals quite easy."
HierarchicalDock is one of the three applications we recently wrote about (along with Quay and OldFolder) that adds hierarchical menus to the Leopard dock. It works easily: Just drag any folder onto the HierarchicalDock icon and presto! It'll behave like a good, old-fashioned dock folder.
This week, Eternal Storms Software released version 1.2 of HierarchicalDock. Changes include:
Preview listed items with Quick Look
The Finder's color labels are displayed
You can now set global or per-folder preferences
There's more, of course, and you can read the full release notes here. HierarchicalDock requires Mac OS 10.5 or higher, is a Universal Binary and, best of all, free.
You probably thought exactly the same thing I did when I first saw Piet Jonas' tip: the iPhone as a digital picture frame? That's a pretty darn expensive digital picture frame. And his tip is pretty simple-- all he suggests is to turn off the AutoLock feature on the iPhone, thus leaving the screen on to display a slideshow. At first glance, it's not that big a deal.
But the more I thought about it, the more genius it was. I've been pining after a Nabaztag lately, and an always-on iPhone just sitting there on the charging dock could serve exactly the same purpose-- you could have it spit out the time, constantly updated stock info, or even watch your email come in. With Piet's suggestion of webcams, the iPhone could work as a little monitor right there on your desk. And if Apple ever gets this rumored RSS reader off the ground, you could watch RSS headlines fly by on that screen. When you think of all the things you could display on an iPhone sitting in the dock, it's not a bad picture frame at all.
Any other ideas of constantly updated information you could put on your always-on iPhone?
Stacks is one of the selling points of Leopard, and many users love it. Many, but not all. If you'd like to use hierarchical menus in Leopard, try one of these three solutions.
Quay 1.0 was released last week as shareware (here is our post about Quay). For €7, Quay provides custom-sorted hierarchical menus, re-sizable icons and a customizable dock icon. Undocumented APIs are not used, and Quay isn't a hack. If you only want to use one Quay Dock icon it is free, but you'll have to pay for the program to use two or more.
Also available is freeware HierarchicalDock by Eternal Storms Software. To create a hierarchical menu, simply drag a folder onto the application's icon. You can opt to preview your files with Quick Look instead of icons, and sort items by last used date or creation date.
Finally, check out OldFolder. It's free and open source, so you can fiddle around with it. Simply launch it and browse to the folder you'd like to use (support for multiple folders is possible, too).
There you go. Three ways to go "old school" on your dock. Enjoy.
In honor of the holiday weekend, when many of us overate ourselves into food comas, I'm coining a word to describe a class of shareware apps: "lunchware," those programs inexpensive enough that you could buy them for what you might otherwise spend on lunch. If it's less than $12, it's lunchware, so Cocoamug's new Leopard dock customization tool Palette meets the standard (€6.90, or about $10.20). For less than the cost of a burger and a beer (at least by NYC prices) you can get several Leopard interface tweak tools in one little app.
For those who have followed Mat's previous posts on drawer-izing the Dock and creating your own custom drawer icons, Palette lets you quickly swap your own drawer icons in for your stacks (or downloaded icons from a pro) without any messing about. You can also turn dock transparency or 3D effects off, change your Dock or menubar colors, and turn off the dreaded menubar transparency. The unregistered version leaves a little palette micro-icon on your drawers to remind you to register.
Here's another brilliant tip by way of Mac OSX Hints. It turns out that you can actually put a "Recent Items" Stack in your toolbar with a couple of terminal command.
Once you execute it this stack allows you to choose between displaying Recent Applications, Recent Documents, Recent Servers, Favorite Volumes, and Favorite Items. If you click on the Stack it opens in grid view to show whichever of these you selected. As per usual with a Stack, the Dock icon is dynamic.
Incidentally, these are the same "Recent Items..." that appear in the drop-down Apple menu, which can be adjusted in the Appearances Preference Pane.
One of the bigger annoyances many folks have complained about with Leopard is the loss of hierarchical file browsing of folders in the Dock. Of course in Leopard you get Stacks, with all their fancy fanning and gridding, but you lose the ability to right-click a folder and dig into the sub-folders. As a solution/work-around many folks have suggested the venerable Dock replacement Drag Thing. But it has a lot more features and at $29 is a bit of overkill just to get that one feature back. So instead, you might have a look at the free Hierarchy from Charles O'Rourke.
Hierarchy is a dead simple application. All it does is create a little floating HUD-style vertical palette onto which you can drop your folders. Clicking on those folders opens them in the Finder, but better yet right-click generates the old Tiger-style hierarchical menus. Of course, this adds another (potentially annoying) palette window to your desktop, but it does a good job at its small task.
As noted in our recent (bad) little things about Leopard post, the dynamic Stacks icons are a bit of a pain. Basically the Dock icon for a Stack automatically changes to reflect whatever is first in that Stack (based on how it is sorted, by name, date, etc.). A clever Japanese user came up with a beautiful work-around for this annoyance with these lovely drawer icons, which is nicely explained for us Japanese-challenged folks here.
The idea is pretty simple. The icon pack features 18 custom drawer folders, and you just place whichever one you like in the Stack you want prettified. Then using a simple terminal command you change the date modified for that folder to well into the future (2020). Now when you sort the folder by date modified, the custom icon folder will always come up first and so give your Dock this great effect.
You can download the drawer icons here (download link) and the terminal jockeying is explained here.
Update: The original Japanese creator of these drawers wrote in to tell us that he's put up a "blank" drawer PNG (or right-click and download here). that you can use as the foundation of your own custom drawers.
Any number of TUAW readers have tipped us off to dozens of Leopard Dock mods. Apparently nearly everyone using Leopard hates the default dock and the easy-to-mod docks make it simple to upgrade to something you like better. For example, here's one suggestion for a glass style dock, a dock color modder, a forum thread all about updating your dock and an entire site fully dedicated to Dock mods. If you'd like to read more, just google for Leopard Dock. Trust me, you'll find lots of hits.
Thanks to everyone who sent this in. You can stop now! But thank you all the same.
First we tweaked the app indicators, and then we tweaked the color, and now we've finally come all the way back in our Time Machine (oh yes, pun very intended) to two weeks ago. Innermind Media, the folks behind WidgetWizard, are probably a little angry at Leopard, considering all that Web Clip functionality, and so they've released a free widget called DockDoctor that will subtract a dimension from your Dock with the click of a button (and bring it back with another click, which is probably just as valuable).
I know it's not for everybody. I know some of you love the new Dock, or at least have gotten so used to it that it doesn't bother you. But this is OS X we're talking about, and so you should have the right to make your Dock look the way you want it to.
Earlier, I posted about how you can revert those new lights in Leopard's Dock back to Tiger's old triangles (and I can't say I was too surprised to find out that most of you didn't want to revert anything-- do what feels right, man), and I said that the next thing to go would be Leopard's shiny Dock-top.
And now, here we go-- Something Awful's echobucket has apparently found the files that need to be changed to edit the look of the dock. As with the triangles, the Dock elements have a few sizes to them, so replace the "scruve-x.png" files (where x is "l," "m," "sm," or "xl") in the Dock package's /Contents/Resources folder (make sure to back up the original files just in case, too), and then type "killall Dock" in the Terminal to restart it, and bingo, a slightly less bright dock.
In fact, just by changing the color of those pictures, you can change the color of the Dock itself (here's an orange dock on a black background for Halloween, via Digg commenter HacKing). It can't be too long before some enterprising programmer figures out how to put all of this inside an easy-to-use app, but here's the real question: if it's all this easy, why didn't Apple offer us this kind of customization ourselves? Sure, when you hand the paintbrushes to the people, things can get ugly, but they can also get much more beautiful, too.
A German site, Apfeltalk.de has posted screenshots of the forthcoming version of Mac OS X, 10.6 (a.k.a "Snow Leopard"). Most of the screenshots show off the Safari 4 developer preview that will include the "Save as Web Application" option in the File menu. 
Over on the Office Google Mac Blog they're 
We 
If you failed to win the 
You probably thought exactly the same thing I did when I first saw Piet Jonas' tip: 
In honor of the holiday weekend, when many of us overate ourselves into food comas, I'm coining a word to describe a class of shareware apps: "lunchware," those programs inexpensive enough that you could buy them for what you might otherwise spend on lunch. If it's less than $12, it's lunchware, so Cocoamug's new 
Here's another 
One of the bigger annoyances many folks have complained about with Leopard is the loss of hierarchical file browsing of folders in the Dock. Of course in Leopard you get Stacks, with all their fancy fanning and gridding, but you lose the ability to right-click a folder and dig into the sub-folders. As a solution/work-around many folks have suggested the venerable Dock replacement 
Earlier, I posted about how you can revert those new lights in Leopard's Dock back to 
