snow-leopard posts

Just in case you were waiting for the stop-motion app on your hard drive to be compatible before switching to Snow Leopard, you can stop waiting -- even if you're using some other program to do stop motion, iStopMotion is the best and brightest, and with the brand new update to version 2.1, it's completely compatible with the newest version of OS X.

OK, you probably weren't waiting for this upgrade to bring the OS up to date, but hey, Snow Leopard compatibility is a nice selling point with any app. This upgrade also includes the ability to put markers (with their own name, color, and description) in the timeline of your video, as well as a full Japanese localization, to go along with the English, German, and French already in there. It's a free update for all current users, and considering that iStopMotion has made quite a few appearances in various Mac software bundles, odds are you've already got it anyway.

I picked up CoverSutra a little while ago in a bundle purchase, and I generally liked it -- it's an iTunes controller with the added features of regular notifications with album art, a music search, and Last.fm scrobbling. My one complaint with the software was that it was a bit of a CPU hogger -- my little Mac mini chugged right along trying to keep it running, and I occasionally had to turn it off completely if I was doing something else CPU-intensive.

But maybe with newly released version 2.2 they'll have fixed that problem -- not only have they made the app fully compatible with Snow Leopard and iTunes 9, but they've beefed up performance, taking advantage of all available CPU cores and, they say, dramatically loading album artwork and searching music faster. I haven't tried it yet, but if you've had the same problems with CoverSutra I have, it's worth picking up the new version and testing it out. 2.2 is of course a free upgrade to current users, and the app itself is available for $19.95.

The Pixelmator team has released another update to my favorite little photo editor. Pixelmator 1.5 Spider brings a host of web exporting and sharing options, including a new "Save for Web" feature and the option to send a picture straight to Mail or iPhoto. Additionally, there's a new Trim tool that will cut off transparent or background pixels, and a new Slice tool that will let you cut an image up into pieces and optimize each for the 'net. There's also the usual round of bug fixes, including support for full compatibility with Snow Leopard.

As usual, the new version is available for update from right within the current app. For new users, Pixelmator is available for $59 over on their website, complete with a free trial if you want to check out this photo editing powerhouse before buying. I really enjoy using Pixelmator -- it's lightweight and easy to use, and while it's not quite as full-featured as Photoshop (though with every big version release like this, they get closer), it's a great app to do a little image editing in.

I stumbled upon a great example of the Snow Leopard Services that I've been drooling over. The S3 Upload Service by August Lilleaas is available as a workflow which can be opened in Automator, so you can examine its inner workings. It uses AppleScript and Ruby, easily passed back and forth thanks to Automator's building-block-style workflow. It lets you upload a publicly-accessible file to an S3 bucket, and copies the URL into your clipboard upon successful upload.

The workflow requires that you at least have RubyGems installed, and have an Amazon S3 account set up, but it will handle the rest. It asks for your S3 credentials with an AppleScript popup, which has the unfortunate side effect of not being able to be forced to the front very easily and tends to get lost behind other windows. There are workarounds to that, but no way to keep it on top once it's up. It looks possible to build custom nibs for your services, so I might play around with making a general-purpose utility panel popup to fill the void in my own projects.

In the process of rolling my own Services in Snow Leopard, I've definitely found some limitations, but I'm having fun working around them. This one is a great example of passing results -- returned from different languages -- and processing them, all within Automator. It's not super-polished -- your mileage may vary -- but a big thanks to August for putting it out there for the rest of us to play with!

As you're probably well aware, Snow Leopard broke a lot of applications, some utilities, even some older hardware. For non-developers, Snow Leopard may seem to have more negatives than positives right now. That will change -- things will smooth out as everyone catches up -- but I thought I'd point out the things that have really made me happy in Snow Leopard. As I promised in my post on what Snow Leopard broke for me, this will be a cheery post. I'm not ignoring the multitude of comments on that post, which amount to a short novel on Snow Leopard breakage, I'm just trying to lighten the mood.

No more pesky font conflicts

I'm pretty good about managing fonts. I had some niggling conflicts with Helvetica Neue, though, that I just couldn't get to disappear. The first time Snow Leopard booted, it didn't just nag me about the conflict, it offered a new button to move the offending file to the Trash. Bam. No more font conflicts and no more searching for the culprits.

System Services

Services in Leopard are highly-evolved, and in my opinion, downright amazing. Sure, all of my existing custom services broke, and many services bundled with applications aren't functioning, but again, this will smooth out with time. The simple fact of the matter is that the Services menu now functions the way it probably always should have. You no longer have to go up to the Application menu, select Services and then navigate to the service you want in a confusing list. If you had a lot of services in Leopard, you know what I'm talking about. I could never remember the exact name of a service, and there was a 70% chance it wouldn't be in a subfolder named after the application. That's no good, and Service Scrubber could rarely hack through my jungle of services in order to shorten the list. Instead of all that, we now have Services which show up in a contextual menu (right click/control-click), and are contextually intelligent, showing only applicable services. Further, you can create your own services using Automator, and make them do anything you want. It's never been this easy, even with tools like ThisService.

One of the refinements in Snow Leopard is a slightly under-the-radar trick for using Exposé from the Application Switcher. The Application Switcher is a quick way to jump between open applications, similar to the Windows Alt-Tab (at least that's what it was last time I used Windows). On a Mac, it's triggered by holding down the Command key (next to the spacebar) and then tapping the Tab key.

Subsequent taps of the Tab key will start selecting the next app in the row of applications, ordered by their most recent usage (so the last application you switched from is one Tab away). Shift-Tab moves backwards through the list. You can also navigate using the left and right arrow keys ... and, with Snow Leopard you can press the up or down key to show all of the windows of the selected application using Exposé.

Once Exposé is up, you can navigate the open windows using the arrow keys, and press Space to temporarily zoom a window for closer inspection. Pressing Return will switch to that application, with the selected window in the foreground. Escape will cancel the whole deal, dropping you back to your current working window. Also, once you've entered Exposé from the Application Switcher, it behaves just like Dock Exposé, and pressing Tab will advance to the next application in the list and Exposé its windows. See the video below for a quick demo, noting that the window zoom is triggered with Space, which isn't shown in the keyboard HUD on the video.

Thanks, Alexandre and Jonathan!

Codeweavers tells us that they've released version 8 of their Crossover Games software -- I tried it out a while ago, and found that while it was a pretty good way to play their recommended games, once you went off the reservation, things got a little hairy. Then again, that was a long time ago, and since then, they've updated the recommended games list quite a bit -- they're now saying that version 8 will allow you to play most of the Steam games, including the excellent Left 4 Dead, and the new Tales of Monkey Island episodic games.

Additionally (and perhaps we're burying the lead a little bit here), this version is completely compatible with Snow Leopard. So while you still may be banging your head against compatibility for some apps (I'm actually sort of glad now that SL was sold out at Best Buy when I went by to pick it up -- think I might just wait until the compatibility issues get ironed out), Crossover Games should work just fine.

And it of course works on both Mac and Linux, so if you have a spare 'nix box sitting around and want some Windows games running on it, there you go. Existing customers with a support entitlement can upgrade right away, the app can be bought for $40, or there's a free trial to try out as well if you'd rather do that.

Overall, I'm very happy with Snow Leopard, and loving all of the little refinements I keep stumbling upon. However, I want to mention a few pitfalls I ran into with my upgrade, on the off chance that anyone has a similar setup and might benefit from some advance warning, or any of the fixes I've found.

Safari & Input Managers

There were a few things we knew to expect (and maybe dread), mostly having to do with 32-bit vs 64-bit processing and compatibility. Input Managers were known casualties. Two of the major victims for me were my 1Password and Evernote plugins in Safari. In 64-bit mode, at least at first, they didn't show up at all. See the Switcher's Blog for updates on 1Password and Snow Leopard. The current 3.0 beta of 1Password is working for me in 64-bit, I just have some keyboard shortcut issues to work out. Hopefully the Evernote blog will start offering more updates soon.

In the meantime, there's a partial fix: if you select the application (Safari) in your Applications folder, go to the File menu and hold down the Option key while selecting Get Info, you'll get the Inspector panel (also accessible with a simple Command-Option-I). For applications which have 64-bit capabilities (such as Mail and Safari), you'll see a checkbox to force them to load in 32-bit mode. That gets Evernote working for me, so I'll run it in 32-bit until things get straightened out. I'll be keeping an eye on the Glims blog, as well.

Update: There's a press release & a blog post from Agile this morning that reiterate the company's compatibility stance for 1Password v2: it should work fine on Snow Leopard in all browsers except Safari, and will work with Safari launched in 32-bit mode. Version 3 will be fully supported with Safari in both 32 and 64-bit configurations.

With only a few hours more to wait until the packages start arriving and the stores start selling Snow Leopard, the reviews are beginning to pour in. To summarize: it's faster, it's (mostly) stable, yay new Finder, mostly yay new QuickTime (good thing you can still install the QuickTime 7 player), and in the words of our colleagues at Engadget: "Here's the thing about Snow Leopard, the single inescapable fact that hung over our heads as we ran our tests and took our screenshots and made our graphs: it's $30. $30!"

• Uncle Walt Mossberg at AllThingsD: "Overall, I believe Snow Leopard will help keep the Mac an appealing choice for computer buyers, and I can recommend it to existing Mac owners seeking more speed and disk space, or wanting to more easily use Exchange. But I don't consider Snow Leopard a must-have upgrade for average consumers. It's more of a nice-to-have upgrade. If you're happy with Leopard, there's no reason to rush out and get Snow Leopard."
• Gizmodo's Brian Lam: "Challenging 30 years of ever more bloated software tradition, the changes here are about becoming a more effective middleware between the media and the hardware, reducing friction while becoming more useful by, well, being lighter, less visible."
• Macworld's Jason Snell: "Failing a massive makeover, then, we've got to take joy in the little gifts that Snow Leopard gives us. And there are a lot of them. I'd like to pick my favorite, but the fact is, they're all small enough that I can't really choose one. But if I could gather up the whole lot of them in my arms, I'd give them a hug."
• Ed Baig at USA Today: "In my experience, Mac OS X was already a superior operating system to Windows. With Exchange and other technologies, Snow Leopard adds bite, especially for business. But as upgrades go, this one is relatively tame."
• Wired's Brian X. Chen: "This upgrade won't deliver any radical interface changes to blow you away (not that we would want it to), but the price is more than fair for the number of performance improvements Snow Leopard delivers."
• Jason Parker at CNET: "Overall, we think that Snow Leopard did almost everything Apple says it set out to do: it refined and enhanced Leopard to make it easier to use. Though the system performs well in everyday use, many of our tests indicate it is slightly slower than the older version of Leopard in more intensive application processes. Still, we highly recommend upgrading for all the new features and Microsoft Exchange support."
• David Pogue in the NYT: "[I]f you're already running Leopard, paying the $30 for Snow Leopard is a no-brainer. You'll feel the leap forward in speed polish, and you'll keep experiencing those "oh, that's nice" moments for weeks to come. If you're running something earlier, the decision isn't as clear cut; you'll have to pay $170 and get Snow Leopard with Apple's creative-software suites -- whether you want them or not. Either way, the big story here isn't really Snow Leopard. It's the radical concept of a software update that's smaller, faster and better -- instead of bigger, slower and more bloated. May the rest of the industry take the hint."
• ...and the aforementioned Engadget review, with lots of delightful videos (captured with QuickTime X's new screencasting feature).

If you've got Snow Leopard questions, we've got answers. Throw a comment in this post, send us a tweet over at the Ask TUAW account, or visit over on the Facebook page. We're also hoping to put together a late-night Friday liveblog to take live feedback from upgraders, and then we'll be live again Sunday night for the talkcast where it will be all Snow Leopard, all the time.

Personally, I'm fine with waiting until September (just a month from now) to see Apple's new Snow Leopard update -- I'm having a pretty busy August already, so I'll gladly wait on that bit of excitement. But that won't stop the rumormongers from wanting to see it sooner: apparently quite a few folks are suggesting that since Snow Leopard has gone gold, the release date might get pushed right up into the current month of August. August 24th is in the mix right now, while Daring Fireball John Gruber (who often knows about these things) says August 28th.

Here's my question though: why? Apple's sitting as pretty as you can sit in this economy, and Snow Leopard is already a huge hit even before it leaves the gate (it's coming before Windows 7, it's easier to figure out, and it's certainly a whole lot cheaper). So why would Apple do something so character-breaking as to start showing off by releasing software early? If there were bugs or problems with it, and they released it early, wouldn't that come back around to hurt them even worse?

If you ask me, Apple isn't going to push it -- they said September, their schedule probably allows for September, and they won't have any issues with waiting until September. They may release it early, but you'll have to color me surprised: we'll probably see it in September.

Snow Leopard is going to be uber cheap, so there's not really any reason to not pick it up -- if you make good, regular use of your Mac, odds are that you'll also make enough use of a copy to justify the value. But even if you're not taking the $30 plunge, Macenstein has the most important part of the OS upgrade covered: the wallpaper. Just like the OS itself, Snow Leopard's wallpaper is only an incremental update from the current version (Macenstein says it looks "faster," and we can see what he means), but just in case you want to at least make your old G5's look like they're all upgraded, just "Set as Desktop Background" and there you go.

Rumors that the wallpaper will actually make your computer faster (or give you back that 6GB of hard drive space that the actual upgrade will give you) are unfounded, and probably shouldn't be trusted. But then again, you never know.

John Gruber mentioned in a recent post about Apple's Snow Leopard list of Enhancements and Refinements that one of the small adjustments to Snow Leopard will be that the default gamma on displays will switch from the typical 1.8 value to 2.2, which is what is used on TVs as well as being the long-standing default gamma value in Windows.

Gamma affects the visual contrast you see on your screen, and a higher value indicates a higher level of contrast. The cost of this higher contrast is that you lose some detail on the less luminous parts of your screen.

If you're interested in seeing what this is going to look like in Snow Leopard, or switching your gamma setting now so that you're used to it ahead of time, here are the steps to do it using the Display Calibrator Assistant:

1. Head into System Preferences, and click on the Displays icon.
2. Click on the Color tab, and press the Calibrate... button.
3. On the Introduction window that opens, click Continue
4. On the next screen, "Select a target gamma", choose "2.2 Television Gamma"
5. Click Continue leaving your Target White Point set to Native (or whatever yours is set to)
6. Now name the new profile you've created, click Continue and then Done.
7. Lastly, you can now choose to switch between your default color profile, and your newly created profile with the gamma set to 2.2.

I realize this might seem terribly obvious to some users, but for others playing with color profiles is not ground they've previously covered. If you're one of those people, this tip is for you.

Welcome back to Mac 101, our occasional series of tips for new and novice Mac users.

Over the past 25 years, icons may have become ubiquitous almost to the point of fading into the visual background; still, the little pictures that began in 32x32 black and white format have grown up quite nicely into the massive 512x512 icons we enjoy in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Although the list and column views are more utilitarian for most file management tasks, there are times when icon view is the way to go.

You can control whether or not a particular Finder window displays in Icon view via the View Menu ("as Icons," or ⌘-1), and then adjust the display size of the icons via the View Options inspector panel (⌘-J). You can get up to 128px square icons in Finder windows, which is plenty big, but what if you want to see all the graphical power of those fully operational battle icons?

One way to see the full-size icons is via Cover Flow -- simply switch your Finder window to "as Cover Flow" (via the toolbar button, the View menu, or with a quick ⌘-4) and you can scale your icons at will by adjusting the window size. If you prefer not to have that black background around your icon, however, what is there to do? Thanks to Rob Griffiths at Macworld & MacOSXHints, here's a great tip for getting the maximum size out of your icon previews in the Finder without resorting to Cover Flow.

To view icon previews up to 512x512, hit the Spotlight search field at the top right of the window; search for a null string (two quotation marks next to each other, no space in between, like so ""), then change the search target from This Mac to Current Folder and the search type from Contents to File Name. Switch to icon view and you'll see, at the bottom right corner of the window, a scaling slider. Push it to the right to maximize your icon size. It's just the thing for appreciating the fine detail on your bottle of unicorn tears. (If you're looking for the CHOCK LOCK and Rick Astley icons above, they're in the QuickPix 2008 pack from the Iconfactory.)

Rob also hazarded a guess that we might see a more accessible version of this feature in future Mac OS X versions. If you watched the Snow Leopard stealth preview video posted earlier, you know he may well be right.

The great Mental Floss blog actually did the research on something that occurred to me as soon as Steve said "Snow Leopard" during the keynote -- naming an OS after a cat "sometimes known as the ounce" might not be the best idea.

File this stuff in the "didja know" column: snow leopards aren't actually leopards -- they're actually closer in family to cheetahs, which means that the new OS might be a little closer to Aqua than we're all comfortable with. Also, they're pretty timid -- not only can they not roar (so new audio features in the OS are out), they're known to hide behind their fuzzy tails. We'll put it this way: you wouldn't exactly want to call your football team The Snow Leopards, so we're not quite sure why Steve decided to use the moniker.

Finally, the weirdest tie here is that the snow leopard as a symbol is already taken -- by the Girl Scouts of Kyrgyzstan. Of course, Steve's naming capabilities haven't really been up to snuff lately, and maybe he just didn't want to go with Cougar -- even though Apple owns it, they may not have been ready to take on all the connotations associated with that particular nomenclature. Then again, maybe this will be good for the snow leopard's image -- after seeing all these pictures of cool cats, if you feel you'd like to help them out, we're sure the Snow Leopard Trust would be happy to hear from you.

That was a heck of a way to start off WWDC 2008, don't you think? Just in case you didn't get a change to read all of our 40 or so posts today, I thought I would highlight a few.

Be sure to check out our WWDC 2008 coverage page for lots more info.

The Stevenote

TUAW Meta-Liveblog of WWDC 08 Keynote: Our award winning coverage of other sites' live coverage of the WWDC keynote

iPhone 2.0 firmware will ship in early July, touch users pay $9.95: iPhone users get the 2.0 firmware for free, while iPod touch folks have to pay Apple ten bucks.

iPhone 3G announced: Did you know Apple makes a phone? The new iPhone, dubbed the iPhone 3G, sports faster networking, longer battery life, GPS, and a flush headphone jack. All of that, and it costs much less ($199 for an 8 gig and $299 for the 16 gig model).

MobileMe announced: .Mac is dead, long live MobileMe. Well, at least that will be the case on July 11. The .Mac replacement offers up push email, calendaring, contacts as well as Web 2.0 apps for checking said things. It still costs $99 for an individual account and $149 for a family subscription (all subscriptions last for a year).

WWDC Reader Q&A Liveblog: You had questions, and we tried to answer them.

Apple posts video of WWDC 2008 keynote: Watch it in the comfort of your own Mac.

iPhone 3G

3G iPhone: What it means - a look at the hardware: Cory checks out what comes in the iPhone 3G box.

Where can I buy an iPhone 3g?: Christina whipped up a very cool map showing you all the countries that Apple will be selling the iPhone 3G in.

AT&T talks iPhone 3G plans, apps: AT&T spills the beans about the new iPhone service plans (spoiler alert, they are more expensive) and talks about the Yellowpages.com app they are working on.

Confirmed: GoPhone is No Go and in-store Activation only: Erica confirms that the iPhone 3G will have to be activated in store, no more iTunes activations for you! Also, the GoPhone plan won't be available for the iPhone 3G.

MobileMe

.Mac to MobileMe: what's the deal?: Apple explains the transition from .Mac to MobileMe for current subscribers.

Get a $30 discount on MobileMe: A little bargain hunting never hurt anyone.

What isn't making the cut from .Mac to MobileMe: iCards will be no more. A nation mourns (or at least a WiFi expert does).

Snow Leopard (aka OS X 10.6)

Apple posts details about Snow Leopard: A press release details some of the features found in Snow Leopard.

Apple posts Snow Leopard website: Even more about Apple's next cat.

Apple posts Snow Leopard Server information: Some information about the server flavor of Snow Leopard, which will include some very cool new features.