I have to say, installing Xcode 4 from the Mac App Store was one of the worst software installation experiences I’ve ever had. Thwarted Expectations For starters, the big appeal to me of downloading and installing stuff from the App Store is that I don’t have to manage it. All that management stuff is handled [...]
In my last post I talked about using Apple’s MobileMe to mimic the functionality of Dropbox, and discussed it as a possible replacement for the file syncing service should I ever need more space than the free Dropbox offers. In the end, both services came up wanting to some extent. So I’ve continued to poke [...]
So I’ve been using Dropbox for quite some time now and I’ve been extremely pleased with it. It keeps my stuff in sync, and I don’t have to even think about it. And that’s what you want from a service like Dropbox: seamlessness; ease-of-use; freedom from worry. I’m using the free version, so I only [...]
By default, Services that you create in Automator simply retain the Automator icon — the little robot with the pipe — in the Services menu. If you want to customize the look of your Services, simply give the actual services on disk (located at ~/Library/Services) a custom icon. These icons will appear in the Services [...]
As is the norm for this time of year, the web’s full of top ten lists. And the portion of the web I read on a regular basis is naming their top ten tech items of the decade. In that spirit I thought I’d post about the most significant piece of technology from my decade, [...]
Though Time Machine uses hard links to reference files from any point in time without using additional space, changing anything about a file will, obviously, trigger a new copy of said changed file to be backed up to your Time Machine disk. What’s perhaps less obvious is that even simply changing the path to the [...]
It’s just come to my attention that it’s now fairly trivial to split a drive into two differently formatted partitions, one of which could be used for the Mac while the other could be used for Windows. This is not necessarily new, but there are a number of things that make it of particular interest [...]
That title should give you a hint just how much my responsibilities have changed since I took my new job. Yes, I still run a Mac OS X Server, but I no longer get bi-yearly hardware updates. So my server is running a PPC, as is my workstation. So no Snow Leopard Server for me, [...]
Alexander Limi, one of the developers of the fine — and my favorite — browser, Firefox, recently issued a challenge that has been heard by many: how to make application installation more sensible for the less technically advanced. What followed — and, to some extent preceded — was an explosion of discussion on the matter. [...]
I’d day this is probably a first in my career. It appears that after installing the Mac OS X 10.5.8 update my drive space requirements have gone down. Yup, that’s right, my System partition now occupies a bit less space than it did prior to the update. I’d first noticed this on my old PowerBook [...]