Dear Apple
Fighting bad design in Apple products one thing at a time.
The blog went down with a Posterous boat and all the recent posts are lost. I am looking into switching to a self-hosted solutions meanwhile. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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Disk got stuck in Macbook Air Superdrive? No worries…
Just arm yourself with some patience and this guide. Here are some funny quotes:
And then you wonder to yourself. The drive inside the case is a Sony NEC Optiarc AD-5630A. And every other drive that Sony sells has a physical eject button, even the slot loading ones. Did Apple hide it? Did they ask Sony to not provide a button?
Of course, you stop worrying about that and wonder how the cable has managed to fray on this barely used drive:
Good to know that there might be a way to extract the disk without disassembling the whole thing though:
[A]lthough jamming the DVD in place using a wad of paper and rebooting does work
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IconSettings: Settings on Your Home Screen Without Jailbreak
I was aching for something like this since I got the first iPhone, the settings hidden deep in the menu are such a pain to change that I rarely bothered. There were various solutions for jailbroken iPhones – SBSettings, HomeScreen Settings etc… But there was nothing to facilitate changing something quickly if you don’t jailbreak.
At first I was installing SBSettings on my iPhones but then the Jailbreaking fad wore off so I had to dig in the maze of Settings app. After a few years Apple added quick access to Brightness control in iOS 4.2, but only on iPad. Actually it wouldn’t be that bad if the Settings app could remember the last setting I was using. And if everytime I was openind Settings I would see the same brightness control I was changing the last time. Same goes for Mac OS Preferences…
And now look at this, the most elegant solution that should be bult-in into iOS from the day one. No Jailbreak, no 3rd party apps, you simply go to iphoneza.co.za/IconSettings on your iPhone, choose the controls you need and add them to your home screen.
The best thing since the release of iOS itself. If you’re anything like me - this is definitely recommended.
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What about USB3?
Dear Apple, I don’t know if you have noticed but suddenly USB3 is everywhere now. It looks like almost every other notebook today is equipped with USB3 ports. Here is my new USB3 hard drive lying next to my Mac. But you don’t seem to appreciate this technology. Why?
I have posted this question on twitter but the only responce I got was in the veins of “Thunderbolt is faster”. Yep it is. Do I care? No. Do I see lots of cheap Thunderbolt drives in shops? No. Do I see any Thunderbolt devices being sold? No. Do I want to pay half of the price for the cable itself? No. Besides, even if we had Thunderbolt drives in abundance, I have only one Thunderbolt port on my Mac. And it is busy powering the video output.
So, all in all, could you please just start changing to USB3 ports in Macs? Or at the very least – make some sort of Thunderbolt-to-USB3 adapter.
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Dear Apple, what have you done to Mac?
Preview, once my favourite jack of all trades makes me cringe every time I try to use it for anything.
The most awful process is copy and paste in graphic files. You paste something, press Enter to drop the selection… But it goes to some thumbnail view (huh?) instead and there you see the file as it was before you tried to edit it.
Thanks for Lion new auto-save system it corrupts original files, you can’t save the file with a different name to preserve the original. You can only export a different version and continue trashing up the original thinking you are editing the new file.
So all in all, it’s still okay for viewing files, but if plan to do any minimal editing whatsoever, get something else. Pixelmator seems quite nice.
Actually this trend worries me alot. Before Apple supplied their computers with software that kicked 3rd party asses. Mail.app was the best mail client I have used, I never even thought about switching away from it. But Lion came out and now I ditched Mail and switched to Sparrow. I don’t do any changes to graphic files in Preview anymore, iTerm replaced Terminal. Even the clock in the menu bar is handled by iStat because it shows the date and it takes onle click to see the calendar… The list goes on actually.
Apple, wake up, you are becoming Microsoft.
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Why would I want to install QuickTime Player 7?
Why would I need QuickTime Player 7 to open anything on my computer? And I don’t want to install it. I have this patented snake oil QuickTime Player Eks anyway. Or maybe it is actually Ten not Eks.
Okay it doesn’t play everything even with Perian and Flip4Mac codecs installed, so to actually view movies I prefer MplayerX anyway. But I am still puzzled how could QuickTime 7 help?
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How to delete your private Photos from Photo Stream
Photo Stream is nice and all, but once your naked picture will spread over all devices you will find out pretty soon that you can’t delete the images that are in the iCloud. Not from iPhone, not from iPad, not from iPhoto. In other words: What happens on Photo Stream, stays on Photo Stream. Is it really this bad? Well, yeah.
iCloud: Resetting your Photo Stream article in knowlegde base suggests the way to get rid of those pesky pictures. Login to iCloud → Click on your name → Advanced → Reset Photo Stream. Sounds easy, right? Heh, but if you think that you dignity is saved, you are in for surprise. Now you have to delete the images that has been downloaded to each of your devices.
On your iOS device, you can remove photos from the Photo Stream view by turning off Photo Stream and then optionally turning it back on. You can do this at Settings > iCloud > Photo Stream.
On your Mac, you can clear cached photos from the Photo Stream view in iPhoto or Aperture by turning off Photo Stream and then optionally turning it back on. You can do this in each application by visiting Preferences > Photo Stream.
If you had Automatic Import enabled in your Photo Stream settings, your Photo Stream photos were also imported to your iPhoto or Aperture Library, and will remain after you disable Photo Stream.
They are suggestting that I might consider to “optionally” turn the Photo Stream back on. Sorry Apple, without the ability to delete photos form the Photo Stream forever, on all devices, I don’t think I will.
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.osx
A bunch of useful OS X Terminal tweaks from dotfiles on GitHub. There are other tweaks for git and bash as well if you are curious. What actually drew my attention is the fix for dreaded UTF-8 problem with QuickLook. Here is the list of tweaks at the moment I am typing this up:
# Enable full keyboard access for all controls (e.g. enable Tab in modal dialogs) defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleKeyboardUIMode -int 3 # Enable the 2D Dock defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -bool true # Make Dock icons of hidden applications translucent defaults write com.apple.dock showhidden -bool true # Disable menu bar transparency defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleEnableMenuBarTransparency -bool false # Always show scrollbars defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowScrollBars -string "Always" # Expand save panel by default defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSNavPanelExpandedStateForSaveMode -bool true # Expand print panel by default defaults write NSGlobalDomain PMPrintingExpandedStateForPrint -bool true # Disable the “Are you sure you want to open this application?” dialog defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices LSQuarantine -bool false # Disable shadow in screenshots defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true # Enable highlight hover effect for the grid view of a stack (Dock) defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilte-stack -bool true # Enable spring loading for all Dock items defaults write enable-spring-load-actions-on-all-items -bool true # Show indicator lights for open applications in the Dock defaults write com.apple.dock show-process-indicators -bool true # Don’t animate opening applications from the Dock defaults write com.apple.dock launchanim -bool false # Disable press-and-hold for keys in favor of key repeat defaults write NSGlobalDomain ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false # Disable auto-correct defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticSpellingCorrectionEnabled -bool false # Disable window animations defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false # Enable AirDrop over Ethernet and on unsupported Macs running Lion defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser BrowseAllInterfaces -bool true # Disable disk image verification defaults write com.apple.frameworks.diskimages skip-verify -bool true defaults write com.apple.frameworks.diskimages skip-verify-locked -bool true defaults write com.apple.frameworks.diskimages skip-verify-remote -bool true # Automatically open a new Finder window when a volume is mounted defaults write com.apple.frameworks.diskimages auto-open-ro-root -bool true defaults write com.apple.frameworks.diskimages auto-open-rw-root -bool true # Display full POSIX path as Finder window title defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool true # Increase window resize speed for Cocoa applications defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.001 # Avoid creating .DS_Store files on network volumes defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool true # Require password immediately after sleep or screen saver begins defaults write com.apple.screensaver askForPassword -int 1 defaults write com.apple.screensaver askForPasswordDelay -int 0 # Map bottom right Trackpad corner to right-click defaults write com.apple.driver.AppleBluetoothMultitouch.trackpad TrackpadCornerSecondaryClick -int 2 defaults write com.apple.driver.AppleBluetoothMultitouch.trackpad TrackpadRightClick -bool false # Disable Safari’s thumbnail cache for History and Top Sites defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy -int 2 # Enable Safari’s debug menu defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu -bool true # Remove useless icons from Safari’s bookmarks bar defaults write com.apple.Safari ProxiesInBookmarksBar "()" # Disable send and reply animations in Mail.app defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool true defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableSendAnimations -bool true # Disable Resume system-wide defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false # Enable Dashboard dev mode (allows keeping widgets on the desktop) defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode -bool true # Reset Launchpad rm ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db # Show the ~/Library folder chflags nohidden ~/Library # Disable local Time Machine backups sudo tmutil disablelocal # Kill affected applications for app in Safari Finder Dock Mail; do killall "$app"; done # Fix for the ancient UTF-8 bug in QuickLook (http://mths.be/bbo) echo "0x08000100:0" > ~/.CFUserTextEncoding
via One Thing Well
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