Rapido Resizer

Another thing Paul was interested in was an easy way to resize images.

I showed him Drag 'n' Scale, which is pretty good.

However, via the same article I mentioned in the last post, I found Rapido Resizer, which looks like it might be even nicer.

Serendipity

My good mate Paul asked me yesterday whether there was some way to silence that obnoxious boing that Macs make when they're powered up.

Sadly, I had to tell him that I'd previously looked for such a tool, but never found one.

However, this morning I was reading an article by a switcher, which pointed me to the Startup Sound preference pane.

Problem solved!

Fiddle OS X's Secret Preferences

There are plenty of OS and application preferences that can be changed via the command line, or by editing property lists, but that do not appear on any preference pane ... until now.

The same chap who created Quick Silver has come up with his own preference pane, called Secrets, that lets you set them.

It's Leopard only, but I'm sure you've upgraded by now, gentle reader.

Thanks to The Unofficial Apple Weblog for the tip.

Update: I should just echo the warning, which has been placed on the Secrets webpage since I wrote this article, that changing some of the preferences it makes alterable can potentially cause problems, so use this utility with care.

Smart Sleep

There's nothing worse than opening the lid of your laptop, only to discover that it's been sleeping for so long that the battery is completely drained.

Smart Sleep is a preference pane that allows you to control whether your Mac goes into sleep mode or hibernation mode when you either shut the lid (or it's been idle for a while).

You can specify that it should always sleep, always hibernate, sleep then hibernate or "smart sleep". The latter lets you specify a percentage of battery capacity at which the laptop will start to hibernate.

One thing to note: you need to install the preference pane in the system folder ... /Library/PreferencePanes ... rather than in the one under your home directory. So, don't just double click to install it, copy the file to the folder manually.

Dashboard Dashed

While I think Dashboard is an interesting idea and looks pretty, I don't like having to press a key to switch to it ... especially on my 24" iMac, where there's plenty of screen real estate.

What's more, I've never found any widgets that I consider remotely useful.

So, I was very pleased to read about DashQuit, which allows you to shut Dashboard down.

I'd really prefer a way to have Dashboard not even start up, but this will do for now.

When Will They Learn?!

Geek Sugar alerted me to this clip from Veronica Mars, where a couple of her geek friends are having an argument regarding which non-Windows OS is better ... Ubuntu or OS X.

It's kind of cute, but you'd think they'd at least look up how to pronounce "Ubuntu"!



PS - I'm sure you know the answer, gentle reader, but just in case someone else happens upon this blog by mistake ... according to the FAQ, it's "oo-BOON-too".

FileSpot

I rarely use Spotlight, because the UI is so simplistic that almost any search I want to do is easier from the command line.

The crazy thing is that Spotlight's underlying tagging and search system is very sophisticated, it's just the interface that's a bit naff.

Enter FileSpot. While I've only just started playing with it, I think I'll end up buying a copy.

Skim PDF Reader & Annotator

I read about Skim ages ago, but only recently got around to playing with it.

It's an OS X PDF reader that allows you to add notes. You can insert boxes, circles and lines. You can also mark sections of the text by highlighting, underlining or striking them out.

Skim provides panes for the PDF contents list, the PDF itself and the notes, as well as full-screen and presentation modes. All in all, an excellent PDF reader.

Java 6 Port For OS X

While I'd always rather be writing Ruby than Java, it's been quite annoying that, up until now, only a very old beta of Java 6 has been available for OS X.

Most people expected Apple to provide Java 6 as part of the Leopard release, but no such luck.

Well, there's finally some relief. Developer Release 2 of OpenJDK has been announced for both Leopard and Tiger.