Published on November 9, 2008
I’ve always loved the nearly-instantaneous sleep feature of Mac notebook computers. If I needed to get up and go with my 12″ Powerbook G4, I could snap the lid shut and throw it into my bag. Recently I grabbed a new Macbook Pro, and noticed that the computer didn’t go into sleep instantly. Instead, the computer was writing RAM to the hard drive, a process called hibernation, which kept the system’s state safe in the event of power failure (your battery dies, or you swap it out for a new one). This is a great feature, but I don’t have a secondary battery to swap, and I was getting tired of closing the lid and waiting for the white light to start pulsing. If you don’t wait for the light to pulse, then you’re moving the computer while the hard drive is active, and you risk damaging the drive. The sudden motion sensor (SMS) is active while the machine is in use, but apparently isn’t active during this hibernation process.
I can across this great blog post by David Alison describing the situation and showing a quick terminal command you can use to disable the hibernation mode. After running the command, shutting the lid on the notebook will skip dumping RAM to the hard drive, and will just instantly sleep. I was hessitant though, because if you don’t hibernate and your battery dies while the machine is asleep, you lose your system’s state. Also, if I bought a second battery, would I remember to hunt down the terminal command and reverse the setting? I’d also be losing the instant sleep state again.
Thankfully Jeremiah posted a link to SmartSleep in the comments of David’s blog. SmartSleep is a preference pane that lets you turn on and off hibernation (writing RAM to disk) with a drop down menu. It also features a mode called SmartSleep, where the computer will hibernate if the battery is below a certain threshold of charge, but otherwise sleep will be instant. Perfect!
If you’re a Macbook user and you want instant sleep, grab a copy of SmartSleep for yourself.
Published on November 2, 2008
If you have Netflix and a Mac, surely you’ve been frustrated that you’ve been locked out of Watch Instantly since it was launched long ago. Today Netflix started allowing Mac users to opt-in to the Mac streaming beta. To get your account added, head over to http://www.netflix.com/silverlightoptin and install the Microsoft Silverlight plugin. Apparently there is a 5 device limit to the beta, so keep that in mind as you activate computers. Hopefully it will go away after the beta is over.
Via: VentureBeat
Published on October 19, 2008
If you’ve got a multi-touch gesure enabled Apple notebook computer, you should take a look at the MultiClutch preference pane from Will Henderson. This preference pane lets you assign multitouch gestures (like Swipe Left/Right, pinch, rotate) to keyboard shortcuts on a per-application basis. You can also assign these gestures to global system-wide keyboard shortcuts. This lets you take gestures that normally only work in Apple applications, like swipe left/right for forward/back in Safari, and use them in other applications like Firefox. In the screenshot to the right, I’ve taken swipe up/down and set it to switch between tabs in my iChat chat window.
This feels like the type of thing that should be built into the system, but until it is, Will Henderson has provided an excellent (and free!) tool.
Published on January 24, 2008
Ars Technica is reporting on (what I think is) a pretty exciting event for OS X software development. Apple has provided software developers with access to the Calendar Store, the system that manages the database of events, todos, and alarms in OS X. This type of access has been possible for the Address Book since 10.2. For instance, you can associate a screen name in Adium with an Address Book entry, and information is populated automatically. Now that same type of interaction can happen between third-party applications and the Calendar database.
I am going to guess that this is going to have an immediately HUGE effect on GTD type applications. The Mac has already seen this market of software grow very quickly. Now these systems will be able to tie into the same database, a database that is also integrated into first-party Apple apps like iCal and Mail.
The area I’m very excited about is calendar synchronization. There are a few tools out already that synchronize online calendars with iCal. Spanning Sync and Plaxo will both sync Google Calendar to iCal, however these require periodic updates and dealing with duplicates can get messy and scary if you make the wrong move in resolving a conflict. Now, I hope we will see instant two-way synchronization that works completely behind the scenes. The Calendar Store access allows applications listen for changes in the Calendar database, and act on them immediately, so I believe that duplicates and other issues related to periodic syncing can be minimized, or in an app to app situation, completely eliminated.
One of the primary reasons I switched my day-to-day computer from Windows to Mac was for the cleanly integrated PIM applications, and I’m ecstatic to see continued and increasing support to make things work together even better.
Via: Ars Technica
Published on December 3, 2007
I love Spotlight for finding documents, but my application launcher of choice is still Quicksilver, mainly because of how I can additionally launch URLs and bookmarks instantly. About the only time I use Spotlight to launch applications is when Quicksilver crashes (alarmingly frequent with Leopard… running B53, not sure what the problem is).
Leopard made Spotlight much better as an application launcher by automatically putting your selection on the “Top Hit”, which will usually be an application if your input matches an application name. Spotlight never chooses the Quicksilver application as a “Top Hit” for me, instead choosing a document that has the term in it.I don’t have any proof that this is intentional on Apple’s part… but this behavior is consistent on both my iMac and my Powerbook. Every other application will come up as a “Top Hit”, regardless of what documents I have on my machine containing the same text, but Quicksilver never will. Is Spotlight biased against easily launching Quicksilver? Can anyone else verify the same behavior on their machines?
