kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Tag Archives: Mac OS X

Picasa for OS X in 2008

It’s been a busy week this week, and there’s some news items that I just didn’t get to yet.  This one comes to us courtesey of TechCrunch.

One of the most popular photo editing programs for Windows has to be Google’s Picasa.  Though it’s not the most full-featured image editing on the market it’s free and great for managing photos and albums, something that isn’t a strength of more full-featured applications like Photoshop and Paint.NET.

On the Mac, the most obvious photo organizer is Apple’s own iPhoto.  iPhoto does a decent job of organizing photos, though it does have its drawbacks and it’s not free.

A free Picasa would not only challenge iPhoto, but would also channel users into using Google’s online service Picasa Web Albums.  One question raised is how this will affect competing photo management services like Photobucket and industry leader Flickr.  Reality is it will probably do little to the market since OS X users make up a relatively small percentage of the software market, but what it will do is make Picasa a true cross-platform tool.

Enabling the Tab Key in OS X

OK, so it’s been about a month since I installed Leopard, and there are a few things that have been bugging me.  One which is a constant source of frustration for me (since I’m really a keyboard guy at heart) is the fact that by default, OS X won’t allow you to “tab” your way through all the controls of a form.

So now I found by way of a bit of surfing (I started with this post from Knightwise) a page on LifeHacker describing just how to accomplish this magical feat.  Truth be told, I did this last year before the Leopard install, but couldn’t remember how I did it.  This post is as much for me (for the next time I have a fresh OS X install) as for the community at large.

  1. Open System Preferences (Apple Menu –> System Preferences)
  2. Click on Keyboard and Mouse
  3. Click on the All Controls radio button at the bottom of the form

Thank God we’ve got that little mess sorted out.

Hidden Details in OS X Leopard

I found an interesting bit of hidden text in OS X.  The icon for “TextEdit” actually contains legible text if you can enlarge it enough to read.

This is in addition to the other little “hidden gem”… Those cute kids in Cupertino thought it would be cute to paint every non-mac computer with the Blue Sceen of Death… funny… Cobalt (seen below) is running Ubuntu 7.10…..

I wonder what other hidden gems might be waiting for me… a working flash player perhaps?

Updates: Windows vs. Apple

I realize that many of you reading this are well aware of the tediousness of regularly performing your windows updates.  Hopefully it’s not as bad as this guy… I mean hell we’ve all done it.  Reload your Windows PC and spend 30-60 minutes running Windows Update multiple times to make sure you’ve covered everything.

So why, prey tell, would it be any different on the Mac?

Well, it isn’t.  At least not entirely.  When I bought Leopard last week, there were two software updates for me to do when I installed it… a mere 4 hours after its release!  2 updates in four hours?  That has to be some kind of record.

Leopard Breaks Flickr Uploader

Caught this story over on DownloadSquad tonight.  OS X Leopard causes a problem with the Adobe Flash plugin for all browsers on OS X (Firefox, Safari and Opera were tested).  The problem has been acknowledged by Adobe but no release date of a fix has been determined.

As I found out last night it makes the uploader *very* broken.  You can select files to upload, but once that’s done the uploader simply does nothing.  Sits there like a bumpkin on a log.  One wonders why Adobe didn’t take the time to test this with one or two of the Leopard Betas / Release candidates…

The DS article does mention a partial workaround, but it’s a HACK.  I would caution against even attempting it.  If you need to upload in the meantime, just use the client application and ignore the issue  until Adobe get their act together.

Leopard on your PC

Well that didn’t take long…

BrazilMAC over on the OSx86Scene forums has posted a tutorial on installing Leopard on your stock PC hardware. I don’t see any way that Apple would release a more standard version of OS X… the fact that it only has to run on Apple hardware is part of what makes it such a stable platform. The original post is from August, but the author has updated it as of launch day (Oct. 26, 2007).

Yes, I know it isn't Leopard. :P -- Photo Credit: dalziel_86 on flickr
Photo Credit: dalziel_86 on flickr

If you absolutely must know how the new cat handles, and you don’t want to shell out a few hundred dollars for a Mac mini (and you’ve got several hours of download, try, retry, and try again time to spare) then this tutorial may just be what you’re looking for.