In the "make dashboard useful" vein, freeware App Update is like Apple's Software Update for your third-party applications. It can be set to check what's in /Applications against VersionTracker, MacUpdate, or Apple—manually or automatically. Growl support too. Not always 100% accurate, but close.
Tag archive for 'osx'
Dashcode comes on the Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) installation DVD. It's a tool for creating widgets (mini-applications made with HTML, CSS, images, and JavaScript) specifically for the OS X Dashboard. Apple did a great job in making Dashcode the epitome of simple so that non-programmers can create basic custom widgets with ease. And if installing Developer Tools isn't your thing, you can still create your own widgets using Web Clips.
Continue reading 'Dashcode is easy, Web Clips easier'
The bright orange menu bar icon for Missing Sync sat in my Leopard menu bar next to Google Notifier, the latter turning from an unobtrusive grey to attention-grabbing red when it had something to tell me (the arrival of unread Google Mail). I found my eye wandering needlessly to the Missing Sync icon, so decided to hack out that distracting brightness.
Continue reading 'Desaturating menu bar icons'
Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) is in the wild, as the media are fond of saying. While there may be few truly "new" features (Apple posted a creative list of 300+), it certainly does look as if the update refines the Mac OS X experience. I'd enjoy such refinements as proper support for UVC cameras, and double-clicking events in iCal to edit their properties—but not at the cost of being unable to run some of my third-party applications. Information on third-party application compatibility with Leopard is hard to come by. By trawling support forums, e-mailing developers, reviewing release notes, reading press releases, browsing developer and user blogs, searching FAQs, etc. I found that Leopard is one kitty that won't always play nice on my Mac.
Continue reading 'Leopard third-party application compatibility'
A 30-day trial of Apple's iWork 08 is available for download, an application suite that "Works with Office". Pages professes compatibility with Microsoft Word, Numbers with Excel, and Keynote with PowerPoint. This includes read-only support for the Microsoft-sponsored Open XML file formats introduced with Office 2007 for Windows.
Continue reading 'iWork 08 and support for Open XML'
