Linked List: October 26, 2007

Friday, 26 October 2007

Visual History of Mac System Settings ★

Screenshots of the Mac system settings, from the original System 1.0 Control Panel through Leopard’s updated System Preferences.

Doing the Leopard Moan ★

Matt Neuburg’s top gripes about Leopard. I completely agree with him about the new Help Viewer window:

When you choose from the Help menu in any application, what opens is no longer the Help Viewer application. It’s an orphan window that floats over, and blocks your view of, everything else on the screen. It belongs to no application, so you can’t hide it or switch away from it. Now, what’s the most common thing to do while you’re reading an application’s help documentation? You read something in the Help, you switch to the application to try it; you see something in the application, you switch back to the Help to learn about it. No more. Now, as soon as the help window opens, you’re stuck: you’re in the help window and that’s the only place you can be, until you close the window (or minimize it into the Dock).

Macworld’s Leopard Review ★

Jason Snell:

Leopard is, at once, a major alteration to the Mac interface, a sweeping update to numerous included productivity programs, a serious attempt to improve Mac OS security, and a vast collection of tweaks and fixes scattered throughout every nook and cranny of the operating system.

Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard ★

If you crave super-detailed analysis of all your upgrading options, Joe Kissel’s $10 Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard e-book is probably your best bet.

MacJournals: The Despicable MacFixIt ★

MacJournals on MacFixIt’s “Be afraid. Be very afraid” advice regarding upgrading to Leopard and their voodoo warnings about the simple upgrade installer option:

The more afraid MacFixIt makes you of installing new software, the more often you’ll check the site — and either view the ads or upgrade to a paid subscription—to see if it’s “safe” to install yet. If you actually learn how things work and make your own judgments, you might break out of a fear-based dependency on MacFixIt, so the site does its best to prevent that from happening.

Apple: Time Machine Doesn’t Back Up to AirPort Disks ★

Would be a great feature if it did, especially for notebook users. And it’s disappointing, because backing up to an AirPort disk was promoted as a feature of Time Machine in the WWDC 2007 keynote.

PC Icon in Leopard Shows Windows Blue Screen of Death ★

I saw this in the developer seeds months ago and laughed, but I assumed Apple would change it before shipping the 10.5.0 release. Funniest joke in Leopard.

Beware Sharp Corners ★

One of the subtle changes in Leopard is that it no longers renders the corners of the screen as round. Peter Maurer is working on a hack to bring them back.

High-Def Digest Reviews HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Release of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ ★

Kenneth S. Brown:

There are even scenes in this transfer that I completely re-watched just to have another chance to explore the intricacies of the sets and props. For the first time, I was able to read all of the small text Kubrick strategically placed across the film. Call me obsessed, but I found myself completely fascinated by these minor details that I’d previously been unable to enjoy.

(Thanks to Brandon Kelly.)

More Goodies in Apple’s New Operating System ★

Nice list of Leopard details from David Pogue.

SimpleMovieX ★

Speaking of DF feed sponsors, my thanks to this week’s sponsor, SimpleMovieX. SimpleMovieX is a simple (duh) $29 video editor with built-in support for popular file formats and codecs unsupported by QuickTime Pro, and features that make it easy to perform simple edits, transcode between file formats, and perform batch operations on multiple files at once.