Today I had another opportunity to take advantage of one of my favorite Leopard tips, but interestingly enough, it’s one that isn’t very well known out there. You may have heard of this tip, you may have not, but I thought that it might be interesting on this Fourth of July to take a break from my usual string of blog posts to share this tip from Mac OS X Leopard.

Have you ever used an application that had a menu item that you said, “Boy, why didn’t the developer think to give that menu item a keyboard shortcut?” I sure have. For example, in the new Safari 3, I use that “Merge All Windows” feature from the Window menu quite frequently, but it doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut at all. Well, Leopard gives you a way to assign keyboard shortcuts easily.

Open System Preferences and go to Keyboard & Mouse, then choose the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. Not only does this tab let you see the various system-wide keyboard shortcuts available to you, including some you may not have known about (did you know that you could show the Help menu with Shift-Command-/ by default or look things up with Control-Command-D by default?). To add a new shortcut, however, just click on the + button underneath the list, which will bring down a new sheet. If you’re adding a shortcut for a menu item in a specific application, choose it in the pop-up menu. If you’re adding a shortcut for a system-wide menu item, like a service or an Apple menu item or something like that, leave it to All Applications. In the box that says “Menu Title,” enter the exact name of the menu item you’re editing. Capitalization counts here, and if the menu item includes an ellipsis (…) at the end, include that as well. Don’t worry about what menu or submenu the item is in. Finally, in the last box, enter the keyboard shortcut you want, being sure that it doesn’t duplicate an existing one in the application or in the system. Then, click Add, and restart the affected application.

If you entered it correctly, you’ll find that the menu item should now display its keyboard shortcut, and for most applications (definitely Cocoa applications), the shortcut will be functional. Incidentally, this trick also works in Mac OS X Tiger, except that the shortcut won’t display itself in the menu item. This doesn’t work everywhere (Firefox wouldn’t go with it), but in Safari, it’s sure a lot easier to merge all windows into tabs with a Shift-Command-M than it is to have to go into the Window menu manually.

Tags: keyboard, keyboard shortcuts, Leopard, Mac, Mac OS X, menu items, menus, tip

I’ve always been a big fan of NewsFire as my feed reader for Mac OS X. I really don’t know why so many Mac users (particularly those who publish the Mac sites) have such an uncritical, undying love for NetNewsWire, but personally, I think that NetNewsWire is big and clunky. Now, yes, granted, it has gotten better since its version 2 days, but I still think that there’s just too much stuff there. RSS news feeds are supposed to be simple. What good is a complicated feed reader for something that’s supposed to be simple?

That’s why I’ve been a big fan of NewsFire, because it’s very simple and beautiful. It may not have the “power RSS” features (I didn’t know RSS had “power”) that NetNewsWire has, but it delivers a very comprehensive set of RSS readability in a very simple, very beautiful, Mac OS X-like environment that I highly prefer over NetNewsWire. It’s actually an interface that I could imagine Apple designing.

Yesterday, NewsFire was updated to version 1.5, which includes some additional refinements, particularly to make it much more Leopard-like, and today it was announced that NewsFire itself is now free for download and use! So, if you haven’t checked out NewsFire yet, I highly recommend that you give it a try.

Tags: feeds, free, Mac, NetNewsWire, NewsFire, reader, RSS, Software

If there’s one way to summarize one of my biggest questions about what was announced at Steve Jobs’ keynote on Tuesday, this has to be the best way. Overall, this year, I was never really excited about this year’s keynote, and there’s not much there to excite me. Time Capsule definitely looks interesting, and (when I can afford it) may actually improve my recent 1.5 Larry-head rating on Time Machine, although I’m not in a position to get it for the time being. I have a number of qualms about the MacBook Air, and as for the Apple TV, iTunes rentals, and iPod touch/iPhone updates, I’m maintaining a solidly neutral stance on those.

Now, hold on Douglas, you’re thinking, why aren’t you coming out and either praising or bashing Apple the way you normally do? Well, for most of these, I can see pros and cons on both sides, so for me, the jury’s still out on my opinions of these. I’m holding off until I get a chance to play around with things before I start to come to conclusions, and I will be sharing these conclusions on this weekend’s “Macworld in review” episode of PreviewCast, and later elaborating here on my blog.

As for trying them out, that’s what I’m going to be doing tomorrow! Indeed, tomorrow, I’ll be going with the Aragon group (about six of us in total, plus chaperones) to Macworld to tour the exhibit hall for the day. This will be my third consecutive excursion to Macworld’s Expo floor, and according to what all the websites are saying, we’ll actually be able to play around with the new stuff, rather than just looking at a rotating object in a bullet-proof* glass case. Which actually sounds exciting.
* I have no idea if the case was bullet-proof or not, and am just making this up.

However, this year, I hope to spend some more time talking to the people whom I really think should be the stars of the show: all of the little developers. (Merlin Mann likes to call the “little devs” section of the show floor Tiny Town.) It’s THEM that make the show possible, because it’s their contributions of their applications that helps the Mac platform succeed. So, I’m hoping to spend more time there this year.

I have one class tomorrow–Calculus, my first period class. After that, the group of us are carpooling up to the Millbrae BART station and taking BART to Powell Street, a block away from Moscone Center (and right next to the SF Apple Store). Last year, we tried to drive to Macworld and had the worst nightmare with parking. We’ll get there shortly after the 10 AM exhibit hall opening, get all checked in, and then have just under four hours to do stuff to our heart’s content. We’ll gather up around 2:15 to head back to BART and catch a 2:30 train back to Millbrae, and then we’ll drive back to school and get back there around 3:30.

I have not yet exactly decided what I’m going to do there. (Well, actually, I have, but I want to save some stuff to talk about in an “after Macworld” blog post!) However, I definitely intend to visit a number of booths. I plan to definitely check out Office 2008; after all, I don’t feel right truly making fun of something until I’ve had the chance to play around with it with my own hands, and I also want to find out, in plain English, what “Special Media Edition” means. I also want to find out if the Omni Group is offering any nice discounts on their new OmniFocus, which sounds like a really exciting app (and did you hear that it won a Best of Show award), and of course come home stuffed with a Macworld 2008 shirt. (I outgrew my Macworld 2006 shirt. As for my Macworld 2007 shirt, in February, it got a huge red stain after an alcohol thermometer broke in Chemistry class and splattered all over my shirt. Yeah, Macworld 2007 was just NOT a good one for me.) Oh, and I intend to gather up as many freebies and handouts as possible! There was some great stuff last year, so I wonder what I can scrounge up this year.

There’s also been lots of other things happening in my life recently, which I’ll try to catch up on in other blog posts, as it is time for me to hit the hay.

However, I will close by mentioning that this is my 300th blog post since I resalvaged this blog back in October 2006. My blog has had a number of incarnations before that, but I’ve never been able to keep a blog steady enough to keep going continuously for 300 full blog posts, which have been put together in 15 months. (You math whizzes can figure out that I’ve averaged out at 20 posts per month, or about 2 posts every 3 days. It’s not quite at one-post-per-day, blog365ers, but it’s pretty doggone close.) Thanks to the many of you who have been subscribing and sticking with my various ramblings. I do this blog mostly for myself, but it’s great to be able to bring you along for the ride and be able to share things that may interest or entertain you.

Tags: Apple, Aragon, BART, blog, exhibit hall, expo, itinerary, Keynote, Mac, MacBook Air, Macworld, News, opinion, plans, School, Time Capsule, Webmacster87.info

Well, most of you will probably be doing Christmas dinner or things like that with your families, but for those of you in need of something to do tonight, you can catch me live as one of the guests on System Showdown, one of the shows on the Tech Podcast Network. Their show description describes me as an Apple Enthusiast, so they may be surprised that I’m a little bit more of a curmudgeon when it comes to Apple. Either way, I’ll be talking about PreviewCast and phpBB Weekly and some other tech stuff as well. They stream live via Ustream, which you can watch via the link I provided.

The show begins tonight (December 25th) at 8:00-9:30 PM EST (5:00-6:30 PM PST). My guest appearance will be during the second half hour. A link to the podcasted edition will be provided as soon as they make it available.

Tags: appearance, Apple, guest, holiday, live, Mac, phpBB Weekly, Podcasts, PreviewCast, System Showdown, Tech Podcast Network, Ustream

As of today, it has now been a full five weeks since I installed Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook. It is no secret that I gave much more focus to Leopard than I gave to the iPhone during its late-June release, and that is because I am a Mac user and the first new OS X release in two and a half years is much more important to me. That’s why, during the week of the Leopard launch, I counted down to the Leopard release in my own way with my Tiger-to-Leopard series, which attempted to put the time difference between Tiger and Leopard into perspective. Then, for the 30 days of November, I wrote my Leopard Feature Presentation series, which selected one new feature per day from Mac OS X Leopard and reviewed it based on my experiences with that feature. Not only has it given me the chance to express my opinions about what I think of Leopard, doing the Leopard Feature Presentation has forced me to discover some of the other new features in Leopard that I might otherwise have overlooked.

So now that I have dedicated a full 45 (now 46) posts on my blog to covering Mac OS X Leopard, and have been using Leopard earnestly for the past 35 days, I will now make my final review of Mac OS X Leopard and do a final recap of the Leopard Feature Presentations during the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.
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Tags: Apple, features, innovations, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, operating system, recap, release, review

One of Leopard’s “big new features” is a feature for those .Mac members who got suckered into spending $100/year for Apple’s suite of services which probably are only worth about $50/year, if that much. It has to do with the Finder’s improved sharing features (file sharing, screen sharing, etc.), and it’s called Back to My Mac.
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Tags: Back to My Mac, file sharing, Finder, iDisk, internet, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, network, review, Screen Sharing

On Apple’s 300+ Leopard Features List, iChat earns the recognition of having the most new features in the list–24 to be exact. Although iChat 4 includes a nice series of new features for the AV crowd and some other new ideas, is the new iChat any better at just plain, old-fashioned text chatting? I spent a couple of weeks with iChat to find out.
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Tags: Adium, AIM, audio, chat, Chax, collaboration, features, Google Talk, iChat, iChat Theater, Jabber, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, preview, Quick Look, recording, review, Screen Sharing, sharing, text, Video

Us Mac users may have teased Windows lovers because it took Microsoft 5 years in between the releases of Windows XP and Windows Vista, but now we’re a little guilty of lengthy releases too. Mac OS X Tiger was released on April 28, 2005, and now Mac OS X Leopard will be released on October 26, 2007. Exactly 2 and a half years, which is half of the length of the interim between XP and Vista.

In preparation for the upcoming release of Leopard, I will be doing a 5-part series on my blog this week taking a look back at everything that has happened over the last 130 weeks. I was originally going to make this a single article, but after getting so many ideas, I have decided to split it into five posts covering five different categories of events. If you have any additional ideas of significant things that have happened during the last 910 days, leave them in the comments. (Although note that I will be out of town for a portion of this week; I have this full series pre-scheduled.)

In this first part of the Tiger-to-Leopard series, I cover the significant events affecting Apple themselves since Tiger came out. Be sure to check out the other articles in the series.
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Tags: announcements, Apple, article, history, iLife, iPhone, iPod, iWork, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, Tiger-to-Leopard

I’ve always said that I’m not a fan of computer games. Well, that’s kind of a half-truth, although I am against the majority of the computer games out there. However, I’m a little more favorable towards some of the games out there that help you unwind and actually take advantage of that big glob in your head called your brain. I’ve already reviewed one or two of these this past month, and today will throw out one more.

I may not be a big fan of Windows, but I do know that it comes with a pretty nice Solitaire game built-in. Chess was all that Apple seemed to be able to muster up for Mac OS X, which is why before I went to Los Angeles this past weekend, I decided to see if I could Google up a good and free solitaire application for Mac OS X. My result was a nifty little app called Solitaire XL.

Solitaire XL is the same Klondike game you’re used to on Windows and many other Solitaire applications, and it doesn’t come with any other solitaire games to play. Still, it’s a pretty nice game to play. It has some nice 3D OpenGL-based effects during game play, and the way those cards flip really gives a nice, real feeling to the game. The application itself only has one brushed metal window which is where the deck/discard pile sits–the rest of the cards float above whatever is behind it. However, the window is the way that you can reposition the game on the screen, and if Solitaire XL is not your foremost application, the rest of the game will hide itself until you bring Solitaire XL to the front again.

However, Solitaire XL does have some available options, such as allowing you to choose between two animation styles (it calls them “Stretch” and “Cut”), change the backside design of the card, set a background to the game if you want, set the animation speed, and even turn on a variation of the game that only turns over one card in the discard pile, instead of the traditional three.

Solitaire XL also can keep score of the game. I didn’t know there was any kind of “score” for Klondike, but the way Solitaire XL keeps score is it adds nine points any time you add a card to the set of suits up at the top (anyone know a name for those stacks?), and subtracts one point each time you draw from the deck. It can then send your scores to its online high-score database, although it has had some difficulty loading properly for me. The only slight detraction from the app is the small unobtrusive ad that pops up when you quit the game, but again, this is freeware.

All in all, if you’re looking for a decent Klondike Solitaire game for Mac OS X, Solitaire XL is a pretty good OS X adaptation of the classic card game available for download at no cost. Now if only someone could figure out a way to help me win it more often.

Final Rating:

Tags: games, Klondike, Mac, review, Software, solitaire

Something that a number of Mac bloggers have been doing recently is sharing what they have up in their menubars, and so I thought that I might as well share mine as well. So, without further ado, here is mine:

From left to right (I’ve linked to reviews where applicable):
CoverSutra - Really nice iTunes controller that I love.
Quicksilver - Without a doubt, the swiss army knife of Mac OS X.
Skitch - One heck of an application for snapping, annotating, and sharing images.
iClip - That nice thing for keeping a clipboard history.
Twitterrific - The driving force behind my addiction to Twitter.
Wakoopa Tracker - Sitting there, quietly monitoring what apps I’m using.
TextExpander - If I forget a snippet or want to quickly add a new one, the menu item is there to help me.
International - Quick access to the Special Characters palette.
AirPort - Because I’ve got to know when I can go wireless.
Clock - The small version because it’s good enough, saves menu bar space, and because I wear a watch all the time anyway.
Battery - How much juice do I have? Am I getting thirsty?
Spotlight - It’s slow and I really don’t use it. I know there’s a way to scrap it, I’ve done it before, but I’m just too lazy to mess around with my precious system in that way.

I realize that my blog has been slumping–apparently I haven’t done a non-review article in a week! I’ll be catching up soon, I hope…

Tags: Mac, menubar, Personal, services, Software