How to tweak OS X Lion to disable window zooming and other eye-candy

Don’t like Mac OS X 10.7 Lion’s annoying window zoom effect for new windows? Thanks to Tomas Franz, you can disable it. Open Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal) and copy and paste the following line:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO

You then need to restart any apps that are running for them to get the new setting.

Hurrah! Snappy window performance again.

Also, if you want to restore CMD+D to being “don’t save” as it was in previous versions of OS X, you can do that with this command:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSSavePanelStandardDesktopShortcutOnly -bool YES

HOW TO: set disk spindown time for hard drives in a Mac

I’ve recently installed an MCE Optibay with 750GB WD HDD into my new MacBook Pro, alongside the 512GB SSD I got from Apple, providing me with a beautiful 1.25TB of total storage in a slim MacBook Pro. (The MCE Optibay replaces the optical drive in the MacBook Pro, allowing you to install a second 2.5″ hard drive of your choice securely in its place.)

I’m planning to use the 750GB Optibay drive for storing music and video files, since they don’t need high performance, and the drive can be allowed to spin down when I’m not listening to music or watching videos, which seems like an ideal arrangement from a power efficiency perspective.

However, by default OS X seems to take about 10 minutes to spin down the drive after it was last accessed. I found a great tip on MacOSXHints.com which describes how to set the system spindown time — you just open up a Terminal shell and type:

sudo pmset -a spindown 1

(where 1 is 1 minute; 0 disables entirely).

So now, my Optibay drive spins down one minute after it was last used — perfect! (Especially good since my MBP is near-silent with the SSD just in use, thanks to Apple’s really quiet fans when running at their default 2000rpm, and the WD hard drive in the Optibay is actually quite noisy — it’s an audial relief when it spins down!)

The same tip above can be used to disable spindown if you don’t want it to happen.

The only thing I’m wondering is what effect a spindown has on an SSD, if any. The value set using this tip is system-wide, affecting all hard drives, so if a spindown did happen to put the SSD into some sort of powersaving mode that might not be ideal, however, I haven’t noticed anything yet.

Hilarious Apple video from 1987 predicting future of 1997

Money quote: “Introducing the Vista Mac…”

Make Safari use CMD+K for Google Search

One of the things that really annoys me about Apple Safari is that it doesn’t use the CTRL+K / CMD+K keyboard shortcut for activating the Google Search dialogue box, which is standard across most browsers — particularly Safari.

Instead, Safari makes you use CMD+Shift+L which is a “twister” of a keyboard shortcut — not very ergonomic.Â

Amusingly, in their efforts to make Firefox 3 more Mac-like, the Firefox team has implemented the CMD+Shift+L keyboard shortcut as an alternative to CMD+K in Firefox 3. However, I still much prefer CMD+K.Â

I found this great post over at 5thirtyone about how to make Safari recognise CMD+K as a keyboard shortcut for activating the Google Search box. It works a treat! Hurrah!

Fantastic collection of contextual menu items for Mac

Ever wanted to change the desktop picture in Mac OS X by selecting the file in the Finder, right clicking and selecting “set as Desktop Picture” from a context menu?Or perhaps select some files, then “move files to a new folder”, “create folder enclosing these files” or “make new folder for files”? (It’s about time Apple built a “move files” option into OS X rather than just having copy available via the GUI.)

The answers to these needs are at a great page listing various context menu plugins for Mac OS X. Check it out. The two mentioned above are DeskPicChangeCM and MoveItemsX.

I also discovered a wonderful program that sits in your menu bar and lets you change your desktop picture. It can change desktop pictures on a schedule, too (with very nice transitions). It’s called PictureSwitcher (pictured below). It’s $US30 shareware, which I will happily pay once I’ve got some damn money in the bank again 😉

And then there’s this handy Utility… Desktop 2 Login, which replaces the utterly hideous, gaudy, un-Apple-like purple starscape that sits behind the OS X login screen. It simply copies your current desktop picture to be displayed instead. Why couldn’t Apple have provided that as an option!! Grumble grizzle!

How to turn off slow sleep / hibernate mode on a MacBook Pro

Putting a Mac notebook to sleep is taking progressively longer and longer as time goes by. The reason? We’re all ordering notebooks with 2 to 4GB of RAM now, and by default, OS X writes the entire contents of memory to disk before going to sleep.

Since Apple is pretty good about force-sleeping the computer before the battery runs out entirely, it’s actually very rare to run out of battery altogether. I think in the entire time I’ve been using Macs, the safe sleep function has only been necessary once — and that was when I changed an old worn out battery over to a new one.

Fortunately, you can disable safe sleep mode, by entering the following into the terminal:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

If you want safe sleep mode back, just change the ‘0’ to a ‘3’.

Voila — your Mac will be back to the good old days of instant sleep.

There’s also a preference pane that can do this called Smartsleep, which lets you select a nice middle-ground: only use safe sleep mode if the battery is running low at the time you sleep the notebook. For me, who is usually plugged into the power point, that’s ideal!

My god, Albert Einstein WAS a genius

I’ve always doubted Albert Einstein’s brilliance… I mean, e=mc²… wtf? I don’t even know what that means.

But I saw a quote from him today that totally rang my bells…

“Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

That absolutely explains why Apple stuff works well. Jobsy doesn’t put in any more functionality than a device needs, and he doesn’t put any less in either.

It also perfectly explains why those dolts who crap on about Macs being for John West computer rejects don’t get it. It’s not that the Mac operating system is oversimplified — it’s that it is precisely simplified enough to not have many of the gordian knots that Windows gets itself into, like the Vista control panel. OMG, what a mess.

Paper bills, online bills… bane of my life

Tech journo Danny Gorog has written a good piece about new sheet-fed scanners that can scan in your bills (even double-sided ones) and save them as PDFs on your computer, eliminating the stacks of unsorted paper we all build up on our desks.

I’m going to have to look into getting one of these scanners. Paper is the absolute bane of my life. I grew up in the digital era and I simply don’t “do” paper very well. It just ends up piling up and getting extremely messy exactly where it -shouldn’t- be … like our dining table at home.

I’ve been wondering about a better way of dealing with it, because I simply never get round to filing it.

In a way, putting them on my computer as PDFs only half solves the problem because you still have to open all the PDFs to get the info out for your tax return expenses, but at least they’d be in the right order already presuming you used a consistent naming scheme. (And with the full version of Acrobat you could even combine an entire year’s worth of Optus bills, for example, into one PDF, which would be nice.)

I’d like to make more use of online bills, but whenever I’ve looked into it, the companies all say they’ll only keep your bills online for two or three years — not the seven years required by the ATO. What’s the point of having them online if you’re going to have to print them all out at some point!

Also, companies haven’t yet moved beyond the ‘represent each individual paper bill in an online format’ way of thinking. Sure, that’s good from an accounting simplicity perspective, but it still means you have to add the bloody things up at the end of the year come tax time.

It’d be great if, say, a telco could tell you your total mobile phone bills for FY07, what proportion of those bills were roaming charges (which you’d presumably already have claimed back from your company) etc.

The campaign to convince Apple to fix its annoying Apple Mail URL breakage bug

Apple Mail has an excruciatingly annoying bug related to URLs pasted in emails: in every other mail client, they’re broken and unclickable.

Apparently this is because Apple Mail uses a relatively new email standard, the “delsp” parameter, which supposedly instructs other mail clients to remove spaces inserted in URLs so they can recombine the parts of a URL into one clickable URL again.

Except that’s not really what the RFC says — turns out Apple has incorrectly implemented it.

Josh Simons has written a great blog post explaining why Apple’s implementation is wrong.

I also chanced upon another blog post today that explains how Apple prioritises the fixing of bugs: by the number of duplicate bug submissions reported.

So, I appropriated Josh Simons’ blog post (with plagiaristic apologies) and submitted it to Apple with some additional notes as an “Apple Radar” bug report.

You can submit a Radar report too to encourage Apple to fix this bug. Here’s my submission (after the jump) in case you want copy-and-paste simplicity. You will need to sign up for Apple Developer Connection (free) first to get access to the Radar reporting tool.

Text rendering problem on Firefox for Mac

Anyone else have this problem with text rendering on Firefox for Mac? As you can see, the antialiasing is seriously screwed up on the right side of this text. Highlighting the text removes the problem, but when unhighlighted the uneven font weight returns.

The original page is at Crackberry.com but when I just switched back to that tab in Firefox just then, the problem has cleared. (Upon refreshing the page, the problem returned.)