What's it all about, Alfie?

Fantastic news! This morning I noticed that Apple had released Mac OS X 10.6.2 to Software Updates and with this, I could get quite a few updates, including the Magic Mouse, the "Guest Account" kill switch, and many more. It seems to have done a pretty decent job of fixing the problems I've been having with Comcast's SMTP server, as I'm not getting the disconnects that were so bloody frustrating in the past few weeks.

Gotta love Apple!

With the recent change of Google's home page to the version with the custom buttons, I've had a problem in that they do not respect the width of the browser and in fact, have a fixed minimum horizontal width to make things look nice. I'm not really interested in seeing more whitespace just so I don't have to see the scrollbar, so I was very happy with this hint about how to effect the zoom factor on the Safari page.

I created the file ~/Documents/defaultzoom.css to contain:

  body {
      zoom: 90%;
  }

and then went to the Preferences, 'Advanced' tab in Safari, and added this as the CSS page. It immediately resized the pages to exactly what I wanted. Very nice.

In general, I think there's a too much whitespace on most sites, and this zoom 'out' by default makes it easier for me to see more information in less space. Great.

Today Apple released a lot of new hardware - new iMacs, new Mac Minis (including a server version with no DVD but two hard drives), new mouse, new remote, and updates to the wireless products. It was a pretty amazing update to the iMac: 27" display with quad-core, up to 16GB RAM, and 2TB disk. All for less than $4k. Amazing.

The mouse looks great because it's got the multi-touch interface on the top - no buttons at all. Very sweet. Definitely cool hardware. Can't wait to see it in the Apple Store and check it out.

I want a new desktop machine 🙂

Wow! I missed the final release of LaunchBar 5.0! This morning I noticed that LaunchBar 5.0.1 was released and I got it right away. There's so much in this app that I don't use, and should... the clipboard history is incredible... the search in Google Images is sweet... there's a ton of stuff that's sitting in this little app that I feel it's something I need to spend about a month on to really find all the value in it. Until I have the time, I'll just use it as I do, and be very happy.

[10/22] UPDATE: it turns out that I didn't miss the final release of 5.0 - this was the final release. They just didn't let 5.0 see the light of day. Interesting. I don't feel nearly as bad about this.

This morning I saw that iConquer 3.0 was released as a 64-bit app with full Snow Leopard support. I haven't played it in quite a while, but it's still my favorite implementation of Risk on the Mac. I've seen one on the iPhone, and have been tempted, but haven't taken the plunge. For now, this is how I play the game, and it's great to see that at least some work is being done on the code. For a while there, I was thinking it had been sold off and mothballed.

Flip4Mac WMV 2.3.0.14 was finally released today with Snow Leopard support. It's been in beta for a while, and I've been using it, but it's nice to see the guys actually feel it's "done" and release a final version. I don't look at that much windows media, but it's always nice to know that I can, if I need to.

There's been a problem with the 500GB drives in Unibody MacBook Pros where there's a hardware delay due to the drive and the machine not quite understanding the spin-down and spin-up cycles. Well... this is the second update I know of for the MBP to try and fix this. I haven't seen it, but I'll certainly update on the off-chance that I have seen it and just not noticed it. That would be a funny one.

This morning I noticed an update to iMovie was out - with an interesting list of features:

• Improved compatibility with camcorders using the iFrame video format
• Improved compatibility with importing video captured on the iPod nano
• Fixed problems with resizing the iMovie window during playback

looks like there was a bit of incompatibility on the importing fixed up this time. SOunds good to me.

Interesting that this morning I read that Apple has released a new version of the iPhone OS: 3.1.2. The low-down on this update is that it adds no new features, but contains several bug fixes that were causing a lot of grief to some users:

The code adds no new features, and instead fixes bugs, such as one preventing sleeping iPhones from waking. Also targeted are crashes during video streaming, and a bug which interrupts cellular connections until a phone is rebooted.

The report I read goes on to say that I'm also getting an AT&T carrier update:

American iPhone owners are being given a parallel AT&T carrier update, v5.6; it is unknown what changes the code makes.

Interesting. Tethering?

I saw that DrawIt 3.10.1 is out and the big change is in how the files are saved. I've seen this on several other apps moving to Snow Leopard, so I'm guessing that this fact, combined with the micro release number means that it's just one little thing and yet it's important. Good enough for me.