From time to time we have shared hidden settings in applications which can be used to "tweak" an app's behavior, such as forcing Snow Leopard's dictionary to reuse the same window or make the print dialog expanded by default. These settings are normally changed using the Terminal.app which can be daunting to some.

Secrets is a (free!) preference panel which has collected a bunch of these settings and made changing them as simple as checking a box or choosing from a drop-down panel of possible choices. It includes settings for about 40 different applications, from Apple applications such as Mail, iCal, iChat, Finder, Front Row, Keynote, DVD Player (and more) to third-party applications including Adium, Audio Hijack Pro, BBedit, EyeTV, VMware Fusion, and TextMate (just to name a few). Some applications have a lot of hidden settings, and some have only one or two.

If you see a setting but don't know what it does, click it and Secrets will show a brief explanation (these are also available on the Secrets website, but they are easier to read in the preference panel). If you change a setting which requires you to restart the application, Secrets will tell you, and even give you a "Quit This" button. (It's usually best to make these changes when the app isn't running.)

Unfortunately at least one of the secret settings from 10.5 doesn't seem to work in 10.6. That is, the setting to turn HelpViewer into a regular (instead of floating) window. There may be others.

I'm off to explore and see what new goodies Alcor (the developer of Secrets, who you may also know as the creator of Quicksilver) has uncovered.

Thanks to the recently-revived Hawk Wings site for bringing this to my attention. If you use Apple's Mail.app, Hawk Wings is a great site for tips and information.

Update: We seem to have taken down the Secrets website (oops!) but you can download the preference panel from a mirror (zip) (166kb).

There was a report this week that Mac OS X 10.6.2 will block Atom support, leaving Hackintosh owners stuck at 10.6.1. Intel's Atom processors have been used in netbooks by MSI, Dell and ASUS for their low cost and modest energy consumption. Hackintosh owners were disappointed.

Shortly after that report was published, Electronista noted that a newly-released build of 10.6.2 (10C535) brought it back. Of course, we're talking about "support" for hackintoshes in a developer build of the OS, so keep that in mind.

The moral of the story: Apple can kill this when ever they please, so have fun while you can.

[Via Engadget]

I'm beginning to think that some other writers on the Mac beat are reading my mind.

About two weeks ago, one of my consulting clients was asking if there was any way that she'd be able to upgrade to Snow Leopard and still be able to run two legacy applications in Classic, one of which was HyperCard. Being the forward-looking guy I am, I suggested that we just move the data from her old HyperCard stack over to Bento (simple), and then see if we could find a replacement for the other application into which her employees could re-enter the old data.

Yesterday I was looking at posts over on the venerable Mac website TidBITS, and blogger/author Matt Neuburg had written a post about SheepShaver. This oddly-named application is a PowerPC Mac emulator, one of several that are available for both Mac and Windows. Neuburg does a good job of explaining the process of getting a ROM image, then using a Mac OS 9 installer CD to get SheepShaver up and running.

Matt pointed out a website, E-Maculation, that is dedicated to Mac emulators and how to get them up and running. While my client loved the solution I was able to provide to her, running Classic under Snow Leopard might be a better (and more fun!) solution for other Mac users. If you're up to the challenge and fun of setting up SheepShaver on a Snow Leopard Mac, be sure to take a look at both Matt's post and the E-Maculation website.

In the meantime, I'm going to go put my aluminum foil hat to make sure that Matt stops reading my mind.

[via TidBITS]

Is it a forgotten project? A fit of open-source pique? Or is it just that everyone got really busy on other stuff? Looks like Apple has just shut down the ZFS project for Mac OS X. The site for the project on Mac OS Forge reads:

ZFS Project Shutdown
2009-10-23

The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.

It's hinted that this was caused by legal issues surrounding the merger of Sun Microsystems and Oracle, which caused Apple to back away from the next-generation file system technology. After many rumors, including ZFS support that was going to be added in Snow Leopard Server, but that ended up being removed in the final version, it now seems like the saga of ZFS on Mac OS X is ending with a whimper.

[via Daring Fireball]

Snow Leopard introduced many welcome changes to Leopard and one huge annoyance. When copying an email address from Mail, Snow Leopard wraps the address in "< >" brackets, for example, "<annoying@email.com>". When pasting, you've got to go back and remove the brackets.

Mac Daddy World has identified the preference setting and posted the simple Terminal commands that will eliminate the brackets. I tried it and it's working perfectly! Thanks, Mac Daddy World. That was very simple and most welcome.

While most users are happy with Snow Leopard, there are these annoyances. Is there something bothering you?

OK, so it's really just the Snow Leopard Server Multi-City Seminar and not a huge rock band on a world tour, but if you're more interested in servers than following your favorite group, this announcement should get you excited.

Apple's setting up a series of 7 seminars across the country (blissfully ignoring most of the center of the USA except for Chicago) designed to sell IT managers, administrators, server architects, technology coordinators, and anyone else who will listen on the advantages of Snow Leopard Server. The agenda for each seminar includes a hardware and software overview, a discussion of setup, administration, and integration, and information about collaboration and communication with Snow Leopard Server.

For those in the content production world, there will be info about Podcast Producer 2. System Administrators will learn about how scripting can be used to ease their workload, and detailed information about integrating iPhones into the workplace will be presented.

The scheduled stops are:

• Boston, MA / October 27
• New York, NY / October 29
• Seattle, WA / November 17
• Chicago, IL / December 1
• Washington, DC / December 3
• Cupertino, CA / December 8
• Los Angeles, CA / December 10

To reserve a seat for one of the seminar sessions, visit this page on the Apple website.

One week from today, Microsoft will try to shake the stink of Vista. BusinessWeek reminds the world that Microsoft is set to launch Windows 7 on October 22nd. I've got the day free, since all of my invitations to Windows 7 launch parties seem to have been lost in the mail.

As the spotlight shifts toward Redmond, WA, Apple Senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller says that Apple sees "a very good opportunity" in the Windows 7 noise, in an interview with Business Week's Peter Burrows.

While no one expects Windows 7 to be as poorly received as Vista, the new operating system will mark the first time in a long while that millions of PC owners will start looking seriously at replacing existing machines, especially with so many PC-people having skipped the purchase cycle when Vista came around.

And there's where Apple gets them. Or tries to, anyway.

Apple is likely to aim new ads at PC users, trying to pull them to the Mac side in the coming days. The ads will probably hit familiar points, such as the susceptibility to malware worn by Windows, and extra programs buyers get with a Mac out of the box, like iMovie and GarageBand.

Apple and Psystar have been embroiled in litigation for quite a while now. At the core of the dispute: Psystar modifies Apple's operating system software so that it can run on its clone machines. It then sells its computers with Mac OS installed to, well, anybody who wants one. As you can imagine, this does not make Apple happy.

Anybody familiar with The Great Clone Crackdown of 1997 will tell you that Apple likes to keep a very tight grip on any device that presumes to run its software. Apple points out that Windows machines are a mishmash of often conflicting hardware and suffer from quirks and errors and incompatibilities that such a set up can bring.

So Apple's cadre of lawyers descended quickly on Psystar. In July of last year, the company sued Psystar for copyright and software licensing violations, quickly amending its lawsuit to additionally charge Psystar with violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

And there was much lawyering.

More than a year later, now that discovery has been completed, the two parties have each filed for summary judgment, which, in effect, asks the judge to rule in favor of the filing party because enough evidence has been shown that either makes or breaks the lawsuit.

Psystar's argument, and the one covered in its motion, somewhat relies on the "first sale doctrine" which says that any purchaser of a copyrighted product can then take that lawfully-made copy and sell it, so long as no additional copies can be made. For its part, Apple says that when one "purchases" its OS, you are only purchasing a license to use the product. Its Software Licensing Agreement (SLA) quite clearly states [PDF link to Snow Leopard SLA] that the user cannot modify the software to run on a non-Apple system.

The idea that what you are purchasing is a license to use the product is pretty commonplace among software manufacturers, because, the argument runs, you can cut any software company's profits off at the knees if every purchaser became an owner with free rein to redistribute the software. Apple states that no software company in its right mind would put the money into research and development of any software product at all if that were the end result of bringing its product to market. Groklaw suggests this could have ramifications for FOSS and and the GPL.

Update: Cnet reports that Apple is acknowledging the problem, while calling it "extremely rare."

There's a few threads on Apple's Discussion Boards describing a problem that's affecting some Snow Leopard users. An issue with the Guest account feature in SL appears to be chomping down on user data with extreme prejudice. Cnet/MacFixIt first took notice of the issue back in early September, but a 2nd report & a link from 9to5Mac have raised the threat level quite a bit.

According to affected users, the guest account's logout wipe -- a standard feature intended to prevent guests from leaving files on the machine -- is inadvertently clobbering the home directories of the non-guest accounts, with catastrophic results. One user writes, "I hadn't used my Guest Account since upgrading to snow leopard, and I accidentally clicked it instead of my user account this morning, to find that when I logged into my normal account ALL my files, settings, mail etc had been reset."

Worse of all is that he's not the only one.

MacFixIt reports that it isn't an epidemic, but readers have described the same issue in the comments to their post. For now, we offer this simple advice. First, make sure your backups are current. Secondly, turn off the Guest account feature if you're not using it (simple instructions here); some suspect that the issue is triggered by having it turned on prior to the SL upgrade. If and when the culprit is identified and squashed, we'll let you know.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

[Via Engadget]

Security System News is reporting today on the US Army's decision to use Mac OS X and Apple servers to run four video surveillance systems. When reliability and security are paramount, says Chris Gettings, Mac OS X is the choice. Chris is the CEO and president of video management software manufacturer VideoNEXT.

"You're not going to have some of the memory-leak issues that seem to plague different versions of the Windows systems," he says. "And mission-critical customers appreciate that."

Additionally, Mr. Pat Mercer, who has actually installed Mac-based systems for "...[a] large government entity" notes that low bandwidth, security and reliability are what those IT departments demand. "That's where the Mac conversation begins," he notes.

This isn't the first time we've seen the US Military using Apple products. In May we saw a story of soldiers using the iPod touch as an in-the-field translator. In December of '07, we published a post about more wide spread military adoption of Apple hardware and software. Of course, we can't forget the life-saving iPod.

[Via AppleInsider]

In the last few days, two builds of Mac OS X 10.6.2 Snow Leopard have been seeded to the Mac developer community. The latest build, 10C591F, is 456.8 MB in size and adds about a dozen changes to the fifty or so tweaks in the prior build.

Apple has asked developers to test nearly 150 specific areas in order to make the new version of Snow Leopard as clean as possible. Known issues that are outstanding and have yet to be addressed include Core Data output, video corruption, and occasional hangs within System Preferences.

With another release of Snow Leopard pending, I thought we could have a little fun with a poll. Given that it took 88 days for 10.5.2 to hit Software Update after the initial release of Leopard, it may be too soon for another Snow Leopard cub to show up (November 24th would be 88 days). Of course, the past isn't any indication of future Apple OS release dates, so your guess is going to be as good as mine. If we don't have a date range listed that's you think is plausible, let us know what your guess is in the comments.

A little over a year ago, I was searching for a way to expand my reach as a Mac consultant. I had heard quite a bit from other Apple Consultants Network members about Mac HelpMate, but really didn't know much about it. After a free test drive, I ended up purchasing Mac HelpMate and its companion software for standalone Macs, Auto HelpMate. Since then, supporting users anywhere within or outside of the Denver area without having to hop into my car and drive to a client's house has become a reality.

Mac HelpMate works by creating a secure, user-initiated connection between a support professional and the user through a gateway server run by the brains behind the application, Apple Certified System Administrator Dean Shavit, who invented the Mac HelpMate service three and a half years ago.

The application is easy for my clients to set up, since there's a ZIRO (zero-interaction roll out) tool that I have on my company web site. One click, and my clients are sharing their screens with me, without having to install software or enter a password or code. The standalone application is used both by the support client and the support professional, and it runs on any Mac OS between 10.3 (Panther) and 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

I celebrated my first year of Mac HelpMate usage by re-subscribing to the service ($600 annually with a $100 discount to members of the Apple Consultants Network) and by upgrading to the new Mac HelpMate 3.0. The new version provides full compatibility with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, as well as a number of powerful new features.

The more we use Snow Leopard the more niceties we uncover. This week I found a simple little check box that has made my life infinitely more awesome. Yes, my entire life.

First, a bit of background. When Mac OS 10.0 was released in September of 2001, we all went crazy with the genie effect, watching windows slip in and out of the newly-introduced Dock with silky smoothness.* Window after window slid into place.

The problem was this: minimized windows moved neighboring icons aside, making everything a bit smaller and harder to identify. Eventually the whole mess became unusable. Sure, you could mouse over or check the identifying icon but ancient eyes like mine aren't meant for such strain.

Snow Leopard has come to the rescue. Now you can minimize windows "behind" their parent app's icon. Here's how. First. launch System Preferences and click "Dock." Then, select "Minimize windows into application icon." As Jeff Goldblum said, "There's no step three." Now, minimized windows scoot behind your Dock icons and there's no more crowding.

*OK, jaggy, halting smoothness. Still, it was cool. Mostly.

• Disk image installers
• Disk image drag-and-drop
• Archive drag-and-drop

Read on for an in-depth look into the current installation methods, and why they need to change.