Apple is about to ship it’s 65th release of Mac OS X – counting all the minor updates. The Robservatory has a table showing all major releases of OS X from the public beta through the latest public version. Completely useless, but fun to look back on.
teleport lets you use a single mouse and keyboard to control several Macs. Simply reach an edge of your screen, and your mouse teleports to your nearby Mac, which also becomes controlled by your keyboard.
The pasteboard can be synchronized, and you can even drag & drop files between your Macs. You can make a donation to the developer if you find teleport useful in your workflow.
Control multiple Macs with one keyboard and mouse
I mentioned a new feature of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard earlier this week, and today I have another one for you that enhances the Airport menu.
Snow Leopard Airport Menu
Years ago, back in the days before OSX, file compression on the Mac meant using applications like DiskDoubler and Aladdin Stuffit. Stuffit was a staple of every Mac computer. Many applications required the Expander app just to install, and virtually any file you downloaded off the Internet for the Mac was compressed using the Stuffit format. You could make the argument that it was the single most popular non-Apple application on the Mac for years. Aladdin (later known as Allume) sold Stuffit to Smith Micro Software in 2005, at which time it was still the dominant file compression method on the Mac OS. Flash-forward to present day and we now have file compression built-in to the OS, via BOMArchiveHelper’s .zip format. So you might be wondering why you would need anything more. Read on to find out why. (more…)
In the last few months one of my favorite sites, CreativeTechs‘ QuickTips, has blogged two of my previous articles (Easily remove an OSX System Preference Pane, and Copy multiple Photoshop layers into a new document without flattening). Today I’m happy to return the favor with this tip from CreativeTechs on eliminating shadows you get when using Command + Shift + 4 in Leopard screenshots. To do it, simply fire up OSX’s Terminal application (located in Applications/Utilities) and enter the following:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true
Then logout and log back in, or restart. Your screenshots should now be void of shadows. 
As noted in the CreativeTechs article, this method works well. But for the really picky designer, the artifacts left around the rounded corners of windows (as seen above) can be a real nuisance. Be sure to check out the link at the bottom of the article that will make a Photoshop Action available which gets rid of the Leopard shadow, and replaces it with a custom layer style which you can turn on and off as you wish. By the way, if you wish to set the shadow defaults back to normal, you can do so by opening the Terminal again and entering the following:
defaults delete com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow
Happy shadow hacking!
Lithoglyph’s Mondrianum is a powerful plug-in for OSX Leopard that enables Mac applications to leverage the resources of Adobe Kuler. Adobe kuler is an online community where you can explore, create, and share color themes. Once installed, Mondrianum acts like a built-in, system-wide color picker, available in any Mac application that supports this feature of Mac OS X. Apple’s own iWork and iLife suites, Adobe Photoshop, and other applications like Coda, CSSEdit, and many more, all work well with Mondrianum. Mondrianum combines the best of the community content on Kuler and the nativeness of Mac applications. If you work with colors on a Mac, be sure to check it out!< Thanks to Ivan at CreativeBits for pointing out this great tool for OSX.
There are already many applications available which allow you to tweek the settings in OSX Leopard to adjust the dock, the menu bar, and other areas you wish to alter. But one thing that bothers me is having all those little apps hanging around my hard drive, or worse yet, running at all times. UsingMac has listed 13 very handy Terminal commands that do the same thing as many of these apps, without the space and memory overhead. It’s as simple as copy & paste. Check them out.