Posts Tagged ‘apple’

Firefox 3.5 & Blasphemy

May 3rd, 2009

I’ve been using Safari since day one. I’ve always found it’s speed, system inte­gra­tion, font dis­play, and over­all min­i­mal­ism to be a per­fect mix for me. Other browsers may be one or two of these things as well, but as a whole, there is really noth­ing that quite matches up as an entire package.

Well, that might be chang­ing with the soon-to-be-released Safari 4 browser.

When the browser’s beta ver­sion was released a while back, I had some ini­tial reac­tions that I still stand by. They were trying to do too much with the new ‘tabs on top’ inter­face, and they actu­ally cre­ated a franken­stein browser that breaks so many UI rules that it’s not even funny.

I’m keep­ing my fin­gers crossed, but some­thing I have been doing a lot lately is using the Fire­fox 3.5 betas and the ‘GrAp­ple Crisp‘ theme. This is a ‘tabs on top’ ver­sion but it’s actu­ally done cor­rectly in my view.

  • The title­bar stays intact
  • Click-​though is respected
  • Click­ing any­where on the bar that is not a tab cre­ates a new tab
GrApple-Crisp-1.9.9.43.png

Worth a look if you like the tabs on top look that Chrome and Safari 4 are offering.

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Getting a Time Capsule Set Up

November 25th, 2008

Backing data up is important.

When you’re making lots of incre­men­tal changes over the course of a day, Apple’s Time Machine soft­ware can be a life saver. If at any moment you acci­den­tally delete a file, need to roll back a file, or oth­er­wise review a pre­vi­ous change, you’re able to do so via an … inter­est­ing … inter­face. Regard­less, it has saved me on numer­ous occasions.

Well, some­thing I noticed after a short while is that the Time Cap­sule back­ups tend to kill your net­work con­nec­tion when in use along with taking a long time when using apps that update fre­quently (iTunes library xml files, for exam­ple, are backed up nearly hourly as I listen to a lot of music while work­ing) . Also, once an hour might be too much for a lot of people. Unfor­tu­nately, Apple does not pro­vide an inter­face to make any changes other than ON & OFF. This makes it rather dif­fi­cult to find a good setup that works for each person’s indi­vid­ual needs.

That’s until I found an app called Time Machine Editor. It’s quite simple, and all it really allows you to do is change the fre­quency of your back­ups. You can set it to happen at hour inter­vals (1, 5, 10, 24, etc), or at a cer­tain time every day. I per­son­ally have set my iMac to backup right before lunch (11:30am) and right at the end of the work­day (6pm). This way, I will not be too far behind at any point, but I don’t have to deal with the increased net­work activ­ity or proces­sor usage.

So if you like Time Machine in theory but think that it’s more of a hassle than a help, Time Machine Editor is for you. I hope that with OS 10.6 we see some slight improve­ments to backup cus­tomiza­tion within the actual inter­face of Time Machine. For now, this is the best we can do.

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