Recently in Hints & Tips Category

Whoa! That's a long time between posts.

Of course something significant must be happening to generate another post and as the title of this post indicates it's Snow Leopard. As you're probably already aware Snow Leopard is due to hit tomorrow - Friday 28th August 2009, up to a month before most developers expected it. Snow Leopard is expected to be a significant polishing exercise for the OS and the user experience - so it means there will be software that doesn't work in Snow Leopard. To avoid the problems many people experienced upgrading to Leopard I thought I'd better recount my efforts todate.

Now for most major applications the transition should be relatively painless especially if they're up-to-date. However, it wasn't the front of screen applications that brought down users upgrading to Leopard nearly 2 years ago. It was a system extensions/hack that really made a mess of things for some people.

Recently I had to re-install my CS4 upgrade and hit a strange error, opening the "Setup" application resulted in the normal request for Authentication, as shown below. The problem is, nothing else happened - the dialog box went away and literally nothing happened.

Just call me a sucker, I always tell friends, family, anyone that asks in fact - research the web seller BEFORE you buy from them. Don't trust them unless you've dealt with them recently. If it's been awhile since you used them checkout their reputation - if only I'd done that, I'd be in a much better place.

Screensavers are one of those things that have really passed their original reason for coming into existence, ie. to prevent an image from burning into your cathode ray based computer monitor. Since then they've evolved into entertainment and infotainment systems providing everything from photo slideshows to RSS feeds to just pretty graphics. Some are even interactive like Soundstream...

A few month's ago I wrote about ways to navigate around mail without using the mouse - and I promised to bring you a second article on navigating around inside the body of an email. Well, thanks to a gentle reminder (thanks Brian) here it is.

This is another one of those tips - that are posted here as much for you as for me.

Obj-C brought with it a range of useful and time saving advances to the language. The most widely used amongst these are @property and @synthesize - if you want to know more about them follow the links. This is actually about an Error Msg you can get through forgetting some basics.

For no apparent reason my wife's iPhone recently stopped showing up in iTunes on her Mac and the iPhone Troubleshooting Assistant (iPTA) didn't help.

Well it's here at last Parallels 4 - hopefully this update will be a big improvement.

Like many people I've been building my iTunes collection over many years, in fact since before iTunes was born, back in the good old days of Sound Jam and other venerable MP3 players.