When a web-site has been running since 1996¹ you would expect it to have enjoyed some evolution, with the odd redesign thrown in along the way. The web-site at apple.com is one such site. Flickr user Kernel Panic maintains a gallery of screen captures of Apple’s home page and it represents an interesting journey through the history of the company. It’s amazing to me that the basic design of apple.com as it stands today is the same as it was in 1998 — how’s that for consistency?

But what would Apple’s home page have looked like in the years prior to 1996? Sadly we never got to see an apple.com home page for the launch of the Apple I, Apple II, Lisa, Macintosh or MessagePad… until today! Dave Lawrence of Newton Poetry fame posted a couple of mock-up apple.com home pages for the Lisa and MessagePad machines on his weblog and Matt Pearce answered Lawrence’s call for others to add to the meme. Between them, they’ve come up with a few beautifully crafted and clever images of the home pages that might have been.
Continue Reading…

Photo Credit: Trash Your Gifts by Euphoriefetzen

Everyone’s favourite uninstaller for OS X, AppZapper, recently generated a bit of a buzz as it metamorphosed into version 2 and acquired a slick new interface. AppZapper also seems to have grown beyond being a simple uninstaller, several pundits are now describing it as an “application manager.”

As an application manager one can view one’s applications in a pretty interface, sort them with various filters and even store their license codes within AppZapper. I have to say that license code management seems to me to be an odd addition to an uninstaller. There’s no synergy between the tasks of uninstalling applications that are no longer required and retrieving licensing details for those that are.

But that’s not my biggest issue with AppZapper. To me, whilst the application itself is extremely useful, the interface is completely redundant and, pretty as it is, it shouldn’t be there at all.

Continue Reading…

Because I’m a geek I thought it’d be “nice” to use GeekTool to tail -f my system.log onto my desktop. What an eye-opener that turned out to be.
Continue Reading…

SheepShaver is a PowerPC emulator that runs under Mac OS X. It started life over 10 years ago as a commercial application for BeOS, but it is now open source and free. SheepShaver is a universal binary, so it runs natively on an Intel machine. SheepShaver lets you run any older system between Mac OS 8.5 and Mac OS 9.0.4.

I know that everybody and his dog has written an AppleScript for extracting currently playing track information from iTunes but, despite a little Googling, I didn’t find any that exactly suited my purposes. So, naturally, I went and rolled my own.

Continue Reading…

Well that’s a first. In the four-plus years that I’ve been running OS X, from “Tiger” to Leopard, I’ve never had the operating system bail out on me.

I wasn’t doing anything unusual. Nor was I taxing the machine to any great degree. I was running Photoshop — as can be seen from the screen capture — then I launched the “DigitalColor Meter” and OS X went off to Elysium.

Oh well, there’s a first time for everything.

Enabling single-application mode means that you can quickly and easily build a custom list of visible applications, and that list is dynamic. In other words, you can achieve a lot of what you might use Spaces for, without having to switch between spaces or manage which applications show in which spaces.

The main advantage to this single-application mode is that clicking an application in the Dock has always brought all that application’s windows to the foreground. So, when I click Terminal’s icon in the Dock, not only do all other applications immediately disappear from view, I see the window for my local shells, the window for the remote shells on my mail server, and the window for the remote shells on my primary DNS server. These windows are exactly where I want them on the screen and there are no other windows cluttering up the view.

Become the proud owner of a high-end desktop “Mac” without paying the Apple Tax. A very cool project indeed.

Apple made the source code of Grand Central Dispatch available under an Apache open source license. One of the new technologies for concurrency added to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Grand Central is Apple’s attempt to help developers deal with the rise of multi-core. The open sourcing of Grand Central comes as something of a surprise, because it is a core technology in Snow Leopard, and could be seen to give Apple a competitive edge in the new world of multi-core… this is an exciting move, particularly for scientific developers. If Grand Central Dispatch does catch on, it could provide a genuine option for code parallelization on and off the Mac.

I’m stuck in computing’s yesteryear. I’m using a recently-obsoleted Macintosh as my primary computer, a Power Mac G5. This once cutting-edge computer was to be the last of Apple’s PowerPC machines. Furthermore, Apple’s latest OS, Snow Leopard, doesn’t run on PowerPC-based computers, so I can’t upgrade my G5 beyond Leopard. As a consequence of this, my operating system can now be considered antediluvian too.

It seems only fitting then that I’ve used a couple of software hacks to add a few retro touches to my aging Macintosh.

Continue Reading…