Good:

Bad:


Yes, makes sense that the Don't something is always on the left, or is it... The destructive option should always be on the right left, and the none-destructive one should always be the default, in first case, Save..., in case of Safari, "Don't Quit". Safari has it backwards right now...

On second thought, no data is really lost if you do quit Safari in the middle of a download, as long as the source has content-range support for downloading (or whatever its proper name is). It will not finish the download, but you can always resume it later. So it seems I've jumped the gun here, the only confusing part is that the similarity between destructive Don't save and the mostly-non-destructive Don't Quit might lead people to believe that Don't Quit is indeed destructive, a remark about the resumable-ness of downloads would be helpful.

p.s.

In first case, Save instead of Cancel is the default, I suppose the default option is the one that makes most sense in that particular case, and I think destructive in this scope means data in memory that is lost before saved to disk, the same reason the red traffic-light close button changes state whenever you have documents with non-saved data.

On the other hand, Save does have the possibility of overwriting existing data, so it's still destructive? I just tried this out, and am pleasantly surprised by this:

Seems they did their homework, even in the case of overwriting, a new warning pop up, default is non-destructive.

I was wondering why the new Mail in Leopard has RSS reader while Safari has it since 2005 when I first saw it. Why duplicate the function at different places? Besides, Mail seems to be an odd place to read about the revealing of US intelligence budget to be $43.5bn in 2007, or the torrential rains that lashed east Cuba, forcing evacuations as Tropical Storm Noel heads for the Bahamas.

Shortly after I found an excellent use for it: a RSS reader for personal blogs, rather than news feeds. Shortly after that, I've conjectured that Mail is on its way of becoming iBlog. And then shortly after that, this confirmed my suspicion:

What kind of RSS feeds you put in your inbox? hmm...

Briefly on Leopard

Amiable: Quicklook, Unified Aqua, Stacks, Time Machine, Spotlight
Disagreeable: Unified Aqua, Stacks, Folder Icons, Menubar, Miscellaneous Bugs
Very Much Disagreeable: Dock, Folders in Dock

Icon for Apple's word processor, Pages

Icon for Keynote '06

Icon for Keynote '08

Icon for the spreadsheet app, Numbers

(All high-res versions extracted from iWork '06 and iWork '08 Tour)

More where this came from... check the video pages again. This gem is hidden in the game files of the film made by afore-mentioned company. Unlike the previous clip, this one is much harder to find elsewhere, at least the last instance of it was removed from the popular website brought to you by the letter Y.

And this site will make more sense after you've watched it.

Dec 2006: 58% of iPod user thinking of switching to Zune
July 2007: 70% of Zune owners will switch to iPod, iPhone

Looks like Zune user aren't very happy, interestingly there are 22% of loyal Zune users who aren't switching because of their "dislike of Apple".

From a small unnamed company where people sit and draw fancy moving pictures on paper and on screen, here's a great piece of comedy. Please check the new Timeopics section for embedded goodness.

Note: This post is intentionally removed of useful information for unspeakable reasons. Meanwhile, the reason this is tagged Apple is left as an exercise to the reader.

Forget about Leopard, Tiger already have a time machine, the search results rightly shows files from the future. (some file names are obscured to protect the innocent)

Here's another one:

It's very peculiar that we have a ten year old sticky shipped with OS X Tiger in 2006.

1997 was a pivotal year in Apple's history, NeXT was acquired by Apple in Feburary 1997 along with Jobs' return. At the 1997 Macworld conference, which is in August, announcement was made of the Microsoft deal and the new board (The Mac Observer: July, 1997 Archive). However, the first version of OS X is released two years later, Server 1.0, which is the old Platinum interface on top of the OPENSTEP operating system from NeXT; and the consumer version, 10.0, another two years later in 2001 after a public beta. The developers probably wrote the sticky just days before the Macworld, and in the early stage of building os x on top of OPENSTEP.

Interestingly, the classic Mac OS 8 was released just three days before the sticky, on July 26th 1997.

Having no access to an iPhone, with the help of iPhoney you can still spot some interesting custom widgets on iPhone version of Apple.com.
First, on the custom trailer page that every one knows about:

The same widgets are seen on iTunes page and Mac page as well, as an aid to the unusual horizontal scroll bars:

It is still not clear if this widget is part of the iPhone-only version of Apple.com, or that it is actually part of Safari 3's webkit engine. While I suspect it is the former, it would be really cool if this is done by iPhone-Safari on-the-fly for scroll bars on regular webpages.

Create empty file named ".metadata_never_index" at the root of the volume.
(Type "touch .metadata_never_index" in terminal)

This will stop spotlight indexing of the volume (HFS+, NTFS or FAT32), and will stop spotlight to return any results, i.e. you will not be able to search the volume at all with spotlight. You might be able to search using non-spotlight based tools like Easy Find.

1. Format a USB stick with a FAT file system (you can use any volume really, but it needs to be FAT).

2. In Mac OS X, set a custom volume icon using the Finder's "More info" window or any tool of your choice.

3. Open a Terminal window, enter "cd /Volumes" and "ls -la". You'll see a file listed that has the same name as the FAT volume, but with a "._" prepended. For example, "._USBSTICK". Copy that file to the equivalent name for the Windows XP NTFS partition, e.g. "cp ._USBSTICK ._WinXP".

4. Transfer the ".VolumeIcon.icns" file created on the FAT file system to the root of the NTFS partition, using Windows.

With both pieces in place, OS X shows the volume icon on the NTFS partition.

You're probably all familiar with sheets, those "dialog boxes" that slide out of the window that called them -- you'll see them in both Carbon and Cocoa applications when you do things like Print, Save As, etc. When used for Save As (or any other dialog that shows the file system), you can also resize the sheets, which is very handy. However, you also have to sit through the 'dropping from the window title' animation each time a sheet becomes active, as seen in this short movie clip. This can take a bit of time, and if you use sheets a lot, it can get tedious to watch.

Back in October, we ran a hint called Change the smooth window resize speed for Cocoa applications. This hint discussed using the NSWindowResizeTime global preference setting in the Terminal to control the speed of the sheet animation. I think there were a couple things in that hint, though, that caused me (and perhaps others) to miss the real applicability: it only talked about Cocoa apps, and it discussed slowing down, not speeding up, the animation -- it proposed a setting of 2.0 to slow down the animation.

Yesterday, while working on some other stuff, I re-ran the command, but used a much lower setting:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime .001

After quitting and restarting Text Edit, the time required to open and close the sheet changed dramatically, as seen in this 'after' movie of the same file and application. And it's not just Cocoa applications; many Carbon applications, such as Word and Excel, rely on sheets as well.

As pointed out in the original hint, this is a global setting (though the hint explains how to change it for just any one app), and all you have to do is quit and relaunch any given program to activate the new setting in that app. This simple change has made a big difference in the speed of my daily tasks -- I use Save As in Word, Excel, Text Edit, and other apps quite often. Now things just pop into existence, instead of slowly letting me know they're coming. The original hint explains how to set it back to the default by deleting the preference (or you could set it to .2, the default value). And use the original hint's increased value if you want to see what the animation is really doing; there's a lot of small details that get glossed over at the normal speed.