Posts Tagged ‘Leopard’

How to Use Spaces in Snow Leopard

December 16th, 2009

Many Snow Leopard users are unfamiliar with the feature called ‘Spaces’ in Snow Leopard, and that’s sad. In my opinion, Spaces was one of the best features in Leopard and it hasn’t of course been thrashed in Snow Leopard, but many Snow Leopard users doesn’t take advantage of the feature, and that can only be because they doesn’t know how to use it.

If you are one of the mentioned, that doesn’t know how to use Spaces in Snow Leopard, we have made this video to show you how you use it:

Configure Spaces

Spaces can be configured the way you want it, as you can see on the video above. To configure Spaces, just enter System Preferences, by clicking the Apple icon in your upper left corner, and then ‘Preferences’ as you can see below (click to enlarge).

System Preferences Button

Then head for the ‘Exposé and Spaces’ button

Screen shot 2009-12-16 at 15.50.15

… and then the window below will appear

Spaces configuration

Here you can adjust Spaces as you want. You can choose up to 16 Spaces, and if you have two screens in your screen arrangement you will now have 32 different ‘desktops’ or ‘work spaces’  instead of two.

In the Spaces Preferences, you can choose if you like cmd, alt or ctrl to switch between spaces, while directing with the arrow keys or the number keys. You can also choose which F-button you like to activate Spaces (to see all spaces at once). Standard key for this function is F8.

How do I use it?

I use Spaces all the time. I like to play a game called Football Manager, but I want to surf the internet and chat with my friends at the same time. My solution is, that I have my game in Space 1, my Mail application in Space 2, Internet in Space 3, and in Space 4 I have Adium and iChat.

Since I have two screen in my arrangement (the one that’s on my MacBook Pro and a separate 19″ screen), I can control two applications at once in just one Space, and if I want to listen to music in iTunes, I just open iTunes in the Space that I use the most (probably the one with Football Manager ;-) ) and then drag it to the screen that doesn’t run the application I use.

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Apple Introduces MightyMouse’s Relief – The World’s First Multi-Touch Mouse

October 20th, 2009

MagicMouseHeroApple announced earlier today some new products for the holiday season, which we find quite interesting. Among the new products is a new wireless computer mouse, which is the world’s first mouse to use Apple’s Multi-Touch technology, which we all knows from iPhone, iPod Touch and Mac notebook trackpad. The new mouse is dubbed “Magic Mouse” which is a new name for Apple mouse devices. Magic Mouse’s predecessor, MightyMouse, which had some problems with its wheel, is pulled out of the assortment.

Magic Mouse features a seamless touch-sensitive enclosure that allows it to be a single or multi-button mouse with advanced gesture support. Using intuitive gestures, users can easily scroll through long documents, pan across large images or swipe to move forward or backward through a collection of web pages or photos. Magic Mouse works for left or right handed users and multi-button or gesture commands can be easily configured from within System Preferences.

MagicMouseGestures

Magic Mouse will come standard with the new iMac, and will be available at the end of October with a suggested retail price of $69 (US) and it requires Mac OS X Leopard version 10.5.8 or later.

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Snow Leopard sales exceed two times sales of Leopard

September 18th, 2009

Today it’s three weeks sisnowleopardboxnce the new Mac OS X Snow Leopard was published and it has seen very strong sales thus far. According to NPD, sales for Mac OS X Snow Leopard has far exceeded prior launches of Mac OS X.

Vice president of industry analysis at NPD, Stephen Baker, concludes that even though some considered Snow Leopard to be less feature-focused than the to prior releases of Mac OS X, Leopard and Tiger, the ease of upgrading and the affordable pricing has paid off for Apple and helped a lot to increase the sale number.

The report from NPD notes that Snow Leopard sales only dropped 25% from week 1 to week 2 and to compare, Tiger and Leopard sales dropped by approximately 60% in the same period.

We are all excited to see next month, when Windows 7 arrives to the retailers, and see if Microsoft is able to double their sales of Vista.

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3 follow-up software updates by Apple

September 1st, 2009

To follow up on certain issues after releasing their major OS update, Snow Leopard, Apple has posted three new software updates to meet and improve the overall compatibility. As usually, the software updates can be downloaded and installed using the built-in Software Update on your Mac, or downloaded from Apple’s Support Download page.

The most noticeable of the three software updates is a new firmware update for SuperDrives. The update does only apply to newer (2008 or later) Mac Minis and iMacs, and fixes the optical disk drive noise, when starting up your Mac.

Also, the Mac OS X Leopard Server received a new update called Mac OS X Server 10.5.8 Update v.1.1, which is available as Combo and Standalone software update, and fixes a lot of smaller issues, including a few OS problems.

And in the end we have an update for the newer (2009 or later) Mac Minis, which is the Mac mini EFI Firmware Update 1.2, which simply makes the Mac read the latest Apple memory kits better.

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Heard of it, caught and tamed it – Review of Snow Leopard, part 1

August 28th, 2009

It took some time, patience and actually not a huge amount of money. The hunt was unusually easy and I expected degrees blow zero. Of course I did remember by Jägermeister to protect myself against the murderous cold, but it turned out to be extremely unnecessary. The hunt began last Tuesday 25th August at 5:00 p.m. and ended today at 13:30 p.m. I had finally caught my prey.

The snow leopard (also known as ounce) is smaller than other big cats. It’s body length ranges from 75 to 130 cm. It has long thick fur which color is something between grey and yellow with dark spots. It didn’t scare the s… out of my pants because who can be afraid of something smaller than a lion that cannot roar?

Snow_Leopard_Disc

First impressions and the upgrade

Anyhow, my first impression of the new Mac OS X Snow Leopard was great. The package was a little confusing though and unfortunately damaged during the transportation to my house, but I didn’t care – I wanted to get started! I ejected my Football Manager 09 DVD from my MacBook Pro and pushed the Mac OS X Snow Leopard disc in and a few seconds later the installation began.

Oh dear god, this takes FOREVER...

Oh dear god, this takes FOREVER...

I had no idea on how long it would take to upgrade an operating system to another, but still I got a little surprised when the timer showed ‘1 hour 45 minutes remaining’. A few seconds later it was only 1 hour and 3 minutes and I decided to do something useful while Mac OS X Snow Leopard installed itself. I began the installation at around 1:40 p.m. and at 2:26 p.m. I got a message: ‘Install succeeded’. When I studied I had math on a very high level so I can hereby, without any calculator :) , tell you that it took 46 minutes to install Mac OS X Snow Leopard. This, of course, depends on how fast your Mac is. After the installation it did an automatic reboot, which took forever (maybe because of my excitement) and two minutes later the well-known ‘Welcome’-video appeared on my screen. Oh yeah it evokes memories from the first time I ever opened my Mac.

Stack_in_snowleopardThe new stack function is pretty sweet

When the video stopped I could finally begin to explore the new operating system, Mac OS 10.6. Except for the desktop picture, I couldn’t really see any big difference, until I clicked on ‘applications’ in my dock and discovered the new ‘stack’ and oh boy this little detail will make my life so much easier and I don’t really know why. This might sound a bit ironic, but I  actually love the new ‘stack’.

Let the stack be the ‘crack of dawn’ in this article. Our review on Snow Leopard will of course continue tomorrow, so see you then.

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AppleLunch will give you a review of Snow Leopard

August 26th, 2009

snowleopardboxOn Friday, August 28th, one of us was promised Mac OS 10.6 delivered to the door. That means you can read detailed reviews about Mac OS X Snow Leopard which we will provide throughout the upcoming weekend and during the next week.

While we wait for Mac OS X Snow Leopard to arrive, why don’t take a look at what we can expect? Here is a list of some features we already know about Mac OS X Snow Leopard:

  • It’s faster and more reliable than any other Mac OS’ (and probably any other OS’ as well)
  • It has a new look and new features for Exposé and Stacks
  • It’s 2x faster to wake up and 1.8x faster to shut down than the older Leopard
  • It gives you about 7GB more disk space than Leopard
  • It has the new Quick Time X implemented which e.g. allows you to upload easily edited videos to YouTube and MobileMe
  • It has a more reliable and higher-resolution iChat
  • It makes sure that you always have the most up-to-date drivers for your printer
  • Time Machine back ups is about 80% faster, and of boy are we looking forward to that!
  • It is more secure than any other Operating System
  • It has Microsoft Exchange Server support
  • It can connect to PC’s over a network
  • It has an advanced screen reading built-in for those who are blind or too lazy to read things themselves
  • It takes full advantage of multi-core processors using Grand Central Dispatch
  • Built-in applications are now 64-bit technology which makes your Mac faster than ever
  • It also makes good use of the graphic processors using OpenCL technology

This list is not complete at all, but it’s a quick snap of what we can expect to see in just a few days.

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