neeklamysaidthis

Even at this early stage of development, Shelf is shaping up to be the start of something great. It elegantly pops up whenever it can and presents a neat list of contact details and links, it's too bad my Address Book is currently so sparse, I might just have to start filling in the blanks.

For MacBook Pro owners, Mac OS X will always create a fresh /var/vm/sleepimage prior to sleeping, this is a copy of the RAM contents which is only used if it loses all power before being woken up.

You can see when your MacBook Pro is writing the sleepimage simply by looking at the status light, on sleeping, the light will be solid for up to a minute before the light starts to pulse, in that timeApple recommends against moving the notebook:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306830

More info can be found by using pmset, in the Terminal, type "pmset -g" to find out what settings your MacBook Pro is using, and then "man pmset" to read the documentation and what the various states do.

In the rare instances the sleepimage is needed, once power has been restored, the MacBook Pro reads the sleepimage and restores the state of the computer to how it was when it went to sleep.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302477
http://andrewescobar.com/archive/2005/11/11/how-to-safe-sleep-your-mac/

For myself this is a useless feature, if I want to have the MBP sleep, then chances are it will be back in use within a few hours, if the battery is low then I will either recharge it or shut it down. Writing a fresh sleepimage every time takes time, is potentially harmful if the computer is moved during the process and undoubtedly takes a toll on the life of the hard drive.

Hibernate.prefPane does exactly what I want and returns functionality I used to take for granted with my iBook G4, and if I ever need the old setting, it's just a couple of clicks and an admin password away.

Although Apple really should give us the options in Energy Saver, in the mean time I'll be using Hibernate.prefPane.

Great! Prior to Leopard Mail I'd been using Aaron Harnly's Letterbox, it did the basic layout well but broke after doing a search, although that was easily remedied, but as of writing, Letterbox hasn't been updated yet.

Installation of Phatso is easy enough, perhaps a little bit daunting for someone new to Mac or even Terminal.

So far it looks good, it remembers the layout between restarts and searching doesn't break anything. Many thanks to Vernon Tang, the author of this plugin!

An invaluable tool for doing quick searches and with just a few key presses. I use Inquisitor many times a day and couldn't do without it now. It's unfortunate that Apple haven't either rolled out their own version or done the right thing and made a plug-in architecture and bundled this with it.

With Leopard, Apple are tightening up on the misuse and potential abuse of InputManagers, this has meant that Inquisitor now requires admin rights to be installed in /Library/InputManagers
Allan Odgaard writes about the change: http://blog.macromates.com/2007/inputmanagers-on-leopard/

Worse is that new major features (and WebKit upgrades) have always been held back for major releases of OS X. So it will probably be another 2 years before OS X 10.6 will remove InputManagers altogether, hopefully before then Apple will have done right.

Beware: The developer inserts affiliate links into your search results without you knowing. A shady practice at the very least, because it's all done transparently.

More info and proof here: http://on.thehold.net/2008/01/has-inquisitor-gone-scurrilous.html

Let´s face it, Inquisitor is a great enhancement for Safari. It is also freeware. It is in my interest for the developer to continue to update and enhance the app. I do not really care whether the app points to any affiliate links or not. If this generates a little income for Inquisitor´s developer to facilitate further development then I´m all for it.

I've no problem with Inquisitor employing affiliate links where a Google search result points to Amazon, for example, but I'm not okay with it manipulating search results such that the affiliate links are shown ahead of the top Google hits. Uninstalled it for that reason.

HATE

maroon,

This has now been removed (well it can be turned off, though by default it's still on):

http://www.newsfirex.com/blog/?p=197

Nice, but I hate how it hijacks the ⌘↵ key combination so that MegaZoomer no longer works.

Avoid. Keeps a cache of icons at ~/user/application support/inquisitor. Essentially makes your search history visible to anyone using spotlight. Try out Glims. It's more customisable and doesn't appear leave files on your system either.

Did use this and it was fine. But removed It and started using glims. glims is much much better

new version tries to phone home after installing process finishes

This is a real gift. Prior to finding MAMP I had considered setting up all of the various parts to run a test localhost, this is just drag and drop simplicity.

There are a couple of caveats, the databases are stored in the central MAMP folder so you have to copy or move these before upgrading - or lose everything, as daft-me did. And the file permissions have to be just so, somehow I managed to mess them up on the last upgrade, that and something else I managed to do, meant I had to re-download.

MAMP really should come as standard with Mac OS X, many thanks to living-e.

Sadly I can't recommend this as an iTunes visualizer, it doesn't matter what settings are used, SoftSkies tears into the processor. This is on a MacBook Pro, Core 2 Duo, even with the window set to the smallest size, standard cloud detail and one of the scenery images taking up half of the display, it still uses 90% + of the processor.

The great thing is that the Gold and Platinum purchased versions do come with SoftSkies V-Bar, this is a standalone desktop application that even on its most aggressive settings, takes no more than 20% of the processor. V-Bar has a few preferences that can be fiddled with, nowhere near as many as the visualizer though, but it does auto-hide on mouseover which is a neat little trick.

All said, it's well worth looking at and trying.