New Apple Lust Objects

saw one last night and played with the maps - ooh la la

google map integration + nazivon add-on = a godsend for the directionally challenged

had a quick play with touch ipod last week. SO THIN! lovely scrolly swipe thing too. just great.

i have powerbook g4 (1.5 ghz, 1.25 gb ram)

i keep mail, ical, pages, numbers, omnioutliner, newsfire, soho notes, camino, iphoto, iweb and a firewire external HD all going at the same time

this thing has gotten hella slow and takes about a minute to go to sleep

is it already obsolete?

no.

and, er, "obsolete" is a state of mind, isn't it? it's not like yr mac goes: "shit, i'm old! better slow down to a crawl" :)

run tiger cache cleaner or something over it. i've got pretty much the same setup and mine runs great. how much HD space have you got free? that could be a key issue, ie for swapfiles and the like.

26 gigs free on the HD!

(and i might want to take iPhoto out of the mix if it's not needed all the time -- isn't it a total waste of resources?)

xpost: right, that's not it, then ;)

seriously: tiger cache cleaner, restart, whoosh.

google map integration + nazivon add-on = a godsend for the directionally challenged

Proper GPS is better though.

grimly otm, I have no idea why you'd run iPhoto all the time on a system with 1GB of memory when it eats memory.

That said, when I upgraded from a Powerbook 1.5GHz to one of the new Macbook Pros (and then a friend sent me a link to a deal with 4GB of memory for like $150) it was the most startling leap in speed I've seen in a long time.

tiger cache cleaner

waht is it ^

xpost, yea Ed I don't understand why they didn't put a proper GPS in?

i just tried it out. eliminated about 1.5 GB of cache, feels SLIGHTLY snappier, but I've only got 3 gigs left anyway, so everything will always be slow.

and i don't have an external HD, nor can i afford one, and the CD drive don't work.

P.O.S.

What "cache" does it clean up? Aren't there freeware things that do this?

http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/

might want to look at this too if you're short on space^

river wolf: i downloaded a shareware thing -- can't remember its name, and am at work -- that basically zaps through yr HD and shows you what all the big files are and where they're hiding. i managed to dump three gigs of shite straight away (huge, unneccessary PDFs, printer-related bollocks, etc). will check when i get home and post a link.

this is TCC ... jon, you'll probably have more fun doing it all from a terminal window already, but hey. anything that gives me a nice point-and-click way to fuck about with the innards of OS X is a good thing. yeh, there are other things that will do the same job, but this is the best all-in-one tool i've found

it also gives you clamAV, which might be handy one day :(

xpost: monolingual is top, aye. think TCC can do something similar.

slimming Universal Binaries.

^ seems like a bad idea on a ppc machine

i surely have some weird stuff i won't be able to find again

ok in my defense i don't keep iphoto and iweb open *all the time*.

TCC worked pretty good. the best was cleaning out the startup .apps, i had no idea i had so many bullshit "services" loaded up. i never use contextual menus, really.

i'm also running quicksilver, wonder how much that eats up.

a bunch i think.

TCC just made my Safari go much much faster. I'd used various shareware optimizer type programs before, TCC is the slowest, but seems to help the most.

I mentioned this on the hoonja thread, but I found quicksilver useless as I wasn't doing anything fancy. I just do my favorite trick of making a folder on the desktop with no name, or two spaces in front, and placing aliases of all the applications and utitlities I actually use in it. So when I need to open something, even something I wouldn't put on the dock because I don't use it that often, I just click on the desktop, hit the space bar, hit command down arrow to open the folder then type the first letter of the alias. It's really not any more clickes or typing then quicksilver.

ya quicksilver seems like mostly lifehacky bullshit to me.

quicksilver is too slow if you put everything in it and have plugins

i love quicksilver and i'm willing to take the speed hit for lifehacky bullshit ;)

i use quicksilver as a spotlight replacement

grimly: i'd definitely be interested in that app. i know i've got massive stuff lurking, probably from video editing.

quicksilver is way faster and better than Spotlight

I just click on the desktop, hit the space bar, hit command down arrow to open the folder then type the first letter of the alias. It's really not any more clickes or typing then quicksilver.

I just tried this and I don't see how it's nearly as good! For a start, you have to make aliases and add them manually. Then, getting to the desktop involves using mouse (yes, you can hit F11 to show it, but then the space bar trick doesn't work until you click on the desktop) . More troublesomely, if your special aliases folder is already open from a previous use, but hidden behind other windows, the space bar trick won't work either.

With Quicksilver I just hit ctrl-space at any time, then usually just the first letter of the frequently used app or document I want, then return and that's it. Just three keypresses (or four if you count ctrl-space as two). Even if it's not the top-ranked (it learns by usage) item for that letter, getting to the one I do want takes a second - just hit the right arrow and scroll to the one I do want.

I'm sure there are less fully-featured app launchers that do a similar thing to Quicksilver and use less RAM, but I can't say I have a problem with my unpimped-up install of it - right now it's using just 7MB.

river wolf ... i did the same vague googling i did when i found the thing and have tracked it down. it's called disk inventory X and it's great.

quicksilver really bogged me down somehow. In any case, far as what I do goes...there's always some desktop showing for me, as I have 2 monitors and have been doing the option-click on the desktop to hide all thing since they introduced multi-finder or whenever, so that's pretty instinctual. Also, the alias folder is always closed because if you hit option command down arrow to open a program, it closes it's window. I guess this is just stuff I've always instinctively done anyway so it doesn't seem like a problem. I like manually adding the aliases though, as I get to choose and say, yes, these are the applications/utilities I want quick access to.

Also good, I put said folder in dock, then right/command click on folder to get list of everything. What you can't do though is drag onto an application like you could with the dock. Remember the old tabbed windows on the bottom of OS9? I would have one called "applications" then I could just drag onto the tab and drop it on photoshop or whatever. Of course photoshop is in my dock, but not every little thing is.

anyway, damn cache cleaner fixed something with Safari!

glad my little recommendation meets with so much approval.

Will it clean different caches to the ones that Onyx cleans?

Horses for courses, Dan. I did have an Applications alias folder in my dock for a while, but really, I don't even like using the dock if I can help it. Keyboard forever, mouse never!

i surely have some weird stuff i won't be able to find again

trying to resist not to interpret this as a pervy comment.

Will it clean different caches to the ones that Onyx cleans?

no, but it'll do the edges of the skirting board, and behind the bog.

I feel a little sorry for caches, sometimes. They're only trying to help.

the new fullsize keyboard is basically awesome guys

I am wanking as I write this ... on my iPod touch. Oh alright its on loan :-(

Taking apple fetishism to the next level...

october 26 for leopard

any takers?

"Time Machine requires an additional hard drive"??

i can't wait for leopard! i might actually go to regent street on the day.

It's kinda the point, that! xpost

time machine will also work with another partition - or so i last heard - not just an entire volume

I can see the class action suit now. "They said Time Machine would back it up, but my disk died and I lost it all, my novel and all my photographs. Coming after the iPod battery I think this is just too much from Apple." TUAW will also become v. angry at this growing Partition Scandal.

It's hard to get too excited about a back-up solution, really. Spaces could be useful, I suppose. Better previewing with skimming? What else is there ..?.. transparent menu bars! I may be a while upgrading to Leopard.

I felt that about Tiger, and was right then too. It's hard to tell how it's better than Panther, and it's much slower on the mini.

I'll be waiting till at least .1 for this.

I may be wrong, but I think if you have a recentish machine then Tiger starts up faster than Panther. Certainly my MacBook feels like it's faster booting than my old eMac was when it was new. Not that I'm often doing it.

I wonder if there's any chance they'll fix memory management in any way, or if that's something that has to be done at the app level. Browsers (Safari esp) seem to just grab ridiculous amounts of RAM if it's left running for a while. Actually I think Safari is just particularly crap because it also seems to sometimes go nuts and start using 90% of the CPU as well.

I hope that you can downgrade to safari 2.0 as well... 3.0 is worse than IE 5.0