AppleMacGeniusVille

“February 24, 2009—Apple® today announced the public beta of Safari® 4, the world’s fastest and most innovative web browser for Mac® and Windows PCs. The Nitro engine in Safari 4 runs JavaScript 4.2 times faster than Safari 3.* Innovative new features that make browsing more intuitive and enjoyable include Top Sites, for a stunning visual preview of frequently visited pages; Full History Search, to search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages; Cover Flow®, to easily flip through web history or bookmarks; and Tabs on Top, to make tabbed browsing easier and more intuitive.”

After seeing this I rushed to install Safari 4. One of the biggest complaints I had was the location of the tabs.  Why, Apple do you have to change the location of tabs when it’s in the perfect place.  It’s almost like when Apple re-released iMovie (before the recent update at MacWorld) after iMovie HD.  They took a great product with a great GUI and bastardized it.  Well, after I complained on deaf ears (Apple Bug reporter) and after much frustration I did some poking around.  I found a way to put it back in the correct place.  I also found a few other nice hacks to put back feature we all love.

Open Termnal and type the following:
$ strings /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari | grep DebugSafari4

DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop
DebugSafari4IncludeToolbarRedesign
DebugSafari4IncludeFancyURLCompletionList
DebugSafari4IncludeGoogleSuggest
DebugSafari4LoadProgressStyle
DebugSafari4IncludeFlowViewInBookmarksView
DebugSafari4TopSitesZoomToPageAnimationDimsSnapshot
DebugSafari4IncludeTopSites

Run these commands in Terminal.app and then you need to restart Safari for them to take effect.

DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop - This moves the tab bar back where you expect it to be.

$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

DebugSafari4IncludeToolbarRedesign and DebugSafari4LoadProgressStyle - When both set to NO it restores the blue loading bar behind the URL. Also puts a page loading spinner in the tab itself, which looks odd with the new tabs.

$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeToolbarRedesign -bool NO
$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4LoadProgressStyle -bool NO

DebugSafari4IncludeFancyURLCompletionList - Switches off the new URL autocomplete menu and goes back to the original one.

$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeFancyURLCompletionList -bool NO

DebugSafari4IncludeGoogleSuggest - Turns off the new Google suggest menu.

$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeGoogleSuggest -bool NO

DebugSafari4IncludeFlowViewInBookmarksView - Removes CoverFlow from the Bookmarks view entirely.

$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeFlowViewInBookmarksView -bool NO

DebugSafari4TopSitesZoomToPageAnimationDimsSnapshot - Disables the dimming when you click on a Top Site and it scales the screenshot up to fill the screen.

Here is the scenario… You have a few Macintosh computers running in a windows environment.  You have a backup that takes place on the main server and most of the other PCs on the network dump in to a folder on this server.  You want to get the Macintosh to dump it’s self as well.  Enters Apple new feature built in to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)… but there is a catch.  Out of the box it only supports external drives and Time Capsule drives (Apple branded NAS), how do you get your Macintosh to save to a Shared network drive…..? 

 
Open Terminal:

sudo defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Connect to your network drive and save your password

Open Time Machine Preferences:
Select your Volume
Click Backup Now or wait for it to start.

Look on your volume and you will see a file called:
machinename_43569812551.sparsebundle or something similar
copy the first part not including sparsebundle

Wait for time machine to fail (no worries this part of it)

Open Disk Utility and click New Image
Paste in the name you copied and choose Desktop as the location. Change the type to sparsebundle. Give it a reasonable size and click create.

Unmount it and copy this file to your network drive. it should be about 80MB. Now go back to time machine preferences and reselect your network share. Click backup now and you are good to go!  Now once your machine is backed up, you will be able use Time Machine as usually.

There is another blog I have found that has his experiences, This is where I found and refined the above steps. [flokrus Blog]

I have also found a very good article that explains how to backup your Macintosh to an Ubuntu file server. [kremalicious]

written by AppleMacGenius \\ tags: Apple, Time Machine, Windows 2008 Server

For some reason this week I am on a iPhone App kick.  I went through a lot of ones I feel are useful for every day and yesterday I posted a link for a iPhone App that is very useful for Hotmail and Windows Live email users.  Today I have found another useful iPhone App.  The App is called HotMacNews.  This particular iPhone App pulls all your favorite technology news site in to one place.  HotMacNews.com has already become one of the most popular websites for viewing all your news, so it was only a matter of time before this service invented an iPhone App as well.  It’s basically a RSS Reader on steroids.  There is around 48+ RSS feeds you can pick from, including AppleMacGeniusVille.com.  It even uses the iPhone Accelerometer, and how does it do this, just shake the iPhone and you will randomly be brought to one of the 48+ and growing RSS feeds.  Brilliant!!  HotMacNews uses the Safari engine, so whenever a RSS site updates or is added you get a live update, no waiting for the App to be updated to the next version.

HotMacNews app provides you with access to HotMacNews- the premiere Macintosh news and tips support site on the World Wide Web in a special iPhone format.  After navigating to HotMacNews, you can choose from over 60 news sites (constantly growing) and see the top news in the selected site.  You can also choose the classic web version in which you can configure preferences to show up to 8 news sites and display the most current news from each of them.  

written by AppleMacGenius \\ tags: App Store, iPhone, ipod touch, rss reader