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Again, full credit for this tip must go to the great folks at Maclife.com This simple tip allows you to pull a widget out of dashboard and place it on your desktop, which is really kind of cool.

To make it happen, open a Terminal window and enter this command

defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES

You will have to logout and log back in or restart your Mac to make the change active.  Then activate Dashboard and click/drag the widget you want, and then exit Dashboard without releasing the click on the widget.  The default key is F12, but you’ll want to make sure you know what it is on your system.  On mine with the Logitech Illuminated Keyboard and Logitech’s Control Center to make the Performance Mouse MX work properly it is Command-F12, so again check your system settings in System Preferences just to be sure.  You can also send the widget back by selecting it and then invoking dashboard.  To disable this feature use the same command replacing YES with NO.  Logout and back in as before to make the state change effective.

Dashboard widgets moved to the desk work the same as they did in the Dashboard.  The only caveat is that if you use Spaces, the widgets you have dragged out of Dashboard will appear on every space.

FUN

Full credit for this tip goes to the team at maclife.com who published it in their August issue.  If you don’t subscribe, you want to think about it.

To enable xray view in Quicklook open a Terminal window and enter the following command;

defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableXRayFolders -boolean YES

Now when you Quicklook a folder you’ll representations of the icons of what is in the folder.  It’s a little thing and definitely geeky but kinda cool.  If you get tired of it, turn it off using the same command, just replacing YES with NO

Recommended

I’m a big user of Spaces in OS X.  I’ve set certain apps to open on certain spaces and because I use dual monitors even set where I want the windows to appear.  Surprisingly I use Spaces more where I have more screen real estate than on a smaller display.

But there were things that were just a pain.  On one of the MacHeist promos, I got as part of the bundle a little app called Hyperspaces and to my own failure, didn’t take a good look at it until a month ago.  Hyperspaces simply gives you richer control over OS X spaces without breaking anything.

I wanted to use different HDR photos for each space.  I also wanted to be able to see at a glance which space name I was on.  Hyperspaces does this simply and without a ton of system overhead.  The only time I’ve ever had a gotcha is when the Drobo with my Aperture library failed to come up after a long system shutdown and I ended up with plain colours.  Once the Drobo was back up, a relaunch of Hyperspaces and all was well.

You can download a trial of Hyperspaces from the CocoaBots and customize up to three spaces for free.  If you like Hyperspaces and you probably will, and want more Spaces and you probably will, you can buy a license at the site for $12.95 USD which to my mind is a good deal for the power and simplicity these folks deliver.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

When I bought my current Mac Pro, it came with nVidia’s GT8800 that I ordered as a factory upgrade from whatever was stock at the time.  The upgrade was inexpensive and got me a better GPU and more memory.  The card also supported Dual Link DVI to two displays and I have to say that I got over two years of excellent service from it.

But as I embark ever more deeply into video editing, I discovered that likely through my own ineptitude and lack of proper training, I was able to strain the capability of the GT8800 so I started researching alternatives.  There was the ATI Radeon HD 4870  on the Apple Store that had a faster GPU but no more video memory, there was the nVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for nearly $2,300 (argh, choke) and the EVGA GeForce GTX 285.  I was not aware of the GTX 285 or of EVGA for that matter so I went over to my local Canada Computers and talked to John and Samuel.  Canada Computers is a retail chain that deals in all manner of kit but this store at least, attracts some seriously hardcore gamers and gamers as we know tend to beat on video cards pretty hard.  Both Samuel and John admitted to no familiarity with the Mac Pro platform but did share that they had enjoyed a lot of customer success with EVGA cards and with the Windows release of the GTX 285.  They did tell me that the GTX 285 had been superseded by the GTX 295 on the Windows platform and also advised that there was a hack out in the internet on making one work in a Mac Pro.  As I depend on the Mac Pro for work every day, i chose not to go that route and had them order me the Mac version of the GTX 285.  With no disrespect to Apple or Apple resellers, I saved at least 10% off the price of the card by getting it from these folks.

Installation was straight forward once I disconnected the web of cables from the Mac Pro and pulled its mass out from under the desk and into the kitchen where I could work on it without crippling myself.  I did learn some tips that might be useful for anyone else.

1. When EVGA says read the instructions first, do it.  If you are not running a current build of Snow Leopard, be absolutely sure you follow the instructions about installing the display drivers BEFORE you take things apart to install the card.  I found that on my machine, running 10.6.3 at time of install, the drivers had already been provided in an Apple update.  If you find this too, well you’ve burned a whole minute, but if you didn’t have the drivers installed and tried to power up the Mac with the new card and no drivers you’d be seeing a black screen and the only fix would be to pull the new card, put in the old card, load the drivers…You get the point.

2.  The PCI-e slots on the Mac Pro have little card locking clips that you engage when removing a card.  Using a flashlight helps you see them and helps you cut down on the cursing when you cannot figure out why the stock card will not come free of the slot.

3. The GT8800 has only one power cable.  The GTX285 has two.  Disconnect the one from the GT8800 before you try to remove the card as you’re going to need it in a minute.  The GTX285 comes with two new power cables, so you could use both new ones of course.  I did.

4.  The motherboard location of the two power ports you will be using is best accessed if you have 14″ long rubber fingers that are impervious to cuts and scrapes.  If you are not Mr. Fantastic, take the time to do the motherboard connections before you install the new video card.  If you don’t, you will just have to pull it out to get the cables connected, and if that happens, remember point #1.

5.  Did I mention that making those connections can be challenging?  I found that a pair of bent nose hemostats worked fine.  Connecting the upper slot first makes things easier as well.

6.  Once the cables are connected and latched onto the motherboard (check that the latching mechanisms on the power connectors have engaged), place the card into the slot.  Slot 1 is best because like most other high end video cards, the GTX 285 is a double-wide.

7.  Replace the card slot locking bar, put all the other pieces back together, connect your cables and fire it up.

At boot time and in normal operations, frankly you won’t see much of a difference.  If you use iStat and watch temps very closely, you might find the system runs a bit cooler.  Or not.  The new card really comes into it’s own when you are doing some intense editing in Final Cut Studio or Premiere Pro or Logic Studio.  Screen draws are faster in Aperture, and Photoshop seems snappier.  I’m not a gamer but I did speak to a guy who uses Steam on the Mac and he says this card is better than what I had for gaming.

In summary, if you need more video horsepower, can handle the expense, and are willing to read the instructions you will like the EVGA GeForce GTX285 Mac Edition.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

For the last couple of years I’ve been using a Dell 24″ LCD alongside an Apple 23″ Cinema Display because I liked the flexibility and control available to me with two monitors. About a month ago, I heard Robert Scoble on TWiT talk about how he used two displays, one in portrait mode and one in landscape mode. So I tried that, rotating the Dell 24″ by 90 degrees. It had a powerful positive impact on my workflow.

BUT, every time I’m in an Apple Store I invariably drift over to the 30″ Cinema Display and remind myself how usable all that screen real estate would be for audio, photographic and video editing, not just for the editor window but for all the palettes I use. So on Father’s Day, I went to Dell’s site and ordered up their 30″ UltraSharp. I admit that I did it via phone because I wanted to ask a couple of questions and check for specials. Syed was very helpful and I got the order placed. The device showed up in five business days.

While the instructions say installation takes two people, it really doesn’t as the screen is not heavy. (those 21″ CRTs were HEAVY). Connections are easy to make and in addition to DVI-D and power, there is a USB 2 connection and a built-in USB hub as well as a memory card reader. The reader supports Compact Flash, SM/SD/MS/MMC so covers pretty much everything.

The screen has no contrast controls and rudimentary brightness capability. There is an OSD, but the manual instructions to launch it don’t work for me and the software provided only works with Windows (BAD DELL!!) Max resolution is 2560 x 1600 and requires a dual link DVI connection. I recently upgraded to the nVidia GTX 285 in the Mac Pro and it has two dual link DVI connections on the back. The card drives both the 30″ at 2560 x 1600 and the 24″ in portrait mode at 1920x 1200 without issue.

The colour at first was a bit wonky and using the OS X built in calibration made decent corrections in advanced mode but the lack of a contrast adjustment throws off the Apple calibration a bit. I have been using a Pantone Huey Pro for a while because of its size and my expectation that if anyone understood colour it would be Pantone, and after running the calibration on the new screen, I am very happy with the outcome. I set the Huey Pro software to do automatic roomlight compensation and that helps more than you might expect.

The display goes to sleep from a power perspective when the Mac Pro sleeps the screen and restarts pretty much immediately. Several days in I’ve noticed that the colours have settled and are even better than when I first set the display up. Fonts are smaller of course because I sit further back now, and the only real downside is that I find myself punching up the font size in browsers and the zoom in applications, but I am loving the increased space.

As noted, I kept the Dell 24″ in play and in portrait mode, the only change is moving it from the left side to the right side, mostly to make fitting into the desk layout easier. I use Hyperspaces to manage Spaces and backgrounds and find running Word or NeoOffice Write in portrait so much more efficient. It’s also perfect to stack BusyCal above Things for workflow management.

When it comes to working with Aperture, or any of the Adobe CS5 apps, the increased space is incredibly empowering and I think I’m more productive although that could really be subjective justification for the expense.

And that’s the only downside. 27″ displays of very good quality (I really like the Samsung) are now under $500 where I live, but the jump to 30″ significantly reduces the option pool and more than doubles the price of entry. If the past is any indicator, expect prices for 30″ displays to plummet now that I’ve bought one. The Dell unit has a richer contrast ratio than the Apple Cinema Display according to specifications. The Apple unit has not changed in years and is still nearly $2,000, still too much for me. Would I have preferred that Apple display? So far I am very happy with my Dell purchase. The display is height and angle adjustable, where the Apple is only angle adjustable. The height adjustment is important to me as I want to have the upper third sightline in line with my eyes and as I have a longer torso the Apple display would be angled up for me, whereas the Dell is exactly parallel to my face (or pretty darn close). Kudos to the Dell monitor guys because adjusting the height is finger strength easy with no goofy latches or slippage or any of the other annoyances found in some other vendor’s height adjusters; this one is brilliant.

For a 30″ LCD display that does excellent 2560×1600 for around $1,200 the Dell UltraSharp cannot be beat.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

GarageBand has a built in function to help you build ringtones for your iPhone from music in your library. Since GB comes with every new Mac and is part of iLife, free is a good price. However, folks who haven’t experience with audio recording apps or who want to make a specific ringtone for everyone of their friends, as does my daughter, (perhaps not THAT many), often find that while GarageBand works, it doesn’t “just work”. Pocket Mac, who gained notoriety building software to sync Macs to a variety of smartphones, build a utility called Ringtone Studio that makes the process of making your own ringtones incredibly simple.

The UI is user friendly and super easy. Just drag the sound file, video file or iTunes file onto the “iPhone” and then using the sliders select the portion of the clip you want for your ringtone. Ringtones should be kept short, about 8 seconds before it starts looping is a good place to start.

The only real downside to the app that I have found is the price. Frankly $20 USD is a lot to pay for what this thing does, but I see other apps in similar price ranges that do much less. One that remains unnamed inserts ringtones onto your phone. That’s it. So I suppose Ringtone Studio isn’t completely out of line, but I think that these folks would sell a lot more copies if they brought the price below $10.

The net of things is that it works. You drag your file on, you select the region for the ringtone, save it (goes to iTunes directly – or at least it did for me) then sync your iPhone, adding the ringtones you’ve created via the Ringtone tab on the sync page in iTunes. I’m not sure it could get much easier.

There are people who just burn up when your phone sounds like anything but a phone, but if you want it to sound like “you” this can work pretty darn well. Of course tastes vary so just because the ringtone was easy to make, doesn’t make it “good”.

RECOMMENDED

If you are like me and upgraded your iPhone 3G to the supported iOS4 when offered, you’re probably suffering the June of your discontent.

iOS4 while fine on the iPod Touch 3rd gen and the iPhone 3Gs is a disaster on the 3G for many users.  Lots of things are blamed, too many apps, use of the Exchange connector yada yada yada.

All I know is that my device which was slow but functional became basically useless after I “upgraded”.  So I looked for ways to downgrade.  The process I followed was using a Macintosh and the iPhone but I believe it can be done if your primary OS is Windows, but I have not tried that so if you do, best of luck with that.

After lots of searching, and ZERO help from Apple, I found this article on Lifehacker.  I don’t propose that there are not others, but I used this one because it was easy to follow and got me where I wanted to be.  Mostly, but more on that later.

So first step is to go to the Lifehacker article and read it.  Seriously read it all the way through.  Then print it off.  Then go to the link provided in the article and download Recboot (Mac link) because YOU’RE GOING TO NEED IT.

Here’s the one other piece that you will have recognized if you did as suggested and read the Lifehacker article before starting, specifically the last paragraph where it tells you that you will need a 3.X backup to get your world back without starting fresh.  Here’s the joyful surprise.

Apple in their wisdom to “help” you (into a migraine) has deleted all your old backups once you have upgraded to iOS4.  If iOS4 actually worked on the 3G this would be ok, but since it doesn’t you can now say ratzenfratzen%#(()@^*@(**(!!!!!

Fortunately you have a Time Machine backup, or other backup where you can easily recover a directory structure from the Library.  If you don’t have a backup, you can still revert your iPhone to 3.1.3 but you will be setting it up as a new device.  But since you’re very smart and have a Time Machine backup, pop into Time Machine and navigate to your_main_drive_HD:Users:username:Library:Application Support:MobileSync:Backup or use ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup in the Go To Folder finder command.  As you will recall the ~ means your username.

Now look carefully at the longnamed folders and select the ones that are closest to the date of when you did the iOS4 update but PRIOR.  Select the folders you want, using Command-Click for multiples and then select Restore.  This will restore the old backups to the right place.  You may get a message saying a newer folder exists do you want to overwrite?  If any backups have been done since you updated to iOS4 you will see this message and you do want to overwrite.  Remember if you have multiple devices syncing to iTunes, the folder naming conventions don’t make it easy to figure out which device which folder applies to so when you do the restore, you may be overwriting a backup for an iPod, an iPod Touch or an iPad.  This is where useful naming would have helped but Apple doesn’t provide it so you’ll have to tough it out.  I suggest that as soon as you get your iPhone restored you sync and backup all your other devices just to be safe.

Anyway, back to the show.  If you’ve done the restore properly and BEFORE running through the process to downgrade, when you get to Step 4 in the Lifehacker article, you’ll be able to select to restore from backup.  You will see all the backups available to iTunes in the drop down, so select the iPhone 3G backup with the date you just restored and click continue.  Your iPhone settings will be restored.

Slow down a second there friends, because you are not done.  You’ve downgraded and you’ve restored your settings.  Now go watch TV or read a couple of chapters because iTunes now needs to put the content specified by the settings back on the iPhone.  This will take as long as it takes depending upon how much stuff you had specified to be synced in the settings.

I would suggest you let the restore process work it’s way through before you make changes such as adding or deleting music, podcasts, TV shows or Movies.  Keep it simple.  Also remember that if you had set up iBook syncing when iOS4 was installed that setting is now hosed because iBooks needs iOS4.  Of course I live in Canada and the only thing on the iBooks store up here is the same content I’ve been able to download for years from Project Gutenburg, so iBooks at least to me is a complete waste of time.

When all is done, you should have your iPhone back to normal with the 3.1.3 OS.  Sync it up to current, make sure your mail and calendar work and you’re back in the game.

There’s lots of speculation about whether Apple will fix iOS4 to work properly on the iPhone 3G.  I have always enjoyed my Apple products, but I also believe that Apple is a business that has turned planned obsolescence into an art form.  Compared to the 3Gs, the 3G is very slow, and with iOS 4 being designed for the A4 chipset in the iPhone 4, my guess is that iOS4 is always going to suck hard on the iPhone 3G.  I should have waited to see the impact of the upgrade so I did not have to go through this time wasting effort, hopefully if you jumped too, this will help save you a lot of time.  If you have to have the functions in iOS4, then better to buy an iPhone 4 or a 3Gs and understand that in two versions whatever you have will be useless again.  And yes, I believe that that sucks hard event was well known at Apple and is a design point to get iPhone users to upgrade.  You can certainly choose to believe that Apple would never do this to a customer, and that’s fair.  If you do believe that, I have some wonderful vacation property for sale completely surrounded by water.

US carriers tend to run 24 month terms that align with the Apple obsolescence plan.  Canadian carriers are bloodsuckers and the 36 month terms are customer hostile, so expect to take a bath every couple of years.  Apple Canada has announced that the Apple Store will sell unlocked iPhone 4 units that won’t be bound to a carrier and whenever the devices show up in Canada I will go that route instead of looking at the subsidized price as a saving at the price of being shackled to the carrier.  You should do what suits you best.

It may have happened to you that over time you have run out of space on your Time Machine volume, but did not want to lost the older backups it contained.  Or you’ve received one of the Time Machine errors that it can no longer back up to your Time Machine volume and all the fixes focus on you erasing the volume and starting over, and this option doesn’t fill you with joy.  With full credit to the staff at MacWorld, here’s a great tip.

Connect your older Time Machine volume to your Mac by whichever connectivity suits the volume and your Mac.  Then without disconnecting your current Time Machine, Option Click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar.  If the icon isn’t there, you can make it visible in the Time Machine pane in System Preferences.  When you option click, you’ll get the option you see in the graphic above, to Browse Other Time Machine Disks.  Select it and point to the older volume.  Now you’ll be able to go even further back in time to retrieve that critical file.

There are a lot of these option click options in Snow Leopard for menu bar icons, this one happens to be really useful.

Warning! If your iPhone is a 3G give serious thought to this upgrade as a substantial number of users have found the upgrade to more disaster than benefit. Complaints abound about slow performance and app reliability, especially around mail and calendars. My experience was so bad I’ve gone back to iPhone OS 3.1.3 on my own 3G. Users of the iPod Touch third gen and users of the iPhone 3GS have reported extremely positive experiences.

But the point of this post relates to the 3G, so unless you want your iPhone to become a beautiful rock, don’t upgrade.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Five days in and I have to say that the upgrade to 10.6.4 has been pretty darn seamless. I upgraded the MBP 17, the MBAir, K’s MBP 13, D’s MB 13, the Mac Pro octal and the little Dell Hackintosh. Every one when completely smoothly using software update except for the Dell which uses the combo updater and the good graces of Meklort’s tools.

I love the new reader function in Safari and the extension capability having installed the adblock and instapaper extensions. I was also glad to see that ClickToFlash also works in the new release. The extensions will prove more manageable than the old plugin model I can see already.

There were changes in Mail that broke most of the add-ons initially but Letterbox has been updated as has Dockstar since the first update.

iCal was also updated but in fairness I haven’t looked at it as I love the amazing BusyCal and use it by default.

All of the utilities I autolaunch work just fine (Launchbar, Textxpander, Hyperspaces amongst others). This is usually where an OS X update causes me the most grief, but not his time. In the past I have seen the dreaded bsod on update but this one was flawless. One tip I strongly recommend is to disconnect all your external devices during an OS X update. Apple notes this in their docs but not everyone is zealously reading them.

I don’t think the new release is any faster in my workflows but given the security fixes and the updates to Apple utilities it’s worth your time to do. Of course, be sure that you have a recoverable backup before making any major system changes.