iPhone scoop

If you, like me, are considering purchasing a new iPhone, here are some of your best bets for preordering (keep an eye on the Engadget updates). I haven’t 100% decided for sure that I’m getting one. I may switch to Android. All I know is that I hate hate hate my Touch Pro 2 (but that’s more WinMo’s fault than HTC’s), and am sick of installing ROM after ROM to barely approximate what Android and iPhones do with much greater ease.

More on Snow Leopard

Hmm. So I’ve had a bit more time to play with it, and it seems like the backspace/delete thing cleared up on its own after I restarted the computer again. Saft is still NOT showing up in Safari, although the software update says that I have the newest version. Multiclutch commands are still not working with me in Safari, so I’m not sure what’s going on with that program. I know that a new version was included with Snow Leopard, but if this isn’t fixed soon, I am going to downgrade to a previous version and see if that makes a difference.

Update: Yay! I was reading TUAW today, and it seems that the problem may be that Safari 4 is now running in 64 bit mode, and the plugins I was talking about only work in 32 bit. Here’s the post. Whew. I’m not at home, so I have to wait until after work to check, but I really hope this is the solution.

On the plus side, I’ve noticed that my computer seems to charge more quickly.

Snow Leopard

I upgraded my computer to Snow Leopard over the weekend. I’d read all sorts of favorable reviews (TUAW offers a roundup), and I found them convincing enough to plunk down $30 bucks. On the whole, the changes to OS X are small (at least for my purposes). Aside from manipulating my photos, and sometimes editings mp3s and videos, I don’t do a whole lot of media-related stuff on my computer. I do find a couple of the new features in Snow Leopard to be awesome. I like being able to view pdfs right from the folder without having to open preview and I love that transferring data is appreciably faster. Still, and I don’t know if it’s just my computer, I discovered that a few things are not working the way I’d hoped they would.

• Saft doesn’t give me an error about not working with Safari 4, but I don’t see the Saft menu when I go to options.
• Function + delete isn’t working as a Wind0ws-style delete for me, and it’s driving me nuts.
• Some of the Multiclutch functions that I programmed for Safari 4 in Leopard don’t seem to be working.

I actually only noticed most of these things last night, and I didn’t look into them too much, because I was finishing up a pair of socks (which came out beautifully, I know you were wondering). I’m not going to be home tonight until late, so I probably won’t get to it until tomorrow at the earliest. A quick glance at some Mac blogs showed that while people are definitely having problems related to upgrading , nobody has mentioned the problems that I’m having. Yay for being uniquely troubled!

In case you have already upgraded to Snow Leopard, MacLife offers a list of 100 tips, tricks, and features that are new to this version of OS X.

There goes that

I deleted the Windows 7 partition on my Macbook because I found it annoying and almost never actually used it. Plus, it slowed my boot time to an unmanageable minute, from a previous low of about 12-15 seconds. Unacceptable. I thought that it would be kind of a tedious process, but the whole thing took about 10 seconds in Boot Camp. I continue to be astounded by this operating system. I still have Windows 7 on my Gateway, and plan to play around with it some more this weekend, as I have been quite remiss. Even the new, shiny beta operating system doesn’t really make me want to use the older computer that much…

And now that I found boxee, and can watch my Netflix instant access content on the Macbook, the other computer is even less useful to me.

Reading really is fundamental. I saw a post on Lifehacker about Syncplicity finally opening their beta to Mac users, and so, having never heard of this software, I read on. The post mentioned something about file sharing, and I was intrigued. I don’t really do the whole file-sharing thing anymore, and I think a lot of other people have moved away from it, too, so I was interested in what Lifehacker recommended.

I downloaded the program, and was initially confused as to how it worked. Where was the interfact? How could I see what other people were offering? Since it was a private beta, I was willing to be a little more trusting and was hoping that I’d find some good and/or rare music. So I read the guide on how to get started, but still wasn’t seeing anything relevant to file-sharing. I went back to Lifehacker to reread the post, and lo and behold, it’s a file SYNCing program, to sync files and content across two (free) or more (paid subscription) computers.

I’m such a dummy. I can’t believe I misread that so many times. If I’d been thinking, which I clearly wasn’t even the program’s name would have tipped me off.

And, just having checked, it seems that MOST of my multitouch gestures are not working with Opera. The only thing that works right off the bat is navigating up and down a page. Bummer.

How to Use Multiclutch

I think I’ve written before about my love for MultiClutch, but if I didn’t, here goes: I LOVE MULTICLUTCH. It’s a smart piece of software that I am finding invaluable. The only thing is, it doesn’t really come with instructions, and most of the places where I’ve seen it referenced assume that you will know exactly how to use it. This wasn’t the case with me, and maybe it’s not for everybody else, either. I saw that an Engadget reader posted a MultiClutch question in one of the Mac threads there, so I’m going to use his (or her) question as a way to give people an idea of how you would use MultiClutch on further thought, I think that the action requested is impossible, but since I spent all this time explaining how to use MultiClutch, I’ll post the following anyway. I’ll use Firefox as an example.

How to Set Up and Use MultiClutch

1) Open System Preferences and bring up Multiclutch.
2) Note that on the left side of the MultiClutch window, where it says Application, there are Plus and Minus signs on the bottom. Click on the Plus sign, and add Firefox to your Application list.
3) For the sake of this example, let’s say that we want to go to the previous tab when we rotate to the left. On the right side of the window, where it says Gesture, choose “Rotate Left”. Once you’ve done that, go to the Key Command part of that section, where it shows a generic key combination. Click in that box so that you can edit, and then actually type out the keyboard combination that you would normally use to accomplish your desired action in Firefox (CTRL SHIFT TAB). The box should now show the correct key combination in symbol form. Once you’ve done that, close the program, and the next time you open Firefox, that gesture will perform that action.

I will say that I think the closing program thing may only be necessary when configuring non-native programs, because I didn’t have to close Safari to get it to register the gestures I programmed. I hope this helps somebody!