Brandon's Blog

Leopard Widget Update

bnew — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 03:04:11 +0000

So it turns out that Apple decided to rename the former Calendar widget to “iCal” and add the ability to view the day’s remaining events from iCal. I have a couple problems with this:
1. Why not leave the name the same, so it relaunched after my Archive & Install?
2. I can’t pick which calendars to display! I subscribe to my boss’s calendar, which is good for reference, but I don’t want his events in my iCal widget. Because of the 2nd reason, I’m now using the iCal Events widget and keeping the Calendar widget just for the display of the calendar. Too bad, because I like the idea of having one less widget running.

Leopard Upgrade!

bnew — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 19:55:36 +0000

So I’ve upgraded to Leopard. First of all, yes - the publicly announced features are cool. Time Machine, Spaces, Quick Look, yep, they’re cool. But everyone is writing about those, so why should I bother? So here’s Brandon’s (ongoing?) thoughts about what has changed in Leopard:

Finder - I can hit return to change a file name, and it automatically selects everything BEFORE the extension! About freaking time!

Dashboard - They took away my Calendar widget! And if I install the Tiger one, it breaks! Why?!

Spaces - Application bindings are kinda flaky. Adium doesn’t like to stick to “All Windows”, especially when I move between external displays.

Dock - I’m torn on this. The ridiculous shadows on the 3D shelf suck, but I don’t care for the other one either. So for now, I’m sticking with the 3D one.

Menu Bar - Not a real big fan of the translucent menu bar. Anyone have a way to get it back to normal yet?

iPhone Hackery

bnew — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 05:41:13 +0000

I just updated my iPhone to the latest software - 1.0.2. Since I’ve been hacking my iPhone to run various 3rd party apps, that meant I had to restore to factory settings and resync everything back onto the phone. I’m very impressed with how easily I was able to get things back to normal (at least, what I consider normal). All I had to do was let iTunes do it’s thing, then run the script to setup the wonderful Installer.app from Nullsoft. I did make some changes myself, to speed things up. Basically, I copied the iPhone restore image iTunes grabbed into the iPhoneInstaller folder, appended a .zip extension and commented out the curl command in their script.

Once I had Installer.app back on the phone, it was a simple matter to reinstall the BSD subsystem, OpenSSH and all the other 3rd party goodness I had going on. iTunes was even kind enough to backup my Lights Off settings.