The majority of us don’t backup on a regular basis. It usually isn’t until we lose a bunch of critical data that the light bulb turns on and we start backing up for maybe a week or two and then we stop. Apple’s new Leopard operating system contains Time Machine to fix that problem. Time Machine runs in the background, backing up your entire hard drive without you having to remember to manually run a backup.

This was one of the niceties which excited me about upgrading to Leopard; however I was somewhat disappointed to learn after upgrading, that Time Machine would only backup to another physically attached hard drive. In my situation I primarily like to place my backups in a remote location such as a networked server. I work of a laptop, so my physical working location is always changing and I’m not going to carry an external drive with me all the time. Luckily, after a few hours of research I found a nice tweak to let me use our office network servers as my backup location.

Here is how you do it:

REQUIREMENTS
Obviously you need to be running Leopard and you’ll need a network share which is larger or equal to your hard drive in your Mac. In my case these shares are in SMB and AFP.

1. Go into Applications / Utilities and open up terminal
2. Copy and paste this command into terminal (all on one line)

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

3. Hit enter / return
4. Mount your network share, in my case my share is off our server called INAS1 and my share is called User-Backups
5. Go to System Preferences and open Time Machine

6. Click on Change Disk
7. Select the share you wish to backup to, I’ve selected User-Backups

6. That’s it, you’re done

Wait up to 15 minutes and you should be set. To verify it is working open up your network share in Finder and you should see a file which is named [your computer name] [your MAC address].sparsebundle

Be sure to post your questions and your results using this method.

Just yesterday I was asked by MediaPost about my thoughts on Google’s “new” Placement Targeting for a upcoming article they were working on. I was quoted in the article as saying the CPM is “so old school”, so I wanted to take a moment to elaborate on that concept a bit more.

For readers unfamiliar with CPM I’ll just point you to Wikipedia. Previously, Google offered Site Targeting, a method for listing your Google Ads on a wide variety of non-Google sites. The principle bidding method for Site Targeting was CPM. Often advertisers didn’t know what price to start their bidding at and most of the time the bids were too low. With Placement Targeting Google has revamped Site Targeting and is now asking the advertiser to bid on ads using the familiar Google CPC (cost-per-click) method. This change by Google makes bidding on non-Google ads a more understandable process for the new advertiser.

CPM still has it’s place for branding; however it is my stance that CPM is quickly going the way of the dodo bird. Our clients aren’t likely to quantify branding via CPM, yet CPC is very quantifiable. CPC measures action, CPM hopes for increased awareness. One method gives me a shotgun to hit my target from 50 yards, while the other gives me a sniper rifle to hit my target from 300 yards. I’ll take the sniper rifle please.

Besides a few minor quibbles with Apple’s new OS release (transparent menu bar, wtf!) I have been extremely happy using and getting the feel for Leopard. And in fact, I am finding some of the “fluff” features to be pretty darn handy. Now, I realize there are plenty of reviews out there covering everything from Spaces, to Time Machine, to the new 64bit kernel process addressing — but I don’t feel that I should rehash what other’s have done so well. If you’re looking for a full “killer” review of Leopard from top to bottom then I strongly recommend stopping by John Siracusa’s Ars review. It’s about 30,000 words and it covers pretty much every thing you could ever want to know about Leopard, and probably a lot that you didn’t.

That said, what I haven’t yet seen is a list of the little tweaks that make OS X Leopard (and me for that matter) purr. So here’s a few things I have enjoyed so far.

1. Drag and dropping via command tab — It’s incredibly cool to see that you can now grab a file, hit cmd-tab and then drag it into an application. This is something that Tiger was missing and that I always wanted to use.
2. Item renaming — Now when you rename a document with an extention it automatically doesn’t select the extension. This is great because about 90% of the time I don’t want to change the extension of the document and unselecting it in Tiger was always a pain.
3. Warning dialog options — For the first time I feel like I finally have some control over the warning dialogs that are popping up in finder. For instance, you can now turn off the extension change warning, and you can also turn off the warn before emptying trash dialogue.
4. Grid spacing — Finally grid spacing is back. I hated the annoying default spacing that icon view had up in previous versions of OS X.
5. Exposé in spaces — For those people using spaces it’s a nice touch that exposé works within the spaces master view (F8).
6. Wallpaper folder list — If you’re like me and change your desktop a few times a week this is awesome. In the wallpaper preference pane you can now add a folder with your wallpapers and have it appear next time you come back. No more constantly locating your wallpapers every time you want a change.
7. Print preview — The print window (cmd-p) in a lot of applications now shows a small preview of your document. A nice touch, building a PDF to preview a one page document was a hassle.
8. Spotlight has dictionary and calculator built in — Now when I am curious what “superfluous” means I can type it in spotlight and quickly get the definition. Similarly I am not always invoking dashboard to use the calculator, now I can just do quick math in spotlight.
9. Scroll in inactive windows — If you have a website in the background and need to scroll down to see some content but are in the middle of a big report you don’t have to switch apps to scroll. Now you can just move the mouse over there and do it even if the window isn’t active.

I think that covers most of what I am really excited about. Granted there are probably thousands of small enhancements that have taken place in 10.5 but I have to admit it’s nice to see Apple continuing to care about the little things. That said, I do have some serious qualms with Apple as of late, particularly regarding usability decisions, but I suppose that blog post is for another day.

Cheers, Bruce.

In the last year I’ve seen an increasing number of websites using what I’ve dubbed as the “Content Footer.” These are exaggerated website text footers which serve the dual purpose of better search engine optimization and increased usability. To help frame the discussion, let’s look at what I think is the best example of a Content Footer, MarthaStewart.com.

Rather then trying to list everything in the main navigation the Content Footer helps organize additional content in similar buckets. This methodology also serves as a micro-sitemap of second tier navigation. From a search engine optimization perspective, Content Footers help re-enforce keyword rich terminology without spamming the search engines.

MarthaStewart.com

Apple uses the Content Footer in the same way as MarthaStewart.com however they’ve opted for a vertical arrangement and they are capping what items are listed in this area. If you look at the applications listed in the Content Footer you’ll see they’ve limited the selection to their top applications. Apple isn’t interested in showing you everything they sell, just what is most popular and relevant.

Apple.com

From a design perspective the argument could be made that Content Footers clutter up the layout, this could be the reason that Apple doesn’t show the Content Footer until the subpage level. Personally, I feel the Content Footer pros outweigh the cons and I think we’ll start seeing more sites designed with this feature in the future.