After installing Snow Leopard on my 15″ MacBook Pro a few days ago I noticed that fonts, specifically at low sizes, looked terrible. Edges where overly rugged and text seemed dim. In essence, it seemed as if every font had decreased an entire weight.

With further research I discovered that this is a problem with 3rd party (non-apple) monitors and their default status in 10.6. Previously in 10.5’s System Preferences users where able to alter Font Smoothing with one of several options:

Yet, in 10.6 the option has been replaced with a simple Use LCD Font Smoothing When Available dialogue. The problem is OS X 10.6 detects some 3rd party monitors (Dell, Samsung, Lenovo, etc.) as CRTs and doesn’t allow them to utilize font smoothing. Here’s an example side by side of font non-smoothing vs. smoothing on Snow Leopard.

Fortunately there is a way to force font smoothing via terminal, simply paste the following text and hit enter:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

• 0 – is the setting for CRT rendering (looks horrible on LCD)
• 1 – is the setting for Light
• 2 – is the setting for Medium (Best for Flat Panel)
• 3 – is the setting for Strong

Once you’ve set this you will want to log out and back into OS X. At this point all the fonts should look as they did before your upgrade to 10.6. Hoorah!

Update: Added another example from iTunes music selection that highlights this issue a bit more. Also, updated a grammar fix thanks to Reddit user guriboysf.

While the bulk of Imulus development takes place in a .NET environment we all still enjoy geeking out from time to time. As a previous Ruby on Rails app developer (mainly front end) I have a fascination in staying up on RoR as well as other open sources frameworks and languages. Obviously this includes a vast number of options now days (RoR, Cake, Django, etc). However, the bulk of them have one common thread, MySQL.

Unfortunately for quite some time getting MySQL to run on Mac OS X 10.5 was somewhat of a pain in the ass. In comparison to some database setups typing in a few terminal commands is no big deal, however, compared with installing MySQL on 10.4 Tiger the 10.5 install was a huge step back. Tiger had a simple PKG installer that once run offered a simple start/stop MySQL preference pain within OS X’s system preferences. However, with the release of Leopard this prefpane was no longer functional. Luckily the issue has been fixed!

The bug has been addressed and there is now a prefpane that can be downloaded and used with version 5 of MySQL. Further it also seems that new versions of MySQL have this fix implemented by default. Great work MySQL community, it’s always nice to see frustrating issues fixed! Especially those that will help new users get a chance to try the product without jumping through hoops.

Recently I’ve been receiving a bunch of flack for my iPhone signature “Sent from my iPhone.” For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, the iPhone places this line on the bottom of all emails which are sent from the iPhone. BlackBerry does the same thing with “Sent from my BlackBerry” but for some reason the iPhone’s signature has really been looked down upon.

I really believe the price and hype around the iPhone has contributed to all the negative comments about the iPhone’s signature. For some people, receiving an iPhone message which follows with the signature “Sent from my iPhone” indicates the following about the sender:

• “They are a pompous ass showing off their iPhone
• “They have way to much disposable income”
• “Wow, this person drank from the Apple punch bowl”
• “They are too busy to send me a real email”
• “This person really has the need to tell me they are working hard”

OK, those are just a few of the negative spins on the signature. If you want to read more about the negative takes on the iPhone read Mitch Wagner’s article in Information Week. Mitch believes anyone who hasn’t removed the signature is a doofus. Nice use of doofus, Mitch!

However, I’m going to flip this argument around. I’m 100% behind the signatures because they tell me a different story. When I see someone has sent me a message from an iPhone or BlackBerry I make the following judgments:

• “OK, they have a mobile device so they have zero excuse for not getting back to me within 48 hours”
• “If their email is short and has typos I know why”
• “This person obviously likes to stay connected”
• “There is a good chance I’ll be able to reach this person during off-work hours”

Yesterday during lunch this discussion came up and Bruce had a great insight, why not just say “Sent from my mobile phone.” This signature leaves out the brand name and the negative associations that others my read into BlackBerry or iPhone. Bruce is totally correct; however being an Apple shareholder I’m also about marketing the products, so for now “Yeah, I sent it from my iPhone.”

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.

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.