Mac Season

If you're new to MacSeason.com and like what you see, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed.

I noticed that my Dashboard is getting slower and slower to load every-time I use it - and ironically it appears to be caused by the very feature that is there to speed things up - the cache.

If you use Dashboard heavily and with Widgets that gets their content from the internet - chances are your cache is building up and over time it becomes faster to load the content directly from the Internet than from the large cache files.

To fix the problem you just need to empty your Dashboard cache, here is how you do it:

In Finder - go to ~/Library/Caches/DashboardClient and drag the files to your trash. Once you are done you need to restart your Dock as that is the application that runs your Dashboard as well. To restart the Dock - start up Terminal (~/Applications/Utilities) and type:

killall Dock

The Dock will automatically re-launch and you are all set — and hopefully your Dashboard is a bit faster.

If you would like to prevent Dashboard from caching anything in the future you can right-click on the “DashboardClient” folder, select “Get Info” and then tick the “Locked” box which will prevent Dashboard to write to the folder. Un-ticking it will set the cache back to normal.

Another week another Beta from the Parallels team - there does not seem to be a lot of differences between Beta 2 and this latest release if you look at the features - there is, however, one important difference at the end “NEW! Lots of various fixes” - so well worth the download.

The installation went smooth and it does seem to run somewhat better (I did have a few problems with Beta 2 suddenly hanging and I had to start Windows in Safe mode)

Take it for a spin

The advantage of CrossOver is that you do not have to start up a Windows environment (like Parallels for example) - with CrossOver you can run (some) Windows application without installing Windows at all and simply run it directly in you OS X with very low CPU overhead (Intel based systems only).

I think the solution is valid if you for example often want to use IE6 to test how a web site looks that you have developed on your Mac or to access those relatively rare sites that requires IE to work at all. However, I had a look at the list of compatible programs and it looks like there is a very long way to go - as I understand the ranking - so far only 9 applications carries the company’s own Gold rank status (and CrossOver is one of them!) - the rest of the applications may or may not work - and how stable are they then?

The latest additions to the new release are:

• The beginnings of an audio input service (which works only for small test applications, but we hope to expand on it in future versions).
• Support for Quickbooks 2000-2004
• A minor adjustment for the ‘My Mac Desktop’ target within file dialogs
• A minor improvement to the web browser in Quicken 2007.

You can pick up a trial version of CrossOver Mac which is free for 60 days. The final version when released is expected to sell at $59.95 but by pre-ordering it you will get it at $39.95 along with some other benefits.

The notification application that I think most Mac users are really happy with has just been released in an updated version (for some reason it did not pick up the update automatically when checking from the Preference Pane?)

Downloading it and installing it was painless, however, and the key issues addressed are:

General

• Significantly improved performance when an application registers with Growl for the first time
• Made the Spotlight importer universal

Preference Pane

• Fixed a bug in which preference changes might not immediately be respected by notifications
• Improved localizations

Extras

• Now ships with Rawr-Jour
• Improved GrowlMail to open the mail message if the Growl notification is clicked
• Fixed searching for album art from Amazon in GrowlTunes

You can pick it up from growl.info

I came across a strange behavior by Safari - all of a sudden my RSS feeds were no longer being updated. I had read a few places that it could be caused by broken databases files in your /Library/Syndication - and deleting these files would solve the problem. I did, however, not have any such files.

I started thinking about what I had changed recently and I realized that I had changed my .Mac Sync setting to Automatic just a few days ago (seems that actually resets the feeds or stops Safari from checking for some odd reason) - so setting that to “Daily” instead fixed the problem.

Looks a bit like a bug to me?

The guys at Techspansion are really busy these days - it has only been 3 says since I last wrote about the update to version 1.18 - and now the new version 1.19 has been released - once again with new features:

• Major increase to H.264 encoding speed on multi-processor Macs! Give your G5 Quad or MacPro a workout.
• Big increase in scaling quality on Intel Macs!
• Check http://visualhub.net/ for new sample files.
• Fixes to decoding on some MPEG-2 sources (lines and half-grey frames).
• Fixes to aspect detection on EyeTV packages.
• Re-fixed aspect ratio detection for a couple weird DVDs.
• More reliable DVD Audio selection.
• Fewer absurd decimals.

Important: Older versions of megazoomer conflict with many programs, including iSquint and VisualHub. If you use megazoomer, please update to the latest version.

I have had a go at making a simple RSS widget for Mac Season using the new Dashcode Developer Beta from Apple (seems pretty stable). You can pick up a copy from developer.apple.com - you will have to register - but there is a free option to join, just click the link on the top left Member Log In and then Join from there.

Making a widget (well a very simple one at least) is very easy. I pretty much just edited the Title of the standard RSS Feed widget to “Mac Season” - dragged the url to my RSS feed to the widget and that was it. You can of course change the design the way you like - but for now I just wanted something simple.

After you have made the changes you like to your new widget - take it for a spin by hitting the Run button and once you are happy with the result simply go “File > Deploy Widget” which will generate what appears to be a file on your desktop (or folder if you changed the destination).

In order for this to work as a download on the web you need to right-click (or crtl+click) on the widget icon and select “Create Archive of “widgetname.wdgt”” - which will generate a widgetname.wdgt.zip file which you can upload to your website.

Check the Mac Season widget - and do let me know if you produce any widgets that we can feature here ion the site.

Mac Season Greetings!

My favorite screensaver is the SaveHollywood Video Screensaver which is available fro free as a Universal Binary. The way I have set it up is to point to a folder with my favorite videos in and they are then shown as my screensaver in random order (currently HD versions of the “Get a Mac” adverts).

With the SaveHollywood screensaver you can:

• play Flash animation as a screensaver.
• use the screensaver to display marketing material in a showroom for example and switch back to Mac OS X with the move of a mouse.
• either select a file or a folder to watch. If you select a file, the movie will loop. If you select a folder, files within this folder will be played sequentially or random.
• select multiple files and/or folders.
• display a movie in its actual size or make it sized to the screen (with or without a border).
• set the movies as mute or low volume.
• choose the color of the background.
• play the movie on the main screen only (if you have multiple monitors).

Finally you can combine it with the “Lock your Mac” tip.

The cool VisualHub has been updated with lots of new features - I use VisualHub myself and generally quite happy with it (iSquint is also pretty good and free)

New in VisualHub 1.18:

• Improvements to DVD encoding quality.
• UI updates and enhancements.
• Converted MPEG-1 files no longer display macroblock errors on some players.
• Multiple files can be dragged onto the VisualHub icon again.
• VisualHub no longer requires Finder.app for any functions.
• QuickTime files without .mov extensions now better identified.
• Converting very hi-res video to MP4, AVI, MPEG, Flash and WMV now provides more reliable quality.
• Two Pass conversion to DVD is working again.
• Reliability improvements to reading DVD/VIDEO_TS sources.
• Rate control for DVD conversions improved.
• DVD, DVD, DVD. DVD? DVD!
• Improvements to Matroska compatibility.
• Custom framerates can now be set for PSP videos (Firmware 2.8+ in /VIDEO directory only)
• Various other small tweaks/improvements/fixes.

Take it for a spin or upgrade today if you are a registred user already.

Parallels just keeps getting better and better and it is getting hard to follow all the builds - the only downside is that one might ending up using Windows more instead of finding great Mac alternatives.

There are once again a lot of awesome features and enhancements introduced in this Beta, including:

USB 2.0 support - “Plug and play” popular USB devices like external hard drives, printers, and scanners, and use them at full native speed.

Full-feature virtual CD/DVD drive - Burn CDs and DVDs directly in virtual machines, and play any copy-protected CD or DVD just like you would on a real PC

Improved Coherence mode - The groundbreaking feature that lets you run Windows applications without seeing Windows just got better! Now you can:
Place Windows applications on your Mac desktop or in your application dock. Just click to launch them directly from OS X!

Use Coherence in Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows XP and Windows Vista!

Better Boot Camp support - Using your Boot Camp partition in Parallels Desktop is now easier than ever. Beta2’s Boot Camp support includes:
Full support for FAT32 and NTFS partitions

Activate Windows only once inside Parallels and work in both environments

Parallels Transporter Beta2 bundled - migrate your real Windows PC, or existing VMware or Virtual PC VMs to Parallels virtual machines!

New Look and Feel - completely redesigned windows and easier to follow dialogues to make Desktop for Mac more user-friendly than ever

True “Drag and Drop” functionality - a long awaited feature that lets you seamlessly drag and drop files and folders from Windows to Mac OS X and vice versa

Read/Write Boot Camp partition - use your Apple Boot Camp Partition as a virtual HDD for Parallels Desktop for Mac

Virtual Machine Catalogue - now all of your virtual machines are available through a centralized VM catalogue which appears on each Parallels Desktop for Mac instance

One-click Virtual Machine Aliases - automatically create a desktop shortcut for your virtual machine with the OS Installation Assistant, by dragging-and-dropping from title bar, or by pressing Command-Option keys combination. Clicking on Alias automatically starts the Virtual Machine

Resizable Main Window - resize the Parallels Desktop for Mac main window as you do with any other Mac application

Auto-Adjusting Screen Resolution - Windows auto-adjusts its screen resolution to the actual main window size

Improved graphic performance - up to 50% faster!

Connect/disconnect USB devices schema improved - no more annoying “wait 5-10 seconds” message on USB device connecting to Parallels Desktop for Mac!

Up to 5 Virtual NICs - now each Virtual Machine can have up to five virtual network interfaces

Enhanced Shared Networking Mode - run Cisco VPN and many other complex networking applications in conjunction with Connection Sharing Mode

Try it out for yourself and also check the ScreenCast demo by Don McAllister.