Apple news blog

At the Worldwide Developer Conference currently underway in San Fransisco, Apple unveiled some of the new features coming in Mac OS X Server 10.6, Snow Leopard. Of course the new release gets the same improvements as the client version, …

Image from LogicielMac
LogicielMac publishes a screenshot of the system requirements for Mac OS X Snow Leopard which was seeded to developers this week. The requirements list the following:

- An Intel Processor
-…

I’m not sure on how many laptops this works on, but on my early 2008 MacBook Pro, when the computer is asleep with the screen down, the pulsating sleep light is quite bright. In the older G5 and first intel iMacs (and I’m not sure which other models), when the computer is asleep in a dark room, the light dims right down.

The hint is to put your computer to sleep using the Apple menu, or the power button if you have it set up that way. Then leave the screen open and allow the computer to make use of the light sensors in the speakers. This will then make the flashing light dim. It seems that closing the screen turns the light sensors off, and the light shines at its normal brightness.

I have my desktop images set to change every 30 minutes in random order. Sometimes the desktop will display an image that displayed earlier in the day, and I wanted a way to ‘advance’ the image easily. The following AppleScript will cause the desktop image to change, in whatever order you have set, each time it is run:

property theSwitch : 0if theSwitch = 0 then  tell application "System Events"    tell current desktop      set change interval to 1801.0    end tell  end tell  set theSwitch to 1else  tell application "System Events"    tell current desktop      set change interval to 1800.0    end tell  end tell  set theSwitch to 0end if

To maintain your current change interval, modify the change interval lines to reflect your interval, measured in seconds. Thus, for my 30-minute setting, I used 1801 and 1800 seconds. One hour would be 3601 and 3600, etc. For this script to work, you must have both Change Picture and Random Order enabled on the Desktop …

There’s already one hint on this site about the many wonders of the Unix utility jot. However, I was bored and decided to come up with some fun jot applications. So after hours of tweaking and coding, I came up with a script that lets you pick between three different types of output:

1. Monkey typing random words.
2. Geeky-looking code spam.
3. Random English words from the dictionary.

Choose one, and your terminal window will then fill with all the randomness you could ever want; type Control-C to stop the program. Possible applications include looking busy at work, lorem ipsum for filler text, and generally feeling geeky.

My favorite is the code spam option. My best friend’s fiancee took one look at my screen and said in an awed voice, “What is that?,” in the same tone that one might say, “You built a nuclear reactor in your back yard!?” So I suppose all that…

On Monday, Apple officially announced the iPhone 3G. The final phone design matched up closely with expectations as spelled out in our pre-WWDC rumor roundup. The 3G/GPS iPhone also matched up closely with one of the first leaked iPhone photos ori…