Having faster and more powerful saved searches is great, but I wish they worked a little more consistently.

In the Finder, they show up in the sidebar. That’s great, they’re easy to find and access. However, they’re difficult to browse because they only show up in list or icon view. No column/browser view (my preferred way to quickly navigate folders).

Now in Open/Save dialogs, your saved searches don’t show up in the sidebar. Instead you get your media browser (for all those times you want to open an MP3 in Word!). But try this: Navigate to ~/Library/Saved Searches/ in an Open/Save dialog and you will now be able to open/save using items in your saved search. Better yet, they show up in column view.

Now, for your last trick, take any saved search from your Saved Searches folder and drop it onto the sidebar with your other folders in the “Places” section. Now that saved search works just like before, but it is also instantly accessible from open/save dialogs.

Sometimes I feel like Leopard was put together by a committee that had no actual designers or usability experts at the meetings. Just a bunch of random crap thrown on the wall, some of which is great, and some of it is just plain terrible.

You can do complex boolean searches in spotlight’s search field by including parenthesis, AND, and OR statements. Unfortunately, a lot of metadata is not available via Spotlight’s keyword searches, but is available via the Finder’s search window as “Other” criteria. Luckily, you can add boolean operators using the Find window and an undocumented trick.

If you hold down the option key while clicking the “+” button in the search criteria (it will change from “+” to “…”) to add a boolean operator (any of, none of, all of) and can nest these operators and other criteria as deeply as you want to.

The new version of Spotlight is also quite a bit faster when dealing with these complex queries, so you can go nuts.

If you’re wondering, the search shown above will find any files that either have a red or orange label or which are neither folders, aliases nor documents that have been opened in the past day or modified in the past week. I use this search as a “Current Projects” folder.

In the Leopard dock, any folders become annoying “stacks.” If you want to open the folder, you need to either open the stack and click the “open in Finder” button, cmd+click it and then open the now-selected folder in the Finder, or right click and select “open in Finder.” Any ability to get to a folder with just one click has been removed.

To get around this, you can make an alias of any folder and put that alias on the dock. The alias will now open with just one click.

It will not, however, display its contents as a stack or otherwise do anything other than open or be a drag target. Still, that might be preferable.

MD Softworks has a fabulous little utility called LeoColorBar which fixes the transparent menu “feature” in Leopard. It’s pretty simple, and simply puts a stripe (in a color of your choice) at the top of any picture you choose, and then sets that picture as your desktop background.

It doesn’t modify the original image, but rather stores a copy in your Pictures folder called “LeoColorBarDesktopPicture.jpg” with the appropriate crop settings, etc.

MD Softworks

My current backup setup consists of a 160GB external hard drive hooked up to a G4/400 Cube. I’m using a combination of ChronoSync and some shell scripts to create a nice archival backup of my home folder. (I don’t bother with apps and stuff because I’m too cheap to get a larger drive.)

Now there’s Time Machine in Leopard, and I’d really rather use it. It’s fully supported, so there’s no need for scripts and hacks, plus it has some nice features with iPhoto, etc.

But here’s the problem: Time Machine will only permit back ups to external hard disks attached to the backing-up Mac, or to other Macs with Leopard installed. Since my Cube can’t run Leopard, I’m stuck! (And an external HDD is out of the question – a backup that isn’t automated isn’t a back up at all, and I’ve lost the files to prove it!)

So here’s a couple tricks I’ve found that might work:

1. Use Time Machine on any disk: This method involves creating an invisible file that flags the network drive as OK for Time Machine. It has to be an HFS+ disk (no problem), and it has to be mounted over AFP. The down side appears to be that it isn’t an automated backup; you have to manually mount the drive so that Time Machine can start using it. Hardly a deal breaker, as a script attached to Proxi (triggered when I connect to my home wifi network) can automatically mount the disk.

2. Install Leopard on my Cube: As with other MacOS X installers, the Leopard DVD can be hacked so as to allow it to attempt an installation on any Mac, regardless of its configuration. Users report that people who don’t support the fancy new graphics in Leopard will find certain applications useless. (e.g. Time Machine shows up as a featureless black screen) Still, since my Cube’s really just a cheap server, I don’t see that as a big problem. Provided I can back up to it and it can run a few always-on applications, it ought to work just fine.

I don’t have Leopard yet, so I can’t try these tricks, but we’ll see how they come out. I’m kind of leaning toward #2, since that should give me the most ideal Time Machine experience and automate the whole deal. On the other hand, #1 would let me get going immediately, which is not without certain appeal.

For the past few weeks, my MacBook has been slow to hook up to my home wifi network. Every time I booted up or woke my Mac from sleep, there would be a short (about 20-30 second) delay before it would properly auto-connect. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I have lots of scheduled apps (backups, updates, IM, etc.) and they’d all report errors or fail when they couldn’t promptly find a network connection.

Turns out the problem was simply one of priority. The top network in my “preferred networks” list was one that doesn’t broadcast it’s SSID (network name). By simply moving all such networks to the bottom of the list, I connected instantly. I figure that during the time Airport appeared to be non-responsive, it was actually attempting to connect to this hidden wireless network.

Every time I download files in Firefox that I “auto process” (i.e. open with an application or whatnot), it puts the downloaded file on my desktop! This doesn’t happen at home, only at work, and never happens on my PC. Reinstalling Firefox (and extensions, themes, etc. – ugh!) didn’t fix a thing!

Well, thank you Riverside Rugby for showing me how to fix this problem for once and for all!

It seems that Firefox secretly looks at your Mac’s prefs for where to save files any time it saves a temp file. I know, I know, it would make way too much sense for it to use the same setting as your save-to-disk downloads in the Firefox prefs. But, hey, that’s why we love open-source software!

So all you have to do is change Safari’s prefs for where to save files. (Darn near any other Mac browser’s equivalent prefs will work, too.) Firefox will then honor that setting for its temporary files, but not for your downloads you wish to save to disk.

Are you tired of seeing news about special iPhone-only websites, when you don’t have an iPhone to try them out with?

Well now you can enjoy the world of really tiny rectangular web pages along with all those iPhonies out there! Either use Firefox and follow this excellent guide or use your browser of choice to change your browser’s user agent to:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419

Now sit back and enjoy the iPhone goodness!

Aldus/Macromind/Macromedia/Adobe Freehand is no more.

For many people (myself among them) Freehand was the very best of the “illustration” programs on the market. While long-time users might miss its pen tool the most, it has much more to offer itself. While Illustrator is just a cog in the machine, and virtually requires a copy of InDesign (or another page layout program) to develop a layout, Freehand’s support for multiple pages (even different page sizes) made it an ideal tool for illustration-heavy page layout, provided your document was relatively small.

As I’m no longer heavily into design, this really affects me very little, but I remain sad to see the sun set on Freehand. If nothing else, there’s no longer any real competition in the illustration space (just as there isn’t in photo editing).

But, at the same time, there are some up-and-coming inexpensive illustration programs coming out on the Mac and in open source that may yet prove to be viable alternatives to Adobe’s offerings.

I just became aware of the Deja Vu font set. It’s based on the excellent Bitstream Vera font set, and is similarly open source. The difference is that the Deja Vu fonts strive for a complete set of unicode characters.