One of my favorite little utilities has been updated to fully support Mac OS X 10.6.1. Default Folder X makes it easy to navigate when both saving and opening files, and it has saved me constant hours of prowling around for folders where I save and open stuff. It's been particularly valuable when I'm working on a new book, because I have graphics and text strewn all over the place in folders on multiple disks.

This new update also adds improved capabilities in Mac OS 10.4 and 10.5. In Snow Leopard I saw some nasty strange screen drawing anomalies, and that is now fixed with this most recent version. The developers also say there are improvements when using Final Cut Pro, QuickTime Player 7, and other applications that export files using QuickTime.

You can try the utility for free for 30 days. Otherwise it is US $34.95, or $14.95 for users of versions bought before June 1, 2007.

It's nice to see this utility updated, and while I love it dearly, it would have been so nice if more of this functionality had been built in to OS X natively. Until then, Default Folder X is a great solution for opening and saving files in a completely quick and sane manner.

I was chatting with my TUAW colleagues this morning about Mac versus iPhone programming. And as per usual with these conversations, we veered in the direction of unfettered speculation. It's an occupational hazard.

As someone who regularly develops on both platforms, I declared that the iPhone represents the future of Mac programming. The iPhone, I posited stated, offers a great new platform without the need to be fully backwards compatible like the Mac. Our own Victor Agreda challenged me to back up that position. After a bit of time and thought, I decided to do so in this post.

My key point is this: Apple's engineers have learned a lot of important design lessons during the history of OS X. When the iPhone debuted, it gave those engineers the chance to rebuild an OS and an API from the ground up. Those engineers could craft a platform and its libraries that built on the Mac's successes without dragging along its less fortunate design decisions. Yes, there were some lemon frameworks that initially made the grade, but over time, Apple has reduced their number.

Even now, Apple continues its iPhone design process, adding new frameworks and APIs at a prodigious rate. The iPhone OS remains a work in progress, developing in ways and directions that the initial release two years ago could not have anticipated. And Apple does this, knowing fully that the closed platform allows them a great deal of design freedom that would not have been possible on the open Macintosh.

In contrast, consider in how many ways the Mac's successful history drags the platform down. A commitment to existing APIs and historical design practices show up in nearly every Mac development project. The simple elegance of the iPhone's built-from-the-start-as-Objective-C 2.0-based API is largely missing from Cocoa libraries.

Whether you're working with buttons, menus or simple text views, the iPhone development approach simply works better: beautiful 2.0-style properties, consistent API design, better-thought-out object inheritance trees, and so forth. With the iPhone, you see a great new platform evolving without the need to be fully backwards compatible

Snow Leopard, with its minimal API changes has bought the Macintosh a few years of stability. But I think it's time for Apple to rethink the platform as a whole, re-imagining its API through the lens of current iPhone OS development. While Snow Leopard offers Apple the room to stay still for now, I can see Apple moving forward in a separate engineering effort to Cocoa Touch Mac, a hypothetical cross-platform OS that supports general development on iPhone and future Mac devices like my imaginary snow-princess-rainbow-pony-iTablet.

The ghost of NeXT-past, as TUAW-colleague Joachim Bean puts it, still haunts us. It's time to exorcise the unhelpful bits of that pervasive spirit and usher in the new age of the iPhone and its API design examples. Mac OS X is, and has been, a superb development platform. What I'm suggesting is that iPhone OS might just be a better one.

We've seen the benchmarks. We've heard from the techno-geeks. According to Apple, Snow Leopard should result in some impressive speed gains, and hefty hard drive space recapture. But does this speed bump actually result in tangible benefits for the average user? Do you really get back a functional amount of hard drive space? I undertook an intentionally low-tech approach to find out, looking at the space on the drive, and using my iPhone's stopwatch function to time various functions before and after upgrade. I took measurements on two computers: a low-end, bare bones white MacBook used lightly as a secondary computer, and a higher-end MacBook Pro used heavily as a primary computer. The white MacBook was generally speedy and efficient before the upgrade, due to the fact that it had very little installed on it. However, the MacBook Pro was bloated and slow due to lots of programs, with problems magnified by years of hard drive image flashes over various computer upgrades, typical of the non-technical business user.

All start up times are true start up times. In other words, I didn't deem the computer to have "started up" until I had full, no-lag control of a fully-propagated desktop. Same went for the programs whose start up times I tested -- none were deemed started up until the program was responding to input and usable. I picked some common programs that I felt reflected typical use. I turned on auto-login to the primary account on both computers to gain timing accuracy. Not all the results are comparable between computers; certain programs were on one computer but not the other. But, in general, the task was instructive.

It was pretty quiet at the ole' Apple Store here in Tucson. I got there just at ten, and while there were stanchions to organize the crowd, they weren't needed and just sat off to the side looking lonely. There were plenty of people in the store, and about half were buying Snow Leopard. Supplies were plentiful, but I was there early.

Installing on both a MacBook Pro and a Mac Pro were two different stories. On the laptop, things were ducky. Everything worked, mail accounts were there, bookmarks, the usual.

On my desktop it was not so pretty. I kept getting messages that I needed to add a password for my MobileMe account, which I dutifully did. Problem was it kept asking. Then I saw some messages about the keychain. Whoops. Not a good message to see.

Well, the short version is that somehow my keychain was hosed. I tried to repair, but that didn't stop the problems. I finally threw away my keychain data and started again, re-entering my email passwords and a few other things. All is back to normal. I also saw a strange message about my iDisk, but I followed the directions and threw a rather large file away. It appeared to be a copy of my idisk for local use.

Other things pretty much work. My Sonos audio system is fine, Photoshop CS3 seems OK, and while it didn't get a heavy duty run through, it opens images, applies filters, runs actions, and saves properly.
Shut down is almost instantaneous, and I noticed I'd saved 14GB after the upgrade.

I'm seeing lots of little niceties. When I take a screen shot, it has a name that includes the date and time instead of 'picture 1'.

All in all, not too painful, but not completely trouble free. With keychain passwords gone I may wind up doing some extra typing for awhile on web sites where I have an account, but that's not too horrible.

Snow Leopard is clearly faster, trimmer, and a bit more fun to use. A good use of $30.00 and just a little bit more time than I planned in getting over a couple of glitches.

'Twas the night before Snow Leopard, and all through the 'net, Apple was sending takedowns for previews of software that technically wasn't out yet... Snow Leopard is almost out, but "almost" isn't quite good enough for Apple. Apparently they sent a last-minute takedown notice to The Register for posting their Snow Leopard preview a little early, and The Register is declining to do anything about it.

Similar previews have appeared around the 'net (our friends at Engadget have published their own review), and while Apple claims that images and descriptions in the post are still confidential, The Register disagrees, saying that many features of Snow Leopard were seen and known way before this week.

So. Will Apple be angry? Will The Register be locked out of any future events (actually, we can identify with that one, given our metaliveblogging chops here on TUAW)? Will they care? It does seem a bit strange that Apple has targeted them with a takedown -- we doubt, as The Register suspects, that Walt Mossberg will be getting any takedown notices. Then again, maybe Apple was just trying (or their lawyers were just aiming for some extra legal fees), and they won't bother enforcing what seems like a shaky case anyway.

Most likely Apple will pass. We'll probably hear them exclaim, however, though it may be less staunch: Merry updates to all, and to all a good launch!

My MacBook Pro and I had a bit of a rendezvous this past weekend. She's a 15 inch Core Duo with 2GB of RAM. Although she'll occasionally get as hot as a toaster oven (leaving red marks on my lap at times) and mooed like a cow when we first met, she's been a consistent workhorse for me.

But her hard drive needed a transplant. Sick of her sluggish performance and hard drive clicking noises, I decided that it was time to fix her up. So, I replaced her 320GB hard drive with, surprise, a 320GB hard drive -- this time a Fujitsu model instead of the Toshiba it replaced. Not because I thought the Fujitsu was any better than the Toshiba it'd be replacing, but because it was the least expensive drive I could find.

Although the hard drive installation went successful, it wasn't without its fair share of bumps along the road. Hopefully, the bumps I experienced could provide many some guidance on what to do as well as what not to do when upgrading your hard drive.

TUAW receives a lot of app submissions for review, both for Mac and iPhone. But it's unusual when a developer sends us individual press releases for a relatively large number of apps.

Steven Degutis is the brain behind a company called Thoughtful Tree. In his words, "I'm an indie Mac developer who writes apps that make my job easier and smoother, and then if I think they're useful enough, I share them with everyone via my company Thoughtful Tree Software. That's just how I roll."

The Mac OS X 10.5.8 update is now available through Software Update. Among the listed features are resolution for compatibility issues when joining AirPort networks, disappearing monitor resolutions in System Preferences, and Bluetooth reliability.

The update will also upgrade Safari to version 4.0.2, though I'm not sure if that includes those of us still on Safari 3 (I'll find out in a moment!) There are a number of other reliability and compatibility tweaks that are listed here. Security features are available here.

The update is not available through Apple's download site as of yet.

Edit (1:55 PT): I can confirm that this update does upgrade those of you still on Safari 3, like I was, to Safari 4.0.2. The combo update is also now available.

A friend of mine let me know that last night, Apple seeded Mac OS X 10.5.8 Build 9L30 to developers. Apparently, this version had only one item in the change list, that item related to an issue with waking from sleep mode when connected to external monitors.

With this one minor change, as well as the fact that the previous build was pushed to developers only five days earlier, it appears that the last version of Leopard is about to show up in Software Update. OS 10.6, Snow Leopard of course, is expected to ship towards the end of September.

TUAW wants to know when you think 10.5.8 will actually appear. Take our poll, and if none of the canned answers fit your thoughts, be sure to leave a comment.

When it comes to cool tools for the Mac, the Livescribe Pulse smartpen is one of the most innovative. It's a pen that works with special dot paper to capture your handwriting and drawings, and links what you write to what you hear since it also records every word within earshot. All of that information is transferred to your Mac for future reference.

The Mac software that comes with the Pulse has been lacking in comparison to its Windows sibling in that it couldn't convert handwriting to editable computer text. Livescribe and Vision Objects today announced the Mac version of MyScript for Livescribe, handwriting-recognition software that converts handwritten notes from Livescribe into editable text.

Owners of the Pulse smartpen can create their own dictionaries of commonly used words, abbreviations, names, or terms for even better conversion accuracy. MyScript can directly receive handwritten notes from Livescribe Desktop, convert shapes, tables, and drawings from the pen into editable images, and send converted text from MyScript to Microsoft Word for further editing or to Apple Mail.

A 30-day free trial for Pulse smartpen owners is available here, and the program can be purchased for US$29.95 at any time. MyScript requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher on an Intel processor.

Apple did the world a great service when they introduced Time Machine backups to OS X. Suddenly, anyone could attach an external disk drive to their Mac and have a constant set of backups at their fingertips with little or no intervention required.

However, there was one very big, hairy fly floating in the soup of backup contentment -- if your backup drive was destroyed or stolen, your backup was gone. Many of us who are paranoid about backups started doing a second level of backups to offsite services such as Mozy, Carbonite, or my personal favorite, BackBlaze.

There's a new kid on the block with a different approach to offsite backup -- Time Warp. This US$25 Mac application (free during the beta period) takes your Time Machine backups, compresses and encrypts them with 256-bit AES encryption, and then uploads them to your personal Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) account.

How does the cost of storage on Amazon S3 compare with the other services? The current costs are $0.15 per GB per month for storage, $0.10 per GB to backup data into S3, and $0.17 per GB to restore data from S3. The Jumping Bean Software team says that backup up 20 GB of personal data would cost about $1.50 per month, which is in line with costs for the other services. Time Warp does intelligent filtering to keep "dumb files" like cache, trash, and temporary files from being uploaded and costing you money.

If you take a glance at the sample screenshot at the top of this post, you'll notice that Time Warp does its best to give you a handle on your storage costs, so there's no guesswork involved. Leopard users who have been on the fence about whether or not to invest in an offsite backup solution might want to take advantage of the Time Warp beta.

On July 20th, 1969, I was an 11 year-old nerd who loved space. Along with billions of other people in the rest of the developed world, I sat in rapt attention in front of the family TV set watching the ghostly figures of Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin taking the first steps on the moon.

Now I'm a nerdy 51 year-old who still loves space. This weekend, my wife and I are celebrating the 40th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 moon landing by presenting an Apollo retrospective at the Lookout Mountain Nature Center near Denver. If you're in the Denver area, drop by at 7 PM on Saturday, July 18th to learn more about the incredible challenges that were surmounted by the U.S. space program to land men on the moon and return them safely to earth.

For the majority of you who aren't in the Denver area, there's another way you can celebrate on Monday, July 20th, 2009. On Monday, Carina Software will offer free download-only versions of their SkyGazer software for Mac OS X on the Carina website. iPhone and iPod touch owners won't be left out of the fun, as Carina's SkyVoyager app will be free on Monday from the App Store.

Be sure to pass along the information to your friends and join in the free fun on Monday!

[via The Mac Observer]

Daisy Disk is the perfect example of one of those tools that should be built right into OS X.

It's the latest in disk visualization utilities -- software that scans your hard drive and lets you know which files are being hard drive hogs (in my case, World of Warcraft - no big surprise there). But, it's the added features that turn this from basic to "wow, why didn't Apple develop something like this?"

Once you initiate the software, you'll see a list of mounted drives on your network that you can scan. I scanned my main drive. It took less than four minutes for it to go through the 120GB drive and display everything in a circular graphic that does remind you of a daisy wheel.

Each section of your drive is color-coded for its specific purpose. The closest parts to the center of the graphic are the root levels. Going further out will net you very specific details on file sizes. Clicking on one section move it to the forefront and let you see everything on that level. When you get down to the files themselves, tap the space bar to preview the file. Then, right click to expose those files in the Finder, then do what you wish with them. Then, click on the inner circle to go back out to the level above. For smaller files and folders, it's better to use the list on the side rather than try to pick things out of the wheel.

Doing this enabled me to find large files that I hadn't seen in years, including a folder of old backups from 2006 that got carried over from my iBook. Deleting those netted me 7GB of space. The only feature really not working properly is the preview portion. When I tried playing .M4V video sources, I was rewarded with a grey screen. Regular .AVIs were fine.

DaisyDisk costs $19.95USD and requires OS X 10.5 or higher. You can do a full-featured download for free, which gives you a great taste of what it has to offer. For those wanting the same sort of tools, but for free, give OmniDiskSweeper or GrandPerspective a try.

We're back with another edition of Ask TUAW. This time around we've answering questions about how to resize windows too big for the screen, "compulsive" updating, booting from an SD card, Open GL in Snow Leopard, and more.

As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Questions for next week should be left in the comments. When asking a question please include which machine you're running and which version of Mac OS X (we'll assume you're running Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions.

Steph asks:

I recently switched from an iMac to a MacBook Pro and now many of my windows are sized to big for the screen of my laptop. I can't reach the corner to resize them and clicking the "Plus" sign in the corner doesn't help. What can I do?

Fortunately, this is very easy to fix. Instead of clicking on the "Plus" sign (the green button) in the top left corner of the window you are trying to resize, Option-click it and the window will fill your new screen size instead.

John asks:

I realize there's a method for updating Mac OSX all the time and sometimes I get the window popping up saying I have updates. Should I always update immedietly when it tells me I have some?

John Gruber mentioned in a recent post about Apple's Snow Leopard list of Enhancements and Refinements that one of the small adjustments to Snow Leopard will be that the default gamma on displays will switch from the typical 1.8 value to 2.2, which is what is used on TVs as well as being the long-standing default gamma value in Windows.

Gamma affects the visual contrast you see on your screen, and a higher value indicates a higher level of contrast. The cost of this higher contrast is that you lose some detail on the less luminous parts of your screen.

If you're interested in seeing what this is going to look like in Snow Leopard, or switching your gamma setting now so that you're used to it ahead of time, here are the steps to do it using the Display Calibrator Assistant:

1. Head into System Preferences, and click on the Displays icon.
2. Click on the Color tab, and press the Calibrate... button.
3. On the Introduction window that opens, click Continue
4. On the next screen, "Select a target gamma", choose "2.2 Television Gamma"
5. Click Continue leaving your Target White Point set to Native (or whatever yours is set to)
6. Now name the new profile you've created, click Continue and then Done.
7. Lastly, you can now choose to switch between your default color profile, and your newly created profile with the gamma set to 2.2.

I realize this might seem terribly obvious to some users, but for others playing with color profiles is not ground they've previously covered. If you're one of those people, this tip is for you.