I'll be away from Mac OS X Hints until Monday, August 24th. In my absence, we'll have a couple of Macworld staffers -- Heather Kelly and Dan Miller -- posting the daily hints. They also covered for me back in July, so they're at least somewhat familiar with the duties now.
As a side note, Snow Leopard is expected to ship sometime in September. As with 10.5, it's my intent to start running 10.6 hints as soon as it's officially shipping, whenever that may be. So if you've been testing Snow Leopard and have found some interesting tidbits, get your hints ready for submission, and I'll be on the clock to push them live whenever the OS happens to ship.
(Note that you can't submit a hint early without breaking your NDA, so I'd advise against doing that. If any hints are entered into the queue prior to the ship date, they will be held until the OS is shipping and can be publicly disclosed.)
A week or so ago, I announced that hints would be posted on Twitter. At the time, I said it was a test of sorts -- if the interest was there, we'd continue the program. It's obvious now that there is interest, judging from the numbers who signed on to follow the tweets. When we launched, we used my own Twitter account, but it's clear that's not the best way to go forward -- not for those of you who are forced to read my daily drivel on Twitter, and not for me, as I must remember to tweet the hints each morning.
Last week, thanks to a quick name grab by Mac OS X Hints reader ad7am, I set up @osxhints to hold each day's hints. The posting of the hints is also automated via HootSuite.
So as of now, feel free to unfollow my Twitter account (I don't care, honest!), and sign on to follow @osxhints. I've also modified the hashtag, and we'll be using just #macosxhints on each tip. (The @osxhints account has several days' hints posted already, all using the new hashtag.)
I apologize for the minor hassle of doing this in a two-step process, but we really did want to give it a test run first. (And no, it wasn't just a 'follower grab' for my account -- as noted, please feel free to unfollow now that the test period is over; I really don't care who follows me on Twitter. Most of my tweets are Mac-related, general observations, or banter with other Macworld staffers and Mac users.)
I'll be away from Mac OS X Hints this week. In my absence, we'll have a couple of Macworld staffers -- Heather Kelly and Dan Miller -- posting the daily hints. Please be kind to them; this is their first attempt at running the site!
I'll be back in the editor's chair starting on Monday, July 20th.
It's been over a year since the last one, so ... Browser wars #10 is now online. Take a second to vote for your web browser of choice. And yes, I know many of us use more than one. But you get only one selection, so vote for your favorite.
The last time I asked about this, Safari got 55% of the votes, Firefox 31%, Camino 6%, and everyone else shared the remaining 8%. It will be interesting to see how things change this time around. Comments are disabled here; please add them to the poll instead.
On the evening of April 23rd, some nefarious types accessed the admin side of Geeklog, the engine that drives this site (the latest version of Geeklog isn't susceptible to this attack). The attackers then posted a few spammy stories (which I've now deleted), deleted some hints, and (much worse) used a Geeklog function to email all registered users. My apologies for this; we're working on the problem now, and will update this story with additional information as we progress.
Update: The hints and comments from April 22nd have been restored.
Update #2: The hints and comments from April 23rd have now been restored. We may have lost a few comments, but I think I got 99% of them, thanks to the comments RSS feed. Obviously, the time/date stamps are all wrong, as I simply posted them as I recreated them. If you see something noticeably out of place (threading-wise), just let me know and I can move it around.
Update #3: Portions of the user settings system (i.e. passwords, viewing prefs, etc.) will be offline while we update the system during the day today.
Note that I'm only offering two choices for the tab bar in this poll -- up top as in Safari 4, or back where it was in Safari 3. While it might be interesting to find out how many people prefer a vertical on-the-side tab bar (as in OmniWeb), I'm mostly curious about this change in Safari 4 vs. Safari 3, and how we all feel about having the tab bar as the window's title bar.
So how about it? Where should the tab bar reside in Safari? Cast your vote, and discuss the topic in the comments to the poll, please. What's my vote? Let's just say I was a very early adopter of this hint, and I hope it survives the transition to the final version.
Mac OS X Hints will be closed for the new year's holiday tomorrow and Friday, returning Monday with the usual hints -- I'll be at Macworld Expo next week, checking out the latest in tech toys along with the rest of the mob. If you're going to be at the show, feel free to stop by and introduce yourself, as I love meeting readers and contributors. I've posted my currently-known schedule in the 'read more' part of this message.
For entertainment during our down time, please contribute to our latest poll about how much (or little) you use the Places section of the Finder's sidebar. Thanks to Perceval for the poll suggestion.
No new hints today or tomorrow as I'll be spending the holiday with family and friends. Hope you and yours have a wonderful holiday season, and we'll be back as usual on Monday morning.
