Audience in cinemas has fallen in the last year... myself included. The prices are too high, there is a lot of advertising before the film (as if it were public TV) and usually lacks of cleaness and silence.... A funny article to read by James R. Stoup

All the harecoded team want you to have a happy new year 2006 full of peace, health, love, money and... more geekery :)

With Sprited Away [author, MacUpdate] you specify the maximum time of inactivity for your applications. When a program has been inactive for such a time it is automatically hidden by spirited away, so you don't have many annoying windows visible on the screen.

If there is any application you don't want to behave like this you only have to exlcude it in the top bar menu (See right image)

Spirited away doesn't have Dock icon nor interfere visually in any other place

This morning del.icio.us was down for maintenance. Some hours after I went back to my inbox to read my daily colleagues entries... BUT NOTHING WAS THERE!! I had a lot of them...

Are they going to appear again?

Update (dec, 19): del.icio.us worked for a while but now there is an odd message:

Due to the power outage earlier in the week, we appear a number of continued hiccups. We've taken everything offline to properly rebuild and restore everything. I apologize and hope to have this resolved as soon as possible. Thank you for your continued patience. Updates will be posted on our blog as we have them.

Update (dec,20): Del.icio.us is back online again. Any of you missed a backup?

curl --user youruser:yourpass -o delicious.xml -O "http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all"

When you plug an iBook 12" to an external monitor you get two duplicated screens. As they are duplicated, the maximum resolution is imposed by your iBook, this is 1024x768 pixels, no matter your second monitor can do 1600x1200.

I bought an iBook 12" because it's really portable and lightweight, but for intensive work, a 1024x768 pixels resolution is absolutely not healthy . We need a solution!

In order to remove duplication to let your 2nd monitor work with freedom you have to make some changes in the System Preferences/Screens panel, under the tab Align. But in small ibooks and other models, that option was removed by apple (to make your life easier?)/p>

There's still a chance to re-enable it, you can check if your mac model is supported and install the patch (at your own risk) Screen Spanning Doctor. After rebooting, you'll see the new tab.

Personally I tested the patch in two different iBooks G4 1.2Ghz and 1.4Ghz and everything went fine...

I am one of those who prefer desktop interface consistency rather than having every couple of applications with different interface looks, depending on the gui framework they are built upon. Variety is the spice of life, but not on a computer desktop, please.

Mac OS X has always 'suffered' from this diversity of gui presentations, like the rest of Unix variants, and Tiger is even worse. We have some metal apps (Finder, Safari, ...) some Aqua (Mail 2) and some hybrids (iTunes 6), not to mention the java apps like Zend Studio, and so on. But in my opinion at least the Apple applications should have absolute interface consistency, being the design wizards they are.

Third parties have provided solutions to this problem for a few years, the most famous Unsanity and its Shapeshifter product. I used it during the Panther days, and I installed a shapeshifter theme that turned every app into the metal interface. Pretty solid and consistent, I liked it a lot and used it for months, the only gripe being that my desktop turned maybe too much grayish. When I upgraded to Tiger I was happy with the novelty of the new gui tweaks here and there, and so I didn't want to install my shapeshifter metal theme anymore. Also, shapeshifter themes tend to change way too much things in my opinion, I just want a consistent gui that also recalls being Mac OS X :-)

Enter the freeware software UNO from Pedro Grilo:

UNO derives from the Latin word for one and stands for 'as one'. UNO is the root of Unity. UNO is a theme that brings the sunken unified toolbar/titlebar look&feel to every single window on your system cocoa or carbon, metal or aqua and already unified windows as well). On an higher level, UNO's main goal is to enhance aqua interface consistence, by making all elements look&feel 'as one'.

And it does exactly what it says! In other words: Finder, Safari, iTunes and the rest of the cocoa apps all look the same now! This is gui consistency heaven now, thanks Pedro :-)

This is what might happen: