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Infinite Loop / The Apple Ecosystem

Monday morning Apple links

Backing up your mac with BackityMac, Firefox 1.5. more!

  •  Want to get serious about backing up your Mac but you don't know where to turn or what application to use?  Heard horror stories about Apple's Backup application?  There's a new app in town and it's name is BackityMac and it aims to be as simple as Backup but without all the exclusivity (you don't need .Mac) and theoretically, it actually works the way you'd expect: "But what is backup without restore.  Choose an image created by this
    program, and the backed up contents will automatically be detected for
    you,  Then decided what you want to restore, and click "Restore".  The
    contents will be placed back into their original directory
    automatically replacing it's contents.
    "  Get this, it's freaking FREE.  Grab it and try it out, I know I sure will be.

  • Daring Fireball's John Gruber has put up a response to PowerPage publisher Jason O'Grady's essay concerning Apple's supposed jihad against him: "I don’t mean to belittle the significance of the subpoena served
    against O'Grady's email provider; if it were me, and Apple (or
    anyone else) were subpoenaing the email records from my hosting
    provider, I'd fight it, too. But a subpoena served against one's
    hosting provider is a far cry from being "targeted for deletion".

  • Firefox is out (as if Firefox itself hadn't already informed you, assuming you're already running 1.5) and it is now an official Universal Binary.  I overheard fellow IL writer Jacqui extolling its "speediness" sometime yesterday, so you know it's gotta be good.
  • An often overlooked downside to having an Intel Mac is that most themes simply wouldn't work.  It's apparently because on Intel macs, there's a new file named Extras2.rsrc.  Extras.rsrc was traditonally the file you'd patch to change how OS X's look and feel, but now there's this new guy with a '2' appended to the end!  A forums and journals regular, Mat Catastrophe, put together a little guide explaining how you can convert those old themes to versions that'll work on your Intel Mac: "Unfortunately, the Endian thing means we can’t do that. As such, we
    need to turn an Extras.rsrc file (big Endian) into an Extras2.rsrc file
    (little Endian) for this to work. Enter a new spiffy application from White Magic Labs called Extras2Extras2
    by Colin Cornaby. All the credit for this, really, is his. Go and thank him.

  • Quake 4 is now shipping from Aspyr as a universal binary. Get fraggin'!
  • Use 37signal's Campfire (a Ruby on Rails online chat application built with loads of AJAX-goodness) and feel the need to contain that functionality in a nice app-like environment instead of a volatile browser tab?  Look no further than Pyro.  It's nothing more than a WebKit project that loads a single site, Campfire of course.
  • CornerClick is a neat little app that lets you assign "actions" to the four corners of your screen: "Tiny, nearly invisible windows hide in the corners of your screen.
    When you click on them an action is performed. The neat thing is that
    clicking in the exact corner of the screen is really easy to do, since
    you can just whip the mouse over there instantly. You get to define
    what actions they perform, and you can have each corner do as many
    things as you want by holding down different modifier keys. If you like, a popup window will display what action is going to be performed when you point at any corner of the screen.

  • GammaWork is an easy to use monitor calibration tool for OS X: "Gammawork enable Mac OS X users the ability to adjust the colors on
    their monitors to correspond to other device such as a printer. It will
    adjust up to four connected displays, independently varying red, green
    and blue color channels, giving total control over color settings.
    Gammawork can also save and quickly load configurations tailored to
    specific needs.

  • Allan Odgaard, author of TextMate, points us to ProFontX, a version of the most-awesome ProFont font with all the ligatures removed.  This means PF becomes even-awesomer as a monospaced, easy-to-read-at-tiny-font-sizes font.

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