James Duncan Davidson writes a bit about fixed width fonts on Mac OS X:

• The case for Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, a font distributed with Gnome.
• Quicklook and Fonts.
• and, A sorting problem with fonts.

I’ve long been a fan of Monaco with anti-aliasing for my Terminal font, but I’m now sold on Panic Sans. John Gruber mentioned it in his link blog, it comes with Coda and is based on Bitstream Vera Sans with better punctuation.

Sold.

There will be no 12” MacBook Pro.

I’m a long time fan of the 12” PowerBook. Mine served me for more years than it should have. It is now being retired for use as a media center, as a black MacBook replaces it.

Almost everything is better. Nicer screen, faster processor, more memory, Intel Inside; you know the list.

The performance really is something. It will take some time to stop waiting for things to happen. Haskell code compiles quickly. And Ligthroom, my main reason for upgrading, is even more productive!

Here’s what I miss from my 12” PB:

• Industrial design - little things like rounded edges, the PB is nice to touch.
• Keyboard - the MacBook keyboard isn’t as nice to type on.
• Size - not much bigger but the MacBook isn’t as convenient as the 12”
• Heat - the PB stayed cooler than the MacBook, especially on long compiles

Otherwise, it is pretty much the same as the 12” PowerBook. This goes right down to the display adaptors. The SVideo/RGB video adaptor from my PowerBook works a treat. But I’m really going to miss the industrial design niceties from the Pro.

In Lightroom, I want to set some metadata on import. The tricky bit is entering the copyright symbol, on both Mac and PC.

The aim is to enter something like:

© Geoff Wilson

On Mac OS X, use the following key combination:

Option + g

Under Windows, there are a few options. The most compatible is to hold down Alt and type 0169 on the numeric keyboard. In some word processors, you can use the key combination Ctrl+Alt+C.

Entering this into the metadata form, storing it as a preset and using it on import means that all my photos are now automatically tagged. On export Lightroom will optionally put the copyright message as an overlay.

Bonus: for HTML, try ©

In the old days, before 3.0, Safari had an annoying habit. If you pressed Cmd-Q with many windows and tabs open, then Safari would quit. This could be incredibly frustrating; especially when you accidentally pressed Q instead of W.

Taboo, a questionable InputManager hack, provided a work around.

Safari 3.0 fixes it properly. Apple has included the option of prompting the user on close if multiple tabs or windows are open.

However, if Taboo is still installed, you cannot close top level windows.

Taboo lives in one of the following two directories.

~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins
/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins

Remove it, and Safari 3.0 will work as intended.

From wincent on Leopard APIs:

Some of the stuff is annoyingly good, in fact; annoying because in many cases I spent days or weeks implementing stuff myself which Apple will be offering “for free” in Leopard.

…

I will continue to support the older versions of Mac OS X, but only for bug fixes; most of the new feature work will go into the Leopard-only versions.

Apple is likely to continue support for their own products on at least Tiger and Leopard. This makes the case for upgrading less compelling. So far I’ve yet to see anything (aside from Time Machine) that I’m dying for in Leopard.

However, if third party applications start to ship for Leopard only, then each application is going add more weight to my desire to upgrade. This is the brilliance of the ease of programming offered by Mac OS X. Something that seems to get better with each and every release.

I’m hearing “Developers, Developers, Developers”, however this time the music is coming from Apple.

Not a good time to be stuck waiting for an API in Vista …