Category: Mac

Ommwriter is a simple text processor that firmly believes in making writing a pleasure once again, vindicating the close relationship between writer and paper. The more intimate the relation, the smoother the flow of inspiration.

If you are a scriptwriter, blogger, journalist, copywriter, poet or just someone who enjoys writing, welcome back to concentrating.

Adobe's Flash Player has always been a cause of a performance drop on Macs, but with the new pre-release of Flash Player 10.1 things are looking much better.

Here is a brief report from Anandtech:


"I took the same Office clip I'd been using for all of the other tests and ran it on my Mac Pro at full screen (2560 x 1600). Using Activity Monitor I looked at the CPU utilisation of the Flash Player plug-in. I compared both versions of Flash and saw a significant drop in CPU utilisation:

Flash 10.0.32.18: 450%
Flash 10.1.51.45: 190%

Going from roughly 450% down to 190% (or a bit over 10% of total CPU utilisation across 16 threads) made full-screen Hulu playable on my machine. In the past I always had to run it in a smaller window, but thanks to Flash 10.1 I don't have to any longer."

Apple has introduced a new mouse called the Magic Mouse. This mouse brings Multi-Touch capabilities to desktop Macs for the first time, similar to iPhone and the entire line of Apple Laptops. The mouse is wireless, using Bluetooth, and has a four month battery life.

Click
Magic Mouse is an advanced point-and-click mouse that lets you click and double-click anywhere on its Multi-Touch surface.

Two-button click
Magic Mouse functions as a two-button mouse when you enable Secondary Click in System Preferences. Left-handed users can reassign left and right click, as well.

360° scroll
Brush one finger along the Multi-Touch surface to scroll in any direction and to pan a full 360 degrees.

Screen zoom
Hold down the Control key on your keyboard and scroll with one finger on Magic Mouse to enlarge items on your screen.

Two-finger swipe Using two fingers, swipe left and right along the Multi-Touch surface to advance through pages in Safari or browse photos in iPhoto.

Having used Snow Leopard for almost a day now, I already have a list of improvements I noticed so far.

Improvements:

• Preview.app: CMD-Delete sends the current file to the Trash
• Clicking the pill button in Finder windows has an animation now
• The selection box in finder fades out when you let go
• Preferences icon in the dock shows list of Preference Panes when right clicked
• When expanding a folder down in List View in the Finder, the icon changes to an opened folder icon
• Right-clicking a Dock menu and right-clicking again closes the menu, as it should
• Apple changed the Stacks animation to a zooming animation instead of the scattering icons animation. It's much smoother
• Finder windows keep their shadows during a minimise
• Scrolling in the Finder is smoother
• Finder prefs has an option to show or hide the warning when changing file extensions
• Finder now has a "Path Bar"
• Exposé's "All Windows" mode now shows minimised windows in the bottom of the screen
• New option in the Dock preferences pane "Minimize windows into application icon"

... and in general:

• All animations are much smoother now
• No horizontal tearing in Spaces anymore
• No horizontal tearing in Safari scrolling
• Lots of little subtle Finder animations

You can now, once again, opt for an Antiglare Display, which replaces the black border with a silver one, on MacBook Pro 15-inch.

Of course, it will cost you £40.