U&lc Volume Ten is available

July 21, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

 

Allan Haley, at the Fonts.com blog:

While I had been writing for U&lc for some time, the first article that carried my byline also showed up in Volume Ten. It was about Morris Fuller Benton, and was the first of many biographical sketches in the “Typographic Milestones” series. There is a backstory here too. Maybe I’ll write about it in a future post.

And while we wait for that story, we can download Volume 10 of U&lc, available as always in both high and low resolution PDF files. If you’re into typography or just love everything about typefaces, you can’t miss these volumes which are being made available in electronic form by the great guys at Fonts.com. (Consider this: the PDF files are searchable, they’re not just a collection of scanned pages from the magazine). Here you can find all the U&lc related posts.

OS X Lion: some useful resources

July 21, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

Of course, this list of resources is far from exhaustive, but I’m sure it’ll give you enough reading material for the weekend. As more interesting stuff worth adding appears, I will update this article. Feel free to chime in with suggestions.

• RoaringApps is a useful wiki that lists application compatibility with OS X Lion. A mandatory go-to place in this time of transition.

• Dan Frakes’ six-part saga on installing Lion.

• Apple’s knowledge base article on Lion Recovery. 

• John Siracusa’s Lion Review on Ars Technica, the longest and best read on OS X Lion. 

• How to install Lion over Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (Dan Frakes, Macworld). 

• Scrollvetica, by Jim Correia (Description: If you spend part of your time living in the future, with default Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad settings, you may find it difficult to switch between the future and the present and maintain any sort of input device sanity. Scrollvetica is a simple hack which inverts all scrolling events on Snow Leopard such that the effective scroll direction is in the direction of finger movement.)

• From Adobe’s knowledge base: Known Issues with Adobe products on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.

• How to make a bootable Lion install disc or drive (Dan Frakes, Macworld). 

• Installing Lion clean (Thomas Brand, Eggfreckles.net)

• Lion’s Lesser Known Features (Thomas Brand, Eggfreckles.net)

• OS X Lion: The Complete Macworld Review by Jason Snell. 

• Apple’s press release features an interesting bit: Users who do not have broadband access at home, work or school can download Lion at Apple retail stores and later this August, Lion will be made available on a USB thumb drive through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com) for $69 (US). Mac OS X Lion Server requires Lion and is available from the Mac App Store for $49.99 (US). (Emphasis mine)

• This article on TidBITS, Our Favorite Hidden Features in Mac OS X Lion, contains lots of useful tips to help you find your way around the new cat.

Update

• As you may have heard, in Lion the ~/Library folder is hidden to prevent the curious/average user from messing with it. But if you’re an experienced user and need to access it, here’s a link from Finer Things in Mac that explains how to make it visible again.

OS X Lion and external monitors

July 20, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

 

This has been a hell of a Lion day, and I’m barely catching up with the flow of articles, tips, and Twitter chatter. I was skimming Shawn Blanc’s Lion review and this bit got my attention: 

PLUG AND PLAY WITH AN EXTERNAL MONITOR

I adore the way Lion manages laptops and external monitors. I find it much more user-friendly than the way previous versions of OS X have managed it.

The tried-and-true behavior of how OS X deals with a laptop and an external monitor has been this:

• With the laptop lid closed and the computer asleep: Plug an external display, wake the computer, and the external display will be the only working display. If you were to then open your laptop lid while an external display is running, the laptop’s screen stays off.

• With the laptop lid open and the computer awake: Plug an external display in and you have two working screens. If you were to then close your laptop lid, the computer would go to sleep.

In Lion, this behavior has been greatly improved:

• With the laptop lid closed and the computer asleep: Plug an external display in, wake the computer, and the external display will be the only working display. If you were to then open your laptop lid, the laptop’s screen would turn on and you have two working monitors.

• With the laptop lid open and the computer awake: Plug an external display in and you have two working screens. If you were to then close your laptop lid, the laptop’s screen turns off and the external monitor becomes the only working monitor.

In short, opening and closing your laptop’s lid is like adding or removing a second display, and does not affect putting the computer to sleep.

I’ve always found the old behaviour annoying, and I agree with Blanc — it’s a welcome change.

BBEdit 10 is out

July 19, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Software

Bare Bones Software just announced the release of BBEdit 10:

The highlights:

  1. New pricing ($49.99, with a special introductory price of $39.99 for new licenses until October 20, 2011);
  2. Project and document window changes;
  3. Preferences and setup improvements (Bare Bones: The Preferences window has been completely rewritten and reimagined. Many obsolete preferences, as well as settings never used in daily operation, have been removed from the GUI in the interests of reducing complexity. Thanks for that, guys);
  4. Reinvented and enhanced HTML markup tools;
  5. Dropbox support (this is really great, at least for how I use BBEdit across my Macs);
  6. Switchable syntax coloring schemes (this will make coders happy);
  7. Packages (quote: A Package is a collection of the sort of things you’d place into ~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/ to extend BBEdit, such as clippings, scripts, language modules, and text filters; but makes it easier to install such items when they are all related to a single type of task, rather than having to manually install and manage items spread out between different folders.);
  8. Search, replace, and edit in Zip archives (oh yes!).

In a nutshell: You really don’t have any excuses not to purchase it now.

Naming your blog

July 19, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

 

 

Catching up with my awful backlog of RSS feeds, it’s interesting that I should find this post now that I’ve just rebooted my website/blog under my own name. Surat Lozowick writes:

Online, your name is your brand, so this makes sense. But a blog named after its author doesn’t say anything about subject matter, which can be both negative and positive — a thoughtful name can define the topics to cover, but it can also restrict them. […]

As it’s something I’ve been considering recently, I decided to ask some of the bloggers I follow: eponymous or not?

I enjoyed reading the answers, and I find the words of Aaron Mahnke to be the closest to the ones I’d use to answer that question myself. He replied:

I find that the best blogs in the world are incredibly focused. They touch on two or three general topics at the most, and rarely stray from them. It provides depth of content for readers to return to time and again, and it gives the writer something to focus their inspiration around. Whether you name the blog after yourself, or with some random name, really doesn’t matter nearly as much as the quality of your content, how relevant it is, and the uniqueness of your “voice”.

As for me, after naming my first blog Autoritratto con mele (“Self-portrait with Apples”), and then using names like The Rizland Observer or The Quillink Observer, I decided to just drop titles and taglines and name this site after my name because, above all, I needed a broader scope. I didn’t want to be identified with just another Mac guy who writes a blog, and then, since here I write both in English & Italian, I didn’t want for my website to have a title that only one of the two groups of readers would understand.