Aint that special

Those busy little coders over at Apple have whipped up an update for Tiger. That puts it at 10.4.8 for those that aren’t keeping count. They are still giving us sweet lovin’ even when the Leopard release is just around the corner.

I was reading through the release notes to see what to expect and came across this:

Resolves performance issues that could occur when connecting to a Comcast network.

Wow, and I just thought that Comcast was screwing my bandwith with packet shaping. I would say thanks for fixing this, but I haven’t noticed any difference in my internet speeds.

So far, it all seems pretty much the same. I still appreciate the effort. It’s way better than having to install security patches every tuesday. Just think how much better Windows would be if Microsoft didn’t have to spend all of their time making security patches.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Tiger, Software

If you’re not using keyboard shortcuts and tricks, you are wasting precious time that could be better spent on YouTube. Here’s a couple of my most used keyboard shortcuts for the mac.

Safari Specific shortcuts

to switch between tabs in Safari

to jump to the search field in Safari

command and ‘+’ or ‘-’ to change the size of text in Safari

General tricks

Hold down the ctrl key while scrolling the wheel/ball on your mouse to zoom your display in and out (I wish my PC had this)

to lookup a word in the built in dictionary

cmd and tab to bring up the application switcher

Technorati Tags: Apple, Hardware, Mac, OSX, Tip, Trick

Parallels has just released RC2 of Desktop for Mac. While the Mac Pro received some love a few weeks back with a beta release, Parallels has put some real quality into this release candidate. Not only is it compatible with Vista and developer builds of Leopard, but there is no longer a RAM restriction. Parallels was only recognizing 3GB before.

I have to ask myself though, are there people out there with $2K of RAM in their Mac Pro that do not have a PC sitting under their desk to run windows on?

Here’s the FAQ sheet for this release:

No RAM limitations

No hardware reconfigurations

while using Windows and it’s critical applications on new 64-bit Mac Pro towers and iMacs.

Other improvements & fixes that make Parallels Desktop even easier to use:

New! Compatibility with developer build of Mac OS X 10.5, code-named “Leopard”

New! Experimental support for Windows Vista

Solaris guest OS no longer hangs after suspend/resume

An improved Parallels Tools package

Full support for OpenBSD 3.8 as a guest operating system

G4U hard disk cloning tool now works in virtual machines

Better video output improvement and acceleration

Added multi interface USB devices support (including Windows Mobile 2005 devices)

Added isochronous USB devices support (including WebCam devices)

Keyboard support improvement: Eject CD key support, left/right Shift/Ctrl/Alt (Option)/Windows keys difference support

Added virtual disk cache policy option: Mac OS X performance optimized or guest OS performance optimized

Image Tool fixes

Optimized disk cache policy for Suspend/Resume feature

Windows ME Suspend/Resume fix

Shared Folders first time access acceleration

Clipboard synchronization tool fixes (unreadable symbols sometimes added during copy and paste)

Sound playback and recording improvement

“Unable to allocate virtual memory” during virtual machine power on fix

Technorati Tags: Apple, Hardware, Leopard, Mac, OSX, Parallels, Software, Windows