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This is one of those things I’m blogging about mostly so that I always know where I can find it.

If you ever find yourself working on a Mac, but without a Mac keyboard with an Eject button on it, you can still open the keyboard with a mouse click by installing the Eject Menu Extra. You’ll find it in the following folder:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/Eject.menu

Just double-click it and it’ll install to your menubar like so:

This comes in really handy at times. Recently, I was using an old PowerMac that we have here in the office for some stuff, and rather than clutter up my desk more with the extra mouse & keyboard, I was using Teleport to control the machine. While using this setup, Teleport wasn’t sending the “eject” command from the Mac keyboard I was using, so I installed this Menu Extra, and was able to control the drive, regardless of the keyboard I was using.

SSBs? Site-Specific Browsers, courtesy of Fluid.app.

Fluid is a slick little app that allows you to create unique browsers for a particular website. These new browsers appear as regular applications that you can leave in your Dock, or Applications folder. In the screenshot above, you can see the Unfuddle app that I made in about five minutes earlier today.

Pretty handy for those sites you tend to visit a lot, and leave open all day long. Plus, if a site supports it, you can get some fancy Coverflow browsing of the links in the page as well.

FluidApp.com

With the recent release of Safari 3.1, I was curious to see a before and after comparison of how Safari 3.0 and 3.1 would render the Acid 3 test. For those who don’t know, the Acid tests are designed to determine how well a browser follows various web standards. Currently, no browsers pass the Acid3 test with 100%, but they are getting closer.

Once I checked out the two versions of Safari, I got curious to see how well some other browsers performed. And so here are the results of my completely unscientific testing, sorted by the respective scores of each browser. Now, on to the results!

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For the third or fourth time in the last week, I’ve caught myself trying to treat my iPod or cell phone as an additional display connected to my Mac. A few times it’s been because I wanted to skip a song on the iPod, so I moused over to the edge of my screen, and was slightly irritated when the cursor didn’t pass over to the iPod’s screen.

Today, it was my cell phone, because I had received a text message and I wanted to read it. Again, I tried mousing off of the edge of my screen to the phone’s, to read the message. I guess I’ve been spoiled by Teleport.

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I often work with two Macs at a time - my PowerMac and a MacBook Pro. I navigate between the two of them using Teleport, which allows you to control multiple Macs with one mouse and keyboard, simply by mousing over to the other machine, as if it were a second display. It even lets you copy and paste from one machine to another, and drag and drop files across machines. Pure hotness.

As I’m usually glancing back and forth between the two machines, it can sometimes get to be irritating when one of them switches on it’s screensaver or sleeps. To prevent this, just give the Mac a healthy dose of Caffeine. When running, the app is a simple little icon that appears in your menubar, and takes only one click to toggle on or off, preventing your Mac from entering sleep mode or activating it’s screensaver. The best part? It’s free!

If you use SC Plugin to work with Subversion, you may have noticed that the icons used by SC Plugin to mark the status of a file aren’t always up to date. Apparently, this has something to do with how the Finder handles notifications that something has happened to the items in a particular folder.

This issue has been disscussed a few times on the SC Plugin mailing lists, and the author has posted a link to a free utility called Nudge, that can be used until SC Plugin can handle the updating of the icons correctly.

Installing Nudge adds an item to the contextual menu of Finder that allows you to “nudge”, or refresh the contents of a folder, and causes the icons in your SVN working copy to reflect their true status. I’ve been using it for a few days now, and it seems to work pretty good. If you use SVN on a Mac, you may want to check it out.

Link: http://www.brockerhoff.net/nudge/

These instructions will guide you through the process of installing and using the Subversion Client on OS X. Later I’ll do a post on how to setup your own SVN repositories, but for now it’s just how to setup the client to access repositories. The initial setup takes some time, (approx. 20-30 minutes), and you will need to use the Terminal, so pay attention, and we’ll get through this together. (continue reading…)

A while ago I posted a link to something called the Apple Product Cycle. One of my favorite parts of this is near the bottom:

Weeks before most users are able to hold Apple’s new gadget in their hands, “What features would you like in the next version?” discussions take place on Mac mailing lists.

I laughed at this the first time I read it, and now, it’s even funnier due to the following post I saw today in the MacRumors forums:

It’s only been a couple of weeks people!

Link to forum thread

I know I’m a little behind everyone else here, but I now have Tiger installed and running on my Mac (Chewbacca).

I received it in the mail today, and so the very first thing I did upon getting home was begin backing up everything so that I could begin the upgrade. The install was pretty painless, only taking about 40 minutes, and that includes updating the developer tools as well. And so far, so good. As far as I can tell, all my data made it through in one piece, all my main apps are still running, and Spotlight is busy indexing everything.

Hopefully later this week I’ll be able to really dig in and start playing with the feature I’ve been most excited about, and that’s Dashboard. I’ve got some ideas for a few widgets, and now I’ve got a chance to start building some.

Also - be sure to check the image used as a screenshot for the Dashboard Doppler widget. A storm brewing over Redmond, WA (via: tuaw.com)

Why?! Why would you want to do this?!