OS X Snow Leopard Server Event

This last week I attended the Snow Leopard Server Tour event in Seattle and I was pleasantly surprised to find that there was much more then improved performance and new apps.

Among Apple’s new updates the server version includes the same 64-bit support, with a pile of new features. The coolest one I found was the Podcast Producer 2 - this new feature includes Podcast Composer. It allows you to create workflows for automating completion and publishing for podcasts, with additional ease to do the job in just a few minutes. 

The Client Management, another new features includes an iPhone configuration utility for easy access to creating secure services, and administrators harbor NetRestore to rebuild via networks, through custom or standard measures. 

iCal Server 2, includes push notification, wireless calendar/iPhone connection, web-based calendaring, and an updated CalDAV, allowing to connect through email. 

Wiki Server 2,  has iPhone support Mail Server which now much faster, it also provides push email, vacation messages  and improvements to mail server clustering. 

The Mobile Access Server, has a new feature  which allows users to get secure, encrypted access to the server and network, nearly hassle-free.  

And finally Web Server has been updated for live video streaming. They announced a new configuration of Mac mini designed specifically to be a server. The new $999 Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server is a fantastic product for workgroups, small businesses, and even schools to use. It's nice that Apple has finally realized that it had a great server under its nose this whole time?

CODA - Your next website editor

If you have to edit your website much and your getting tried of the Adobe products, there's a program I've been using that maybe your answer, I’m sure many of you are already using Coda, and are well aware of this amazing application. But for those who aren't you need to take a look at Coda, a brilliant web development tool from Panic software.

Coda pins each ‘site’ that you have to a wall, and updates the thumbnail according to what your site currently looks like. It’s really useful, as you can quickly identify your site. Adding sites is also animated—much before Core Animation came along in Leopard in fact. There are bookmark-lets that contain the server information, they also remember which documents you last had open!

Coda’s core UI is split into Sites at the top level, and ‘Edit’ current site (with FTP listing in the sidebar), Web ‘Preview’, and a CSS editor taking up the meat of ‘editing’. Switching between the three editing tabs is by means of a shortcut Cmd+2/3/4. Once you get the hang of it, you don’t even have to think about it.

The code editor is very adequate. Proper code is highlighting (with the option for themes), block editing, error correction. It uses GREP based find/replace. You can web preview, with DOM inspector as well as Safari inspector.

Rendering the site in Webkit, you get the current rendering of your site either on the web, or locally. Coda’s web preview can edit the web preview by pulling down the code, to see how changes reflect live on your page. Coda also comes with its own inspector, allowing you to gauge the hierarchy of the page, useful for editing. You can even change the url of the website midway, open the page in another browser, and check for any syntax errors within the console.

This is definitely something to take a serious look at, I think it's pretty cool I use it everyday. http://www.panic.com/coda/

Crome for Mac

I installed the new Crome for Mac, just look at the starting page it has a ho-hum old-style history overview page. I like the new thumbnails of pages that you can move around and pin down. It also includes the ability to switch to “list view.”

Recent activities, Tips and Suggestions windows below the thumbnail section on the launch page. This really interesting because it does offer up sites that I am finding to be generally interesting based on my browsing.

The “History” area of Chromium is also looking cool thanks to the favicons. And search is working in that section.

When you launch an “Incognito” window, the pages you view in this window won't appear in your browser history or search history, and they won't leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window. Any files you download or bookmarks you create will be preserved.

Overall, the browser feels very snappy and most sites seem to load and render just fine. Dragging tabs around works good. The one major thing still missing is the lack of a Flash plug-in, which prevents sites like YouTube from working.

Snow Leopard’s New Preview app

Apple's new Snow Leopard’s Preview app has some new features and functionality that might surprise you. This is one of the biggest upgrades I've seen with the app. The first big change is the annotate menu, which now takes the form of a little toolbar at the bottom of the window. It has a single button that activates and deactivates it and a sidebar that has four different views.

I'm building banners for my iWeb site with Preview, I use it to grab a image (including JPEG, TIFF, GIF, PICT, and other image file formats), crop it, and export. The PDF file viewer allows you to view, work with, and print PDF files.

Keep your mac running like the day you got it.

Do you remember the first day you got your mac... Fast Fast Fast

Through normal use your computer begins to slow down. It accumulates lots of junk files and it gathers privacy files that should be eliminated. There are tweaks for memory, startup, and Windows that can help your system to run at its very best.

Day by day, bit by bit your Mac has got slower and slower. You don’t really notice because it has happened so gradually.

Until one day you have a chance to use another machine, that’s when you realize what your beloved Mac has become, as slow as an asthmatic ant carrying some heavy shopping.

Well all is not lost, while this list is unlikely to make you mac into a speed demon overnight, one of the following suggestions may just help.

First: Having too many files and folders on your desktop can slowdown your machine. Put these files into folders in your home directory and create aliases to them on the desktop.

Next: Preference files can easily become corrupt and can make programs act weird or run slowly. One program that come with OS X is in the utilities folder and its called "Disk Utility", To get to it on you desktop click "Go" - "Utilities" and the click on "Disk Utilities". The window will open and you will see your main hard drive listed on the left side, click on it, the rest is pretty ease. Running repair disk permissions every couple weeks will keep your machine running like new.

Too many widgets on dashboard will so things down. Each widget on your dashboard uses memory, you can check this by using your Activity Monitor. Remove any widgets that you don't use or are memory hog's, use the dashboard control panel to remove them.

It doesn’t hurt to regularly clear out built up Caches, Log files and Temporary Items an easy way to do this is to use an application like Cocktail. If you prefer you can delete Caches manually, they can be found in Home/Library/Cache.

If you have any tips for speeding up your Mac, please leave a comment below.