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Forget fancy formatting: Why plain text is best→

Forget fancy formatting: Why plain text is best

Although modern word processing programs can do some amazing things—adding charts, tables, and images, applying sophisticated formatting—there’s one thing they can’t do: Guarantee that the words I write today will be readable ten years from now. That’s just one of the reasons I prefer to work in plain text: It’s timeless. My grandchildren will be able to read a text file I create today, long after anybody can remember what the heck a .dotx file is.

David Sparks from the wonderful MacSparky blog and Mac Power Users has made a debut post on Macworld with a great discussion on working with plain text files (I also believe Patrick Rhone talks about this and information silos in his Minimal Mac podcast, Enough).

I’ve been increasingly using TextEdit with Marked for writing everything that shows up on the website, and I know Federico recently put Byword (in combination with OmniOutliner) to the test with his great MacBook Air review. No matter what tools I use, whether it be TextMate, iA Writer, or another app, I’m always writing in Markdown and writing in text files. These text files are saved in Dropbox or some temporary workspace (which I consider to be my alternate directory to the Desktop).

Honestly, the best way to get started with plain text before you invest in another app is to simply open up TextEdit, hit ⇧⌘T, and start typing. David makes a strong case for nvALT, which you might like better since you can have the best of both worlds: accessible plain text files in the file system in a big container that makes it easy to search through everything you’ve written (as a bonus, these files can be tagged and synced to your iPad and iPhone via Simplenote).

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Hands on with Lion Recovery Disk Assistant→

Hands on with Lion Recovery Disk Assistant

In my testing of the initial release of Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, I encountered an apparent FileVault conflict. If I used Lion Recovery Disk Assistant to create a recovery drive while FileVault was disabled, the resulting drive would successfully boot any compatible Mac, whether that Mac had FileVault enabled or disabled. However, multiple recovery drives created on Macs with FileVault enabled would not boot compatible Macs, regardless of whether the Macs being booted had FileVault enabled or disabled.

Good to know. Dan Frakes from Macworld reached out on Twitter to get confirmation on whether this was an issue, and others experienced it as well. He recommends that you either use a machine that has FileVault disabled, or to turn it off if you’ve decided to create a recovery drive. Also, keep in mind that the recovery partition you create will be invisible to the Finder, even if other partitions are available on that drive. The Recovery HD partition is hidden in the same way it’s hidden on your Mac’s internal drive.

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Gizmodo Officially Not Being Charged in iPhone 4 Case→

Gizmodo Officially Not Being Charged in iPhone 4 Case

We are pleased that the District Attorney of San Mateo County, Steven Wagstaffe, has decided, upon review of all of the evidence, that no crime was committed by the Gizmodo team in relation to its reporting on the iPhone 4 prototype last year. While we have always believed that we were acting fully within the law, it has inevitably been stressful for the editor concerned, Jason Chen, and we are glad that we can finally put this matter behind us.

The two men behind the stolen iPhone, however, are being charged with misappropriation of lost property, and possession of stolen property according to the DA’s official statement posted on Gizmodo. I’m sure both Gawker Media and Apple are glad to have this case put behind them.

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Apple surpasses Exxon Mobil as most valuable company in the world→

Apple surpasses Exxon Mobil as most valuable company in the world

Matthew Panzarino writing for The Next Web,

Apple has, at least for the moment, taken the place of Exxon Mobil as the most valuable company in the world, measured by market cap, reports MacRumors. Apple’s market cap hit $341.55 billion in valuation today, while Exxon Mobil was valued at $341.42 billion.

[…]

Apple’s record high of $404 per share was hit just last week, although it has fallen 8% to 368.40. ExxonMobil took a deeper hit, falling 20% to $70.21 allowing Apple to creep ahead.

Apple is having a great day, up 4% while Exxon’s growth remains stagnant. While both companies have taken hits thanks to the stock markets being down after the S&P downgrade, this is the first time Apple has been ranked as the most valuable public company in the world, even if for just a moment.

Update: Great quote from John Paczkowski at All Things D:

Incidentally, at $341.5 billion, Apple’s market cap is more than twelve times that of Dell’s $26.54 billion, which is highly ironic considering Michael Dell’s infamous suggestion for the company: “What would I do [with Apple]? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

Update 2:  Mark Gongloff from the WSJ:

Exxon Mobil ended the day with the crown, at $348 billion in market cap. Apple ended at $346.7 billion.

(image via MacRumors)

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Toggle Mac OS X 10.7 Lion New Features On / Off With Lion Tweaks→

Toggle Mac OS X 10.7 Lion New Features On / Off With Lion Tweaks

The latest Mac OS X 10.7 brings a whole lot of improvements along with a dozen iPad inspired UI features and animations. Although these improvements don’t come into conflict with UI design and core features of Mac Snow Leopard, many users hate the idea of bringing the iPad like UI elements and animations to Mac OS X. If you’re amongst those who want to keep Mac OS X 10.7 installed on your system but also want to toggle some of its new features, window options and animations on/off, Lion Tweaks is probably the best Mac Lion tweaking application that you can try.

We’ve posted lots of tips and tricks that require a bit of elbow grease when it comes to taking control of Lion, and we’ve even posted utilities like this one for Launchpad for hiding unwanted folders or apps. With everyone wanting to disable this or modify that, why not just create a utility that puts everything you’d want in one place? AddictiveTips has posted a utility from iFredrik that’ll have you customizing Lion with nothing more than a couple of button presses. For those of you who are fed up with slow window animations or that iCal leather, you can disable it with a simple click thanks to Lion Tweaks.

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Fullscreen Safari Trick→

Fullscreen Safari Trick

When using Safari in Lion’s Full-Screen mode, you can grab the edges of the browser and drag inward to reduce the width, making fluid websites easier to read on wide monitors, while keeping a nice clutter free view.

For as much as I’ve used Safari in Full-Screen mode on the Mac, I’ve never noticed that the cursor changes at the left and right edges of the display to signify that you can resize the webpage. It’s a neat effect, and it almost looks a little 37signals-ish when you have a webpage resized to show the light linen in the background. What’s nice is that the width will remain as you navigate the web — there’s no need to resize per webpage, although the new width isn’t shared between tabs. Hat tip to The Brooks Review for pointing out this clever trick from Finer Things in Mac.

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Change the Launchpad Folder Background Image in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion→

Change the Launchpad Folder Background Image in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

Tired of the linen background image of folders in Launchpad? You can easily change it to anything you want with this simple walkthrough…. you have to use a PNG file, so find one that you want as the new Launchpad folder background image.

Remember when we pointed you to a nine step process that taught you how to change your Dashboard and Mission Control backgrounds? You can even change the background of your Launchpad wallpaper thanks to OS X Daily, whom ask that you prepare a PNG (hopefully one that tiles nicely) before walking through the five required steps. You’re basically just swapping out an image with another image via the Finder, which makes backing up the resource you’re replacing pretty easy. I’d create a backup folder in your user folder before making any changes — that way you have all of the old resources in one rememberable location.

To get started, how about checking out this awesome pattern by Jeff Broderick?

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By The Numbers: What Can An OWC 6G SSD Do For Your 2011 Mac mini?→

By The Numbers: What Can An OWC 6G SSD Do For Your 2011 Mac mini?

But if you’re into audio editing, video editing, or doing anything else that reads and writes large amounts (or several small amounts) of data – there’s just no substitute for a SATA Revision 3.0 capable SSD such as the OWC Mercury EXTREME 6G SSD. The speeds are well over twice as fast [as Apple’s SSD] boasting 506MB/s read speeds and 432MB/s write speeds from a single drive!

Then we tested two OWC Mercury EXTREME 6G SSD in a RAID 0 configuration (on the server model of Mac mini – again we’re looking into how to get a second hard drive into the consumer model, but that will be another blog post down the road after we figure it all out) we got Thunderbolt-saturating speeds averaging 995MB/s and 994MB/s for read and write speeds respectively.

When I put a Mercury EXTREME 3G into my MacBook, cold boot times were reduced from a minute thirty to just 25 seconds — reboots are even faster. OWC knows their stuff, and their USA grade solid state drives are impressive as always. With the Mac Mini, they found they could achieve more than 10x the speed of a conventional hard drive, and over 4x the speed over Apple’s SSD with their setups. Regardless of whether you choose Apple’s or OWC’s Mercury EXTREME 6G SSDs, the performance boost over a traditional hard drive is stunning.

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Changing OS X Lion’s Mission Control and Dashboard image backgrounds→

Changing OS X Lion’s Mission Control and Dashboard image backgrounds

As soon as I installed Mac OS X Lion I began playing around with all the new features. Naturally, Mission Control and Dashboard were two of the first things I tried. I immediately hated the image backgrounds Apple chose to use and began searching for a way to alter them. It didn’t take long, and it’s quite simple to do.

The linen texture is unpopular with a lots of people, often being designated as, “The new pinstripes”. Personally I like the linen texture as it provides nice contrast against bright and floating desktops and apps, but I’m not sure why it didn’t carry over to the dashboard. The dashboard, featuring a lego-like texture, oddly stands on its own from the rest of OS X as some kind of ugly stepchild. It’s bad enough the dashboard still retains that metallic widget-bar, and Apple reinforces its distinctness from the system with a background that reminds me of diamond-plate — it’s simply unappealing. In the meantime, you have a choice in whether you want to look at it (or linen) through a nine step process that allows you to swap out those gross backgrounds for bubbles, stiching, denim, or whatever floats your boat.

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