Leopard notes & tips
Although I’ve been running developer seeds of Leopard since WWDC last year, I haven’t mentioned it here to stay on Apple’s good side and avoid violating my NDA. Here are a few of my notes and some tips for using Leopard.
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[*] As you’ve probably heard, USB drives connected to an Airport Extreme base station can’t be used for Time Machine backups. However, there’s a simple hack that will let you use such a drive. I find that I often lose the Airport Extreme connection, so I moved that drive to another Mac as a server.
[*] If you use VMware or Parallels, you can be wasting a lot of space in your Time Machine backups, since the virtual disks are several gigabytes and change frequently. To avoid that,
exclude your virtual machine folders in Time Machine options. You should still back up your virtual machines manually, of course.
[*] If you’re sharing a printer from a Linux server, you’ll find that it won’t show up in Leopard’s printer list. There’s a very simple fix.
[*] Many users report wireless connection problems in Leopard. I find that the Airport Extreme 802.11n is very unreliable, so I’ve gone back to my older Linksys 802.11g access point.
[*] Sherlock is officially dead. Although it was still present in Tiger, Widgets & Spotlight took over most of its functionality.
[*] The translucent menu bar can be extremely annoying, depending on your desktop picture. OpaqueMenuBar makes it a lot nicer.
[*] If you’ve never bothered with Text To Speech, try the new high quality voice Alex. It’s by far the best sounding computer voice I’ve heard.
[*] As you may have heard, Input Managers (which include many Safari extenders) aren’t fully supported. However, you can still use Input Managers by placing them in the top level /Library/InputManagers folder rather than ~/Library/InputManagers in your home folder and making sure they’re owned by root. I found that 1Password, DockStar, and SafariStand work in Leopard. Unfortunately Saft doesn’t work.
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