Another one of my completely random, and probably uninteresting observations about the MobileMe preference pane in Mac OS X System Preferences. It’s also an excuse to try out a very short screencast with Jing and its Screencast.com hosting.

If you can’t, or don’t want to watch the video, if you search for iTools (.Mac/MobileMe’s original name) in the search box of System Preferences, it highlights MobileMe as a search result. Just as you’d expect from an intelligent search tool, it realises what you really mean.

However, that functionality hasn’t been replicated for if you search for .Mac, now MobileMe’s former name. It does highlight Back to my Mac as one of the results, but just as with iTools, MobileMe should be highlighted straight away.

Yeah, so, I just released some Windows software.

My program for converting and splitting Mac OS X .dfont files into TTF files, DfontSplitter has been a pretty popular route in to my website for some time now.

While the original program is written for OS X, it became apparent from my website statistics that many people who needed to convert .dfont to .ttf were Windows users.

So, today, I have released DfontSplitter for Windows, version 0.1. This program is, again, simply a wrapper script for fondu, which does the real work. It has a completely unique GUI, custom built for the Windows platform.

There is also a brand new project page for DfontSplitter, with links to both the Mac and Windows versions of the software and the documentation too.

Hopefully this can serve the need of Windows users who need to convert those filetypes, and don’t want expensive or spyware-ridden software. Enjoy!

A quick footnote – this is a bit of a licensing quagmire. There are lots of different licenses that apply to different bits of DfontSplitter for Windows, including GPL 3.0, GPL 2.0, BSD and Creative Commons. That’s all explained on the project page, and in further depth in readme and licence files in the downloads.

Oh and it’s also slightly ugly, in terms of how it interacts with fondu. But it works. 🙂

Summing my thoughts up and dumping them as quickly as possible:

• Snow Leopard. Why do I always hate Apple’s product names, then warm to them eventually? It’ll have to grow on me. Looks relatively boring. Apple ran out of ideas – lack of innovation.
• iPhone 3G – nice.
• iPhone 2.0 software – looks solid. Nothing earth-shattering that wasn’t really expected. $9.99 + UK VAT + mild extortion will be leaving my bank account soon.
• Mobile Me – reserve judgement. I’d like to give it a try. Not sure I need yet another email address. Probably too expensive.

Any other thoughts? Accepted in brain-dump format or more eloquent versions. 🙂

Today and yesterday I was tasked with representing IT and the IT courses that were available at my college; perhaps marketing them a bit too.

To do that, I did a couple of presentations on two topics that tie in nicely to some of the things that the courses offered do, one on operating systems (specifically, the differences between Windows and Mac OS X) and one which focused on mobile communications, with a Bluetooth demonstration. Turnout for the IT presentations was a little disappointing, but still, I think it went very well.

When you think presentation, you think PowerPoint.

Recently, I tried out the trial of Apple’s iWork 08, specifically because I wanted to play with Keynote and use it in a real setting, for these presentations I did.

I ended up buying iWork, mostly for Keynote. I absolutely love it – I think the results it makes can look more professional than the average PPT and the process of putting the presentation together involves significantly less screaming and hair-pulling (and once you’re used to it, almost none at all).

In my opinion, Keynote is the best program for making visual aids to presentations that you give that I’ve tried. Of course, using a great tool doesn’t mean you’ll have a great result, but it might help you along the way. 😉

… is the little Time Machine icon in the menu bar. It saves a Dock space as I can access everything I need to do with Time Machine in a much more compact way.

The new Stacks stuff is nice, but while I use Stacks, I don’t use it for collections of enough items to warrant using the new list view.

One thing I might like back, though, is the ability to put an icon for my home folder on the right side of the Dock that with one click opens ~ in Finder. Yes, I know, I could click the Finder icon at the left, but that works ever so slightly differently; it might focus an existing Finder window.

Did anyone else notice the TM backup done straight after 10.5.2 took ages to ‘prepare’? I understand why, because there were a lot of individual files that changed in the update, and it had to query the FSEvents database to list all those changes, but I wonder if anyone else experienced that step taking 20 minutes or more.

So Leopard is here and it is very very nice. I haven’t had an awful lot of time to actually sit down and just play – it’s mostly copying stuff from my backup over, getting things running smoothly again. I will report back with thoughts later!

As you can see, Spotlight is furiously re-indexing all the stuff I just copied, so it is pegging my CPU (usually just one of the cores though, so it’s still snappy and responsive) and making it very very hot (see the menubar for the CPU core temperature)!

More Leopard stuff soon.