macosxhints.com Site News

Comments are now editable

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:50:00 -0800

This was one of the promised features from the Geeklog upgrade, and after resolving an issue with the theme, it's finally working -- at least, it's working in my testing. Feel free to leave a comment here and edit it to make sure it works for you, too. Note that there's a one-hour time limit on changes to comments.

We're still working on the character set issue; hope to have progress on that front shortly.

-rob.

Captcha added for hint submission and registration

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:30:02 -0700

I really didn't want to do it, but after over 150 spammy story submissions in under an hour, I've had to enable a captcha on the story submission page, as well as on the new user registration page. For now, I'm using the "simple" images, and hopefully that'll be enough to stop the spambots.

The captcha shouldn't be active anywhere other than those two pages; comment spam, while problematic, isn't bad enough to merit that move (and thanks to everyone who uses the Report Abuse link to point out the spammy comments).

Again, sorry I had to take this step, but I don't have the time to manage all these fake submissions by hand.

-rob.

Site upgrade progress notes

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 18:57:58 -0700

Some notes after a day of working on the assorted upgrade-related issues here:

I've made some changes to search, so that it works a bit more like the older version (year added to date display, author column removed, etc.). It's not perfect, but I expect we'll see more improvements in the near future. (I've opened a feature request for better control over search.)
Search does, however, have a date-related issue right now. If you order results by date, the output is seemingly random. I've opened a bug with the Geeklog team, and it's being investigated.
Searching for words with special characters, such as Expos�, no longer crashes the search engine.
Activated a titles-only search -- it's a checkbox on the advanced search page. If you haven't tried it yet, it's quite useful for narrowing down hint results.
Those who are seeing a narrow side column should now be seeing it at the desi...

Site upgrade complete; new features active

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:12:37 -0700

Whew. That was a huge project, and fraught with more peril than I had expected. Nonetheless, we're done now, at least for the most part. I'm sure there are some things I've missed. In particular, please let me know if you see a story or comments with odd looking characters in them; things like "é" or "’". There were some character set changes in the Geeklog core that caused us some trouble with special characters. I think we cleaned up most of them, but there may be some lurkers.

So what do you, the reader, get out of this? Quite a bit, but here are a few things to note:

Comment editing - you can (for a limited time after posting) edit your comments!
Comment notifications - receive an email notification if a comment is posted in a thread you posted in.
Username changes - no longer do you have to email me to change your username.
Account deletion - don't want to have an account here any more? You can delete it.
Greatly improved...

10.6: Snow Leopard RSS feeds available

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:31:00 -0700

I haven't yet added them to the RSS feeds page, but there are two new Snow Leopard-only RSS feeds available:

feed://feeds.macosxhints.com/macosxhints/snowleopard -- All hints that are coded as "10.6:". This is probably the feed most of you will be interested in, as it includes every Snow Leopard hint.
feed://feeds.macosxhints.com/macosxhints/snowleopardsystem -- Only those hints in the "10.6 System" category.

Both of these should be working fine, but please let me know if there are any issues.

Snow Leopard's coming soon!

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:38:00 -0700

Earlier today, Apple announced that Snow Leopard will be available on Friday, August 28th. So that's when we'll start running Snow Leopard hints, in their own category (as with 10.4 and 10.5). When submitting hints on Snow Leopard, it will help me if you note that it's a Snow Leopard hint somewhere in the hint or title -- just include 10.6 somewhere and I'll know to code it when we run it.

Thanks!
-rob.

Guest editors and Snow Leopard in the near future

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:29:00 -0700

I'll be away from Mac OS X Hints until Monday, August 24th. In my absence, we'll have a couple of Macworld staffers -- Heather Kelly and Dan Miller -- posting the daily hints. They also covered for me back in July, so they're at least somewhat familiar with the duties now.

As a side note, Snow Leopard is expected to ship sometime in September. As with 10.5, it's my intent to start running 10.6 hints as soon as it's officially shipping, whenever that may be. So if you've been testing Snow Leopard and have found some interesting tidbits, get your hints ready for submission, and I'll be on the clock to push them live whenever the OS happens to ship.

(Note that you can't submit a hint early without breaking your NDA, so I'd advise against doing that. If any hints are entered into the queue prior to the ship date, they will be held until the OS is shipping and can be publicly disclosed.)

-rob.

New and improved tweeting of daily hints

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:00:00 -0700

A week or so ago, I announced that hints would be posted on Twitter. At the time, I said it was a test of sorts -- if the interest was there, we'd continue the program. It's obvious now that there is interest, judging from the numbers who signed on to follow the tweets. When we launched, we used my own Twitter account, but it's clear that's not the best way to go forward -- not for those of you who are forced to read my daily drivel on Twitter, and not for me, as I must remember to tweet the hints each morning.

Last week, thanks to a quick name grab by Mac OS X Hints reader ad7am, I set up @osxhints to hold each day's hints. The posting of the hints is also automated via HootSuite.

So as of now, feel free to unfollow my Twitter ac...

From now on, hints will be also be tweeted...

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 07:25:00 -0700

Note: This hint has been replaced by this one, with our new automated Twitter account.

-rob.

Guest editors this week...

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 07:31:00 -0700

I'll be away from Mac OS X Hints this week. In my absence, we'll have a couple of Macworld staffers -- Heather Kelly and Dan Miller -- posting the daily hints. Please be kind to them; this is their first attempt at running the site!

I'll be back in the editor's chair starting on Monday, July 20th.

-rob.

New poll posted (finally)...

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:32:00 -0700

It's been over a year since the last one, so ... Browser wars #10 is now online. Take a second to vote for your web browser of choice. And yes, I know many of us use more than one. But you get only one selection, so vote for your favorite.

The last time I asked about this, Safari got 55% of the votes, Firefox 31%, Camino 6%, and everyone else shared the remaining 8%. It will be interesting to see how things change this time around. Comments are disabled here; please add them to the poll instead.

-rob.

Mac OS X Hints site update

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:11:00 -0700

On the evening of April 23rd, some nefarious types accessed the admin side of Geeklog, the engine that drives this site (the latest version of Geeklog isn't susceptible to this attack). The attackers then posted a few spammy stories (which I've now deleted), deleted some hints, and (much worse) used a Geeklog function to email all registered users. My apologies for this; we're working on the problem now, and will update this story with additional information as we progress.

Update: The hints and comments from April 22nd have been restored.

Update #2: The hints and comments from April 23rd have now been restored. We may have lost a few comments, but I think I got 99% of them, thanks to the comments RSS feed. Obviously, the time/date stamps are all wrong, as I simply posted them as I recreated them. If you see something noticeably out of place (threading-wise), just let me know and I can move it around.

Update #3: Portions of the user se...

New poll - Where should Safari's tab bar reside?

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 06:32:00 -0800

The release of Safari 4 Beta came with one quite-controversial new feature: tabs on top, ala Google's Chrome. My colleague Dan Frakes discusses some of the pros and cons of this move, but I thought I'd ask the macosxhints readers, via this new poll, what they thought of the change in the tab bar's location.

Note that I'm only offering two choices for the tab bar in this poll -- up top as in Safari 4, or back where it was in Safari 3. While it might be interesting to find out how many people prefer a vertical on-the-side tab bar (as in OmniWeb), I'm mostly curious about this change in Safari 4 vs. Safari 3, and how we all feel about having the tab bar as the window's title bar.

So how about it? Where should the tab bar reside in Safari? Cast your vote,...

No new hints today...

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 07:30:00 -0800

Macworld, and thus Mac OS X Hints, is closed for observance of President's Day today. Back as usual tomorrow.

-rob.

Happy New Year, new poll, and Expo stuff...

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 21:00:00 -0800

Mac OS X Hints will be closed for the new year's holiday tomorrow and Friday, returning Monday with the usual hints -- I'll be at Macworld Expo next week, checking out the latest in tech toys along with the rest of the mob. If you're going to be at the show, feel free to stop by and introduce yourself, as I love meeting readers and contributors. I've posted my currently-known schedule in the 'read more' part of this message.

For entertainment during our down time, please contribute to our latest poll about how much (or little) you use the Places section of the Finder's sidebar. Thanks to Perceval for the poll suggestion. My Expo schedule, at least as I know it now...

Tue Jan 6:
12:30pm - 1:30pm -- Podcast in the Macworld booth on the show floor
2:30pm - 3:30pm -- Podcast in the Macworld bo...

Happy Holidays!

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 07:30:39 -0800

No new hints today or tomorrow as I'll be spending the holiday with family and friends. Hope you and yours have a wonderful holiday season, and we'll be back as usual on Monday morning.

-rob.

New poll posted on Apple hardware surprises at Expo

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 07:15:00 -0800

We're now less than a month from the 2009 Macworld Expo keynote address, so I thought it'd be interesting to gauge what everyone's expecting in the way of hardware surprises from the keynote. Hence this new poll asking how certain (or not certain) you are about any new hardware announcements coming from Mr. Jobs during the keynote.

Just so everyone's clear, a 32gb iPhone or a 16-core Mac Pro wouldn't count as a new hardware announcement. A netbook, a video game console, a large-screen television...those would all count as new hardware.

So how about it, do you think we'll be seeing any "one more thing" announcments in January?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 06:18:00 -0800

Macosxhints will be closed today and tomorrow for the Thanksgiving holiday (and Black Friday shopping extravaganza). For those in the US, I hope you have a safe and enjoyable holiday. The hints will return as usual on Monday

In the interim, I invite you to ponder OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard's actual "for sale" date. Apple stated last June that it was going to ship within "about a year," but exactly when will that be? Take your best guess in our latest poll. Personally, I voted for March, due mainly to it being the release month for the original OS X 10.0, but I've heard rumors of everything from January to July. What do you think? Will it Snow early next year, or will it be a summer Snow?

Remembering Michael Crichton

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 13:47:00 -0800

I was very saddened today to read of the passing of Michael Crichton. What, you may ask, does this have to do with macosxhints.com? More than you might think -- Michael was a big-time Mac user and early OS X adopter (rare for someone who relied on their machine to make a living!).

Back in 2001, when this site was just a time-intensive hobby, I didn't have any ads, and relied on donations to cover my hosting costs. Michael Crichton was one of the early donors, and in addition to his check, he sent me a very nice card and autographed book.

His passing today hit me pretty hard, and the best way I could think to handle it was to write about what he meant to me, both personally and relative to this site's history. So rest in peace, Michael -- you entertained millions, and you will be missed.

-rob.

Hints turns eight...

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 06:30:00 -0800

Today not only marks Election Day in the United States (vote early, vote often!), but also the eighth anniversary of the launch of macosxhints.com. Obviously, a lot has changed in eight years, and the pace of hints here lately has slowed -- but that's not surprising, given the continuing maturation of OS X itself. But with roughly 12,000 hints in the database, we've covered a lot of OS X-related ground during those eight years.

One thing that hasn't changed is the mission of the site: to share OS X tips and tricks with anyone interested in reading them. After all, it's the community that really makes the site work -- only about 1,400 of those 12,000 hints have my name on them. That's why every hint ever published is still available to anyone who wants to read them; what the community helps to build should always be freely accessible to that community.

Thanks to all of you for making this s...