I’m often digging into old bitmap font and UX design out of curiosity — and someday hope to revive a lot of these fonts in more modern formats using a pipeline similar to that for ZX Origins so we can get all the usable fonts, screenshots etc. out of them.

One limitation I’ve run into is digging into old Macintosh fonts. While James Friend’s PCE.js puts System 6 and System 7 at your fingertips when it comes to later MacOS 7.5, 8 or 9 releases the site doesn’t have you covered as PCE doesn’t support PowerPC emulation (it emulates Motorola 68000 and Intel 8086 processors).

I’ve been using Mac OS X daily since 2001 when I purchased my Titanium PowerBook. I still can’t get used the Home and End key behaviour.

If, like me, you want Home to send you to the start of the line and not to the top of the document, then create a file called DefaultKeyBinding.dictDefaultKeyBinding.dict in your ~/Library/KeyBindings~/Library/KeyBindings folder (might need to create that folder too) with the following contents:

It’s been a few weeks since I took up Microsoft’s employee offer of a free Windows Phone 7 (when you renew a 2 year contract) and combined it with AT&T’s offer of buy-one-get-one-free for my wife.

So how have things been going?

I wanted an SSD for some time and finally caved in. Armed with credit card, screwdriver and trusty MacBook Pro I fitted a sweet SSD and decided to document the experience.

There are a bewildering number of options out there. Budget, as always, dictates the combination of speed and size available.

I came home from work today to find my family pack upgrade version of Snow Leopard. It’s been a few hours, so here are impressions so far.

The packaging was very small and lightweight and eco-friendly compared to the big-plastic-box-monsters that come out of Redmond.

The word is out that Snow Leopard will be about trimming down Leopard — likely Apple’s effort to switch to lower-capacity solid-storage such as found in the MacBook Air and perhaps future iPhones and maybe a tablet.

Mac OS X binaries have always been on the large size containing as they do multiple human languages and processor code (PPC, X86, X64) and it will be good that you don’t need to keep running TrimTheFat or XSlimmer to get them down.

Delicious Library is a DVD, game and book organization tool I’ve been using since my PowerBook G4 and a 2.0 version has been dangling from Wil Shipley’s mouth longer than I care to remember.

Windows users however will find Libra a very interesting clone and it features some of the same great features such as bar-code scanning via a web cam, tracking loans, a rendered virtual shelf and fast queries.

Spaces is new in Leopard bringing virtual desktops to the masses. Leopard gives you a number of ways to switch between spaces including a menu-item drop down and configurable keyboard shortcuts.

To move a window to another space you drag it to the edge of the screen and wait a moment but curiously you can’t use this great technique without a window to switch!

Wake up every morning to your iTunes playlist without the danger of an app launching it and having a problem/update pending that prevents you getting to work on time.

Alarm Clock 2 also includes Timers (great for a quick 20 minute power nap) and Stopwatches alongside the normal one-off or regular scheduled alarm that will bring both you and your machine out of sleep ready for that early-morning email check.

Bundles are a concept in Mac OS X whereby a specially named folder becomes what appears to casual users to simply be a file that can be copied as usual and often launched by double-clicking on it.

Other operating systems have file formats that are little more than containers for other files and in doing so keep those interesting resources out of your reach. (Okay, we have DMG but that’s more of a transportation mechanism like ZIP, TAR etc.)

Space was a little tight (5GB) after my upgrade to Leopard and so I went on the hunt to free up space and ended up freeing almost 20GB of my 100GB disk — enough to let me set-up a new 20GB Boot Camp partition that will host Vista and take over from my XP Pro Parallels image with any luck.

Disk Inventory X helps identify large files on your system which may no longer be required. In my case 8GB of imported iMovie clips, a 4GB Parallels backup HD image and a 140MB download of Boot Camp 1.4. A few blank DVD-R’s later and I’m almost 13GB lighter.

I couldn’t pick up a copy in the USA as the Seattle store was closed for remodeling and when they said October 26th, they meant at 5pm and not 9am, go figure! Thankfully IQ in Guernsey had them in-stock when I arrived back home Saturday.

It’s good, but I wouldn’t say twice as good as a usual OS X upgrade… which is almost how long it took.

Stories about Apple’s Boot Camp and the looming expiration of the 1.x beta versions to coincide with the release of Mac OS X Leopard and Boot Camp 2.0 are abound.

To clarify there are a number of pieces of software which make running Windows on a Macintosh, they are:

One of the things I love about Apple is the way they enhance Mac OS X with great features for other developers to leverage. Built-in spell-checking, incredibly rich edit controls, development environment and the recent Core frameworks are such additions. Core Image allows applications access to real-time hardware-accelerated graphic effects and is used within some of Apple’s own apps for various effects.

Pixelmator is the product of a two-man team that provides Photoshop like abilities for $59. Apple would not ship such a product for fear of further upsetting Adobe.

Everybody enjoys a good laugh and there are some fun simple things that can confuse your co-workers, family or friends for a few minutes.

Here’s a few tricks that may… or may not cause some amusement. Just make sure you step in before they need to call their IT support guy!

Deeper takes you further that System Preferences and provides access to a number of extra options such as Finders graphical effects, layout, spacing and menus, as well as some extra options for Dashboard, Dock, Expose, Login and more.

As an extra cool treat you can also select a screen-saver to be your desktop background just to show off how smooth, slick and system-deep the transparency, scaling and hardware acceleration go in OS X.

Apple tends to hide away unusual functionality in order to keep the user interface easy to use.

Here are a few hidden menu options that magically appear when you press the ShiftShift, AltAlt or CtrlCtrl modifier keys.

I have decided to get to grips with Ruby on Rails and get it set-up on my MacBook Pro. There seem to be a variety of options available:

As Scott Stevenson points out this is too many options for a system that is described as Convention over configuration.

Jeff Atwood asked What’s Wrong With Apple’s Font Rendering? and as I answered in the comments it comes down to philosophy:

The primary difference is that Microsoft try to align everything to whole pixels vertically and sub-pixels horizontally.

It must be that time again already… here we go!

Everyone needs a calendar to hand. In Windows using the time in system bar seems to be the quickest option although it’s obviously not meant for that and one false click sends you to the future.

Parallels have released a beta build of their excellent virtual machine for the Mac and it’s loaded with cool new features. Once out of beta it will be a free upgrade to existing owners.

The feature list runs something like this:

I’ve been using my MacBook Pro now for about a month and think it’s the ultimate developer machine. You really are spoiled for choice and everything you might want is at your fingertips.

Every Mac ships with the Xcode developer tool set. This gives you the native preferred Mac development platform called Cocoa which uses Objective-C at it’s core. The actual tools are based around the GCC 4 compiler and GDB debugger with a rather nice Xcode IDE and Interface Builder GUI designer from it’s NextStep origins.

Developers keep finding new and unexpected uses for hardware and software — seemingly never more so than on the Mac and OS X.

Whether they’re using the iSight camera to scan bar codes into your Delicious Library or turning the Apple Remote into a alarm key-fob in TheftSensor there’s always some novel hack around the corner for the latest bit of kit.

Another round-up of the best Mac OS X software I can find.

Piping Microsoft and VMWare to the post relative unknowns Parallels are on beta 6 of their Parallels Workstation for Mac OS X/Intel.

Well obviously the hot item for the next major release of Mac OS X will be Intel compatibility but I’m hoping they’ll get a chance to squeeze some new features in too. Here what I’d like to see next:

Apple’s new iMac-only media centre interface seems to gave garnered quite a bit of a attention. So much so that enterprising individuals have hacked it onto their Mac. Apple should make it available to non-iMac users, possibly as part of 10.5, the next iLife or maybe even bundled with the optional remote control.

Check out podiobooks who have put up a number of free audio-books from various authors. Neil Gaiman has managed to get the first chapter of his new Anansi Boys book read by Lenny Henry up too.

Fluid is a screen saver that gives you, well fluid visual effects. It has a whole bunch of preset effects and a mixing desk to mix up your own. Works okay on my PowerBook but ideally needs something more powerful! Mac Mini owners need not apply.

I’m sure you’ve read all about Apple’s latest Mac Mini, a stripped-down machine for those wanting to try Mac OS X (according to Steve Jobs in his recent keynote). It also appears to be a good way to get mum-and-dad off your back with it’s practically non-existent rate of viruses and spyware. It even makes a reasonable server being that it comes with Apache, a firewall and can share your Internet connection — even wirelessly.

It’s already been pointed out that the Mac Mini is based on PowerBook technology however there appears to be one significant change (apart from the obvious transition from laptop to desktop) and that’s the graphics processor.