By Graham K. Rogers

Opening Gambit:

This has been a busy weekend and the amount of time I found I was taking up on tech matters -- as interesting as this is to me -- meant that putting it all in a single Cassandra column would have made that a little heavy to digest. Ergo: Mac Tech Comments.

Mac Tech Comments

I have been continuing with the articles on System Preferences and now have online,

• Accessibility
• Bluetooth
• CDs & DVDs
• Date & Time
• Desktop & Screen Saver
• Dictation & Speech

An email from a local user had me look again at the Desktop pictures and I wrote a small amendment to the text because I found something that had been missing in my earlier comments. What had been invisible was made visible and available by a click on a photograph. Weird.

There were lots of messages from local users over the weekend and I detail some of those below.

I found a minor problem with the iTunes app store at the weekend. Some apps do not display as a full screen and there is only a thin stip (around 25% of the screen) used. The rest is white. There are also no screen shots available and it is not possible to click on the App icon for the URL to be copied. I decided to send feedback. As well as the version of OS X still being only 10.7 in the button provided for the purpose, iTunes only goes up to 10.5 while I now have 10.6.3 -- is anyone at Apple's Support section paying attention?

A later check of iTunes had no change, but I decided also to look at the apps affected on my iPhone. This was an identical display plus the screenshots, so perhaps some apps have a link missing.

The app I first looked at that gave me a hint that something was wrong has the name Vintique. As I looked at the App store on Sunday I saw this rise and fall from number 1 to 2 to 1 and then 3 as sales adjust the relative positions. As the iTunes store display was a mess I had a look at this app in the App Store on my iPhone. Although we are used to apps that apply filters and effects to photographs, this had a nice look to it and at only $0.99 was an easy decision for me to make.

The app has been beautifully put together and there is a good array of filters, effects and other tools. It is also interesting that the filters can be edited by the user. As well as the normal effects and frames there are some useful editing tools that work with sliders. I am glad I found this.

Although Apple Support may be unaware that there is a new version of OS X, a lot of users and the developers are. Even with the inevitable few problems that I have experienced with the release of Mountain Lion, some have had a few problems, and there are always underlying code problems that most users will be unaware of. It is no surprise therefore to read in an item by Kelly Guimont on TUAW that 10.8.1 has been seeded to developers and while there are no specific problems to look at there are "focus areas": Active Directory; Microsoft Exchange in Mail; PAC proxies in Safari; SMB: USB; and Wi-Fi and audio when connected to Thunderbolt display

As I use Safari for a lot of my work, IO was disappointed when RSS feeds disappeared. However a quick search in the Mac App Store, and a couple of false starts, found me Monotony, which was a reasonable solution, but got a lot better when Tim Schroeder let me have a copy of the beta release of version 1.1. The major advantage here was that this utility now worked with the new Notifications Center and rather than have a disappearing Growl display, the news items appeared in a list that I could scan quickly and then (if anything was interesting enough) click on to have the item open in Safari. The updated app has now been submitted to the Mac App Store for approval apparently, but in the meantime the beta is available for anyone to download.

I learned that the way I have Safari set up, a new item would open in a blank Tab if there was one: if not, a new page. I make sure I have enough blank tabs open now so that the news is all collected for when I want to go through it, like now.

An advantage with the newest Safari is that, while before I had to click on each tab to see what was in it, now a new tool -- just to the right of the + icon to add a new tab -- gives me a left-right scrollable display of all tabs, so that I can easily access the next one I want.

I was asked a couple of questions over the weekend by a Chiang Rai user who used to pick my brains a few years back, then sort of fell off the radar. He is going to the UK soon and wanted advice about picking up a cheap notebook Mac here and finding a suitable modem for dialup there. As he still has the Mac mini he picked up back then and, now 7 years old, it never misses a beat, I suggested that this would be his best solution and he would be working on a machine he was totally familiar with. I also gave him the idea of a USB 3G or wifi attachment as that would be more effective than Britain's creaking dialup services.

A reader from Bangkok noticed that I was working through System Preferences and asked about Displays. I should get to this preference panel by Monday I hope. He had attached a video projector -- like I often do -- but had not been able to see the second panel that usually opens so that he could adjust Resolution on the other display. With only basic information I suggested that (as he could obviously use the projector) he might try the Gather All Windows button as that extra panel might get lost on another screen, particularly if Mirroring is Off. No feedback as yet.

Another reader (such a busy weekend) asked about buying Alsoft Disk Warrior and in our online discussion mentioned that buying the DVD now means a download is immediately available. I did remind him that this would need to be on other media (a bootable disk, a second computer) for any repairs to be done as Disk Warrior needs to be able to work on an unmounted disk for its magic to take place.

On Monday morning (I was up early) a reader in Australia commenting on my Desktop & Screen Saver preferences article, tells me that there has been a change in the way slideshows are handled. Before he was able to select a folder (such as 2011) that contained folders for each month of the year, with event folders in those. The slideshow would tunnel down (not a technical term) and any photo in the folders and sub-folders would be used in the slideshow. Now, he reports, with Mountain Lion, nominating the top folder for the slideshow source brings up, "No Photos" which as he writes, "is 100% correct and 100% useless."

Put that in the blink twice folder. . . .

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.