Archive for November 27th, 2009

My Mac OS X Customized Settings

Friday, November 27th, 2009

The time is upon us for Black Friday sales and/or new Macs for Christmas that we’ll be disappointed with when there’s a product announcement in January.

With these new computers, we’ll want to forgo the tedium of initializing settings to remove silly restrictions meant for bumbling peasants. We’ll want to customize Mac OS X to our nerdish liking. Here is how I go about mine.

Finder

  • Set View Options in Finder to Arrange by Name
  • Turn off Spring-loaded folders in the Finder
  • Disable drives from showing up on desktop

Mail

  • Configure Rules to designate color coded message lines from family

iTunes

System Preferences

  • Keyboard & Mouse: Enable right-click on Mighty Mouse, Disable Expose, Dashboard buttons
  • Dock: Automatically hide Dock, Disable animate opening applications
  • Software Update: Disable automatic checking

Advanced Customization

  • Turn off Bluetooth and remove from Menu Bar
  • Turn off feedback for Sound controls and unnecessary notifications in iChat and Mail
  • Remove the Windows BSOD in Leopard
  • Run Terminal commands to disable unnecessary features and animations
    Change Dock to 2D Appearance
    defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock
    Disable animations in the Finder
    defaults write com.apple.finder DisableAllAnimations -bool true
    Disable ‘snap to grid’ animation
    defaults Write com.apple.Finder AnimateSnapToGrid -bool FALSE
    Disable Info pane animations
    defaults write com.apple.finder AnimateInfoPanes -bool false
    Increase the speed of the Save dialog box (Default is 0.2)
    defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime .001
    Force Mail.app to display plaintext
    defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE

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How to Start Using Microformats

Friday, November 27th, 2009

Microformats are good, and Google recently announced they would start supporting two of them: hCard and hReview. Think of hCard like an official business card for the Web. hReviews are reviews for products, restaurants, etc., which you might find on an Amazon product page or Yelp.com. Your favorite SEO voodoo daddy will tell you that Google will shine upon your site if they find you’re using extremely semantic markup with the likes of Microformats.

Even if you’re making simple websites, they always contain contact information — why not publish it in an hCard format? Use Tantek Çelik’s easy hCard creator to start.

Don’t have any street addresses on your site? You can still sneak one in for author contact information. Any link pointing to the author can be made into a vCard like this:

<span class="vcard"><a href="http://author_domain" class="fn url">Author Name</a></span>

There are many ways to start using Microformats today and it becomes addicting. It is now impossible for me to accept br tags inside street addresses. I hope to see more uses for Microformats in the future. For example, if you visited a site that contained an hCard, the browser could facilitate a download right to your address book.

For further reading, try Andy Clarke’s article, “A tribute to Microformats“. Also, check out John Allsopp’s excellent Know Your Microformats section on his blog, Microformatique.

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Posted in HTML and CSS, tutorial | No Comments »