There’s a lot to be liked about the Mac App Store.

The sheer convenience being near the top. I’ve written about my own top five favourites.

But it’s not all sweetness and light. Underneath that hugely convenient portal to all things app-goodness is some stuff that’s much less magical.

Here’s my top five for things I wish Apple would fix.
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The Mac App Store has just passed 100 million downloads. For a service that’s only recently celebrated it’s first birthday that’s quite a feat.

Personally, I’m a fan of the Mac App Store. Most of my new software purchases now happen on the Mac App Store. In fact, if an app isn’t available on the Mac App Store I’m less likely to purchase it.
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Back in the dim, dark and distant past of May last year, I started writing a series of articles around the theme of Your Life in Sync.

At the time, I wrote mostly about how I’ve set up my email to work across all devices I use on a daily basis. In June, Apple hosted it’s annual world-wide developer conference. This conference was the platform for announcing Lion, IOS5 and iCloud, the last of which was set to replace MobileMe. It became clear that there really wasn’t all that much value in continuing to talk about MobileMe and how to use it when the operation of that service was under an iCloud (pun intended, feel free to ...

When you mention notifications within an Apple context, most people immediately think of IOS. But the concept of notifications is alive and well on the OS X platform as well. Growl has been around since 2004 with a long history as a preference pane and a free download.

As of October this year, Growl has been released on the Mac App Store as a paid app (A$1.99). Gone is the preference pane interface in favour of being a separate application in it’s own right.

I’ve been using Growl for as long as I’ve been using a Mac. It’s a great way to keep ...

I love the Mac App Store!

Before the MAS, if I needed to do something, I’d get on Google, choose some search terms that might get me an app that’d do the job, try and figure out which ones were actual links to actual software and which were just aggregators of someone else’s content, try and find reviews on the software, figure out which of a dozen or so payment methods might be involved, and then, finally, if I was happy with all of the above, actually purchase an app to do a task.

Now, I load up MAS, enter a search term, have a look at the results (and their attached reviews) ...

The release of OS X Lion saw the introduction of a window restore feature - when you start an application, it tries to re-load whatever it was doing when it was shut down.

Most of the time, this is a really nice feature to have. Let’s say Safari decides to crap itself. No need to worry about trying to note down the dozen or so tabs you had open, just quit out of Safari, start it up again, and all those tabs you had loaded will still be there.

Unfortunately, this can have unintended consequences. For example, ...

Damn! My toaster isn’t working. This pile of junk hasn’t worked properly ever since I upgraded it to tOS (toast OS) v8. Every time I tell it to lightly toast I get “burnt to a crisp”.

Of course, we never really face these kinds of problems with our toaster. It really only does one thing - char the outside surface of bread products - and there isn’t all that much to fiddle with anyway.

A computer, on the other hand, is a far more general-purpose device with an infinitely greater scope for stuff to go wrong.

However, with some thinking and understanding you can develop processes that will help you fix any computer problem at all. Even if you’ve never seen it before and don’t really know why it’s happening.

What is this magic panacea for computer woes I hear you ask?

It’s called a diagnostic process.

At it’s heart is the concept of carrying out systematic troubleshooting.

Let’s take an example:


(For this example, I’m also going to stipulate that we’re dealing with an ADSL connection…)

One approach to a repair ...

No matter how much you like the way your computer works, no matter how well the computer interacts with the operating system and applications, there’s always those little niggles that you learn to live with. You know, that minor irritation that isn’t really a deal-breaker but you just wish it was handled a little better.

I’ve always been a fan of those little utilities that identify these irits and do something about them. The best ones are tiny little things that do one job, but do it well. They aren’t trying to be the swiss army knife of applications. ...

Just recently I bought a new digital SLR (this one, if you’re interested). Cameras aren’t a new thing for me, I bought my first film SLR camera back in about 1979 (this one). So, my learning curve with the D90 isn’t so much coming to grips with SLR’s in general but bringing somewhat dated knowledge up to date - understanding what the various program modes do, how to get the depth of field I want - as well as just figuring out the mechanics of using the camera - file sizes and quality, and so on.

I’ve been shooting in RAW + JPEG since I got the camera. Partly to figure out exactly what it’s capable of when worked pretty much as hard as possible and partly to understand the differences between RAW images and the in-camera processing that happens when you’re using JPEG. Saving both gives me a point of comparison.
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