This is by far the best ‘bang-for-buck’ modification you can perform on your iMac. Well, apart from putting in lots of RAM. Best of all? It’s a very simple and straight forward procedure that takes approximately 25 minutes to complete.

I won’t lie, I was actually talked into upgrading to an SSD by several friends, the only problem was cost. Last weekend I decided to finally bite the bullet and purchased a 120Gb Intel 320 Series drive. I highly recommend doing your research before going out and buying just any drive as all drives are susceptible to problems, some just less than others. From the research I did, it seems the Intel drives are a great middle ground in terms of reliability and performance.

Prerequisites
Firstly, Whatever SSD you do end up purchasing, I suggest that you find out if you need to update it with a more recent firmware as not all SSD’s ship with the latest one available. For instance, I upgraded to the latest 320 Series firmware as it offered a fix for a certain issue which occurred with power loss.

Secondly, assuming you have purchased Mac OS X Lion, you’ll need to create a Lion Install on a USB key, see the following guide on how to do this: http://www.cultofmac.com/105527/how-to-make-a-bootable-install-disk-of-mac-os-x-lion/ Otherwise, have your Mac OS X Install DVD handy.

And finally, be sure you have Torx T8 and T10 screwdrivers handy.

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Filed in Guides, Mac

Use skEdit? Don’t like the standard dark theme that’s included with the app? Well, here is my concoction for you to try.

If you’re a skEdit user, you’d be familiar with the fact not that many syntax highlighting themes are available to us. Whilst I don’t mind the standard dark theme that’s included by default, I decided to modify it a bit to my liking. What you see above is what I’ve come up with.

If you’d like to try it out, grab it here.

Put it in your ~/Library/Application Support/skEdit/Themes/ folder, then to use it simply select the theme via preferences.

Filed in Mac

Inevitably, I have updated to iTunes 10. Initially, I was skeptical about what would happen to my existing library, which consists of quite a few dozen playlists. Upon updating and opening iTunes 10, my worst fears came true.

iTunes 10 offers new layouts for playlists and sure enough has done what I was hoping it wouldn’t do; it resized all my playlist columns. This left me with the joyful task of rebuilding my entire iTunes library, as I was not going to resize columns of close to 100 playlists.

What makes things even more frustrating is the fact you cannot apply a default column layout to existing playlists, it only works for new playlists. Genius Apple, Genius.

Moving onto the appearance side of things. I bet I’m not the first one to say it, but.. the iTunes 10 icon is awful horrid. They were either smoking crack or drunk over at Apple Headquarters when it came time to designing the icon, It looks like it was designed by a novice. Personally, I would have applied the silver gradient with gloss you see in the image above on the musical note and left it at that, without the surrounding orb.

Now onto the UI bits of the App itself. The sidebar icons have almost become a saturated colour, which leaves things looking quite dull. Luckily, there is a fix for such things. I don’t have an issue with the traffic lights being vertical, although some will argue it disrupts what the end-user is familiar to.

Apart from the things I’ve mentioned above, I don’t really have any other problems with iTunes 10. Apple, insert an option to resize all playlist columns!

Filed in Mac

I recently picked up a 27″ iMac and I have to say this thing is just epic. Seeing as I’ve owned my 24″ since mid 2007, I decided to make this upgrade worthwhile and got the top-of-the-line 2.8GHz Quad Core i7. Ohhh baby!

The Display
This thing is big and looks astounding, especially with the 2560×1440 resolution. Did I mention it’s stupidly bright? The LCD is pretty much the primary reason I held off buying the 27″ for a while due to all the reports on the LCD flickering, yellow tinge and other problems. Upon initial inspection, my LCD has 100% perfect pixels and doesn’t exhibit the yellow tinge. However, the bottom right hand corner does suffer from some back light bleed. But to be honest, it is only really noticeable on black and hardly worth returning for.

Another thing I have also noticed, although very minor is that the LCD does exhibit signs of the screen door effect

The Magic Mouse
At first I was skeptical using the magic mouse as there was quite a bit of mixed feedback. But I must say, after a few hours of putting it through its pace, I quite enjoy using it. The only question I asked myself was, what am I supposed to middle click with? Well, after a few minutes of searching Google the answer became apparent in the form of MagicPrefs which allows you to add, customise and configure multiple gestures for the mouse. Problem solved.

The Keyboard
I’m not entirely a huge fan of the wireless, numeric pad-less keyboard, but seeing as it is wireless I’ve decided to keep it. The keys are nice, just like the initial release of the newer Apple keyboards. One thing that takes getting used to is using the function key to forward delete and page down. Apart from that, I have no real gripes.

The Performance
The Quad Core iMac flies. Everything is very snappy. Whilst I don’t do any video editing, applications such as Photoshop and Illustrator open blazingly fast and are super responsive. I usually have a lot of applications running at once and experience no performance loss or system slowdowns.

If you’re in the market for a new Mac, definitely have a look and play with the 27″ iMac.

Filed in Mac

With the release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard came a new Exposé selection border and quite frankly the default one was, well.. ugly.

Soon enough, the MacThemes forum was bombarded with several different iterations of newer, sexier looking Exposé selection borders.

The set that stood out to me was created by TheSpaz. Yes, this is old news but I had trouble sourcing the files and thought I’d host them here for anyone who may be looking for them. Install into: System > Library > Core Services > Dock > Contents > Resources

Click to download

Filed in Mac