Mac mini internals

The Unnofficial Apple Weblog has the inside scoop (literally) on the Mac Mini

Fixing Stuffit

If you've tried to use Stuffit Expander recently you've experienced the irritation of it doing nothing for a minute or more as it looks for its now-nonexistent version-checking server. Our knowledgeable friend Ivan over on The Well offers this fix, a series of commands you should enter via the Terminal:

 defaults write com.stuffit.Expander allowVersionChecking -bool NO
 defaults write com.stuffit.ExpressPE allowVersionChecking -bool NO
 defaults write com.stuffit.Engine allowVersionChecking -bool NO
 defaults write com.stuffit.DropStuff allowVersionChecking -bool NO
 defaults write com.stuffit.DropConvert allowVersionChecking -bool NO
 defaults write com.stuffit.DropTar allowVersionChecking -bool NO
 defaults write com.stuffit.DropZip allowVersionChecking -bool NO
 defaults write com.stuffit.Deluxe allowVersionChecking -bool NO

Alternatively, you can launch the app, wait for the connection attempt to time out, and then change the "Version Check" setting in Preferences.

What does iTunes 4.7.1 break?

I'm a bit wary of installing it just yet. Any brave souls care to report?

'Dashboard Widgets for Mac OS X Tiger'

Dori Smith is writing a book on Dashboard.

TexWrangler: Free

While this takes a bit of wind out of my sails as a developer working on a somewhat similar application, Barebones software announced today that as of the 2.0 release of TextWrangler (nee BBEdit Lite), that product has become free. Happy MacWorld 2005! (Download)

Longhand

Longhand (not to be confused with Longhorn, which will probably ship someday) is an excellent word processorish calculator. It's a bit hard to explain how it works except to say that it's absolutely nothing like the Calculator util that ships with OS X. Instead of pecking in individual numbers and functions you simply type the equation you want and it gets evaluated, ie:

2+3*pi-sin(500)

just like that. It's very slick and fast to use and has already replaced Calculator in my dock. Download

(If it seems like I'm obsessed with calculators, based on the number of recent posts concerning them, I'm really not. I'm just very bad at math).