2/14/09

Much-desired feature finally restored to the Mac Finder

OS 9 had it, and Windows has always had it: the ability to select an item from the Trash, and restore it to its original location – wherever it was you originally deleted it from.

But for some reason, Apple dropped this incredibly useful functionality (along with window shades). Instead, you can only grab things out of the trash and move them manually to some other location. If you can’t remember where something was before you deleted it, you’re out of luck.

Good news: Reports are coming in that the next Mac OS version, 10.6 or “Snow Leopard,” will have a “put back” feature. This is really important for scenarios where a file you delete, accidentally or otherwise, needs to go right back to the exact same location where it started out.

The inability to do this has led a lot of users, myself included, to come up with clunky workarounds. For example, if I’m removing an application and its preference files, I end up creating a new folder on my desktop and re-creating the entire subdirectory scheme, moving elements manually into their appropriate folders. That way, I can delete the folder, knowing that if I drag the folder out of my trash back to my desktop at some point, I can figure out how to put things back together again.

If this feature makes it into Snow Leopard, that will be good news indeed – I can simply select a file in the trash, and click “restore” or “put back” or whatever Apple decides to call it, and have the file go back from whence it came.

Isn’t it stupid that this “feature” hasn’t been there all along?

2/12/09

Watercolors without the mess

I’m a photographer, not a painter. But I’ve always been intrigued by Photoshop techniques that can give photos new life – make them look like paintings, charcoal sketches, line drawings, etc.

I never really like the default effects in PS, and I sorta kinda know how to achieve some of these effects manually. But it can be a long, arduous process.

Enter Topaz Simplify and Topaz Adjust, two awesome plug-ins for Photoshop CS3 or CS4. After just half an hour or so of experimentation, I used these plug-ins to create new pieces of artwork from some photos in my collection. Here’s an example of a “painterly” look applied to an otherwise nondescript photo of my friend’s cat:

Before:

maxstraight

After:

max-blog

Simply and Adjust both let you work on a layer, making tweaks and adjustments to suit your taste, and save those sets of adjustments as pre-sets. Handy for applying the same treatment to a group of photos. You still have to know some image manipulation stuff to begin with, if you want to do anything more than the pre-fabbed default presets. But with a little time and experimentation, you can get some really cool looks. Here’s a heavily-manipulated version of a photo of a church I took in Lancaster last summer:

Church Towers 

You can take these two plug-ins for a 30-day test-drive by downloading them from Topaz Labs. Have fun!

2/11/09

Fake MobileMe email / phishing threat

 Ars.Technica recently posted an article about a new phishing scam that actually sounds like it has a chance of bamboozling many users: Bogus emails, purporting to be from Apple, which prompt you to update your .Mac / MobileMe account information:

“As usual, the e-mail is disguised to look like a legit message coming from Apple, but clicking on the provided link (so that users can "update" their billing information with a working credit card, of course) forwards them to a site that is not at all affiliated with Apple.”

Phishing, if you didn’t know, is something you’re not generally protected against just because you use a Mac. (unless the phish attempt has to do with installing malware or viruses which don’t run on Macs). Threats are platform-independent. In this particular case, there’s no virus or malware. Instead, it’s good old fashioned trickery and forgery, using “social engineering” to get you to make a mistake and turn over information you shouldn’t to somebody you don’t want to know.

6 Windows 7 Versions

We don’t know exactly when Windows 7 will be done, or what it will cost. But we do know that there will be six– yes, count ‘em – six different versions of Windows:

  • Windows 7 Starter
  • Windows 7 Home Premium
  • Windows 7 Professional
  • Windows 7 Enterprise
  • Windows 7 Ultimate.
  • Windows 7 Home Basic

Luckily for you, you only really need to worry about deciding between two of them, unless you run a business network of Windows computers.

Windows 7 Starter will most likely be available only via pre-install, from select manufacturers.  Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate are probably more than most “normal” users need. Windows 7 Home Basic is a stripped down version, which Microsoft says it will sell only to “emerging markets.” Meaning, mainly in second- and third-world countries, although not exclusively. Their list of emerging markets starts with Afghanastan and ends with Zimbabwe.

That leaves Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Professional. Pretty much the same split as with XP, where we have Windows XP Home and Windows XP Pro.

Microsoft will most definitely do a better job explaining the differences, at least if they’ve learned from their mistakes with Vista. Also, it’s important to note that you can actually upgrade to a higher level of Windows online – give MS your credit card, and you download whatever it is that turns one version into another. In other words, the core of all the various versions is identical, and all you need to do is unlock the additional functionality to upgrade.

ExtremeTech has a pretty decent, if not preliminary summary of the 6 versions of Windows 7. If your next new computer purchase happens when Windows 7 is the main offering, you might want to spend some time looking at the various versions and deciding ahead of time which is right for you.

In the XP days, I recommended that people buy the Pro version, even if it was for a home computer. It just made the computer more valuable on the used market, because Home was limited in what you could do in a multi-computer business network. Looks like the same advice may hold true for Windows 7.