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There’s good news for all you Mac OS X Leopard GUI Themer out there. While there’s Panic’s Candybar for icon customization in OS X there is no application to alter all the user interface elements of Leopard. In Tiger there was an application called ShapeShifter but since the whole GUI in Leopard changed it stopped working.

Architect and Façade to the rescue: SlightlyPretentious announced its “Theming made easy”-application Architect is coming as a public beta next sunday (is it 08/31 or 09/07?) on Wednesday, September 3rd. Icon Designer Laurent Baumann already posted a new sweet application icon for this app a while ago and we can expect a nice and good looking solution for theming and customization in Leopard. Head over to the Screencast and see Architect and its UI in action.

While Architect will help you customizing Leopards UI and building themes out of your modifications, Façade (Laurent’s icon of it) will help you switch (and manage?) the themes. But currently there’s no word on the SlightlyPretentious website about this application.

Slightly Pretentious made Architect available as a public beta while claiming Façade will be coming in october. But Façade already has its own nice website.

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Apple has updated its latest operating system to version 10.5.4. As alway Apple recommends the update to all Mac OS X Leopard users. According to Apple this update adds support for more RAW formats to the whole system meaning you can use these new RAW formats in all Mac OS X applications based on Core Image (iPhoto, Aperture, Preview etc.). But at the moment it’s unclear which new RAW formats were added. Apple hasn’t updated the general RAW format compatibility list yet. According to Apple’s general RAW format compatibility list the Mac OS X 10.5.4 update incorporates the Digital Camera RAW Compatibility update 2.1 released in May. The cameras fully supported by this update and now also by the 10.5.4 update are: Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi/Kiss Digital x2/450D, Epson R-D1, Leaf AFi 7, Leaf AFi 6, Leaf AFi 5, Pentax K200D, Pentax K20D. Just the Epson R-D1s seem to be new to the list of supported cameras in OS X 10.5.4.

This update also addresses the issue with saving and reopening Adobe Creative Suite 3 files on a remote server which could lead to data loss in previous versions of Leopard. Performance issues when using the Final Cut Studio applications with AirPort networks were addressed too.

The other changes include fixes for X11, L2TP VPN, AirPort, iCal, Safari, Spaces and Exposé. For a complete list of changes you can have a look at the corresponding Apple support article.

The update is available via Software Update for all Leopard users. Alternatively you can grab the update package from the Apple website (88MB) or the whole Combo update (561MB). The Leopard Server update is available too as standalane package (133MB) or as Combo update (677MB).

If you’re on Tiger and don’t want to update to Leopard you can grab the Security Update 2008-004 for Intel (128MB) or PowerPC (80MB) to just take advantage of the security related fixes.

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For quite some time I use my Ubuntu machine as a file and backup server for all Macs in my network which is perfectly accessible from the Finder in Mac OS X. There are some instructions available in the web for this task but all failed in my case so I wrote my own tutorial with all the steps needed for it to work properly.

So here’s my little Tutorial for connecting Mac OS X Leopard with Ubuntu and using your Ubuntu machine as a backup volume for Time Machine but all steps can be reproduced on every Linux box and they work with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger too. At the end of this tutorial you will have a server which shows up in the Finder sidebar and behaves just like a Mac server when accessing it from your Macs. To be perfectly integrated with Mac OS X we’re going to use Apple’s Filing Protocol (AFP) for network and file sharing.

Although this Tutorial involves using the Terminal in Ubuntu and looks a bit geeky it’s very easy even for beginners. I have tried to explain all steps and Terminal commands so you may learn a bit about the Terminal too. At the end of the article you can download my Server Displays icon pack quickly made by me with custom icons for a Mac, Ubuntu and Windows server.

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According to Mozilla’s Developer Center the official release date for the Firefox 3 will be Tuesday, June 17th. The release day is also Mozilla’s Firefox Download Day where they try to set a Guiness World Record for the Most Software Downloaded in 24 Hours and you can help them to achieve this goal simply by clicking or partying.

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Apple released a developer preview of the upcoming version of its web browser Safari to registered Developers. The Safari 4 Developer Preview is available for Mac OS X Tiger/Leopard and Windows. While the main changes are not visible to the user the most significant visible new feature is the overhauled Web Inspector.
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Beside the Mac OS X 10.5.3 update Apple has posted another update which adds RAW decoding support for seven more cameras.

The seven cameras now fully supported in Mac OS X are: Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi/Kiss Digital x2/450D, Epson R-D1, Leaf AFi 7, Leaf AFi 6, Leaf AFi 5, Pentax K200D, Pentax K20D. The RAW decoding on MAC OS X works across the whole system, so you can use these cameras and their RAW images now with Aperture and iPhoto too.

You can get the update via Software Update or you can download the standalone installer (2.4MB) from Apple’s website.

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Today Apple released an update to it’s newest operating system Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard which updates it to 10.5.3. As always Apple recommends all users to update to the newest version.

Among the photography and Aperture related fixes are an improved compatibility between Time Machine and Aperture 2 and the availability of additional RAW image formats for several cameras.

You can fire up Software Update to update to 10.5.3. The update is 420 MB in size and a restart is required. Alternatively you can download the combo update (536MB) from Apple’s download page which includes all fixes and improvements since the first version 10.5.

You can read about all fixes and improvements in this Apple Support article.

Update: According to another Apple Support article Mac OS X 10.5.3 adds RAW decoding support for the following cameras: Hasselblad CFV-16, Hasselblad H3D-31, Hasselblad H3D-31II, Leaf Aptus 54S, Leaf Aptus 65S, Nikon D60, Olympus E-3, Pentax *ist DL2, Pentax *ist DS2, Pentax K100D Super, Sony DSLR-A200, Sony DSLR-A350

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Wouldn’t that be great? Hook up your scanner, fire up Aperture, click on Import and the images coming directly from your scanner plate? Although my scanner is shown as a source in the import dialogue you can’t import images with it directly from Aperture. But using Preview/Image Capture and Automator you can bypass this limitation.

In the Image Capture scan window you can define an automatic task which will follow the scan process. It defaults to Preview meaning that the scanned image will open as a new Preview document after the scan. But we can make the images import to Aperture after the scan just with tools which are build into Mac OS X and come with every Mac (besides Aperture). So here’s what you can do to scan directly into Aperture in 3 simple steps.

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A while ago I wrote about my problems finding a universal scanner driver from Canon for my CanoScan LiDE 500F to use it under Mac OS X. The solution was the Canon Asia website where a universal driver version was available.

But since then Apple released Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in october 2007 and the Canon driver with the version 11.2.4.0X stopped working on this new operating system.

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After i released my Aperture File Types icon set many of you asked how they can really use these icons for displaying the icons of images on your Mac system. Sadly this isn’t as easy as dropping them in Candybar into a well for image icons cause there isn’t any well for them. So using other icons as standard file type icons for images is a bit tricky. I discovered two ways of doing it, which involves overwriting resources of Preview.app and Photoshop. So before doing anything I mention in this post, you should make a backup copy of them.
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Extremely useful post from Daniel Miessler about 9 Lesser Known Safari Features Worth Switching For:

Inline Dictionary:
Safari, being a Cocoa app (OS X), allows us to instantly define words we find. Simply highlight the word and hit the ctrl-cmd-d shortcut. So if I highlight the word ‘functionality’ in Safari and hit the shortcut, here’s what I get.

(Via dmiessler.com.)

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Nice article on Smashing Magazine by Kate England. It’s the Human Interface Guidelines for icons in a nutshell: Mac OS X Leopard: Designer’s Guide to Icons:

To get really beautiful icons, Apple recommends that you let a professional designer create your icons. Despite all the eye candy and realism that is possible to apply to icons, less is more. Strive for a simple solution using one easily recognisable object. The basic shape or silhouette of your icon can help users to quickly identify it. If you aim for an international market, your symbols need to also be internationally recognizable providing Worldwide Compatibility.

(Via Smashing Magazine.)

For reference you can browse the Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) from Apple online or download it as a big pdf-file.

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As you may know you can easily password protect your website or parts of it using an htaccess file with special instructions on an Apache-based server. For using this method you just have to put a file named .htaccess (which includes the instructions for the webserver) and a file named .htpasswd (which includes the login-accounts) in the directory you want to have password protected. But you have to encrypt the passwords of the login data for yourself, which is a quick task on a Mac.
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UPDATE: I wrote a follow up article describing how to use this scanner with the newest Mac operating system Leopard. Feel free to head over to this article to get the freshest facts about using this scanner with Mac OS X:
Using the CanoScan LiDE 500F scanner with Mac OS X Leopard

At the end of last year I watched out for a new scanner and the CanoScan LiDE 500f from Canon was the choice. But finding a suitable driver wasn’t that simple cause everywhere around was only the horribly old PowerPC-driver. As long as I had my old G4 in the house it wasn’t that problem. But at this time all Macs were already Intel-powered and also my new MacBook which replaced the G4 was Intel-Powered and i had a problem.

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