Mac OS X Tip of the Week: Become the Ultimate Menu Master
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Did you know that you can access your menus without touching your mouse?
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There's plenty of things to love about OS X 10.5 that are flying under the radar. Here are Macworld's 10 favorite low-profile features.
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Learn how to tell whether you&#146;ve turned on Snap to Grid or Keep Arranged by Name for a particular window. It&#146;s the latest Mac OS X killer tip at the Apple Pro/ site. [Nov 10]
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In a new post to his blog today, Felix Geisendorfer talks about view coding - specifically working with a menu and determining which element is active.   One of the challenges many of us have faced before and will face in future is building a menu. Now this of course is very simple assuming that we're just shooting for a static &lt;ul> with some &lt;li>'s containing the links. However the tricky part is to figure out what is the active menu item. I had some code doing this in the past but tried out a new flavor of it today which I call the MacGyver menu for CakePHP as it's a little dirty yet powerful and easy to maintain.   In his included code, he creates a simple navigation from an array of titles/links and, with some sorting, a regular expression and a CSS class, the selected item can be highlighted simply.
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âGiven the impressive value of Time Machine and improvements to existing programs such as iCal, iChat, Mail, and the Finder, most active Mac users will find more than enough reasons to consider [the] upgrade cost money well spent,â reports Jason Snell . Leopard delivers, Snell declares, âa major alteration to the Mac interface, a sweeping update to numerous included productivity programs, a serious attempt to improve Mac OS security, and a vast collection of tweaks and fixes scattered throughout every nook and cranny of the operating system.â
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First a little background. I stopped using a Mac in 1997, as Apple was transitioning to the new operating system. I started using the Mac again as my primary OS in late 2005, a little more than two years ago. This is the first new version of the OS to come out since I switched back. Based on a tour of the new features, pretty late at the end of a long week, it's safe to say an OS is still just an OS, the purpose of the OS is to stay out of your way until you need it. Leopard may be prettier than the last version, I'm not sure it is or isn't. Not sure I'll use many of the new features. For people who hadn't used VNC before, "screen sharing" would certainly be a big new feature if they're working in a networked enviroment. And maybe the new backup code will fit into my routine. I have some ideas about that. (Maybe I'll just have one computer on my LAN that is backed up and copy things there if I want them backed up.) File sharing is more convenient in Leopard, the shared computers are listed in every Finder window, and this is good. FInding the disks that are available on each of these computers is one step easier too.  The Preferences applicaiton appears largely unchanged, except the Networking section where a lot of functionality seems to be missing. I have to look at this more closely. The Download stack is lost on me since I don't use Safari or Apple's mail app. I would find it useful if Firefox had a similar feature (but they kind of do, I can direct all downloads to a specific folder). All in all, changes to an OS aren't that important. The action is in the apps, and for me, just a couple of primary ones, the web browser and my integrated writing and programming environment. It's been quite a while since there have been meaningful improvements to either, and those improvements would end up meaning a lot more to me than improvements to the OS. There isn't much you can do, after the Mac has been around for 23 years, that hasn't already been done.  Net-net, my first impression of Leopard is that it isn't a big deal one way or the other.  PS: I wonder if the next version of the OS will be called Leonard, to honor Leonard Rosenthal, a famous Mac developer in the 80s and 90s.
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Recently posted document throws a little light on a key feature of the next edition of Mac OS X.
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âWith Leopard, Appleâs operating system widens its lead aesthetically and technologically,â states Ed Baig . Baig âmigrated to Leopardâ from Tiger âwithout pain on a MacBook laptop and my own iMac desktop; thereâs mercifully none of the software driver and other hassles associated with a Windows operating system upgrade.â Calling Leopard âone cool cat,â Baig praises Time Machine with its automatic backup and effortless file retrieval; the new videoconferencing features in iChat Theater; stationery, notes and To Do options in Mail; Cover Flow, Spaces, Stacks, and the ability to âhighlight and copy any portion of a Web page inside the Safari browser and turn it into a live Dashboard widget.â
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Four years ago, I bought a book entitled, "Mac OSX: The Missing Manual" and noticed it had reached the #1 best sellers slot at Amazon. I remember wondering how an operating system with 3% of the PC Desktop market could sell enough books to rank #1. Then, I realized there I was buying one too. I didn't use a Mac, but my wife bought one and needed to learn this new fangled UNIX desktop. The point? The Missing Manual served a big need - big enough to warrant a #1 best seller.
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Taking a sneak peek at Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard, Yuval Kossovsky writes for Computerworld, &#147;What I saw proved again that Apple has the most sophisticated user interface (UI) for an OS out there &#151; and at the same time is always looking for ways to make computing even more practical, simple and fun.&#148;
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After putting Leopard through its paces, Dean Takahashi (San Jose Mercury News) finds it is aptly namedââItâs fast and sleekââand concludes that the latest version of Mac OS X âgives Apple [an] advantage over Microsoft.â It offers âmore than 300 new features, making it the biggest upgrade in a long time,â and âa lot of the features allow you to do things more quickly and more easily.â That includes iChat, which, he says, âgot a good makeover. Besides doing video chats with the built-in Webcams on Macs, you can now use them to share any kind of file with the person youâre chatting with. You can also take over that friendâs desktop in case youâre diagnosing the machine from afar.â
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The PHP-GTK Community site is back again today with another quick tutorial showing how to build a submenu with the help of the GtkMenubar widget.   It's broken us into the key sections - details, a visual tree of the structure, the logic tree and relationships, and, finally the source code. It's a pretty simple process of creating the menu and appending the elements onto it, much like a normal drop down menu. The key is in the set_submenu function, creating a new object for the code to append the submenu elements to. The rest is just simple appends.   They've also included a screenshot to illustrate the end result.
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Part Two Last time round, we cautiously dipped a toe into the Mac development waters from the perspective of a Windows programmer with RAD experience. Along the way, I briefly looked at the rudiments of Objective-C syntax, and I described terms such as 'framework' and 'Cocoa'. (Remember, the idea here is not to turn you into a killer Mac coder, but rather to look at the essentials of mainstream Mac development using terminology that's familiar to a .NET, Delphi, C++ or VB developer.)â¦
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On of the next steps up from building a regular menubar or toolbar in your PHP-GTK application is the addition of icons to help liven up the menus and help users quickly find what they want. This new tutorial on the PHP-GTK Community Site aims to help with just that.   When creating a soft, you'll often want to have a menu like in the majority of graphical softs. It's often clear in your mind but require more code than you want to do simple things using a plain GtkMenu. So here's a class to help you to quickly design such menus and will also allow you to display nice icon in your menus.   They start with a usage example before getting into the code of the class - a simple menu with a "file" and "help" top menus and under "file", "open" and "exit".    The complete code for the class is included in the post so it's a simple cut and paste away from being yours.
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Don Reisinger tackles Mac OS X Leopard and helps you decide if an upgrade is in order.  And while he can't stand "early and often" OS upgrades, his final recommendation may surprise you.
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Mac users upgrading to Leopard will find a refinedd and improved Spotlight search feature, as our Macworld colleague explains.
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While Mac users get busy running Windows virtually, what's Apple got cooking? In Monkey Bites.