Hot off the heels (relatively speaking) of their ribbon interface-clad Office 2007 Microsoft’s Mac division has announced their next version of Office for Mac that will also include the ribbon interface. Problem is, both Microsoft and Apple already solved the problem of feature accessibility years ago with the tall toolbox and the ribbon is a giant step backwards, especially now with widescreens so prevalent.
When I turned on my first generation Core Duo MacBook Pro I got in early 2006 this evening the backlight refuses to turn on using the function keys on the keyboard. All other keyboard functions are fine.
If I shine a torch at the screen I can just barely make out the windows and can adjust the brightness slider in the Display prefpanel, but nothing happens. Using an external monitor I can use the machine, but the internal display is still black.
Not sure whether this is a problem with Snow Leopard, I sure as heck hope so but it’s looking increasingly unlikely. I didn’t have the backlight Snow Leopard installation problem, but could this be related?
Things I’ve tried so far and have failed:
This is really serious. I need to take this machine to classes. If it’s a hardware failure and I can only use an external display, I’m in big trouble.
For some reason, Apple decided in Snow Leopard to disable graphical configuration of font smoothing (aka sub pixel rendering) and instead rely upon LCDs to report what settings should be used. Problem is, support for this is spotty with some panels and the resulting fonts look rough and pixelated.
On regular Leopard if you open the Appearance prefpane you’re presented with a drop down box where you can choose how heavy font smoothing is applied, as shown in the screenshot above. On Snow Leopard all you get is an ambiguous checkbox saying "Use LCD font smoothing when available" without any option to choose by how much:
Fortunately you can still adjust this manually by opening Terminal.app and entering the following command with an integer between 1 and 4 (representing the 4 previously available options), then re-opening your applications. Easiest way is to enter this, then log out and log back in.
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2
Heaven knows why Apple user interface designers decided to remove access to this feature.
I'm Ruben Schade, welcome to my labour of love mix of tech, anime, thoughts and nonsense from Singapore and Australia. Thanks for stopping by.
I'm also on Twitter, Flickr, Google Reader and lots more places.
