With their launch of new iMacs and Mac Pros yesterday, Apple are perhaps copping the most flack for discontinuing the 24 and 30 inch Cinema Displays. Presented for your consideration are my thoughts, interspersed with plenty of pointless nostalgia. Is that how you spell "interspersed"? Doesn’t look right.
Grabbing a quick coffee at our local deli this morning I happened upon an article in the Sydney Morning Herald by David Flynn talking about the utopian idea of all day battery power. Where do I sign up? :)
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.
With the introduction of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Apple has decided to disable graphical configuration of font smoothing. Fortunately, there is a workaround!
In Leopard and earlier versions of Mac OS X, if you opened System Preferences and chose Appearance, you could choose the level of font smoothing on your monitor with a handy drop down box.
For some reason, Apple decided in Snow Leopard to to disable graphical configuration of font smoothing aside from a single checkbox, instead relying on LCDs to report what settings should be used. The problem is, support for this is spotty and sometimes the results look terrible.
Fortunately you can still adjust this manually. Open the Terminal in your Utilities folder, then enter the following code on one line. Replace the "2" with a number between 1 and 4, depending on how much smoothing you want.
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2
The changes will only take effect on newly opened applications. The easiest way I’ve found is just to log out and log in again.
Heaven knows why Apple user interface designers decided to remove access to this feature.
Hi! I'm Ruben Schade and this is my labour of love blog from beautiful Singapore and Sydney.
I also lurk on Twitter, Flickr, Google Reader and lots more places.
