Leopard comes with Rails, but I prefer to roll my own in an effort to keep my environment stable. As always Hivelogic has the goods:

I upgraded my Mac Book to 10.5.2 today. Everything went swimmingly, but I noticed that everyone I know had suddenly moved their birthday to Wednesday the 13th at 15:00 EST–according to my calendar anyway.

My fix for this was to go into the iCal preferences and uncheck the Show Birthdays Calendar checkbox, then recheck it. This put everybody’s birthday back where it was supposed to be.

Update 2008-05-29: This birthday calendar weirdness happened again with the 10.5.3 update. Although, only three birthdays got screwed up. Once again, unchecking and then checking the Show Birthdays Calendar fixed the calendars.

NetNewsWire and NewsGator’s other client products are now free. Well, almost free. You’ll have to give up some attention data, but that’s not so bad is it?

I had a minor hiccup upgrading to the 3.1 version. This was because I had been using NewNewsWire Lite version. When I tried to launch NetNewsWire 3.1, it failed (crash report details below).

Update from the comments: Brent is on the case and has posted a new build to fix this first-run issue. See his comment below for more information and the link. Thanks for the quick response Brent!

If you encounter the same problem, this is what worked for me: Move the ~Library/Preferences/com.ranchero.NetNewsWire.plist file to the desktop. After doing this, NetNewsWire should launch without issue and the preferences file will be recreated. If this works, you can trash the old file that was moved to the desktop.


Process: NetNewsWire [917]
Path: /Applications/NetNewsWire.app/Contents/MacOS/NetNewsWire
Identifier: com.ranchero.NetNewsWire
Version: 3.1 (1200)
Code Type: X86 (Native)
Parent Process: launchd [116]

Date/Time: 2008-01-09 19:21:31.431 -0500
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.5.1 (9B18)
Report Version: 6

Exception Type: EXC_BREAKPOINT (SIGTRAP)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000002, 0x0000000000000000
Crashed Thread: 0

Application Specific Information:
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '*** -[NSCFString timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x515990'

via The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Recently, I discovered that one can hold a window while switching Spaces in Leopard. The window can then be dropped onto any other space. This, of course, isn’t the only way to move a window to another space. But, I like this better than dragging windows off the screen.

Here’s how it’s done:

  1. Grab the window you wish to move by clicking and holding with the mouse.
  2. Switch spaces directly (default: ^ Number Key) or with the arrow keys (default: ^ Arrow Key).
  3. Drop the window on the desired space.

The movie below shows these steps in action. On my keyboard, using the arrow keys to switch spaces is cumbersome, so I usually use the ^ Number Key combination to switch directly to the space I want.

If you can’t see the movie above, you can download the Quicktime file directly.

For more tips, take a look at this Spaces tips screencast (the production values are much higher than my Quicktime movie).