One of the few things I wasn’t keen on when Leopard came along last year, was the dropping of the very slightly curved top-left and -right corners of the menu bar, and I kind of hoped they’d make an — at least optional — reappearance, along with the non-translucent menu-bar which was restored in 10.5.2. They didn’t of course, so I was pleased when I stumbled across Many Trick’s Displaperture. Although it provides options for crazy amounts of curvature in all four corners of your display, all I can see anyone really wanting is the smallest available amount of curvaceousness on those top corners, so that’s what I’d recommend.

The app doesn’t seem to modify any system files, and you’ll be back to the default as soon as you kill the application, which runs in the background.

Now that I’ve had my wish for a couple of days, I’ve shunned the curviness in favour of the default straight-edged menu bar — it was a nice experiment, but I’ve decided Leopard probably suits its sharper look, so I’m finally ready to let go. Still, I’ll never forget you, oh lovely rounded corners.

Probably my favourite little application in a quite a while is Pukka. It does relatively little, but makes what it does do – posting to del.icio.us – an absolute cinch. del.icio.us itself has a simple but well thought out web-based interface which I really like, but, even with the bookmarklet, it can still be slow waiting for web pages to load when you just want to file something away and get on with things.

Pukka allows you to post a link either by dragging a URL to it or by using its bookmarklet, which works in a similar way to the regular bookmarklet, pre-filling the URL and Title fields automatically for you. Pukka caches your existing tags regularly and provides the handy type-ahead suggestions you’d expect. It handles duplicate URLs well too, helping you keep your account nice and tidy.

I’d recommend you take a quick dive into the settings and set it to hide itself after submitting a post, regardless of how long this takes. It will then notify you via Growl once it’s been successfully added, if you wish.

Even though it keeps things simple, Pukka still has an extra couple of tricks up its sleeve. Right clicking on the dock icon allows you to navigate your bookmarks via tag and, more recently, it’s also started caching a local copy of your bookmarks for searching in Spotlight. This is still a bit hit-and-miss unfortunately it seems but Justin, the developer, pushes out updates regularly so this is bound to get even better.

1. Open a Finder window in Column mode
2. Select a folder in the first column
3. Type the first letter of any file or folder in the column to the right
4. As you would expect, the first file or folder beginning with the letter you typed gets selected
5. Rejoice! All is well in the world.

Now, imagine you wish to use this same logic when saving a file:

1. Open your favourite OSX appliction (Safari, Mail, whatever)
2. Open the Save dialogue
3. If it’s not already open, maxmise this by clicking the down arrow to view the file locations, and make sure you’re in the Column mode again
4. Now try repeating the way you navigated the columns above
5. No cigar
6. See how the previous logic is thrown out of the window and typing a letter now selects the first file/folder for that letter in the current column.

Why is this? Am I missing something?

Bored of your desktop wallpaper? Like a bit of variety? I just came across a neat little app called DeskLickr which, coupled with its very own Flickr group, will give you a nice random desktop wallpaper from the above group at regular intervals automagically. If you don’t like their images, you can have it pull in images from your favourites or any other Flickr tag, which means a pretty much endless supply.

The only down-side is that doesn’t seem to work with multiple monitors yet.

In OS X, scrolling the mouse wheel whilst holding ctrl allows you to zoom in to any of the desktop pretty much infinitely. From there you can pan around any of the desktop you need to with your imaginary mangifying glass. It’s a really useful little feature for when you need to quickly scrutinise an image, text which isn’t resizable for whatever reason or any other piece of UI chrome.

However, what I particularly love, from a usability point of view, is the fact that if you scroll back to almost the regular size — say, just one notch off — when you next move the mouse pointer, the desktop will snap back to a 1:1 zoom, as if by magic. In other words, you can’t accidentally leave the desktop in anything but an obviously zoomed state — perfect for when it’s been activated by accident or when you haven’t quite returned it back to normal.

Within OS X, Firefox has the rather useful keyboard shortcut ⌘K to have the Google Search box gain focus. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case in Safari. If, like me, you find yourself constantly switching between the two browsers, the lack of consistency can be annoying.

Here’s how to remedy that:

1. Open System Preferences from the Apple menu and choose “Keyboard & Mouse”
2. Click the + symbol to add a new shortcut
3. Change the “Application” drop-down to Safari
4. In the “Menu Title” field, type Google Search followed by the keystroke option+semi-colon. You should end up with the field containing Google Search…
5. Enter ⌘K in the “Keyboard Shortcut” field.

Finally, quit and re-start Safari to start using the new shortcut.

This tip is correct as at OS X 10.4.9.

One of the strangest ideas for an application I’ve seen in some time is Blackhole’s Noise. The basic idea seems to be that in order to mask nearby noise, you mask this by the application’s built in white, or pink, noise, which is basically fizz, ahem, “signal with even power distribution on a logarithmic frequency scale”.

I was skeptical, but decided to try it for myself, so gave it a whirl just now. Alas, it really isn’t something I could listen to for more than about 3 seconds – I just found it annoying. I’d be interested to see if anyone does actually find this solution useful though.

On a side note, I really love the icons for all of the Blackhole applications.

One of the annoying things about OS X, from a British perspective at least, is the obscure way of changing the default dictionary the operating system uses for things like spell checking. There’s a couple of ways of changing this however, depending on whether you want to do it on a per application basis, or system wide.

Per-Application

1. Right click in an application where you’re editing text and choose the “Spelling“ → “Spelling…“ option.
2. Then simply change the dictionary drop down to “British English“, or whatever you require.

Easy, huh?

System Wide

More usefully, you can change this for your whole system by doing the following:

1. Open System Preferences → International from the Apple menu.
2. Choose “Edit List“
3. Make sure “British English“ is checked in this list, and click “OK“.
4. Make sure that British English is now at the top of the Languages list. If it’s not, drag it to the top.
5. Close the International System Preferences window.
6. You may need to log out and back in for the changes to take full effect.

I hope this proves useful to someone – I know it will for me the next time I need to set up a fresh OS X install.