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I don't go in for the full-zoot "Snoopy-style" wretched excess, and prefer a pastoral winter scene desktop picture with animated snow gently falling.
This year is my first Christmas season working predominantly in OS X, I've had to come up with an OS X-native snow generating utility.
For the past several years, running the Classic Mac OS, my favorite snow application has been Rick Jansen's Snow for Macintosh, which lets it snow on your desktop, on your windows, adds a Christmas Tree, and sends Santa and his sleigh flying around your screen for extra festive season cheer. However, one of the cool things about Classic Snow is that since the whole process of letting it snow on your windows is somewhat CPU intensive, if you found Snow slowing down your machine you could use the preferences to choose fewer or smaller snowflakes, no Santa, no tree, or no snow at all. You can set the number of flakes, how fast they fall, Santa's speed limit etc. It all worked very well.
This year, Rick has released an OS X native version of Snow for the Macintosh. It still snows on your desktop and Santa and his reindeer still fly around your screen while snow piles up on top of your windows. However, the tree is gone, having been replaced by an ambling Polar Bear and resizable snowdrop plants. Rudolph the reindeer's nose also glows red once you register the application.
Unfortunately, I found that Snow for OS X does not work nearly as well as Classic Snow did, at least on my 700 MHz iBook. The snowflakes' behavior was not as pleasing and did not respond as well to preference settings. Increasing the intensity of the effect slowed everything else down noticibly, and there are no preference options for turning off the bear and the snowdrops, which I don't particularly fancy.
Snow for OS X is still a beta, so these aspects may improve, but for now I found its performance disappointing compared with its Classic predecessor.
Snow is $10 shareware. You can use it for free for 10 days (trial period).
For more information, visit:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~janswaal/MacOSXSnow/
Another snow application for OS X that makes a snowfall on your desktop is David Remahl's Snö (the Swedish name for Snow) which is freeware, OpenSource, and consists of two separate parts; Snö Desktop is a program that makes snow fall on your screen, while you are working with other things at the same time. Snö Screen Saver is a Mac OS X screensaver module. To install this, drag the file to the Screen Savers folder in the Library folder of your home folder:
Mac OS X Drive -> Users -> YourUser -> Library -> Screen Savers
or, to make the module available to all users on the machine, you can put it in:
Mac OS X Drive -> Library -> Screen Savers.
As with Snow, Sno allows you to configure snowflake size and behavior in its preferences.
Sno works well, and its screen rendering of snowflakes is better than with Snow for OS X, but falling snow is the whole enchilada with this application -- no buildup on windows, so Santa,Rudolph, bear, etc.
Sno is also freeware, as opposed to $10.00 shareware in the case of Snow for OS X.
For more information or to download Sno, visit:
http://ittpoi.com/stem.php?product=com.ittpoi.sno&type=frameset
or
http://hem.passagen.se/dare/
I don't like the appearance of the stylized snowflakes in either OS X application as well as the more natural-looking ones in Rick Jensen's Classic Snow, which remains for me the benchmark in this type of utility. They're both small downloads, so it's worth checking both out to decide which you prefer.
Buggy mouse support in OS X
Panther Tip / Desktop Printing
More about long file names
Buggy mouse support in OS X
From Rion Carter
Hello,
I just wanted to email you with a discovery that I made- Mac OS 10.3 doesn't have the same mouse driver as previous versions of Mac OS X. I was able to click with one input device and drag with another in every application that I tested.
Hope you find this information useful,
-Rion Carter
p.s. Keep up the great work!
Thanks for remembering, Rion. A couple of other readers have mentioned this as well, and I'm very much looking forward to checking it out, It will make my life a lot easier.
Charles
Panther Tip / Desktop Printing
From Krishna M. Sadasivam
Hi Charles:
Just wanted to share a tip I came across from Apple's Panther support page, namely: desktop printing. Like classic MacOS, with Panther you can now create a printer icon and place it on your desktop. True drag-and-drop printing!
http://www.info.apple.com/usen/panther/tipoftheweek.html
As always, keep up the great work!
Stay 'tooned,
-Krishna
Krishna M. Sadasivam
Creator of "The PC Weenies" Cartoon
http://www.pcweenies.com
"Celebrate your Inner Geek!"
Visit our store:
http://www.cafeshops.com/pcweenies
Thanks for the tip, Krishna.
Charles W. Moore
More about long file names
From Thierry Chambon
Hi again Charles,
"Glad you enjoyed the Pfinder review. Long file names is not an issue that has loomed very large in my computing needs, but I expect that you have some compelling requirements for it."
Long file names support is important to any Mac user exchanging or sharing large volumes of files with business partners using Windows or UNIX-based systems. We could not tell our customers and colleagues to limit the length of their file names to 31 characters so that we can use them more conveniently in OS9 (and that would reflect poorly on the Mac platform).
OS X and Apple Mail solve that problem at the OS and mail-client level, but MickeySoft Office X applications, including Entourage, still remain behind. You can open a file with a long name in an Office X application, but if you need to save an Office file with a long name, you have to use 31 characters or less in the Save dialog box, then rename the file in the Finder (hence my previous comment about Office X being merely a kludgy carbonization of Office 2001).
Incidentally, I just read a letter in the Feedback section of the December 2003 issue of MacWorld (page 15, bottom of column 1) that blames Office X's lack of support for long file names on OS X itself. Apparently, the author of that letter was not able to save a file with a name longer with 31 characters from an Office dialog box and concluded that this was a limitation of OS X as a whole. I can't believe that the erroneous statements in that letter were actually published in Macworld with no answer or correction from the editor... That letter is worth reading, although I still can't decide if it is sad or funny.
Since long file name support has been technically possible in the classic Mac OS since the introduction of the HFS+ disk format (as demonstrated by the Kilometre Browser utility), I suspect that the name length limitation was maintained in MacOS 9 partly because of a planned obsolescence scheme.
Best regards,
Thierry Chambon
English > French Technical Translator
Thanks for the explanation, Thierry.
Charles
***
Charles W. Moore
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