Post-SL: Use Your Contextual Menus Again

One unfortunate consequence of upgrading to Snow Leopard is that Apple tossed contextual menus onto the Abandoned Apple Technology dungheap. Not much help to those of us who've grown dependent--dare I say, addicted--to the use of these right-click wonders. The replacement? A greatly improved Services system that has a contextual component. We'll have to wait for developers to catch up. In the meantime...

Here's one way to keep using your 32-bit CMs, though not a very elegant solution; it's better than nothing.

What is it?

Shortcuts is a Mac OS X application to assign hot keys to contextual menu items. It works only with menu items added by contextual menu plug-ins. Version 2.0 also allows you to display a menu with items added by CM plug-ins.

[From Abracode Shortcuts]

What Apple's Snow Leopard Has In Store

I'll be going for it once I know my recording gear and software will behave with this kitty.

Here’s a look at how three of these additions to Snow Leopard—64-bit computing, Grand Central Dispatch, and OpenCL—work and how they could improve your Mac experience sometime soon.

[From Inside Snow Leopard's under-the-hood additions | Mac OS X | Macworld]

And then, the smaller stuff...which in some ways is more exciting than the major stuff:

[From Snow Leopard's smaller changes | Mac OS X | Macworld]

10.4.4. update is big crash-bang-boom!

I just made the mistake of loading this update via Software Update without backing up first. Let’s this be a lesson to everyone. Don’t do it! Backup, backup, backup!

Remember when I said that a Safe Boot was getting me out of trouble in 10.4.3? Well, I’m stuck at the gray Apple screen of death again, and I can’t Safe Boot or boot into Single-User mode. I can’t even do an Archive and Install...I tried and the stupid thing still doesn’t recognize the file system. All the usual troubleshooting steps were ineffective. The only real option is to blank the drive and start over, and I don’t have the time anymore. I’ve spent a week trying to get running with Tiger and it has been a waste of time.

Sticking with Panther for now, which is rock solid for me at 10.3.9! Maybe Apple with fix this crap eventually instead of breaking it.