Posts Tagged ‘osx’

If you’re running Mac OSX Lion and trying to update your locate db, you may get the following error message.

-bash: updatedb: command not found

You can call updatedb by using its full path instead.

/usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

You could also create a symlink in your bin directory which would then allow you to just call updatedb as normal.

One utility Mac OS X seems to be lacking is a simple text editor such as Notepad for Windows. It comes with TextEdit but the problem is that this uses rich text format (RTF) which is very annoying when editing system files or code.

Thankfully, you can reconfigure it to use plain text.

Simply go to TextEdit on the menu bar and hit Preferences. The top option should allow you to toggle between Plain Text and Rich Text.

I recently updated my MacBook Pro to the new version of OSX, Lion.

So far, I’m not overly impressed. Firstly, when I upgraded Finder totally broke itself. It added a number of documents to the devices bar on the left, which I couldn’t click on, but because they had a long filename they would expand the devices bar all the way over, so every time I opened a Finder window I had to drag it back.

They’ve also got rid of Spaces which allows you to have multiple desktops. They’ve replaced this with Desktops, which is basically the same thing, except that you can only tile them horizontally, whereas before you could set up a grid and scroll each way. Desktops is quite good because you you can gesture from one to the other, but I Miss my grid.

They’ve also taken Dashboard and moved it onto it’s own Desktop which is annoying because the only time I use Dashboard is when I need a calculator, and I need it as an overlay because I want to input some figures which I’m currently looking at.

Some of the new gestures are quite nice, but I now need to use five fingers to show my desktop, which is quite a difficult gesture to perform. I’ve also noticed that it’s just not quite as fast as Snow Leopard and the new full screen apps system just isn’t as seamless as it is in Microsoft Windows. Finally, there are just a few bugs too that need working out, especially with the new scrolling system.

Other than that, it has some quite nice features. I haven’t used Launchpad or Mission Control so I’m not too fussed about those, but gesturing between Desktops is good and being able to turn wi-fi on and off without being prompted for the admin password is good. Unfortunately, if that is all I have to say about a brand new version of an operating system, it’s a bit of a poor show.