Brandon’s Tips: Mac OS X 10.7

I’m now using Mac OS X 10.7 on my primary computer. Here are a few tips I’ve figured out along the way.

• iCal 5.0x: Apple has changed the way you create events. If you hit cmd-n or double click on a day in month view, you create a new entry. Seems reasonable enough, but for some reason creating the new entry makes it an all day event. What?!?! Hrm, that’s a bit annoying. Check the preference, no way to change that behavior. Previously creating a new event would set the start time to the next hour compared to the current hour, on the day you tried to create the event. Check the Interwebz, hrm, there’s apparently a new feature. iCal will make new events All Day by default. If you want it to start at a certain time, enter the start time and iCal will automagically set the duration for one hour. Want a different end time, you can set that also. So: cmd-n > “My Event 8:15am – 9:30am”. Well, I guess that’s a useful feature. Sure would’ve been nice to know about it before getting annoyed. Also, I find the contrast of the text in Month view to be insufficient. Until Apple releases a way of changing the font face or styling, increasing the font size with cmd-+. (Found this one on an Apple support forum.)
• “Backups” taking up Disk Space: What is backups space taking up my hard drive space?!?! Apparently OS X 10.7 has a new feature to create local Time Machine backups that can save you if you accidentally delete a file. Works great for small files, sucks up space if you happen to be shuffling media around like I am for work (think 1GB video files). Sigh. I’d like the 12GB back please. (I found out this answer at Reed Corner Design, and apparently from the command line I can type sudo tmutil disablelocal to disable this feature. Though I should remember to enablelocal after I’m done doing my major futzing.