If you use Aquaffic or Josh’s mod, download the updates (and let me know if they work for you) on the iTunesque page.

There had been rumours of the “Marble” interface, but nothing (I repeat: nothing) has changed visually as regards the general interface (bar a few luminosity adjustments and the changes required by the new functionality). Icons, scrollbars, list headers, the “traffic lights”, …, everything with which Mac OS X themes generally deal, it’s all unchanged.

Except that Apple decided to change a couple of things in the structure of its theme files, which means that a) we can’t simply copy our theme files from Leopard to Snow Leopard, and b) we haven’t a clue how to decode one of the core UI files, “SArtFile.bin”. Hopefully there will be a decoder soon.

In the meantime, I’ll be using my external drive every now and again to boot under Leopard, because the only theming tool we can use (Themepark 4) works only under Leopard.
If you are an iTunesque user, expect a bunch of new packs for Snow Leopard in the coming days/weeks.

Edit: many iTunesque packages are now available. See the iTunesque page for more details.

So, the question is: when will that be?
Turns out the counter can help us have a certain strategy.

I decided to take a look at how the counter uses its data after reading an interesting post over at the MacRumors.com fora.

First, one should know that the counter displayed on the aforementioned contest page at Apple.com is a JavaScript counter that fetches its data from a .txt file, countdown.txt.
How is this useful? Knowing where it gets its data means that we can know what is the “hard” data. Basically, the counter isn’t “live”.

Here’s the data I collected:

11-APR-2009 21:00:00|938030517|275391
11-APR-2009 22:00:00|938271179|240662
11-APR-2009 23:00:00|938477072|205893 (8.43 AM in Brussels, 11.43 PM in CA [California, Apple's area])

7.40 (22.40 CA): 938477900
7.57 (22.57 CA): 938548000
7.57 (22.57 CA): 938503000 // => variation!
8.00 (23.00 CA): 938511841
8.40 (23.40 CA): 938673000
8.45 (23.45 CA): 938693000
8.46 (23:46 CA): 938638000 // => variation!
8.50 (23:50 CA): 938649000
9.00 (00:00 CA): 938682965

As you can see, the data from 11 PM was added at around 11.43 PM, and the counter data was adjusted at 11.46 PM.

The data of the countdown.txt file can be summarised as follows:
Date – Time – Number Sold – Delta
The last number, which I call “delta”, seems to represent the number of applications bought between 10 PM and 11 PM (as 938271179 + 205893 = 938477072).
The interesting thing is that the counter then uses the delta to calculate what it’s supposed to be at the following hour, i.e. 12 PM in this case. Thus, at 12 PM San Francisco time, it displayed 938682965 (I have just checked).

Therefore, the countdown.txt file is updated approximately 40 minutes after the hour, and the delta is then used to adjust the counter, though that can apparently take up to 15 minutes (see the examples of counter data between 10 and 11 PM, where the change occurred at 10.57 PM).

How can this be of use?
Well, it can be useful to take a look at the fluctuation of data, as collected by MacRumors.com member omahajim and posted at GoogleDocs, and see what is the average during certain hours over a few days. The idea is that you can then determine whether at a given hour, the “delta” found in countdown.txt will be close to reality or not (based on previous days – during hours where it’s night on the American continent, fewer apps are downloaded), and that will especially be useful during the last hour of the countdown.
One should note, however, that there is a good chance that, during the last hour of the countdown, the number of downloads will surge after a certain point (read: after 999.999.500, there could be something crazy like 5000 downloads a second).

Nevertheless, this might be of use to someone who hopes to win the mega (and only) prize of “a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card, an iPod touch, a Time Capsule, and a MacBook Pro”.
I know I’d love to win it, but there’s a good chance the countdown will end while I’m asleep, so I figured that it would do me no harm to reveal such data.

If by a strange twist of fate you do win after reading this, may I ask for the Time Capsule or a couple of App Store purchases?

Anyway, if you use Aquaffic and don’t want to see the iTunes traffic lights, head over to the iTunesque page, or grab the Aquaffic updater directly here.

MacHeist is a web community of Mac users in which the Directorate (the big bosses) organise “Heists”, missions for the community members to solve in exchange for free software, and once the missions are over, a bundle of applications is revealed.
A few days ago, finally, the MacHeist 3 bundle was revealed, and I’ve shelled out 31 US dollars (thanks to my Heister discounts) for the nice applications that compose it.

It was loads of fun, and now it’s over. Well, almost: the Directorate should be revealing one or two other apps in the coming days, or something like it. We’ll see what happens next.
If you’re a Mac user, have the available funds and haven’t done so yet, go get your bundle now.

Proof of the advantages of MacHeist for users: in total, when all applications are unlocked, I’ll have obtained over 1500 USD-worth of applications during MacHeist 3, all for 31 USD. Awesome!

Still, I should add that I’m slightly disappointed in the bundle, which has many applications that I shall not be using all that often. Previous bundles, especially the MacHeist 2 one, seemed to be more interesting overall. However, this opinion may change in the coming days if the Directorate announces new applications to go with the bundle.

Here is a small updater for these resources, also available from the iTunesque page.

While this statement may be somewhat exaggerated (ever so slightly), it is based on the ultimate proof: my observations.

During my first year at university, back in September 2004, there were probably 10 laptops present during lectures, while we were 300 students in our first year of Law. Laptops were marginal, as they have been for many a year in universities in Continental Europe, where courses are often given ex cathedra and aren’t highly interactive.

In third year, the proportion had increased: there were probably 8-10 laptops for 120 students. At most, you would see two G4 iBooks (or one iBook and one brand new MacBook), and PowerBooks were nowhere to be seen in the Law and Political Science faculties.

When I started my fourth year, I decided to bring along the MacBook I had received for my 20th birthday. As we were starting our Master’s degree, we were in a bigger university, and there were 400 students. We started the year with probably 10-15 laptops, and by the end of the year, we were approaching 30 laptops, 3-4 of which were Macs.

And then came the fifth year, 2008-2009. Boom. Explosion in the number of laptops.
During the first term, of September to December, we found ourselves in much smaller groups, because of the increased variety in classes. In my classes, we were usually 40. On any given day, there were usually 8-10 laptops, 3 of which were Macs.
During the second term, it seems to be even worse: 40 students, some 10 laptops, and easily 6-7 Macs.

I’ve gone from being a pompous self-righteous geek to being just like the majority of the hard-wired cases! What has happened?

Fortunately, the majority of the Mac users there still use Microsoft Office, whereas I use iWork. Yay, I am still somewhat different!

What’s the purpose of Shelves? It makes your Finder look as ordered as a nice, clean shelf of documents. And with a few tricks, you can apply that look to all your folders.

The basic idea is to make your Finder windows look like this:

The settings for this to work are simple: icon view, icon sizes of 128×128 pixels, maximum grid spacing, no “icon info” showing, and best keep it organised (by name here). You can apply these settings by hitting the keyboard combo “Cmd” + “J”, or going in “View => Show View Options” in the Finder.

Just like that, folders become beautiful. I found CoverFlow useful and icon view boring, but this has set a new paradigm.

However, applying it like that isn’t enough. There are a few additional steps to get it to work system-wide.

First, you need to change all the folders where you’ve set “always open with CoverFlow/list view/…”, because you want the default look to now show everywhere, right?

For that, fortunately, there is an Apple tool which you can use: Automator. Open Automator, start a workflow with “get specified Finder items”, then add a step “set folder views” (where you define the folder view just as stated beforehand). Check “apply changes to sub-folders” if you really want the changes to affect just about every folder you can possibly imagine.
Now, I got loads of errors trying to apply that workflow to the whole drive, even to folders containing loads of sub-folders, so this isn’t a perfect solution. Also, it takes time and uses up your CPU a lot. Basically, I found that it worked best if I already knew which were the folders where I’d been foolish enough to set “always open in CoverFlow”.

Next, you want this folder background to apply to the whole folder. The problem is that, if you have a folder with hundreds of items (like my “Applications” folder), the image will stop at some point (well, after 4000 pixels, to be more precise). This is a problem.

But there is a workaround: there’s a trick which allows you to force the Finder to loop any background images in icon view.

Before explaining how to do that, however, you need to fix the image, because it is a little too short to loop perfectly. The easiest way I found to fix the image was to cut off 178 pixels from the bottom, which gives a result you can download here if using the “Leather Shelves” (otherwise, you’ll have to fix the image yourselves).

Once that is done, and once you know you’ve applied the background image to all the important folders (and once you’ve made those settings the ones for the default folder [just hit the "use as defaults" button in the "Show View Options" window]), you need to apply the “hack” to make the background image work.

The way to get background images looping can be found here, as pointed out by MacThemes user Dustin. There’s one problem however: you need Property List Editor. This is a utility which comes with the Developer Tools, a set of things which are an optional install with Leopard. If you haven’t installed the Developer Tools, you can install them from your Leopard DVD, but it might be too much of a hassle just to get your background images looping…

So, here’s what you need to do, if you have Property List Editor.

• in the Finder, go to “~/Library/Preferences/” (your User library)
• find the “com.apple.finder.plist” file
• open it in Property List Editor
• hit “Dump”
• select all the resulting text
• copy it into a text file (in TextEdit, for example, but make sure you hit “Format => Make Plain Text” (“Shift” + “Cmd” + “T”)
• search “BackgroundFlags”
• the first two results should be in a section below “<key>DesktopViewOptions</key>”. Ignore those two results, and move on to the next one
• from the third BackgroundFlags onwards, change the following “<integer>0</integer>” into “<integer>1</integer>”.

Theoretically, that should do it. Just relaunch Finder (using the “Force Quit” window) or log off before logging in again to see the backgrounds start looping!
If this doesn’t seem to do the trick, try to find “<key>BackgroundPictureURL</key>”, and copy that and the following line (“<string>…</string>”) near every single instance where you changed the BackgroundFlags integer.

And there we go, you’ll have ordered your Finder a little more.

And finally, the exam period has come to a full stop. At least, temporarily. Though that’s hardly news compared to beating Lemmings!

We have an old Acorn computer on which are installed some of the greatest games to this day, Lemmings and Pac-Mania. If you don’t know them, Lemmings is a great “puzzle action” game, and Pac-Mania is like a semi-3D version of Pac-Man.

When we were kids, this is what we spent days playing. But alas, this was not meant to last. With the advent of Macs in our family, we moved away from RISK OS to Mac OS, and those wonderful games stayed on the Acorn, as if frozen in time.

Back when we moved, I decided to set up the Acorn again, and see if I could play those games that accounted for such fond memories. While Pac-Mania was still as fun as ever, Lemmings refused to start. So, while waiting to find the Lemmings disk once more and try to re-install it, I perused the internet, looking for a temporary fix to my new-found addiction.

At first, it was Pingus, a free game for Mac, which caught my attention. It was fun, but proved not to be quite the same as Lemmings.
And then came the discovery: someone made a port of the old PC version of Lemmings to the Mac (to Intel Macs, rather).

So I started trying out Lemmings once more. And during this exam period, I immersed myself fully in the game.

The first few levels, I remembered. Somewhere around the 20-25th level of the “Fun” difficulty rating, I started to feel lost, my memories not going that far. Most probably, I had never managed to get past some of those levels.

Then came the “Tricky” difficulty rating. At first, I didn’t really notice a change. But then came the blooming “Level 23: From the Boundary Line”. Lo and behold, that made me flinch. It was such a challenge that I had to look up a solution, provided by YouTube. Even with the solution, it took me a few tries to get it right.

The difficulty then seemed to drop a little for a while, but I found that in the “Taxing” difficulty rating, levels became steadily harder. There were at least a couple of instances that took me many tries to figure out or do properly.

Finally, the “Mayhem” difficulty rating deserved its title, sending awfully complex levels at me every now and then (with “easy” ones compared to them in between).

It was hard, it was tough, and I must have sacrificed thousands of lemmings during my many tries to beat levels.

But I succeeded!

Yay! Huzzah! One thing to cross off my check list of “things to do in my life”, right above the “recreate the Pac-Mania songs on the piano”, also done.

By the way, for those who would like to try it out, someone created a web version of the Lemmings game, 40 levels included!

I had an exam the following day, and a power cut right when Phil Schiller was on stage, so I was unable to follow it immediately. However, when I did read up about it, I was surprised by the reaction of some of those large websites who covered the event.

First, one should mention what was announced by Phil Schiller: updates to the iLife and iWork software suites, and an updated 17-inch MacBook Pro, along with an announcement relating to iTunes. Schiller explained in detail, too much perhaps, the main new features of the software updates, and the effect was a much more technical and detailed keynote than the ones Steve Jobs had done in the previous years.

In their live feeds, Engadget and Gizmodo had many comments, by those covering the event, relating to how boring the many iWork announcements were. One of the people involved kept on writing “updates” such as “wake me up at the next announcement”.

In the main articles that followed the keynote, many plainly stated that the MacWorld announcements were “underwhelming”, disappointing and whatnot. Many comments posted in reply to these articles mocked Phil Schiller for delivering a keynote which would be forgotten sooner than any of the previous ones.

Well, I’d like to pitch in.

I am one of those Mac users who does not have a massive photo collection. I am one of those who doesn’t ever create home movies. If I record music, I create my own, and don’t create a track based on pre-defined loops. iLife is therefore not a suite I use a lot (the only application I use among iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto, iWeb and Garageband is Garageband, and only to record a few songs per year).

On the other hand, since iWork ’08 came out in the summer of 2007, I have been using Pages every single day at university and at home. It’s a word processing application that does almost everything I want it to do, and it does it in a very pleasant way. It’s fast, and it’s simple. I don’t get frustrated using it, unlike Microsoft Word.

I don’t use Keynote, because I never have to do any presentations (though that will most probably change as soon as I start to work), but I’ve found that I use Numbers more and more.

All in all, I’m certainly more of an iWork user than an iLife user.

And with a MacBook which is not even two years old, I’m not in the market for a new machine. I don’t care much about the availability of a new MacBook Pro with a 17-inch screen, and I certainly wouldn’t care either about a new MacMini or iMac, or even an iPhone Nano (I’m happy with my iPod touch ).

No, I didn’t want a keynote about awesome new machines. I wanted one about software.

So, how did this keynote go?

After Phil and the developer behind iMovie had talked about three of the iLife applications in great detail, and after many details concerning Keynote, I was extremely disappointed to see that Pages had been mentioned for only a short time, just to say that it has a cool new “full-screen” feature (great to write without distraction), lots of new templates (I don’t really care for those, because I tend to build my documents from scratch) and integration with Numbers (very nifty feature, which I’m sure I’ll be using in the future). Come on, Phil! I was hoping for some more detail on my most-used productivity application!

Still, word processing is not many people’s idea of “fun”, despite the ease at which one can make great looking documents in Pages. Which is probably at least partly the reason why iWork didn’t get as huge an update as it should have (I know there are a couple of bugs I’ve been reporting to Apple for a year that still haven’t been fixed, despite their absolute necessity for professional papers).

I guess I’m a little annoyed at Apple and at Mac users in general. It seems that Apple’s stereotype of the Mac user is true (the Mac user only cares about “fun stuff”, like “nice photos” and “cool home movies”), and Apple hasn’t yet realised that there are power-users of the iWork suite who would like Apple to iron out some bugs rather than pour all its software resources into the iPhone and the impressive but less “professional” iLife suite.

Well, here’s to hoping that at some point Apple wakes up to hear the voices of those Mac users out there who truly use iWork and would love to see it become better. After all, they’re the ones who will bring the Mac among the white collars and suits.

I guess I must applaud Apple for even mentioning iWork, despite the audience which was far too oriented towards gadgets and “cool” stuff. But really, there’s still so much to be done.

Now, will it please fix the footnote and table of contents issues?