You can have TextEdit fit the text to the document margins, instead of to the window, so that the lines of text will remain at a fixed width and the font size in the printed document will match the font size on the screen. To use the same font size in printed and onscreen documents: Choose Format > “Wrap to Page.” A rectangle shows the margins of the document in the window.

You can set this as the default for new documents by checking “Wrap to page” in TextEdit’s preferences window. For more details, see the discussion at Tiny Print from TextEdit.

I now use this to toggle between my headphones, which are always plugged into the front of my Mac, and my speakers, which are plugged into the line output jack on the back of my Mac. This is so much easier than plugging in and unplugging my headphones or opening System Preferences each time I want switch between headphones and speakers!

No longer. Preview in Snow Leopard uses the sidebar for both files and pages. So if you drag a PDF file into the sidebar, Preview assumes you simply want to open the file. To combine PDFs, you have to do the following:

1. Open the first PDF file in Preview.
2. Click the “Sidebar” button.
3. If the PDF file contains multiple pages and the thumbnails for the individual pages are not displayed, position your mouse over the thumbnail with the spiral-edge binding and click on the left arrow that appears. This will “open” the multi-page PDF.
4. Drag the additional PDF files onto the thumbnail for the first file.
5. Use “File->Save As…” to save the new PDF file.

Not terribly intuitive, is it? Frankly, I’m amazed this change made it past Apple’s usability experts. It clearly violates a fundamental principle of the Macintosh user interface: individual files are represented by individual windows. The previous version of Preview, which did represent files as windows and reserved the sidebar for pages within files, was much more intuitive.

Incidentally, there is a preference for choosing how Preview should behave when opening files. However, this preference does not rectify the problem of the sidebar being used for both files and pages within files. Moreover, the default value is inconsistent with the Macintosh user interface.

Further evidence of the discrepancy between the behavior of the new Preview and the Macintosh user interface is noticeable from the unusual title bar text. After opening two documents, for example, the title bar reads “document2.pdf (1 page) (2 documents, 3 total pages)”. If you make a change and then quit without saving changes, you’ll see another non-standard alert.

The system extension “/System/Library/Extensions/CNQL1212_ClassicNotSeize.kext” was installed improperly and cannot be used. Please try reinstalling it, or contact the product’s vendor for an update.

According to this thread on the Apple discussion boards, CNQL1212_ClassicNotSeize is an old kernel extension for Canon printers that is no longer compatible with—or needed for—Mac OS X. Since deleting the file, I haven’t seen the warning message again.

The first sign that something wasn’t right appeared during the account setup process when I entered the information on the outgoing mail server. Mail displayed a spinning gray spokes graphic next to the message “Checking connection to mail server servername“. It continued to do this until I clicked the “Cancel” button, at which point Mail allowed me to continue with the account setup.

Now when I tried sending an e-mail message, the message remained in the “Sending…” mailbox until I quit and relaunched Mail, at which point the message moved to “Outbox”. When I went into Mail preferences and clicked on “Accounts”, I saw the message “Checking account: Connecting to server…” displayed in Mail’s Activity window. When I opened Mail’s Connection Doctor, the message “SMTP connection to servername failed” appeared after a long delay.

After much experimenting, I found a solution, which is to set up the account as follows (I first removed all Mail preferences and files so as to start with a clean slate):

1. During account setup, enter the outgoing mail server information, but click “Cancel” when Mail keeps saying “Checking connection to mail server servername“. Then click “Continue”.
2. Bring up the Activity viewer by choosing “Activity” from the “Window” menu.
3. Open Mail preferences, click on Accounts, and select the account in question. In the popup menu to the right of Outgoing Mail Server, choose “Edit Server List…”.
   1. In the server list window, select the problem account.
   2. Click the “Advanced” tab.
   3. Click the red stop sign icon next to “Checking account: Connecting to server…” in the Activity window.
   4. Select “Use custom port” and enter 465 (for SSL) and leave “Use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)” checked.
   5. Click “OK”.
4. The popup menu should now display “servername (Offline)”.
5. Choose “Edit Server List…” from the popup menu again.
   1. In the server list window, select the problem account.
   2. Click the “Advanced” tab. The password field will now be blank.
   3. Click the red stop sign icon next to “Checking account: Connecting to server…” in the Activity window.
   4. Enter your mail account password.
   5. Click “OK”.
6. The Activity window should briefly show that Mail is checking the connection and then the message should disappear.

Why all the fuss? I’m not certain, but I speculate that it’s due to the mail server in question accepting only unencrypted connections on ports 25 and 587 and only SSL connections on port 465. Mail seems to think that if an outgoing mail server supports SSL it should support SSL on all ports on which it accepts connections. Adding to the confusion is a bug in Mail that seems to prevent changes to the outgoing mail server configuration when the “Checking account” process is active.

Installed iLife ’09 on two Macs today, and both hung at the end of the installation process. The iLife installer reported that installation was successful, but clicking the “Restart” button failed to reboot the computer; instead, the Installer window closed, the menu bar disappeared, and all that remained was a non-functional Dock. None of the usual tricks (e.g., Force Quit) would work, so I had to resort to powering off by holding in the power button. The system log showed the following:

LaunchServices/5123589: coreservicesd is running an unsupported version, 0 ( we are 10500000 ), so we cannot talk to it.
— last message repeated 153 times —

Very annoying. I suspect the iLife ’09 installer isn’t completely compatible with the most recent Mac OS X (10.5.7).

Personally, I didn’t encounter the above  when upgrading. However, on one of my Macs I did run into a problem starting the update. Basically, I clicked the “Install” button and then Software Update hung with the spinning colored disk.

Fortunately, I was able to quit all other applications and log out (partially, at least) before I had to hold down the power button to shut down. After rebooting, I was prompted to download the update again and this time it worked without a hitch. Perhaps Apple’s update servers are a bit overwhelmed by the size of the 10.5.6 update?

There are several active discussions on this topic on the Apple Support discussion board (see, for example, iChat freezes after 10.5.5 update). The resolution that has worked for me so far is the following:

• In the QuickTime System Preferences, click on the “Streaming” tab and then choose “1 Mbps Cable” for the streaming speed.
• In the Audio/Video iChat Preferences, choose “500 kbps” for the bandwidth limit.
• Relaunch iChat

You’ll notice that the size and quality of the video are reduced, but at least it works!

But is the new iDisk secure? Sadly, a message from Apple support reveals that it is not:

When you connect to your iDisk, the authentication of your MobileMe member name and password is done via Digest Authentication. This is a common, secure way to handle authentication for many HTTP-based services (such as webpages) or WebDAV servers (such as iDisk). For more information about Digest Authentication, you can search for the term in your favorite search engine.

Once you are connected to the iDisk and after the authentication process, the actual transfer of data is not encrypted. This includes publishing pages or photocasts with iWeb or iPhoto, using Backup, syncing with iDisk Syncing, publishing calendars with iCal, or simply copying a file manually to your iDisk.

This is unacceptable. Since iDisk stores and retrieves files in the clear, a local or wireless network eavesdropper could easily capture sensitive files as they are read from or written to iDisk. This is particularly egregious since Mac OS X already supports WebDAV over HTTPS, which could easily provide the needed encryption.

As a workaround, Apple suggests first saving sensitive files to an encrypted disk image, but this negates the convenience of iDisk Sync. It is also unreasonable to expect novices, presumably the intended users of MobileMe and iDisk, to anticipate the need for—not to mention possess the ability to—create encrypted disk images.