This used to be quite a complicated task to install ImageMagick and RMagick from source, but these days (thanks to some great work by others) it’s a piece of cake…

First install ImageMagick using this install script hosted on github (http://github.com/masterkain/ImageMagick-sl):

cd ~/src
git clone git://github.com/masterkain/ImageMagick-sl.git
cd ImageMagick-sl
chmod +x install_im.sh
sh install_im.sh

Now simply sit back and wait. (Oh, you’ll need to enter your password at some points as the libraries are installed into /usr/local).

Then, once that’s done, RMagick is installed by:

gem install rmagick

Simples.

I’m a fan of the Tails plugin for Firefox… Now Safari (on Leopard) gets its own Microformats Plugin!

Of course, in order to take advantage of Microformats and perhaps bring the information they offer onto your system, you need a browser that will read them - there’s Firefox plugins, and NetNewsWire 3.0’s built-in browser reads them. But what about Safari? Thanks to SIMBL, there’s a small array of Safari plugins available and from the maker of Safari Tidy comes Safari Microformats. Whenever visiting a site with Microformats, an icon appears in the right of the address bar (not unlike the RSS icon). Clicking it brings up a menu of available hCards and hCalendars you can add to Address Book and iCal.

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Quick Look is a beautiful thing, and in my view practically itself worth the cost of admission to Leopard. Unfortunately, the more you get used to it, the more annoying it is when you get to a file format that Quick Look doesn’t support. Fortunately, Apple was smart enough to design Quick Look with an open architecture that allows developers to write their own plugins and support more file formats, which Japanese developer Taiyo used to write two excellent plugins.

The first addresses a serious annoyance with the default Quick Look implementation on folders. If you invoke Quick Look with a folder selected in the Finder you’ll get…a picture of the folder icon. Frankly, that’s pretty stupid. Taiyo’s Folder Quick Look Plugin fixes this by displaying the folder’s contents, which is how it should have been done in the first place. Likewise, Taiyo’s Zip Quick Look Plugin displays the contents of zip files.

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Stacks is pretty much Leopard’s only non-eyecandy change to the dock, and it had the potential to be pretty handy, but the fact that the icon representing the stack is whatever the top file in the folder happens to be really ruins it (for me at least). However, if you haven’t yet given up on stacks and thrown them off your dock, there is a solution: overlaying stacks icons.

In essence, these are just small-ish semi-transparent icons that are permanently our top icon. This picture explain it best (before & after):

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Leopard’s Finder has a glaring bug in its directory-moving code, leading to horrendous data loss if a destination volume disappears while a move operation is in action. I first came across it when Samba crashed while I was moving a directory from my desktop over to a Samba mount on my FreeBSD server.

This is why you should NEVER just move data from one drive to another - copy it first, only then delete the original.

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The Leopard Dock shows folders as a layer of icons, which is crazy for folders as you cannot easily recognize a folder based on its contents. Especially crazy when the folders have recognizable icons already!

Of course, here at Stairways we prefer to find solutions to problems rather than just grumble, so here is a trivial solution. Simply create an alias to the folder, name it to sort as the first icon, and put it in the folder.

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Update: Here’s another way to achieve the same idea, but with icons sorted by date - i.e. the downloads stack.