Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Back to My Mac will apparently, by design, let a user control or observe your machine if they know your .Mac password, with no local password needed for the machine being controlled.

This is security 101 people:

1. Always use a strong password.
2. Once you have a strong password, never share it.

Could Back to My Mac be more secure? Yes. Is security only Apple’s job? No, it’s yours too. Don’t be the low-hanging fruit. Choose a strong password and keep it secret, always.

Somewhere in the foggy back end of my mind, I seem to remember a demo of stacks where Steve(?) took files from a number of different folders and placed them onto a stack in the Dock, creating a collection of related files that can be located anywhere in the file system. Pictures related to an event, located in the Pictures folder, could be stacked with a PDF related to the event, located in the Documents folder. That seemed damn useful to me.

Now, at release +16 hours, I read this in Help:

Folders in the Dock are called “stacks.” A stack can be a handful of documents, a group of applications, or a set of folders—anything you need to use frequently. When you click a stack, it springs open in an arc or a grid, depending on the number of items.

The Dock comes with two stacks already in place: the Downloads folder, where items you download from the Internet are stored, and the Documents folder, the default location for new documents you create. You can add more stacks by dragging folders to the Dock. You can create as many stacks as you like.

And indeed, through my own experimentation of dragging files to the Dock, stacks don’t work the way I remember them. (And the help explicitly says, “dragging folders to the Dock”.) Reading the help, it seems like stacks are an improved way to view the folders we’ve always had.

1. Am I hallucinating a previous demo of Stacks that never happened?

2. If the demo I remember really did happen, when were stacks dumbed down, and why?

Here’s something I don’t like about Leopard:

Shares are not shown as mounted volumes in the side bar, but mounted disk images are.

On the desktop, both mounted volumes are shown.

That’s inconsistent and just a tad annoying. What’s the logical difference between a volume mounted from a server and a volume mounted from a disk image that determines that one is visible in the side bar, and the other isn’t? It’s not a preference setting.

Using two different sides of the same application (Finder), I have two different ways to get to the same resources. Why, every time I want to view a server-mounted share, must I perform an extra click of the server, then wait for the “Connecting…” phase, then click the share? Over a LAN that’s not a big deal, but over a VPN it can be an annoying delay. For what logical reason are some volumes a click away, and some other volumes two, depending whether you’re accessing them through the desktop or a Finder window?

Addendum: Directly connected external volumes also show up in the side bar.

So why do network volumes now show in the side bar?

Take a good look at the following screen shot from Leopard’s Screen Sharing:

That’s how you make a new connection to another machine. Connection… New… - command-n.

See how simple that is? Now get coding.

Is it me, or does Address Book in Leopard not include the ability to send SMS messages through a Bluetooth-enabled cell phone? I ask because my phone needed a third-party iSync plugin under Tiger, and I’m not sure if this missing functionality is because the plugin needs updated, or because Apple dropped that feature.

Anyone care to enlighten me?