os x 10.7

is a huge disappointment.

mission control is a mess, finder is a mess, i cannot run supermongo on it, the color scheme looks dull, iweb is gone...

fortunately they didn't abandon expose completely: by default, control+down arrow key shows all the windows just like what expose does (it's called "application windows" in system preferences). actually, this doesn't show all the windows, only for the application you are currently using... sigh

some interesting features:
-- double click an app on the dock will bring it into expose mode
-- in mission control, pick an app by moving the mouse to its group, then one finger up will slightly expand that group, allowing the desired window to be more easily selected

command+tab can also be used to switch among applications.

to sort of get rid of the horizontal lines that separate different groups in finder (when using sorting options other than "by name"): select "sort by none", then select "clean up by xxx"; this doesn't really work as "sort by xxx" as in 10.6 or before, but this is a start...

jobs

steve jobs (1955-2011), r.i.p.

tags

i have been using internet bookmark services to classify papers, as they provide the ability to label a paper with multiple tags. i've used citeulike for a while, and it worked fine. the only drawback is i have to be online to access my library and be able to search for papers with tags.

just found out that the bookmarks of firefox also allows one to label a page with tags. so now i can bookmark arxiv pages and give them any tags i want. in the bookmark page, there will be a list of tags and one can sort the papers by the tags. what i haven't figured out is how to find papers with more than one tag, which is certainly possible with citeulike.

browsers

here's a comparison of some of the major browsers for mac:

- firefox 5

• good: can sort bookmarks; lots of plugin/extensions
  
• bad: cannot open pdf within the browser; sync is not reliable (better use xmarks for that)
  

- safari 5

• good: runs fast on macs; can merge separate windows
  
• bad: cannot sort bookmarks (a tool called safarisort exists, but cannot specify which folders to sort); no sync option (safari version of xmarks doesn't work well for me)
  

- chrome

• good: clean interface; can sort bookmarks; can open pdf within browser
  
• bad: hangs a lot; sync option not reliable (better use xmarks)
  

sync

how to synchronize two computers? below are some ways when only one computer is used at a time (eg one is mainly used in office, the other elsewhere):

for documents/files that i use very often, i put them in a dropbox folder; dropbox is free and convenient to use, but it can only hold up to 2gb of data unless you pay for the extra space. also, if you move a file out of the folder, it will be removed from the dropbox folder on other machines; therefore, to keep files synchronized, they have to be in the dropbox folder.

for emails, it's very difficult to sync. the best way seems to be just using gmail or any other web-based mail services. it's possible to upload all the mails from programs such as thunderbird or mail to gmail, using the latter's imap capability.

for bookmarks, xmarks is easy to use and is free. the basic idea is like dropbox -- storing the bookmarks on the cloud. or wait for firefox 4, which has a built-in bookmark syncing capability.

for all other files, i think rsync is the most convenient way. you can set up ssh so that no password/pass phrase is required to login from one computer to another -- this saves a lot of typing whenever you do rsync! furthermore, rsync is fast, scriptable (see eg this article) and easy to customize, and has the ability to do a dry run (ie only showing what will be sync'ed without actually syncing). i found it much easier than using unison.