Under Vista it’s far less obvious, but the setting is there if you know where to look for it.

First, go to Power options in the control panel. I find it easiest to do this kind of thing by bringing up the Start menu and then typing (in this case) power, and then selecting Power Options:

Next, in the Power Options window, don’t click on change plan settings as it’s somewhat buried in there nowadays. Instead, select the Require a password on wakeup link that’s lurking in the top-left of the window:

You will then be presented with a window which looks useful, but in fact the Don’t require a password option you’ve been looking for is greyed out — you can’t select it! This is because you first need to click on Change settings that are currently unavailable:

Then confirm you’re happy for the change to be made:

And finally you’re in a position to select the option:

Then click on Save changes and you’re done. (I know, it shouldn’t be that hard, but c’est la vie with Vista at times.)

It’s worth repeating that you should only set this option if you’re happy that someone with no knowledge of your login details can walk up to your suspended Vista session, wake it up, and start doing stuff as you.

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I’ll explain (I think I’d better ).

Mac OS is pretty complete out of the box. If you’d like to burn an ISO image onto CD, or browse that ISO image, or ssh to another host, or use VNC, or… then it’s all already there, well integrated and working from the start.

Windows isn’t like that — the basic OS lacks a lot of functionality. If you’re going to burn an ISO, or browse one then you’ll need something like Nero. If you’d like to ssh to another machine then you download putty, if you’re going to connect to another machine using VNC then you’ll need that, and so on.

What you end up with is a whole host of extra software, all pretty much working, but all pulling in slightly different directions and all clearly written by different companies with different ideas about the user interface, and differing levels of integration with the whole.

Firefox and friends are also a little like that. The basic functionality is in the application, but all the extra frills are plugins, written by many different people. Many of the plugins are a little quirky, and they all tend to pull in slightly different directions — sometimes interacting badly with each other. It works, but it’s not elegant.

Microsoft and the Open Source Community do this for very different reasons. Microsoft does it to spread their programming effort as thinly as possible (I guess they’d say as efficiently as possible), always concentrating on ‘value’, and never on quality. The Open Source Community do it out of necessity: not everyone can be hacking the central code all the time, it’s just not practical, and the plugin approach enables a huge number of people to work on additional functionality whilst keeping the project manageable.

The world would be a much poorer place without open source software, but there is a price to pay. The plugin approach that open source development engenders leads to some great software (I wouldn’t give up my Squeezeboxes for the world for example, and my squeezeserver is bristling with plugins), but those systems do sometimes feel like they’re all elbows and knees — rather awkward, and somewhat less than elegant.

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Coming to Mac OS X from Windows (XP and Vista), I missed being able to lock my session using a simple key-chord. I work in a shared office so it’s sensible to lock the session every time I walk away — something I do regularly.

In Windows, you simply press Windows-L and that’s it — time to go. Mac OS X Leopard doesn’t provide anything as succinct as standard, but there are ways.

Firstly, there are a couple of solutions that are accepted as standard ways of doing this — but unfortunately both have problems. I’ll cover these methods first in case they work for you, and then I’ll cover a solution that really is as quick and easy to use as the Windows’ lock screen key chord.

Partial solution number one: use a hot corner

A hot corner allows you to drop into the screen saver by moving the cursor to a chosen corner of the screen. To do this, first go to System Preferences->Desktop & Screen Saver and click on Hot Corners… Then select Start Screen Saver for one of the corners:

Now, when you place the cursor in that corner (I chose the bottom-left), the screen saver will start.

Of course, this doesn’t help unless your system is configured to require a password when woken from the screen saver. You can set that in System Preferences->Security:

And that’s it. Now, before you walk away from your Mac, just drop the cursor into the bottom-left corner of the screen.

However, there is a problem with this method — at least for me — as I don’t want the system to prompt for a password on wakeup. I end up typing my password far too often — every time I’ve left the machine alone long enough for the screen saver to start.

What I want is the Mac to remain unlocked until I explicitly lock it. So, on to solution two…

Partial solution number two: select a pull-down from the menu bar

Here’s another way of locking the machine, and this one doesn’t require that you tick Require password to wake up this computer from sleep or screen saver.

The trick is to enable fast user switching in System Preferences->Accounts->Login Options:

which will then place your user name in the menu bar at the top of the screen.

When you want to lock the session, just click on your user name:and select Login Window… and you’re done. (You can also achieve a similar result by ticking Show Status in Menu Bar in Keychain’s preferences if you prefer.)

What’s my beef with this solution? The problem is that it’s still rather slow and fiddly — and it’s something I do regularly, so I want to just press and go, just as I did with Windows.

A full solution

To implement a full Windows-L style solution we need Dockables to provide us with an application that locks the Mac OS session, and Quicksilver to launch that application.

First, download and install Dockables from cocoaapp.com. This gives you a bunch of useful applications in a sub-folder of your Applications folder:

and the one we’re interested in is Lock Screen.

Next, download and install Blacktree’s Quicksilver and run it to configure a new Lock Screen key-chord. Quicksilver will present you with its main window — just quit that and instead move to Quicksilver’s menu bar at the top of the screen and select Triggers… from the drop-down menu.

In the Triggers window that appears, click on the + at the bottom and select HotKey.

A new window will appear. Click on the first field and start to type lock screen. Quicksilver will rapidly find the Lock Screen dockable you installed earlier. Click Save.

Nearly there

You now have a new command, but with no trigger. So click on the None in your new command,

click in the input field labelled Hot Key: and press the key combination you wish to use to lock your session from now on. (I chose alt+cmd+L because the obvious choice – cmd+L — is already used by Thunderbird — my email client.)

I suggest you don’t use the ctrl key as part of your hot key-chord. If you do then quicksilver presents this dialog every time you type the chord:

Now, having typed a key-chord (which doesn’t include ctrl), exit the Triggers window and you have yourself a new Lock Screen hot key-chord: alt+cmd+L in the example above.

And finally, tweak some settings

You need quicksilver to run at all times, so bring up Quicksilver’s preferences (available from the Quicksilver menu in the menu bar at the top of the screen):

and tick Start at login. You may also want to tidy up the dock a little — as quicksilver is running all the time I’d rather it didn’t appear in the dock and instead appeared in the menu bar:

so I untick Show icon in dock (and I also tick the option check for updates):

And that’s everything sorted. Any time you need your display locked, just type alt+cmd+L…

and walk away…

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Spotify is a source of music that seems too good to be true, but it’s there, it’s legit, and it allows you to listen to pretty much any music you like for free.

The player runs on both PC and Mac (and even Linux under Wine), and it would seem to have an extensive catalogue. The Enemy, for example, is recent and not exactly mainstream pop, but they’re there to be listened to. (They’re good — why not check them out?)

Spotify also has a radio tab, where you can specify which genres you’re interested in, and which decades and the player feeds you relevant music (interspersed with adverts but hey, what did you expect?).

Stop press!

Spotify has announced that they’re allowing UK users to join without the need for an invitation — so if you’re based in the UK then the rest of this article is no longer relevant to you — you can simply visit www.spotify.com and sign up.

Sorry — no invitations left

I’ve handed out all my invitations now I’m afraid — sorry. This article used to say:

If you’re outside of the UK then Spotify is free by invitation only (if at all), and I have some invitations to give away. If you’d like an invitation then drop a comment at the end of this article and I’ll send you one, while stocks last

I’m not connected with the guys at spotify in any way, but such a worthy app deserves to be heard.

Once you’re invited

There will be a link in the email — follow that link, download the app, and you’re there.

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A source of frustration

Not dangerous, but irritating until you figure it out: when an application is not the foreground app (i.e. mouse and keyboard input isn’t going there at the moment and the application’s menu bar is not at the top of the screen), then clicking on the application’s window will make it the foreground app, but the mouse click is not forwarded to the application.

So for example: with Windows, clicking on a link in web browser will follow that link, regardless of whether the application is the foreground app. With Mac OS X, if some other application is currently the foreground app then your first click will just select the web browser as the new foreground app — it will take a further mouse click to actually follow the link. So with Mac OS X you often have to click twice.

More dangerous

Dragging a folder to somewhere that already contains a folder of the same name results in very different behaviour. If you’re used to Windows then you may lose data.

Say I have a new Franz Ferdinand CD ripped and ready for my music collection. The music is in a folder named after the album, which is itself in a folder named after the artist.

With Windows, I can drag the new ‘Franz Ferdinand” folder from my ripping area to my music area and it will say

I say yes and it’s job done. The new Franz Ferdinand folder’s contents will be merged with the existing Franz Ferdinand folder’s contents in my music collection.

With Mac OS X, the OS says

Note the difference: ”Franz Ferdinand” is being replaced. So if I click on replace then all my previous albums by that artist are gone — not at all what I intended!

Another subtlety

There are others, I’m sure, but another dangerous difference in file manipulation when you’re used to the way Windows does it is this:

Drag a folder from one file-store window to another and then change your mind and hit delete (cmd+backspace in Mac OS X).

Under Windows, the destination window is now in the foreground, so you end up deleting the destination copy.

Under Mac OS X, the destination folder is highlighted (hint: it’s highlighted in grey not blue — that’s the subliminal cue), but it’s still the source finder window that’s the foreground app, so you end up deleting the source rather than the destination copy.

As with much of the Mac OS X vs Windows behaviour, the Mac OS way is usually better thought out, but that doesn’t stop it from being dangerously different if you’re used to the way Windows does things. Here’s hoping that this article will save some people some grief.

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I have an Epson R1800 (the A3 variant of the R800) plugged into a PC running Windows and shared on the home network.

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