1Password and a New Path

There are a few applications that have become so ingrained in my workflow that I consider them to be essentials. One such application is 1Password by Agile Bits, however I've recently run into some trouble with it. You see the program is a password manager which integrates with your browser (Safari, Firefox and Chrome) via an extension. The trouble is that the extension is not able to connect to the application anymore for some reason - I've not tried with Chrome but it seems to be the same with both Safari and Firefox. Let's hope the next release solves the problem; it's annoying to have to work around this issue.

On a related but more social note, I'm trying out a new application for my phone called "Path". The idea seems to be similar to Facebook and Foursquare but the UI is much cleaner and more user friendly. It's also designed to be much more reserved for your inner circle. The designers have limited you to 150 friends for this purpose which, if I remember correctly, is based on a magical number. This number is supposedly the maximum number of people that the average person is really friends with and thinks of often. My circle is significantly smaller than that but I've always been a little more introverted than most others!

RAWR

As you savvy individuals might have guessed by the title of this post I upgraded to OS X Lion this morning and have been playing with it for most of the day. My MacBook Pro is running straight up OS X Lion and my iMac is running OS X Lion Server just to give me something else to play with. All in all I'm happy with the quality of the product with just one exception... what seems to me to be a serious issue with Lion is in how it deals with the Sandy Bridge Intel Graphics cards that can be found in the newest of the high end Apple laptops.

The operating system runs measurably slower when the laptop is switched to it's integrated graphics card - the solution, or perhaps workaround, is simply to disable automatic graphics switching. While this bandaids the problem it's hardly a viable fix since the AMD graphics card uses significantly more power which drains your battery much faster. From what I've heard this issue is well known and heavily discussed at the WWDC by developpers. I'm crossing my fingers that this gets sorted out with 10.7.1 in the very near future; here's hoping!

Nerdtacular

So I've been toying with some AppleScript and a little application called Proximity (download) which gives you some pretty neat features. Currently I've got things set up to start the screen saver and require a password to wake it when my phone moves out of bluetooth range. When I come back into range it unlocks the screen saver and sets it to no longer require a password.

Big deal I hear you say, what if the situation was as such - you come home from mowing the lawn and when you walk through the door your music starts playing and your computer announces that while you were out you've received 4 new e-mail messages. Taking this a small step further you could, with the addition of some hardware, have the garage door open as you pull up the driveway, have the lights turn on and have the shades on your windows close. Of course this could all happen automatically in reverse when you leave the house.

What a way to spend a holiday weekend right?