It happens so often: a Mac web designer creates a site that looks amazing in Firefox and Safari. It validates flawlessly.

And then one day they happen to be looking at it on a friend's Windows machine running Internet Explorer, and it looks like hell: padding and margin settings blown out, weird little bugs popping up all over the place, and that wonderful design generally shredded.

The usual suggestion is to buy a full copy of Microsoft Windows (cha-ching!) and either use Boot Camp (rebooting every time you want to test a tweak to your design) or pony up the cash for virtualization software. Either way, you're dropping a chunk of change and using up a boatload of disk space.

Perhaps more appealing, you could buy CrossOver Mac, which for $60 lets you install and run lots of Windows software on your Mac.

But if all you want to do is test web sites, there's a much cheaper solution to your problem. As in free.

ies4osx is a Mac-friendly version of IEs 4 Linux, which uses the open-source WINE project to run slimmed-down versions of IE 5, 5.5, 6 and 7. (CrossOver Mac uses WINE as well.)

Installation is drop-dead easy:

• download a disk image, and drag the folder it contains to your Applications folder,
• download, unzip and run the ies4osx installer,
• and run ies4osx itself to download your choice of flavours of IE.

The result? IE icons in your Applications folder, ready for you to launch 'em.

One little thing: when you run IE, it actually opens in X11, which is installed automatically in OS X 10.5, but is optional in earlier editions - Tiger users, dig out that installation disk.

A bigger issue: this only works for Intel-based Macs. G5 and G4 owners, my sympathies.

If my experience so far is typical, ies4osx is a winner. The installation process was flawless (although it would have been nice to have a progress indicator as the app installed various versions of IE -- as it turned out, that was only about 10 minutes or so).

So far so good on running IE... even simple Flash movies (like the ones that make up the headlines on the Social Signal blog) render fine, although more complex ones seem to choke.

So: Windows software without Windows, and without breaking out the Visa. Nice.

Like so much that comes from Apple, OS X 10.5 is a thing of beauty. Really and truly.

Oh, there are glitches like the way transluscent menu bar works... but on the whole, it's very nice.

Except...

After about a month of Leopardy goodness, here are a few of the spots I'm not enjoying so much. In fact, they're so thoroughly on my nerves that they've qualified as my Vendetta of the Week:

• Spaces. That virtual desktop feature looked so promising at the outset, so wonderfully and thoughtfully implemented. But once you start launching documents and finding them turning up in seemingly arbitrary locations, and switching applications only to be taken to entirely unexpected desktops, the frustration mounts. I don't mind learning how a feature's quirks and foibles, and I'm prepared to put up with arbitrary behaviors... but not capricious, inconsistent ones. Kindly pick a system and stick to it, Apple.
• My keyboard freezing. I'm not the only one with this problem: the system suddenly stops recognizing the keyboard for about a minute at a time. (Just the laptop keyboard; a USB keyboard still works fine.) Once it starts happening, the only way to stop it is to restart the computer. (Actually, I just noticed a forum post that suggests toggling Num Lock. By god, it worked. It's a pain, but it worked.) ...but only temporarily. I restarted. Update: Apple has released a fix.
• The firewall. It's a colossal step backward from a place that wasn't that far forward to begin with. Yes, it's certainly simpler and easier to use; stripping out most of the useful features will do that for you.
• Time Machine. As backup software, it couldn't be simpler, and bravo. But why can't I easily set my own preferred interval for backups... or force a backup right now?

Those are my beefs with Leopard. What are yours?

Added: How could I have forgotten? Clicking the "Save" button for Mail.app attachments used to launch a handy dialog box allowing you to pick a destination folder. Now, it just dumps those files into a single pre-defined location – which I never, ever want to do. (To get around this, hold the button down and choose from the menu that appears.)

We're a little Basecamp-crazy over here at Social Signal, and a lot RSS-crazy. So the fact that Basecamp spits out a handy RSS feed that updates you when your projects to much as twitch is, to us, a Good Thing.

But I've never been able to make reading the Basecamp feed a frictionless part of my daily workflow. That's why I was intrigued by one of the new features in the latest version of the Macintosh operation system, OS X 10.5 (known to its friends and marketers as Leopard).

The new version of Mail included with Leopard allows you to subscribe to an RSS feed right alongside your email messages. Which looks like a perfect solution...

...until you try adding the Basecamp feed.

Basecamp, being a secure site where you can plan projects without worrying that the world is peering over your shoulder, very sensibly password-protects its RSS feeds. Mail, unfortunately, is baffled by feeds that require authentication. (And what's worse, it doesn't tell you that's what's the matter.)

So what's the solution? Thanks to the fertile mind of one Kanuck54, a user on Apple's support forums, there's an easy way to get around Mail's minor failing:

The trick I found is getting the authentication information into your keychain.

You can open Keychain Access and add it yourself, but the easiest way is to set Safari as your default RSS reader, open the RSS feed with Safari, and when you enter the username and password tell it to add it to your keychain.

Then go ahead and add the feed to Mail (note the link in Safari to do this doesn't work), and give it permanent access to the keychain entry. Everything should now be good to go.

I tried this without setting Safari as my default RSS reader; the tip worked fine.

And by the way, Safari turns out to be a bit of a Rosetta Stone (that's this kind of Rosetta, not that kind of Rosetta) when it comes to figuring out how to make Mail jump through fiery hoops while juggling kittens and singing The Girl from Ipanema. Check out this tip on including HTML and CSS – including handy things like links to external images – in an email signature.

(doctor to patient on operating table)...And while we're in there, we figure we'll upgrade you to Mac OS X 10.5 'Leopard'.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about Skitch, the Mac-only screen-capture-and-annotation tool from Plasq, the people who brought you Comic Life.

Now I've been given a handful of invitations to their beta... and the first has already been spoken for. (Hello, Alex.) Whoever'd like theirs, just leave a comment below...

Update: And be sure to include your email address, either in the comment or via our contact page.

 

 

Funny thing – I was just thinking yesterday how unnecessarily complex it is to illustrate one of these posts with a screenshot, especially a cropped and annotated one. Grab the shot (either to the clipboard or my hard drive), fire up Photoshop, make my changes, save the screenshot in a web-friendly format, upload it to the Social Signal site... blecch.

I mean, I love you people, and there's nothing I wouldn't do for our readers... but that's a lot of effort. And I'm an innately lazy person.

Apparently the folks at Plasq know some innately lazy people, too, who have served as the inspiration for their latest project (Mac only, as far as I can tell): Skitch.

If you've recently bought a Mac, you probably know Plasq from the brilliant Comic Life application that came bundled with your new computer. It's an elegant, intuitive and fabulously addictive way to turn your photos (or other digital graphics) into comic book pages.

Take the same simple but powerful approach to interface design, apply it to the challenge of screenshots for bloggers, add a little file hosting (more on that in a moment) and you've got Skitch, which is now in beta.

Skitch lets you take quick and easy screenshots – full screen, an individual window, a marquee selection – that you then annotate, mark up, resize and otherwise alter, before clicking a button that uploads it to the Skitch server and opens a corresponding page in your browser.

Click one of the buttons on that page, and the code to embed the image is copied to your clipboard, ready to be dropped into your blog post.

And that's it. You've never even had to glance at a dialog box or browse your hard drive.

If you don't like the thought of your image being hosted on Skitch's server, don't worry: you can enter FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, .mac or Flickr info in Skitch's preferences. And if you insist on going old-school and saving it to your hard drive (who does that any more?) Skitch will let you do that too.

A few quibbles: Skitch is no Photoshop, and your tools are very, very limited – but they do a lot within those limits. The inability to transform annotations (other than text) once they're on the image is annoying at first... except that it's so easy to create new ones, a do-over isn't as irritating as you'd think. Conspicuous by its absence from the list of supported file formats is the venerable GIF, but I'll get over it.

Especially since it was literally less than 24 hours between my reflecting on how much of a pain screenshots can be, and Plasq inviting me to the Skitch beta. Even if they never get around to integrating that level of telepathic responsiveness into Skitch, it's going to be a great little tool.