users

One drawback to having multiple users on OS X is there is no easy way to limit the amount of disk space used by that user. If a user has write access to a file system, then they can fill the drive until there is no space left for others. For the most part this just takes some chatting with the other members of a household or workplace, but to avoid confrontations you can set up the system in various ways to limit a user's disk space use.

Partitions

If you know exactly how many people will be using … Read more

Sometimes people may find their hard-drive space being progressively used up, and there are many reasons why this could happen; however, though people will generally look in their documents, movies, music, and other standard home directory folders to find large files, they may not touch the Library folder.

What is the user Library?The Library folder is a location for applications and system processes to store settings and shared resources. For instance, you can put a Web plug-in in the "Internet Plug-Ins" folder and it will be used by any Web browser. There is no need to have … Read more

Sometimes when troubleshooting problems with a user account, the easiest solution is to create a new account and migrate your data over to it, instead of finding the roots of the problem (of which there might be many) and fixing them. The problem with migrating to a new account is OS X by default is set up to prevent access to documents in other accounts, so when you go to your previous home folder, you are blocked from viewing the files.

Additionally, while you can change the permissions for files and copy them to your new account, there may be … Read more

Apparently dissatisfied with a redesign that buries much of their influence, hard-core users of social-news site Digg have been gaming its "Top News" page so that it's dominated by links to rival site Reddit.

The "Digg Version 4" relaunch, following an alpha test, was rolled out to the general public last week.

In order to maintain relevance in a world where users' individual "social graphs" on Twitter and Facebook bear a significant weight on news consumption, the new Digg promises a custom experience for individual users rather than the "old" Digg … Read more

The next version of Ubuntu will get multitouch interface abilities, catching the Linux operating system up to Windows and Mac OS X in at least one domain.

"Every single major PC manufacturer has been asking for a touch story on Linux. This has been one of the major missing points for Linux in the PC ecosystem," said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the company called Canonical that develops and supports Ubuntu. But multitouch support will arrive in the next version of Ubuntu, 10.10, aka Maverick Meerkat.

Adding multitouch isn't easy, particularly in the open-source world of Linux … Read more

Beloved CNET to the Rescue listeners:

Next week's show is all about wire management, so we thought it would be fun to highlight some of the beautiful (and not so beautiful) wire management techniques you're using in your home and/or office. Send us a picture of your handy-work, and we'll take some of the best and worst creations to showcase on the show, as well as in the show notes.

We don't have any prizes to give out beyond a virtual pat on the back, and the potential adoration or abject disgust of fellow CNET … Read more

Android app developers looking for user interface inspiration now have something to help get the process going: a cold, sharp piece of laser cut metal that promises to speed up the design mock-up process.

Remember the super thin, laser-cut iPhone user interface design stencil kit from Seattle-based Design Commission? The group has just come out with a follow-up version for Android developers.

The new kit, which retails for $25 (plus $5 shipping), features 150 percent scale cut-outs of standard Google Android OS buttons and iconography, as well as a mechanical pencil and some stickers. Developers can use the stencil to … Read more

Mozilla said it hopes to release its second beta version of Firefox 4 "on or about July 22," bringing Mac users a major new user interface that the first beta enabled by default only on Windows.

That feature, called tabs on top, follows the look of Google Chrome and Opera, in which tabs get top billing over the address bar. It's not revolutionary, but it's hard to change the habits of software used by hundreds of millions of people, so Mozilla has made it easy to switch off and has been taking pains to explain its tab rationale. … Read more

The venerable dialog box, long a staple of software design, faces extinction or at least endangered-species status in Firefox.

Mozilla designer Stephen Horlander has published Firefox interface mock-ups that illustrate how the browser could look with some options set through a preferences tab rather than through a preferences dialog box.

The designs are experimental, but some of the work is proceeding already. For example, Firefox's new interface for managing add-ons uses this "in-content" interface, and Firefox's about:config controls have appeared in a browser tab for years.

Moving away from dialog boxes is by no means … Read more