Long-time Mac users probably have different solutions for this problem, but as a newbie, the screen going dim after a certain period of time - without an intuitive way to switch this off - drove me crazy! I wanted to enjoy my slideshow, video, presentation, reading something etc. and suddenly it all went dark. Arggghhh.

So I was delighted when I found

Caffeine, a super-light program sitting in your menu bar that prevents your Mac from going to sleep/starting screen savers.

Note that Caffeine doesn’t help if you close the lid - if you want your Mac to stay awake in this case, InsomniaX is your thing - it disables the sleep when closing the lid so you can listen to music/control your Mac with the remote etc.

Since I bought my Mac, Safari has been my primary browser of choice. I have been using Firefox sporadically too - you can’t do serious web development without FireBug! Safari is light, zippy and renders wonderfully looking OS X look’n'feel pages - however with the arrival of Firefox 3 I am really pondering to ditch it in favor of FF (still no OS X look in there, tho’ ;-)). Firefox 3 beta 5 is just phenomenal - fast, powerful, and it has all the stuff I am missing from Safari (FireBug, del.icio.us toolbar, DOM Inspector, ton of other extensions) so I am really thinking that I will remain a Safari user on my iPhone only.

However, FF3 is missing some functionality I am depending on - most notably jssh support - DOM inspector was removed too, but can be installed as an add-on, and since beta 4 FireBug is working, so no major hurdles there. However, jssh, as usually was a harder nut to crack.

Fortunately Angrez, FireWatir’s author pointed me to the right direction - which was in this case compiling Firefox 3 with jssh support! Here’s how:

• Download the latest tarball (currently Firefox 3.0b5) from the FireFox source code ftp
• Follow these steps up to the 3rd point
• My .mozconfig file - assembled from this post and the mozilla developer docs
  (put it into our home folder)
• Compile time!

  cd mozilla; make -f client.mk build
  

  1. cd mozilla; make -f client.mk build
That’s it! Easy, huh?

Sit back, enjoy your coffee and in a few minutes you’ll have your own, new hot FF build with jssh support!

By the way, FireWatir 1.1 hit the streets just today! Grab it and let the testing commence!