Disabling OS X Lion's Resume feature

Mac OS X Lion is out and it includes a feature that is useful to some but irritating to others.  That feature is Resume.  Imagine working in a Pages document and right before you hit the save button, the power goes out or you accidentally exit the application.  In the past you would utter some expletive and relaunch the application and redo your work.  With Lions resume feature you needn't worry.  Applications designed to use this feature will resume exactly where they left off including the position of the cursor at the time of exit.

However, several of my colleagues have noted situations where the feature is annoying or embarrassing.  I've noticed that the resume feature will open all Safari windows active when I excited the app.  This can get annoying since I often times have several tabs open when I close Safari.  This can be quite embarrassing if you exited the browser while surfing twitter or Amazon.com. Later your boss or a colleagues comes over to demo something on the company Intranet and the first thing they see when you launch Safari is your review of adult diapers.

Fortunately you can turn this off.  Here's how.
Screen Shot 2011 07 29 at 11 15 21 AM
From System Preferences select General. Uncheck the "Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps". Unfortunately, it's a global system preference so you won't have Lion's Resume safety net from other apps.

it’s called ‘beta’ software.

Downloading & installing beta versions of iOS is akin to moving into a near-new house with missing windows, no carpet & some furnishing. In other words, it’s a building site. If you don’t understand this distinction, then you have no business installing it.

I blame this expectation on Google leaving the beta tag on their services for so long.

Mounting MobileMe iDisk on Windows XP

One of the discussions on the Apple MobileMe iDisk forum is how to get iDisk mounted as a drive on Windows XP. While Apple has provided instructions on how to do this on Vista nothing was said about XP. The solution that worked for me was similar to the one that Apple provided for Vista and involves using the "Add Network Place" wizard.

mounting-idisk-on-windows-xp

If you’re using Windows XP, open the Explorer, click Computer, and then click “Map network drive” in the toolbar. Update: Apple has updated the MobileMe client for Windows. The instructions for Vista seem to work for Windows XP as well. Follow the instructions as above, enter http://idisk.me.com/[username] in the folder field, and click “Connect using a different user name.” Enter your MobileMe member name and password, and then click OK. That's it. You are done. No need to read the rest of this. Then click the link that says "Sign up for online storage or connect to a network server" to launch the "Add Network Place" wizard. Then Click OK.

Click to choose a network location and click next.

choose-a-network-location

Then type http://idisk.me.com/[username] in the folder field, and click next.

enter-idsk-info

Enter your MobileMe member name and password, and then click OK. This mounts your iDisk on your desktop, so you can work with it as you would any other hard disk.

mobileme-username-and-password1

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