nutMac

I drive a lot from client to client so I tend to spend a great deal of time on the road. About a year ago I started to listen to podcasts religiously as an outlet for my ever increasing frustration with monotonous radio shows and repeating playlists. Some of the first podcasts I listened to then was BoagWorld, This Week in Tech and some Mac Radio show with two obnoxiously cheesy radio personalities pretending to care about Mac computers but are really just paid to pedal the latest offerings from their sponsors.

Along the way many podcasts have come and gone in my rotation as I grew tired of poor audio quality, lackluster hosts and overall poor choices of material to broadcast. BoagWorld fell by the wayside once it seemed that Paul and Marcus had lost the spark and chemistry they once had, This Week in Tech fell out of favor with me when it became obvious that Leo Laporte was clearly a tech pimp who’s opinions were constantly in conflict between one production and another (TWiT vs. MacBreak Weekly) seemly just to fuel what ever fire would get him the most advertising revenue. Countless other podcasts have come and gone and still do in my quest to find new things to listen to (the fact that I have the choice is what makes podcasts great).

Over the past year though I found a few gems; Spark, Search Engine, The Linux Action Show, The Vinyl Cafe, You Suck at Web Design, Alt Text, Buzz Out Loud, The Hour, and my personal favorite… MacBreak Tech. It’s this last one, MacBreak Tech, that breaks all convention as far as format is concerned. The CBC productions, Spark and Search Engine, are just that… CBC productions. The Linux Action Show and Buzz out Loud follow a familiar news, reviews and Q&A format. The Vinyl Cafe, The Hour, Y.S.A.W.D., and Alt Text are purely for entertainment… But MacBreak Tech? Man, if you are reading this blog then MacBreak tech is for you.

So you are a geek right? Of course you are. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. And by default you love Macs (if not than you are really off course and better look at getting your GPS navigation unit fixed). So, Mac geek, imagine passing the water cooler at the office and everyone is taking about Survivor, JailBreak (not the iPhone hacking kind that might interest you) or Grey’s Anatomy and you think to yourself, “Man wouldn’t it be great to hang with a bunch of Mac geeks like me?” MacBreak Tech is exactly that, a bunch of Mac geeks sitting around the proverbial office water cooler talking about the mac geekery that truly interests you. You coming away with a new opinion, perspective or idea and a new trick or tidbit of information that you might not have known previously. MacBreak tech is the ONLY Mac podcast worth anything right now. It is a true gem glistening from the inner depths of my iPod.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have a few email interactions with MacBreak Tech’s main host, PixelCops John Foster, spurred by a comment I posted after listening to one of their particularly interesting podcasts reviewing Path Finder (yes, I am THAT fanboy). Here is a guy that really and truly puts himself into a podcast. He is the same guy behind the scenes as he is in the show, totally approachable with little to no ego about him. A genuinely cool guy… in the geek sense of the word.

If you haven’t done so already, I strongly urge you to go into iTunes and subscribe to MacBreak Tech. You will thank me for it.

I picked up my copy of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard from the Apple Store area of BestBuy (it must be a new thing, I didn’t question it) last night. I rushed in at 6:00pm sharp to beat the crowds (the Apple rep there told me there would be a lineup) only to find a lonely unmanned stall with a full compliment of Leopard boxes locked behind glass… not a single copy sold. I swear I am the only Mac user in Kitchener Ontario… Anyhow, I spent the evening downloading all the latest releases of all my apps (VersionTracker Pro.app is the bomb for that stuff), and backing up my drives, and backing those up on more drives, and so on. Then this morning I pulled out TechTool Pro and ran the full suite, to get me all optimized and what not (I would hate to copy over a mess of frags and discombobulations to the new setup). I also had a fresh new 500 Gb SATA drive ready to migrate to. Once I felt safe and secure, I popped in my Leopard DVD. No, I did not perform any sick, Apple product disrobing ceremony and no, I most certainly will not post pictures of how I opened the box.

So all went smoothly despite all the FUD I had read on MacFixit over the last few days. The install and migration took all of about two hours, including updating apps that didn’t make the cut so well and resetting keyboard shortcuts that got jumbled in transit. So here are a few thoughts;

• Finder…

  Cooler than before… but it still sucks. Path Finder still blows it out of the water from a productivity standpoint.

• Coverflow

  Coverflow is cool if you don’t keep anything in folders, but not so cool when you actually organize your life. You know where coverflow is cool? In iTunes! ‘Nuff said.

• Quick Look…

  Path Finder has had that built right in for quite some time and still does it better IMHO.

• iChat…

  I might have to open that app for the second time since it’s introduction way back when… I do think the desktop sharing is going to be cool though

• Time Machine…

  Now here is a great piece of software that is going to get in the wrong hands and generate all sorts of false security. For a guy like me this is cool because I will still do my regular cron backups, but I will have time machine going too. Why? Because time machine only keeps backups for as long as there is space n the disk to hold it. You can’t just keep shoveling crap into and figure it will be there for all time. I guess what I am saying is, don’t start arbitrarily cleaning off your main drive without a care in the world because you think Time Machine has got your back. I still recommend a daily regiment of backup, preferably automated.

• The Dock…

  There is a lot of extraneous visual information here that really impedes productivity. Until I get used to seeing reflections and transparencies and swoopty Web2.0-like lines and what not, I am going to struggle to see active versus inactive apps. This isn’t a huge deal for me though since I rarely use the dock but still, trying to spot those shining lights is a little tough, especially if you use the default star-scape desktop background.

• Stacks…

  Could be cool and I definitely plan to really play around with it. This is one of those new features, like expose, that might be a sleeper concept but something that everyone should use to make life faster. As of right now though I have the two default stacks. I have one for my Downloads folder (which I made myself and put in a special place, so how did it know where to find it?) and one for my Documents folder. And my documents folder is not one that should ever be sprung open without fair warning. It’s a big, scary, messy, unorganized place that should strike fear into all those who stumble upon it unsuspectingly.

• Front Row???

  Did I miss this in the press release somewhere? I have a Mac Pro… which has no IR capabilities… therefor Front Row is disabled… except now??? I did try to hack it a long time ago, but the hack never worked. Or did it?

• Speed…

  For all the griping that I may have had with all points above, that all pails by comparison to the fact that Leopard is FAST. Nothing add up to productivity like speed and Leopard has bags of it!

Was it all that bad to have made the switch? No, I am actually glad I did. The experience so far has been enjoyable… I just complain a lot. It was a quick and painless transition that could not have been any easier. WELL worth the $129 price tag… worth double if you ask me.

Technorati Tags: Mac, OS X, 10.5, Leopard

By now you must all be aware of my dislike of writing, doing, or enacting anything in a web browser. That being said I am also an advocate of being mobile so I live in a virtual world with virtual contradictions. I prefer blogging services that exist remotely to ones that live on my desktop, I prefer webmail to pop accounts, etc… but what all of these have in common is their dependence on a browser interface in order to take part and most of these don’t have the greatest appreciation for Safari (my browser of choice).

In most cases I have found way around this (most of them involving TextMate and some sort of plugin) but in the instance of webmail, gmail in particular, I was pretty much stuck. Gmail’s Safari suppport, or lack thereof, is legendary and not improving and since Safari 3.0 it’s been absolutely deplorable. This sent me on a search for solutions a few months back and that’s when I came across MailPlane, a “desktop” solution for power gmail users like myself. I say “desktop” tentatively simply because it is from my uneducated standpoint a specialized web browser that looks to be built on Camino but that is purely speculation.

Mailplane has become a permanent part of my daily workflow. I manage a number of gmail accounts easily and efficiently from MailPlane, view images and attachments without a hiccup, switch from one account to another with one key stroke, drag and drop attachments (now that is cool) and engage in IM chats via the built in Google Talk.

Currently in beta, I know the developers plan to go public with MailPlane very soon. To learn more, visit mailplaneapp.com.

Technorati Tags: MailPlane, Mail, Mail Plane, web mail, webmail

So it’s been a week or so since the new iMacs and their respective keyboards were introduced and I have been intentionally quite about the matter simply because I don’t like to fuel unfounded rumors and complaints when I have no solid proof or experience. So I just kept my mouth tightly closed until I got to my local Carbon Computing to actually put both of these new Apple Inc. offerings to the test.

Here is what I can tell before even walking in the door; Apple Inc. seems hell bent on ripping off a much larger chunk of the market share than previously enjoyed in years past. Why? Who offers more, MUCH MORE, for that much less? Lets put it this way, to get the fastest mac mini at 2.0 GHz with the most amount of storage (160 GB) available to it and a 23″ Cinema display will run you about $1773. Now have a look at the base model 24″ iMac; more processor power, twice the storage, the ability to run multiple monitors on a graphics card that far exceeds the sad excuse for video output on the mini, built-in iSight… for $1799. I don’t know about you but that is the best way to spend $26 no matter where you come from!

Now I am all for cheaper computers and better savings and all, but where are the savings coming from? Not off the profit margins! Apples shareholders are not known for taking a hit an keeping quite about it. Granted many of the components come down in price over time, but with all the components they’ve added to the new iMacs I really wonder how they managed to drop the price so far. I hope it’s not been in shoddy manufacturing processes.

My thoughts after physically touching and seeing the iMacs side by side with their white predecessors? WOW on looks! The new iMacs look stellar by design and function. The new, glass covered screens are true and brilliant. Not enough good can be said about that improvement from flat to glossy (actually makes me jealous just owning a regular HD 23″ Cinema). The ports are still a bitch to get at but it’s all about keeping the visible faces clean so I fully understand there, but just on USB on the side would have been nice. Though the guts aren’t all that different from the previous iMacs, and it’s hard to gauge when simply opening the basic apps and such, but the new iMacs seem to be zippy enough. Keep in mind that I come from the Mac Pro world so it’s hard for me to be a judge of that sort of thing.

But that keyboard… mmm I don’t know. My impression of laptop keyboards is that the feel cheap and flimsy, so to model a desktop keyboard after that of a laptop seems wrong to me. I gave the new keyboards a spin and just could get behind the feel. Now I have read a lot of reports on the new keyboards improving peoples typing speed and reducing arm fatigue so I am sure I will end buying one for those reasons, but I have serious doubts that it’ll hold up to my regular key bashing abuses. It’s pretty sharp looking though, and very light weight. If I were one to care about this sort of thing, it would honestly suite my setup better; aluminum Mac Pro, aluminum Cinema display… aluminum keyboard perhaps?

Technorati Tags: iMac, Apple Inc., Mac Mini, Mac Pro, Cinema dispay

How many of you Mac users out there have heard of Skitch? If your a much a geek as me then you know about Skitch and chances you even have your beta copy and are sending out invites. For those of you that are… er… a little more normal, here is what Skitch is; Snap, Draw, Share! That’s it in a nutshell. A screen grabbing app with so much more.

There is no shortage of ways to dump your screen into a screen shot on a mac, from built in hot keys to native apps like the Grab.app found in the Applications > Utilities folder, to 3rd party apps like SnapZ ProX or SnapNDrag. But what all of these methods lack is a way annotating, marking up and sharing these screen shots. Never has it been so easy to snap draw and share screen shots and pictures before.

So lets put this app into working perspective which I will do from the perspective of a web designer, because… that’s what I know. I use this a lot to communicate with my customers and show them marked up designs, pointing area that I think need changing or explaining what I mean with certain terminology. It’s an indispensable tool for that purpose.

In the above example, I might snap a shot of the design I am working on, add some remarks and comments and then email it to my client, or perhaps post it on a server of my choice. You can even post it to your own mySkitch account if you don’t have any servers of your own. The brilliant part is Skitch will add the date and time to each image name so that you will never overwrite any image on upload and you will always know which image is the most current one. Then at the click of a button you can copy the URL or HTML code that Skitch generates to use in an email or website, etc…

I am serious when I say that it has never been easier to share desktop ideas.

Technorati Tags: Skitch, screen capture, screen grab, screen shot, OS X

Have you ever been using the Finder in OS X and wished it could do more? I remember when 10.4 came along and being so thrilled with the new finder. It was so advanced, it had a sidebar… The novelty wore off pretty quick when I still wanted tabs, breadcrumbs and more features. For a while I was using Captain FTP as my main file browser since it allowed tabbed browsing but it’s tough to push an app that was design for “here-to-there” file transfers into a common file browser. It was actually a bit cumbersome at it.

Then I came across Pathfinder, “Path Finder is an innovative file browser and manager with powerful tools to make you more productive on Mac OS X.” Indeed it is. I wasn’t sold on first try. The reality is I didn’t give it a fair shake. I had it open for about 2 minutes, convinced myself I didn’t like the GUI and moved on before so much as opening the app.

It wasn’t long before frustration with the Finder was overwhelming again and since a few months had passed, I thought I ought to try out Pathfinder again. This time, being determined to do away with Finder, I forced myself to use Pathfinder for a week. Well this time it didn’t take more than a day and I was completely hooked. This is what the Finder was always meant to be. Pathfinder allows total system control and file management. It’s a dock, a path finder, a breadcrumb, file manager, image browser, image converter, pdf viewer text and document editor, ftp client, terminal interface, console panel and so much more all wrapped into one.

It shares some things in common with Finder, like the sidebar that is capable of showing your volumes and shelving your frequently travelled folders and files for easy access. But that’s not all your sidebar needs to show. Click on the bar that defines what is being displayed below it and you will be presented with options such as shelf, volumes, processes, file history, folder history, selection path, info, permissions, iTunes browser, attributes, subversion, preview, hex terminal and console. With all of those choices, you might think that one sidebar is not enough. Well that’s why you can have three more, one on the right, one on the left and one below for a total of four programable sidebars, each with two programable panels. We’re talking total file management here!

With all of this you can imagine I could go on for ever about what I like to do with Pathfinder, so I’ve decided to limit it to some of my favorite features.

• Tabs - no common browser, whether it’s for the internet or file browser, should be without tabs. There is no excuse for it.

• Drop Stack - you can easily drag a file or folder from tab to tab, but if you haven’t yet figured out where you want to drop that file or folder, simply drop it into the “Drop Stack” and there it will remain until you find the right place to drop it.

• Breadcrumb - need I say more? Breadcrumbs are the single most important part of any navigation, so why limit them to websites?

• Convert image - resize, crop, and convert the file type of any image. This is ideal in my blogging workflow where I am constantly working images to fit into a particular page size on various blogs.

• Common sense - developers are constantly adding to and digging into their contextual menus. It seems as though Pathfinder has caught on to this. Most of most oft used contextual menus items are right there in the information panel, or the tool bar or in the sidebar, etc… One in particular that saves me a butt load of time is the “open package” button found in the information panel of any app or plugin or proprietary file type. Since the RapidWeaver themes I design are all packages, I find I use this button nearly every minute.

• Information - know everything about the selected file without hot-key combos or contextual menu selections. Select a file and, depending on your panel configurations, you can know all it’s information, attributes, and permissions right there in front of you.

You may like your Finder just fine, but it you are looking for more, get Pathfinder. Your productivity will go through the roof.

Technorati Tags: Pathfinder, Finder, OS X, Cocaotech

This really is a bit of a fluff piece but us Mac users have to find something to cheer about in out tiny Mac-o-sphere. I don’t know much of it’s history or origin, but I stumbled upon a great mac app rating site today, CoolMacApps.com. All I could really get from it was this:

CoolMacApps.com was born out of frustration… and out of an addiction; An addiction to cool software, and a frustration with the current top-ten lists and file repositories out there.

This was little more than a fun way to waist a few minutes in the day, and only served to confirm my feelings about a great number of apps I was aware of. One thing that came as a surprise on this app voting site was RapidWeavers placement in the number 1 spot. Not that I ever doubted RapidWeavers strength and ability, but what shocked me is that it has beet out some of the more generic, globally used apps like FireFox or Adium.

Recent polls have shown that only 8% of North Americans have engaged in deep internet activities like building web sites. On the flip side, nearly everyone has used a web browser or IM client. I find it hard to imagine that RapidWeaver, a web building tool, would beat out such staples to mac computing as a web browser and an IM client. It’s just not in the numbers.

What’s really at play? Well… Web 2.0, meet Community 2.0! I happen to have a bit of an insiders knowledge of the whole RapidWeaver machine. If I was a betting man, I would always put my investment dollars on the company with the ravenous, blood thirsty, go-to-battle-and-die-for-your-app kind of community backing that RapidWeaver has behind it. If you want to see what I mean sometime, go to the RapidWeaver support forum and just arbitrarily flame the app in any old thread and watch the blood bath that ensues. You’ll want to change your mailing address before embarking on such suicidal endeavors, mind you (and let it be known that I don’t actually condone forum trolling).

This isn’t to say that the ratings are rigged in anyway; I really do believe that RapidWeaver is an excellent app. But I do think that RapidWeaver does have an unfair advantage when the owners simply need to put out a single call to the one gathering place that you will likely find 90% of all RapidWeaver users and the hordes will flock by the thousands to pledge their allegiance to their beloved RapidWeaver.

Who did I vote for? Here is just a few: RapidWeaver (of course), Quicksilver, Sticky Windows, Parallels, TextMate, iClip, Inquisitor and NewsFire.

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Technorati Tags: CoolMacApps, Rapidweaver, FireFox, Adium, web 2.0

When you’re a web designer, screen space is never too plenty. Start developing for a multifaceted web content management system like RapidWeaver or WordPress and suddenly 23 inches of HD widescreen goodness is as crammed as the streets on Bangladesh at rush hour. I have many tricks that have come and gone; the dual monitors (which fill up as fast), the virtual desktops (most clients have been very unstable and unsupported to date), the tighter and tighter resolution (until 12 point text is no longer legible).

Then there are the tricks that stay with me like expose, hot corners, alt+tab and other means of getting from one app to the other. These solutions never addressed the issue of screen clutter though. No matter what I do or what I use, the kind of developing that I do takes up space and the lack of screen space that slows me down.

The solution I use now (thanks to a tip from Elixir Graphics) is Stick Windows from Donelleshi Sotware. This is a bit of a throwback to the OS 9 days where you could “dock” your apps at the side of your screen. I wasn’t sure at first… took a bit of getting used to… but before long… you completely hooked on the Stick Windows way of doing things!

Stick Windows has turned my way of developing around. I used to segment off my work load according to how many windows I could stand to have open at any given time. Now I am not afraid to keep it all open and on the go at all times. Windows are now like my thoughts; they pop up when I feel I have the time to give them some attention and then move off when I am done.

That’s how cool it is; if you have a bunch of windows open, drag to the edge of your screen and poof! It’s turned into a little tab hanging onto the side of your window. You want that window back? Click the tab. Don’t need it anymore? Click on another window and the first one zips back to it little tab again, tucked out of the way. Stick Windows turns a messy screen into an efficient workplace.

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Technorati Tags: Sticky Windows, Donelleshi Software, RapidWeaver, WordPress

Finally an app that takes site creation/management seriously, and takes software bloat even more serious. Few affordable web development apps out there really handle web project development and management well, save for DreamWeaver… but then one must refer back to the idea of affordable. Now Panic Software offers Coda, a complete web authoring and management package all wrapped up into one window.

Does this make you more productive? It certainly can. Does it make you faster? It certainly will. What you’ve got is a tool that will allow you to code your markup, style it, add some DOM scripting, perform some terminal queries, write some server side php and publish it all in one handy package! It’s like RapidWeaver for pro’s. I’ve just scratched the surface of this app and I am sure there will be more productivity posts concerning this app coming from me very soon.

Technorati Tags: Coda from Panic, DreamWeaver, RapidWeaver, Web creation

How can any self respecting speed freak like myself not make mention of a mouse accelerator or two. That is something that has always driven me nuts about OS X; the maximum mouse speed is just too darn slow. Back in the day when I was running OS X 10.2 on a fruity iMac with a puck mouse, I found a great little preference pane app called USB Overdrive (now supported by Senlick). I used USB Overdrive faithfully up until a few weeks ago. It was great for making a multitude of USB devices go stupid-fast, but I only use one USB device, my mouse. What I wanted (with the onset of carpel tunnel syndrome) is a fast mouse with very fine accuracy and acceleration controls.

What I found was SteerMouse, another preference pane app that allows for finer tuning of the mouse tracking speed and sensitivity, etc… it also allows for detailed button programing (up to 16 if you like). Though SteerMouse is by no means worlds apart from USB Overdrive, I was pleasantly surprised with it’s interface and feature set and think I will stick with it for some time to come.

So just how fast do I have my mouse set? My mouse travels at about 180 ppi. To put that into perspective for you, I can go from adjacent corners on a 23″ HD cinema screen by moving my mouse little more than few inches; just the flick of my wrist.

Technorati Tags: USB Overdrive, SteerMouse, mouse acceleration, software