Getting To Know Your Mac

Previously I wrote about whether iTunes suck or not. Conclusion is that it doesn't suck but the MP3 CD burning sucks big time.

Today I tried to burn a MP3 CD with iTunes for the very first time. I dragged all the albums I wanted to a new playlist. Then I hit the Burn Disc button and waited. Then it said: 56 songs out of 102 songs cannot be burned since they are in wrong format. Well yeah, they are in MP4 format but so what? Why can't it just convert them temporarily into MP3's so it can burn the disc? Turned out it just can't.

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Songbird.

Cult of Mac and Webmonkey are wondering if iTunes suck. They're stating that Songbird is worth checking out. And so I did.

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(Updated Oct 22, 2008)

It's yesterdays news, but the new MacBooks are here. I've been waiting for them to arrive for several months. Wait began when my PC laptop's screen started to flicker, hard-drive started to click and applications started to crash. I even got blue screens of death, which I hadn't seen for several months.

I watched how Apple's CEO Steve Jobs walked up on the stage with the same black shirt and the same worn-out oversized jeans that he always wears. He started to talk about the new MacBooks, finally. My wait was over. Or was it?

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I recently set my Dock to hide automatically and instantly I noticed that I'm not able to see if I've received new emails. Altough at most times this ain't a bad thing (for productivity's sake), but when expecting an important email a notification would be nice.

I found a plugin for Mail called Mail.appetizer. Mail.appetizer displays a neat transparent notification of incoming emails. It's currently in beta for Leopard (and Tiger) but I haven't noticed anything special about it.

Try it out.

Before I switched to Mac, I had a PC running with 3 displays. I really got used to having all that screen space and after switching I had only one display again.

Few weeks ago I got bored and put my PC up and running again. Currently I use Synergy to share Mac's keyboard and mouse with the PC, but I've always wondered, if you can move your mouse cursor over the other screen, why can't you move application windows?

I came up with a concept where there would be a software that uses Synergy and perhaps VNC-like features together. This software would trick the Mac believing that it has two displays attached when the other display would actually be a software that transfers Mac's other screen view all over to the PC with the client software.

I really don't know if this would be possible, but if Synergy is, why this couldn't be? You might know something that I don't, share your thoughts.

If you've recently switched from Windows to Mac, you might have noticed that switching applications with cmd+tab doesn't behave like in Windows.

Windows displays all open windows in the taskbar so you could browse through them with hitting alt+tab or clicking the desired taskbar button. Unlike in Windows, Mac swaps applications - not actual windows. If you have for example Mail and few emails opened in separate windows you have to first open up the mail application and then click on the email windows or access them from Window menu. You can also press cmd+shift+´ which is possibly the weirdest key combination ever.

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Password Safe SWT

Some times you have lots of passwords to remember and you need to store them somewhere. Best place for passwords ain't in Post-Its sticked to your screen or written in the corner of your morning magazine. You might think storing passwords in your cell is safe, until someone steals it. Even Excel-sheet with password protection doesn't seem so safe to me.

If you need that extra security maintaining your passwords, try Password Safe SWT, which is a clone of PasswordSafe for Windows.

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Dashboard

I remember the day I installed Windows Vista and got to the desktop for the first time. Vista has a dashboard floating around in the desktop displaying widgets such as clock, calendar, outdoor temperature, photos etc. I kept the dashboard there for a whole day until I realized it's using up valuable screen space, closed it and never re-opened.

The day I got my first Mac with Leopard, I did just what everyone else does: clicked on every icon, browsed the hard drive and examined the keyboard. When I hit the Dashboard-button I thought I had seen this before…

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TextWrangler

Some tasks require to use a simple text editor that doesn't have all the unimportant Word-like features (font styles, margins, headers, footers etc.). In most cases I don't have to add pictures of my recent holiday trip to mom's, videos complaining that I have a bad hair day or even calculations about my weight gain in previous 6 months. Just text editing, no more than that.

In Windows I used Notetab Light for many years but unfortunately they don't distribute a Mac-version. TextEdit is shipped with OS X and can be used for most tasks but if you need text editing in daily (or even hourly) basis, I really recommend TextWrangler.

TextWrangler has all the features you'll probably need:

• better support for character sets than in TextEdit
• advanced text replacement
• syntax coloring for most programming languages
• multiple document editing
• works like a charm and completely free

Give it a try.

First time I grabbed my mouse to move the cursor on my recently unwrapped Mac, I noticed that the cursor didn't behave like it used to behave in my previous life. Somehow arrow movement just wasn't so accurate, it didn't feel right.

System preferences, I thought, that would save my day. After searching under mouse preferences for some kind of a slider that could allow me to adjust the mouse settings I realized there's no such thing. "Is this what it's going to be? Do I really have to learn how to use a mouse all over again?"

I dropped the mouse and stopped for a while. As in many cases, I might not be the only one suffering from this issue. After some search engine ramble I found a solution.

iMouseFix allows me to adjust mouse acceleration or even disable it. After some testing I turned the acceleration off and got my mouse back nearly as good as it had been for 15 years. I didn't have to re-wrap my Mac and take it back to the store. Greatness.

Ps. If iMouseFix doesn't suit for you, SteerMouse might.