cellio | Mac

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Mac

My Mac Mini arrived Friday, faster than I expected. In an act of will I did not punt my congregation's Friday-evening services, attendance at which required starting Shabbat two hours early, to play with it (and go somewhere else later). I did verify that a VNC server is running on my PC and reachable from my laptop, so I can skip the dual-monitor/keyboard/mouse-on-one-desk setup. So now, off to rearrange bunches of hardware and load up a new machine.

If you've got favorite Mac tips & tricks, sites, software, etc, please feel free to share. I've used an iBook (running Tiger) casually, but as a main machine it's new to me.

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Synergy is helpful for this- you can run 2 monitors, one keyboard, if you like..

Excuse the poor organization, but as I look through my Applications folder, some useful stuff:

Adium handles IM duties for multiple services. It doesn't do audio or video, so you might want to keep service-specific clients (or iChat).

Growl is a notification system that can be installed alone, or it may be installed by some other apps (like Adium). It gives pop-up notifications for whatever you'd like -- new mail, new IMs, downloads completed, etc. It has become the standard way to do pop-ups on the mac. It's reasonably non-intrusive, given what it does.

Cyberduck is a decent graphical FTP client.

Flip4Mac will give you access to Windows audio and video codecs. There's a free version, but they try to hide it behind the pay versions.

Xmarks handles bookmark merging across browsers and platforms. Very handy for moving between machines.

Mozy will back up 2GB of data for free.

Disk Inventory X will show you which files are eating all of your disk space.

NeoOffice is a port of OpenOffice to OSX that works better than the official port.

Gimp.app is a port of GIMP to OSX that uses the native tools pretty well. One trick: you have to have the Apple version of X11 installed.

Handbrake handles video conversions well. Max does audio transcoding pretty well. Both are GUIs on top of existing open source tools.

The Macam drivers will let you use most PC USB webcams with the mac.

Quicksilver is a really handy app that gives you a pseudo-command-line. Basically, you hit a hotkey, then type the name of an app or filename. It brings up a list of matching apps/files.

Shrook is a decent RSS reader if you have a widescreen monitor. If not, NetNewsWire Lite does a decent job for free.

If you want Emacs, it's complicated. Best overview I've seen: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsForMacOS

If you're really pining for Unix, MacPorts is an easy way to build Unix apps. Fink is also available.

Thanks for all the info! (I had your recent post about Moxy still in a tab, by the way -- sounds useful!)

Long shot, but any wisdom to offer on printer sharing? I don't care whether my HP LaserJet stays attached to a PC or moves to the Mac, but I need to be able to print to it from both, and so far the obvious isn't working and Google tells me lots of people have this problem. :-( ("The obvious" meaning share from PC, verify no firewall issues, try to add from Mac.)

I managed to get that working a while ago, but I don't have that setup any more. All I remember for certain was that there was a slightly stupid trick involved. I think we had fewer problems attaching the printer to a Mac with a static address then telling the PC to connect by IP address.

You may need to ensure that Windows file sharing is working for your account (including setting up Windows login credentials). That's just a guess, though.

Sweet!

Enjoy your Mac :)

Run the "Terminal" app...Unix. (You probably knew that, but at least one Mac/Linux crossover user I knew did not, and spent a long time griping about how there was this darn Unix under there somewhere if only they could get to it.) For an upgraded replacement, try iTerm.

I really like TextMate for editing, partly because I have a custom bundle which does things like highlight quoted text (i.e does syntax highlighting for my *stories*).

I like "Chicken of the VNC"; dunno what you're using.

Delicious Library is a lot of fun for managing collections of books/videos/etc.

Transmission is a decent Bittorrent client.

For news, http://macintouch.com is still my favorite after a decade or more.

Thanks! Yes, already found the terminal and Chicken of the VNC is what I'm using there.

I am totally in love with these apps:
- Things (by Cultured Code, otherwise very difficult to google for)
- 1Password
- Quicksilver

And the Linux cross-overs:
- Gimp
- Inkscape

I use Aquamacs to get my emacs fix. Otherwise, the builtin apps do pretty much what I want. Have fun!

Thanks!

otherwise very difficult to google for

Yeah, I can see that. :-)

Any advice on getting Firefox to use the control key instead of the option key as a prefix? That placement really sucks and I'm so used to control-t from Windows that it's screwing me up. (Also control-c and control-v, so I suppose I should be asking this question more broadly -- but if any app can be customized in that way, it's got to be Firefox. :-) )

Apple Menu, System Preferences, Keyboard & Mouse, Keyboard "tab" (probably already selected), click "Modifier Keys..." in the lower left corner.

You probably want to swap Control and Command. You may want to set both Control and Command to trigger Command.

Huh, I had no idea that existed. I just remap my brain to use Command on a Mac. Now that I'm used to it, I like it better. Possibly because my thumb is stronger than my pinky?

Wait, your thumb? On my keyboard I would have to fold my thumb under my palm about as far as it can go to reach that key, and it's really hard to do that while hitting some other keys like 'v'. What keyboard are you using? (My current keyboard isn't going to be the final one; I can already tell its ergonomics are sub-standard. But I don't think these keys move around that much, do they?)

Huh. I can reach the Option key if I reach all the way under my thumb. I usually rest my left thumb on the very left edge of the spacebar, so it's only a slight jump to reach the Command key.

I have the old school white keyboard that came with my Mac (not the silver laptop-key style ones that came with Willie's Mac). I agree on the new keyboards would be more of a stretch.

I rest my left thumb below the center of the space bar, roughly between 'v' and 'b'. I suspect those typing lessons in fifth grade were my downfall -- who anticipated modern keyboards back then? :-)

I use my thumb for it as well (M$ ergonomic keyboard), but I often do not keep my hands on the standard baseline. Trying it out it seems like I rotate my left hand clockwise a bit and drop it one row down and one column out towards the edge when doing lots of cut/paste operations.

I'll second the Synergy recommendation from above if you do want to use both computers at once easily, although a few people where I work prefer to run Xming on the Windows box and just use native XWindows to deal with the multiple monitors.

Actually, I want Control on the caps-lock key (for emacs) and already remapped that. I don't think I can map both Control and Command to the same key, and that would probably confuse some apps anyway. (Do any Mac apps other than emacs, which isn't a native Mac app, use control?)

What I'd really like to do is to tell individual applications, or perhaps the OS if my suspicion about control is correct, that wherever they're expecting command, they should accept control. Otherwise it's going to take a long time and a lot of finger cramps to de-hard-wire cut and paste. :-(

Control is used by non-native apps. You'll end up using for RDC, VNC, terminal apps, etc. Other than that, I've never touched the control key.

I wonder, given how little control is used, if you might have more luck the other way: tell the non-native apps (well, emacs and Terminal) that whenever they expect control, they should accept command.

An interesting thought. Thanks; will investigate.

I'm not sure if these are the kind of tips you're looking for, but for me the biggest adjustment to Mac OS X has been the organization of all open windows by application, and the fact that an application can be running without any open windows (running in the sense that you can command-tab to the application to access its menu bar at the top of the screen). The single feature of OS X that I use most often is Exposé (System Preferences -> Exposé and Spaces), which allows you to "zoom out" and see all of your open windows (either across all applications or within the currently active application), so you can click on the one you want. Exposé has replaced alt-tab for me, except in those cases when I am just switching back and forth between two applications (more generally, when I don't have to look at the list of applications while switching). Particularly nice for me is having Exposé mapped to a corner of my screen, so now I can effectively "alt-tab" using just my mouse hand. Another nice touch about Exposé is that it allows you easily to bring only one window to the front, in contrast to command-tab, which brings all windows for that application to the front.

Thanks! And yes, I welcome these kinds of tips. I did play through Apple's video intro for people coming from Windows, but there's only so much they can cover in five minutes or so. I know there are a lot of nifty things tucked away inside MacOS; I haven't found more than a few of them so far.

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