There's a whole lot of buzz around the latest Parallels beta release. They have added a new feature called "coherence" which allows OSX and Windows to co-mingle on your desktop. At first, this seems wrong and creepy. But once I appreciated what this will mean for the future, I found peace with Windows on my Mac. Here's the gist, you can drag documents between the Windows and Mac desktops and folders.
I really wanted to bring my DVD's on a recent cross-country flight. I was familiar with backing them up using a PC, but I had never done it on the Mac. I played around with several options and decided that Handbrake is the best solution if you want a file for your iPod or in iTunes while Mac the ripper is the best if you want a dvd image file at full quality.
I tried out a trick making the rounds on many of the Mac news sites. Supposedly, it is possible to enable Apple's Front Row on the MacPro. This sounded like a great idea. I'd love use my Mac Pro as a media machine but for some reason Apple chose not to include an IR remote with the Mac Pro. The hack seemed easy enough. Just modify the AppleHIDMouse extension to allow the mighty mouse to control Front Row.
It seems that Disk Warrior is not going forward to support Intel macs. It's pretty disappointing because I was a big fan of this software for the PPC macs. Unlike the Windows world, there are few system diagnostic tools for the mac. Maybe that's because there are fewer issues with incompatible third party hardware. However, sh*t happens and sometimes you need more than Apple's disk utility program to figure it out.
This is a little gem from the last Digg videocast. I've totally ignored this option in Apple's Mail application for the past couple of years. You can select a message that is spam and bounce it back to the sender as if your address no longer exists. This is a great way to get off of those spam email lists. If you do this enough times the spammers will conclude that your email address no longer exists.
The new Aperture web site from O’Reily is definitely worth your time. It now includes the great websiteAperture tricks.
Technorati Tags: Aperture, Apple, Blogs, iPhoto, Mac, Photography, Tip
Here's a quick Automator script to pull all of the image links in the frontmost Safari window into iPhoto. I use this when I stumble across a web page with great photos I want to add to my gallery. Notice that what this script does is download to the desktop and then import to iPhoto. After completion, it deletes the originals from the desktop. This way I am sure to get the full resolution images rather than the lower resolution web thumb nails Technorati Tags: Apple, Automator, iPhoto, Mac, Productivity, Programming, Tip, Trick
Who doesn't love Youtube (this month)? In fact some of the stuff I like so much that I want to keep it permanently on my computer. While there are applications out there like TubeSock, I think the way I do it provides more options. I start by grabbing the flash file from Youtube with the free application PodTube. This little utility grabs the flash movie from the frontmost Safari window and loads it onto the desktop.
My Mac Pro received another 1GB RAM upgrade tonight. That puts it at 3GB total. Apple's Aperture just sucks up the RAM. Especially when dealing with the NEF (RAW) files from the Nikon D80. The extra RAM has made a considerable difference. Aperture is snappier and I can listen to music while I play with my photos. Doing a self-install of the RAM was a snap. Here's the instructions: 1) Power down the Mac Pro 2) Open the side panel 3) Pull out the top RAM riser 4) install two 512K RAM chips (from Apple) 5) Put the memory riser back, close the side panel and power-up Done.
I love the system utility Onyx. I've tried most of the others, including MacJanitor and Cocktail, but Onyx has always done a good job and has a great feel to it. Now I'm aware that most of them are simply running a series of unix maintenance commands to repair permissions, clear cache files and update catalogs. But I still find them easier to use than the Unix commands. I am now an Applejack user.
