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.
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.
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.
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.
Now that I am all about digital photography (at least this week) I've noticed some limitation of having only 2GB of RAM. If anything will tax your system, be it PC or Mac, it is digital media. Aperture really puts some serious load on my Mac Pro. I wanted to see exactly how much. Introducing iStat. It's a great little application (donation ware) that comes in either Widget or application flavors.
It's no secret that OS X is way ahead of Microsoft Vista. One example is the Core image built into OS X. One of the advantages of having image support built into the OS is that you can handle large image files with less strain on the cpu and memory. It also ensures that the user experience is consistent across multiple applications. I'm no expert, but there is a reason many graphics professionals choose the Apple platform.
When Apple bought Coverflow to include in iTunes 7, I was both happy and sad. At first I was happy that iTunes finally had a nice interface for my album art. Sadly, Coverflow was no longer available (or so I thought). Coverflow downloaded album art from Amazon while iTunes uses the iTunes store (makes sense). I have some unusual CD's which iTunes just ignores the cover art for while Coverflow happily found.
Is there really any reason to have so many different media formats? WMV, mpeg4, QT, FLV... the list goes on. While Quicktime handles many of the most popular formats, there are still plenty that it doesn't and that really gets frustrating. Sure, I have VLC running on my Mac Pro, but it is far from a finished product. Why can't Apple just finish the supported format list for Quicktime? I even upgraded to Quicktime Pro to get some extra formats (like Mpeg2).
Just a quick link today. This one is for the list of keyboard shortcuts from Apple. It's really meant to discourage programmers from using these standard key combos for their applications. Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Productivity, Tip, Trick
Simplicity is the Apple way. Sometimes that comes with a shorter feature list. Apple's Mail is a good example. Even your grandmother could use it with little or no help, but that is partly because it has so few features. Just try to get granny to have a go around with MS Entourage. Luckily, there are more than a few Mail users out there that have cobbled together some of the most asked for features in the form of add-ons and Scripts.
