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My Mac Tips

These are some (hopefully) useful tips and things I think anybody with some interest in technology should do. Hope you enjoy them.

1) Get msn working on iChat.

2) Download Chax

3) Install some extensions for Safari via Safari Extensions

4) Clean up the menubar and the Dock even a little bit.

5) Use cmd+click to move/remove items in cocoa applications (Finder, iWork, etc).

6) Use Hot Corners. If you don’t know how to do it.

7) Buy Permute for video converting, Perian works fine too for watching video in more formats than Quicktime allows you to, but Permute is more of a long term solution.

8) Mess with the Terminal.

On Tech Wars

I came across a comment on Gizmodo, that made me see things a little bit clearer in where this big (like Giant BIG) companies do their business. 

Apple tells people what they want
Google gives people what they want
Microsoft asks what people want.

 Some commentator in The Dogs of War

I couldn’t agree more, and I think Microsoft will become irrelevant in the next decade, it still has a pretty goos hold on the markets its in, but as Apple gets better at coming up with useful features, and Google finds ways to make them more user-friendly, I think that MS-free world could be close.

Apple Against the World | Daring Fireball

mnmal:

Jason Snell, on Apple’s moves to maintain control over the App Store and native iPhone app development by prohibiting the use of third-party meta-platforms:

sounds good, but the develop-once-run-anywhere philosophy is something that makes more sense to bean counters and development-environment vendors than it does to platform owners and discriminating users. In the ’90s we were told that Java apps would be the future of software, because you could write them once and deploy them anywhere. As someone who used to use a Java-based Mac app on an almost daily basis, let me tell you: it was a disaster. Java apps didn’t behave like Mac apps. They were ugly and awful and weird, but hey, at least they ran on the Mac.

That’s exactly why I don’t believe in multi-platform apps. They are not right on any environment. Take the first version of Firefox for example, it was OK on Linux, it was sort of OK on Windows but it was a disaster in Mac. It looked and feel and behave really bad. The same can be applied to Java applications, apps for the mac built with the horrendous QT libs and other “frameworks”.

Applications must be native. Period.

You want an app for Mac? Code it in a native compiler using Cocoa. You want an app for Linux for the Gnome desktop? Use GCC (or other compilers) with the GTK+ libs. What’s so complicated about that?

I do think that Apple is a bit headstrong with the whole “I need to approve each and every app”, heck i had two apps rejected by them, but I do understand why they are doing it. They want to maintain a certain level of look, but above that, they want stability. The want a platform that won’t crash and where apps will behave in a way that will surprise the least the user.

Its the same argument as always, do you want quality or quantity on your platform?

This is my desktop, I tried to follow everything in Minimal Mac, my dock is always hidden, and everything is reduced to make the least noise in my desktop. One point that I’ve always disagreed with Minimal Mac is Adium, I like Adium, don’t get me wrong, but I just love iChat and I live the way it connects with the whole Mac OS environment, besides, I got it to play nicely with Facebook Chat and MSN so all my buddy lists are there.
Zoom

This is my desktop, I tried to follow everything in Minimal Mac, my dock is always hidden, and everything is reduced to make the least noise in my desktop.

One point that I’ve always disagreed with Minimal Mac is Adium, I like Adium, don’t get me wrong, but I just love iChat and I live the way it connects with the whole Mac OS environment, besides, I got it to play nicely with Facebook Chat and MSN so all my buddy lists are there.

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