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Smashing magazine inspired this post. They listed 13 applications to make your life easier, but I really didn’t think any of them were that useful. Here is my list to help you trick out your new Mac.

1. QuickSilver: I love this application. It’s a launcher on steroids and is probably the application I miss the most when I am using Windows. I can call up any file or application with just a few keystrokes. I don’t mean Ctrl-Alt-T-Left Big Toe and Nose, I mean Ctrl-Space and start typing the name of it. It’s a wonderful tool and I recommend not only installing it, but giving it a good effort, it might seem awkward at first, but within a week you will never know how you lived without it. Download
2. Growl: Growl is your swiss army knife notification engine. You can style your notifications to display when, where and how you like, and tons of applications support it. It’s an essential add-in to Firefox and Adium. Download
3. Cyberduck: Cyberduck is my FTP client of choice on Mac. It’s probably not a lot of good to a mainstream user who has little need to FTP, but if you are a webmaster, you will love it. Download
4. Adium: Chat people, iChat is cool but serious un-equipped to communicate with your mass of PC friends. Adium supports it all, it’s infinitely skinnable and in a few years of my use, very stable. If you want to chat on MSN, Yahoo, GTalk, AOL, Facebook, MySpace, ICQ, and many more at once, this is the tool for you. Download
5. Live Mesh: Forget .Mac or .Me or whatever they are calling it these days. If you just want to keep files in sync across a few machines, both Mac and PC as well as Windows Mobile, Mesh is incredibly valuable. I run it on every computer I own and use it at least once a day. Files in your mesh are located on all computers set up to syncronize and also in your free space on the web. Never wish you had that file again and save tons of wear and tear on your thumb drives. Download
6. Text Wrangler: This is kind of like Cyberduck, your general user won’t need it, but if you ever touch HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, etc. It’s a great color coding text editor. Download
7. VLC: Let’s face it, not everything runs in Quicktime, even if it did, who would want to? VLC is your one player to show just about anything. This one of the first apps I install on a new Mac. Download
8. Handbrake: Like to watch your DVDs when you travel but wish it was easier to get them on your iPhone, iPod, Zune, PSP, etc.? Handbrake will rip DVDs to just about any format you could need. Download
9. Firefox: Safari is fine, but I just love Firefox, especially since I can mirror the setup on my PC and keep everything in sync with FoxMarks. Download
10. Spaces*: Yea, this is a cheat, it comes with OS X, but that makes it free right? If you are not using multiple monitors on your Mac, you should be using Spaces, enable it and see what it’s all about. Download

Give some of these a try and let me know what you think? If I missed some, add them in the comments below!

Are you tired of Psystar? Pearc? All of these fly by night rigs trying to steal your software. Are you frustrated with your lack of market share? Lucky for you I have the answer. I’ll give it to you for a million dollars, or I’ll just blog about it and you can steal it, whatever works man.

The Toyota vs. Lexus Theory

We all know Lexus cars are made by Toyota. We all know Acuras are just over priced Hondas. It’s no secret. So what is wrong with Apple themselves coming out with a budget line of computers that run OS X. They they can still control every aspect of it, but cram them into less pretty boxes with cheaper parts and sell them like gangbusters. The Apple faithful will still buy iMacs and Mac Pros like crazy. If you want to keep your brand image, license it to a single company. I would suggest a new company, I wouldn’t get in bed with the likes of Dell or HP, something new and rambunctious with a rep, maybe someone LIKE Psystar. It’s a novel idea, right?

They tried something similar with OS 9 and it failed, but what if they end up with a Brand X, a division of Apple. That way they keep it in the family and don’t end up having to actually license the operating system.

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s brilliant. Call them Oranges I am going to go wait by the mailbox for my check.

A few of my Mac centric friends saw my blog post on Windows 7 and said that Aero Peek ripped off Apple’s Expose. Let’s make this clear, I have 3 Macs running OS X Leopard, I use them all of them time, and I think that makes me pretty credible to judge Mac OS X features. I have also been playing with Windows 7 for several days and have it installed on two computers that I use every day. I have some screenshots to display how Aero Peek and Expose’ look, and I’ll narrate how they work in case you aren’t using them.

Apple OS X Expose’

When you are using your Mac and have a bunch of applications open, a keyboard shortcut or hot corner will tile them out on your desktop like this

Ironically I don’t really use this feature much. I prefer to use Spaces to thumbnail all four of my virtual desktops and then select the desktop I want to use, organizing applications by sets instead of selecting from all available windows like this. Expose is also somewhat of an island in the sense that if you don’t choose to create a hot corner for it or remember the shortcut, you might not ever even notice it is there and use it. In my experience many users do not actually take the time to learn shortcuts so not having this hot corner enabled by default limits its exposure.

So what is Expose’ really? I would say that it is a beefy alt-tab for PC or cmd-tab for Mac. Ironically cmd-tab was not available on OS 9 and many claim that Apple stole it from Microsoft Windows, but that’s a debate for another day

Microsoft Aero Peek

Windows 7 brings us Aero Peek. Aero peek is integrated into the taskbar and adds several features to the mix. First and foremost when you hover over a running application’s icon in the taskbar, Aero Peek turns all other open windows transparent to draw focus to what you are highlighting like this

What’s powerful about this is that there are no shortcuts or hot-corners to assign, every application supports it and it’s default functionality. When you hover over any icon in the taskbar a thumbnail of that application is shown, no need to hit a hot key and see what it looks like, if you hover the thumbnail, all other windows fade to clear and that window retains clear focus at it’s actual size and placement.

That doesn’t sound or look like a copy to me. It’s a variation on ways to find open windows for sure, but these are concepts here, I think you have to go much further up the implementation stack before you call it copying.

Is it a copy?

In my opinion it’s not only not a copy, it doesn’t even serve the same fundamental purpose. Apple Expose’ is designed to show you all open windows and let you choose the one that you want to have focus. Aero Peek is meant to show you which window would have focus if you click it. Since you have already highlighted the window that is being shown, and the taskbar thumbnails are telling you textually which application or document it refers to, you aren’t using Aero Peek to select, you are using the taskbar thumbnails to select and then Aero Peek is showing you what the current selection is.

Sometimes OS X will show you a thumbnail in the dock, sometimes not. Windows 7’s task bar always shows thumbnails when you hover. So the Windows 7 taskbar is the tool you are using to select your application window.

For the record, Vista’s task bar had application thumbnails also. The thumbnails were not capable of showing a set of documents and windows related to that application however. If you compare the thumbnail view on the Windows 7 taskbar it’s actually quite superior for a few reasons:

• Windows 7’s taskbar displays all windows related to the icon you are hovering over grouped together. Expose’ has no concept of relation when you have several windows open so you see every window for every application in a big pile.
• Hovering over different application gives you a full size preview of the window you are hovering over no matter how many windows you currently have open. Expose’ thumbnails become less and less useful the more you have open because they get smaller and smaller.
• Right-clicking pinned applications give jump lists that allow you to launch the application in specific states or with specific documents already loaded. (Recent Items for example)

I think it’s interesting that Microsoft Windows had the taskbar long before OS X had the dock. When OS X released the dock, it was seen as being revolutionary, nothing else like it in the business. Microsoft comes along years later and makes some tweaks and refinements to it’s taskbar which basically boil down to taking the names off of the taskbar buttons and integrating the quick launch menu with running applications, and now people are blaming Microsoft for stealing the dock. I can’t figure it out to be honest, is the taskbar in Windows 7 so drastically different than the taskbar in Windows Vista that it’s turned to stealing from Apple?

Hopefully after looking at these you can see that the functionality is useful, well implemented and unique. The who copied who rhetoric is tired and old, if you want to get nasty about it, look at all the things one could make an argument that Apple stole from Microsoft.

• Is iWork a copy of Office?
• iTunes is a media player, did it rip of Windows Media Player?
• Is Front Row a poor copy of Windows Media Center?
• Cmd-Tab is the same as Alt-Tab in functionality and implementation.

I think that these things are the result of evolution of personal computing, not a board room full of developers saying “ooh, that’s awesome, we need to steal that.”

The best quote I have ever read was on a forum once, it said:

The only thing Microsoft ever stole from Apple was the personal computer market…

Ouch.

Microsoft announced Windows 7 and are apparently giving up on Windows Vista, the failure…right?

Well, if you pay attention to dates, and I do, then it looks like we have a huge list of failures on our hands, let’s take a look at a few of such familiar utter software failures, shall we?

Here we go, in no particular order:

Apple OS X v10.5 Leopard

Yea, you know I would go there, so let’s just get it out of the way shall we? OS X 10.4 “Tiger” was released on April 29th, 2005. Due to obvious market failure and un-acceptance (note the sarcasm) Apple was forced to release OS X 10.5 “Leopard” just a mere 2 1/2 years after the release of Tiger. The shame! Oh, and in case you aren’t getting my cynicism just yet, “Isn’t Leopard just an updated version of Tiger?”

Adobe Creative Suite CS3

That’s right folks, apparently everyone hated all of the CS3 applications. Released in March of 2007, Adobe was forced to release CS4 in less than two years from the launch of CS3. It offers modest updates to CS3 in many categories and is apparently one big bug fix, why else release it so quickly.

Microsoft Windows 95

Credited for much of the internet boom, as well as being one of the most prolific operating systems ever, Windows 95 was released on August 24th 1995. Around 2 1/2 years later, Microsoft released Windows 98. Realistically it was much like Windows 95, the User Interface was nearly identical. Drivers were compatible and almost all software claimed it was Windows 95/98 compatible. I am sure this should sound familiar.

Apple iPhone 3G

Ok, fine, I am picking on them, but seriously. The new iPhone came out so fast people were flat out pissed that they bought the first one. The original iPhone shipped in June of 2007 and the 3G version (which everyone really wanted) shipped in July of 2008 with zero incentive program to help early adopters upgrade. Ouch!

The Truth About Software

I am going to let you in on a little secret. Software companies are, wait for it… trying to make money. I can tell you from someone who lives inside the Microsoft machine, that when a version of software is shipped, the next version is already in development and the version after that is being planned. I am not exaggerating, that’s how it works. For people to be surprised that Windows 7 is being talked about is pretty funny to be honest. Microsoft has admitted that Windows Vista went through some growing pains and shipped late. All that means is the Windows 7 team had plenty of time to work on their code.

I don’t consider Windows Vista a failure, and I would bet the sales figures don’t tell that story either. I understand the mountain of bad press Vista has received and some of it is warranted. But when the bandwagon got rolling, boy did it start spitting out negativity from tons of people who had never even seen Vista, much less used it. We can thank Apple’s ads that are, to be nice, less than truthful in their depiction of Windows Vista.

The legacy has some really good points outside of that. I am betting it will be Windows Vista that goes down in history as the operating system that brought true 64-bit operating systems to the masses. Go to Best Buy and see how many new PCs are running Vista 64-bit edition.

Windows Vista will also be the operating system that made Windows Media center move from a boutique version of Windows to giving users true, seamless and fantastic media capabilities on their computer, features that you still won’t find anywhere near the Apple OS X/Front Row/Apple TV ecosystem.

Sure there are many other new features in Vista, and all new OS versions have tons of new features, but these two are huge, just you watch.

So you live in a Mac/PC hybrid environment and you regularly have to share files between them, right? Well, I don’t think it’s that uncommon, and there are several ways to tackle this problem, but I thought I would share with you my approach.

First we have to start out with a little bit of code for you, the tool of choice is Script Editor, which can be found in /Applications/Apple Script. First let’s start with a little code, er, script:

   1: tell application "Finder"

   2:     mount volume "afp://UserName:Password@IPAddress/ShareName"

   3: end tell

   4:  

   5: tell application "Finder"

   6:     mount volume "smb://ComputerName;UserName:Password@ComputerName/ShareName"

   7: end tell

Now, depending on your purpose, you may only need one of these two tell clauses. The first one is for connecting to shares on OS X systems, the second is for connecting to shares on Windows systems, which is the purpose for this post, so we will concentrate on that.

Fire up script editor and paste in lines 5-7. The tell application function tells the Finder application to perform the embedded commands. The command inside is mount volume which you use to, that’s right, mount a volume. In this case we will be using a random share named “mystuff” on a fictional PC called “mypc.” Your username will be “myusername” and your password is, can you guess? That’s right, “mypassword.”

The mount line in this instance would be:

mount volume “smb://mypc;myusername:mypassword@mypc/mystuff”

Pretty self explanatory really. Now the trick comes in, with this script edited, choose File, Save As…, give it an application, change the file format to “Application” and make sure “Run Only” is checked. and “Startup Screen” and “Stay Open” are unchecked.

Save it and you have an application that is single function to connect to your share. Now we are getting somewhere. Copy this file somewhere save, in my Macs I copy it to the root of “Macintosh HD” and then lets go to System Preferences.

Under the “Accounts” Preferences pane, select “Login Items” for the account you use to log in, and click the small + button to add an item to the list. I called my login application “ConnectHPVista64” and in the screenshot you can see it in my list:

I check the hide box so I don’t see it run and then I am done. Log off and log in and you should see your the dock icon bounce for a few seconds and then you should see the volume on your desktop (assuming you haven’t disabled them from showing.)

That’s it, hope this helps someone.