Archive for the 'Articles' Category

No one really knows how long until the futuristic real-time strategy game StarCraft II is released, but you can bet it won’t be any time soon. Developer Blizzard Entertainment is notorious for taking its time intricately crafting epic story arcs and balancing multiplayer modes, which would explain how the company has produced some of the most popular computer games ever released.

So while we wait impatiently, why not brush up on the basics by playing the original StarCraft in the mean time?

I was a bit hesitant about writing this article but the information (and results) are just too juicy not to give away. Half way through penning this I also noticed that Adam Pash at lifehacker did a similar story so I guess it’s acceptable to write about this sort of thing - and it should be. In case you haven’t guessed yet I’m going to detail for you my adventure building a Hackintosh box running Leopard that rivals the speed of a similarly configured Mac Pro.

But for less than 1/3rd the cost!

After its initial shine in the spotlight, the MacBook Air bashing began. It has been attacked from every angle. It’s expensive. The battery isn’t user-replaceable. It doesn’t have firewire. It doesn’t have ethernet. It doesn’t have an optical drive!

What everyone is missing in all this however, is that the people this notebook is targeted towards couldn’t care less about any of that stuff. Let me break it down for you right after the jump.

Everyone in the Mac community, MacApper included, has been wondering what Stevie J will have for us this year at Macworld. Our own James Matarrese wrote an opinion article today on why he thought the Apple TV won’t have a DVR. In a somewhat unusual welcome for this new writer, I’m going to tell you all the reasons he’s wrong!

There’s been a lot of speculation about what will be released at Macworld this year, and one thing that keeps coming up is the AppleTV. Among some of the hopes for the device, the one that stands out to me most is the suspected DVR. Now, at first glance, it would make a lot of sense for Apple to include DVR functionality. The hardware is there, and the software wouldn’t be very hard to implement, plus, it gives Apple entrance into yet another market yet uncharted to them, competing against the mighty TiVo.

We here at MacApper love Mac freeware, and try to write about it whenever we can. If we can find a program that does as good a job as commercial offerings, we will do our best to bring it to your attention. Following along that vein of thought we prepared something we think you guys might find useful. It’s a list of the best and most popular freeware for OS X.

The list is sorted alphabetically by category and currently has 57 freeware mac apps.

My mother has the messiest file system I have ever seen on a computer. I, being a savvy computer user myself, maintain the complete opposite: a slick file organization system. Let me explain.

Meet my mother: a few years ago, she was one of the few people in the entertainment industry who worked without email; a relic of an industry which used to rely solely on telephones. My mother’s lack of email was due to many things, including a fear of computers. So, on Mother’s Day, 2005, I forced her to conquer her fear. I gave her a computer, hoping to drag her (kicking and screaming) into the information age. She willfully agreed.

We strive to review and preview the latest and greatest applications for OS X here at Macapper, but if there is one thing I have relied on over the years, it has been several Mac Software download sites. They have pointed me in the right direction when looking for even the most obscure application. And as this blog and others can attest to, there are so many obscure and cool apps floating out there.

This list is by no means definitive but here is a list of my 7 must-know software download repositories for the best in Mac software, and more. Let me know if I missed any!

The staff here at MacApper look at Mac applications constantly so that we may bring you reviews of all the best Mac software. While we constantly are using new Mac apps, we all have our favorites that we use every day and would be lost without. I thought it would be interesting and hopefully helpful to some of you to to complile our staff’s favorite apps and share them with you.

So without further adieu: the 2007 Edition of MacApper’s Staff Picks.

With the introduction of the new iMac a few months ago, Apple released a newly-designed keyboard. It has been received positively, mostly because its industrial design is both visually stunning and potentially reduces the risk of repetitive stress injuries due to the smaller incline. However, several people, including this humble author, have a beef with the fact that Apple rearranged the special-function keys along the keyboard’s top. For no apparent reason, Apple decided that they should move these keys around and, in some cases, remove them altogether.

The good news is that, in at least one case, the missing functionality can be re-found with a simple, little trick.

There is a large number of browsers available for OS X; considerably more than for Windows or any other platform. Which, obviously, is a good thing! Depending on your needs however, any of these browsers could be the best one in your mind. What follows is a rough breakdown of 7 browsers for OS X with a quick note outlining their base appeal, along with some pros and cons for each.

Right after the quick breakdowns is a poll asking you to select which browser you prefer. I’m really looking forward to hearing your preferences and opinions, so here we go…

Having access to Wifi in coffee shops, book stores, airports, hotels and countless other places is wonderful. It allows for you to get out of the house and truly use that portable laptop computer to the full extent of its name.

This handy feature doesn’t come without its downfalls though, as I found out this morning. I was sitting in a coffee shop that will remain nameless, to protect it’s image. Because this has nothing at all to do with the coffee shop, it just happens to be this establishment that had been chosen as a hacker’s hotspot trap.

There’s a lot of talk about going green these days, even from Mr. Jobs himself, so I thought I’d show you a few easy ways to cut down on the amount of energy your Mac uses. These steps can easily be followed by any Mac user; in fact, the same concepts can be applied to PCs running Microsoft Windows. These tips will not only save you electricity and paper, but also could help your computer last longer.

All of my favorite tips are posted after the jump. Let’s save some power today shall we?

Screen Savings

Well Leopard is finally here and there are some security features being included that won’t get much attention but add heavily to the strong security stance of OS X. Apple quietly leaked plans to add code-memory randomization to Mac OS X Leopard, a move aimed at making the operating system more resilient to virus, worm and network attacks. The cynics reading this might remember that earlier in the year Microsoft botched its own implementation of the same technology.

As a passionate software developer, I am what people sometimes call a computer geek. And yet there is something very special about my geekiness: I hate coffee. I have to confess that I have never drunk a single cup of coffee and yet - I love Java!

Ok, right, that’s a bad word trick that has been used thousands and thousands of times. Of course the Java I’m talking about is not something to drink, it’s something to write: I’m talking about the programming language.