Archive for the 'Tutorial' Category

On the Mac, there are many web browsers available. Mozilla Firefox is a great cross-platform browser, but until recent betas it hasn’t been very efficient or overall good-looking on the Mac. Apple’s Safari is simple and elegant, but lacks any official plug-ins, making it difficult to do the kind of advanced work that you can with Firefox extensions. For today, we’re going to be focusing on these two popular browsers. Many people seem to like the simplicity and integrated interface of Safari, but wish that they could have the wide array of extensions available for Firefox at their disposal.

For most of us, we have and use different identities. Some of us may have one identity for friends and family and another identity for freelancing and so on. With all these identities, we need a way to bring them all together into one.

I have four email accounts that I use the most, which means I have four different mailboxes that I check often. When using mail.app, the left sidebar of your mail.app application can become a mess with all of its folders. I decided to figure out a way to make my four mailboxes, one.

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!

In my circle, I’ve had a lot of friends recently purchase Apple computers. One of the first questions that they ask me is: “How do I play this video? It’s not showing up properly!” My friends, you have come to the right guy, because I have quite the toolbox for you.

There are 3 very important applications that every Mac user should download. These applications will allow you to play almost every video file on your mac, and make you a happier, more entertained person.

Just follow these steps in order:

I’ve mentioned before that one of my favorite new features that was introduced with Leopard is QuickLook. This oft-forgotten feature allows you to preview files without ever having to open up an application, and it’s only a space bar click away.

Now, a team in Japan has released what appears to be the first external plug-ins for QuickLook, and they really add some awesome functionality to this already useful new tool. So in this article I will take you through the installation of a nifty Quicklook enhancement, that I really found helpful.

Without using Parallels, Crossover or Bootcamp, or even having a Windows Partition! Today we’ll be using Wine to emulate Windows and run all version of Internet Exlorer, which will make for a much lighter overall system footprint. It will also integrate perfectly into OS X.

I get asked this one a lot by web developers so I thought I would throw this up here for posterity. Not everyone wants to taint their Mac by running full blown Windows on it (am I right?), but if you’re a web developer it’s pretty critical that you build pages that render properly in Internet Explorer. If you have done this type of work on *nix you might remember using a great tool named ies4linux. Well you guessed it, ies4osx was recently ported to the Mac by Mike Kronenberg.

Before you all start thinking I’m going crazy and say mean things like “He’s Nuts!” and “Hasn’t this been posted before?”, let me explain; please. I recently (and foolishly) upgraded to 1.1.2 on my iPod touch because I wanted to see the non-existent new features it brought.

Yes, it gave me the much desired calendar “Add” button and yes, it gave me the useless battery indicator in iTunes, but I already had the Calendar button and had no need for the battery indicator, so I set on my mission to downgrade back to 1.1.1.

The one-two punch of the mouse and GUI are an intuitive duet, but sometimes you just want to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible. Keyboard shortcuts give you that.

While OS X offers keyboard shortcuts for most commands in the menu bar, there are a few orphaned commands worth adopting. Not a problem though, because OS X allows you to easily adopt any menu bar function and map it to a keyboard command, without the assistance of any third party software.

Question any Mac user about what kind of anti-virus program they use and the majority of them will answer ‘none’. A Mac under attack? That’s almost blasphemous, is the expected reaction. Unfortunately all is not hunky dory in the Mac Kingdom, and our precious machines may just be under attack. A piece of malware, dubbed OSX.RSPlug.A trojan horse, is doing the rounds and MacWorld gives some tips on how to disinfect your machine.

To check if you machine has been afflicted with the malware, check the top-level /Library -> Internet Plug-Ins folder, and look for a file named plugins.settings. If it’s there, then you got a bad case of the OSX.RSPlug.A trojan horse.

Ever loved an application, but wished it never appeared in the dock, like spotlight? It’s always there, but has no dock item. I’ve wanted such functionality a surprising number of times, particularly with application launchers such as LaunchBar and Quicksilver.

They’re great, but I never use their dock icon; I use their keyboard shortcut instead. So, why have them sitting there taking up space in your dock? There is a relatively simple hack that fixes it, so that when launched, the application still runs but does not appear in the dock (or when command - tabbing).

A problem I have had recently is one just small enough to get under the skin. Have you ever right-clicked and selected “Open With” on an image to open it with your favorite editor only to be bombarded with a list of applications you thought you removed ages ago? Maybe even some you never knew existed? There is also the problem of duplicates.

Mac OS X seems to think that some of my applications are more useful than others by listing them twice. There has to be an easy way to fix this right?

We all know OS X has many tricks up its sleeve, but the built-in Apache web server is often overlooked. With a bit of fiddling, you can make your Mac host its very own website in just a few clicks.

Apache is the most common web server used on OS X. It is the industry standard and is actually the most widely used web server software available. While the nuts and bolts of Apache are out of the scope of this article, I’ll show you how to quickly set up the server, as well as make it internet accessible with an easy to remember free domain name.

Everyone has this problem - you have tracks in your iTunes library that don’t have cover art. Whether the tracks came from some obscure CD that iTunes has never heard of or elsewhere, the problem of missing cover art didn’t used to be a problem. However, once Cover Flow appeared in iTunes, the artwork became more prominent. Then, with the release of iPhone, cover art has become even more important. With Cover Flow possibly coming to iPods soon, it will become an even larger part of our music listening experience.

Our last tutorial’s picture viewer, while pretty cool, wasn’t useful for too much more than just viewing images within Quartz Composer. This time, we’ll take your great QC skills and use them to break our creations free from Quartz Composer and into the rest of the Mac OS X environment.

In our last Quartz Composer tutorial, a tour through exciting QC concepts such as displaying images, layers, mouse input and using the Math Patch, we learned how to create a reactive and visually appealing composition in just minutes. This time we’ll make a great MacApper RSS screensaver while we discuss concepts such as making a really cool visual particle generator, controlling your Composition’s attributes from the screen saver preference panel and using macros from other Quartz Compositions.

I won’t belabor (you can use this tip to find out what ‘belabor’ means) you with more Quicksilver fanboyism… We already know how awesome it is. What I will do though, is share with you a little tip that I’ve found really helpful when reading, writing and blogging. I know there are many great ways to look-up a word in the dictionary on the fly in Mac OS X, but unfortunately my favorite method–selecting text and then pressing Command-Control-D–only lets me view one definition at a time. Take a peek at this very simple look-up technique and I think you’ll be pleased to find there is a simple way to use Quicksilver to get definitions and look at multiple words at once.