My Iomega external drive I had connected to my Mac Mini started acting up, so I decided to retire it. I purchased a Western Digital My Book with 1.5 TB of space. This will hold my Time Machine backups, and I will also store music, photos and videos on there.

I didn't notice when I purchased the drive that it came with some software called WD Smartware. Apparently this is backup software. I didn't think anything of it, since I wasn't interested in using some other backup software, I have been happy with Time Machine. When I connected the drive to my Mac Mini, the drive mounted, and then I also noticed another icon on the desktop called WD Smartware. I right clicked on it and chose 'Eject', it unmounted, and then automatically remounted itself. I tried this a couple times, but it just kept remounting. I double clicked the icon to open the folder, and found a readme file. Apparently this is a virtual CD which you use to install the WD Smartware application. The virtual CD will keep mounting itself, until you install the software. Too bad if you don't want it installed. I performed a quick Google search, and found that this is a big issue with a lot of people. Like me, all of these people do not want software shoved down their throat.

I did a Google search on removing the software, and that's when I found that it's not even a separate partition that can be erased, it's part of the firmware of the drive itself. Western Digital has provided a firmware update to remove the software, but it only works with Windows. No such tool for Mac users. I guess you could go through the trouble of hooking it up to a Windows machine, then installing the firmware update, then hook it up to your Mac, but there's no guarantee this would work. The fix I found for the moment is to edit my /etc/fstab file to stop that partition from mounting. This is pretty simple. First you need to get the UUID of the partition. To do this run the following command in Terminal.app

diskutil info /Volumes/WD\ SmartWare

This should present you with information about the mounted partition. Find the line that has the Volume UUID and copy the UUID. Next you will need to edit /etc/fstab and add the following line

UUID=the_uuid_you_copied none hfs rw, noauto 0 0

Once you've edited and saved your updated /etc/fstab file, you should be able to right click and 'Eject' the WD SmartWare Virtual CD and it shouldn't remount itself.

It sucks that you have to go through so much trouble. Hopefully enough people complain to Western Digital about this so that in the future they don't try to force the software on their customers. I know I'll never purchase another drive of theirs that comes with this software.

Tags: apple, mac

I've upgraded one of my Macs, the MacBook, to the newest Apple OS, Mac OS 10.6, Snow Leopard. I still have to upgrade my Mac Mini. Snow Leopard isn't as drastic a change as the previous OS, Leopard, was. This is labeled as a release where Apple refined the OS. Instead of concentrating on adding a ton of new features, Apple has made the existing OS better. Some people have been calling it what Microsoft would term a Service Pack, but it's a bit more than that. Even though there aren't many visible changes, there has been a lot of work done to refine the OS.

Smaller Footprint

One of the more interesting features of Snow Leopard is that you will actually gain back hard drive space once the OS is installed. This may seem weird, but once you understand one of the main refinements of Snow Leopard it totally makes sense. Back in the day Apple ran with the Power PC (PPC) architecture. A few years back Apple switched over to Intel. To allow their software to work on both architectures, they implemented a technology called Rosetta, that allowed for universal binaries. What this allowed was for a developer to compile their software against both PPC and Intel, and the resulting binary had the smarts that allowed for it to run on both architectures. This was great, but the downside was all these programs had a lot of extra baggage that was unneeded. With Snow Leopard, Apple is no longer supporting PPC. While this sucks for users that have the older Macs, this is great news for everyone on Intel, because there is no longer the need for the wasted space. Another space saving feature is that Apple is no longer bundling a butt-load of printer drivers. Now, when you hook up a printer, Snow Leopard will download the needed driver from the web. Before installing Snow Leopard I had 55GB of available space on my MacBook. After the install I had 68GB. The amount of space you get back varies per user, I believe the average is around 6 - 8 GB.

64 Bit

Apple has been in the process of converting all of the applications in their OS to 64 Bit, from 32 Bit for a while, and with the release of Snow Leopard they are mostly complete. Whereas with Microsoft Windows you would have to purchase a specific version of the OS depending on if your machine was 64 Bit or 32 Bit, Mac OS X was always smart enough to run a mixture depending on your set up. Finder, the file explorer on the Mac, has been rewritten using the Cocoa Framework from the previous Carbon Framework to allow access to all the new features.

New Expose' and Stacks

Stacks, where folders in the Dock expand, has been enhanced to allow for scrolling in grid view, and also allow drilling down in directories. Expose' has been enhanced to show minimized windows. You can also click and hold on an application icon in the dock and all associated open windows will Expose' themselves.

Quicktime X

There's a new version of Quicktime, which has a new look-and-feel, along with the ability to share directly to YouTube or FaceBook.

Grand Central Dispatch

This is something great for developers. Programming to take advantage of the new multi-processor machines available today isn't an easy task. With Grand Central, a developer just adds a couple lines of code around a section in their application that they feel would benefit from multi-processing, and Grand Central will take care of handling the rest.

Exchange Support

This feature to me is just crazy. Out of the box, as long as your company isn't in the stone age and still running Exchange 2003 like some company I now **cough** Tuner **cough**, you can use the built in Mail.app and iCal.app to connect to your companies Exchange server. This is a welcome addition, seeing as Microsoft doesn't currently produce Outlook for the Mac. This isn't native in Windows, you have to spend money on Microsoft Office to get that functionality, which can cost a pretty penny. Snow Leopard costs $30, or $49 for the family pack, which allows for installing on up to 5 machines.

A couple other features I've seen is support for up to 512 x 512 for icons, and you can play videos directly in the icon for a quick preview.

Overall I feel that Snow Leopard is a nice update, and you can't beat the price. The OS is snappier, and boot up, shut down is super fast.

Tags: apple, mac

It was another great year for MacHeist. In all, over 67,000 people purchased the bundle, and received almost $1,000 worth of software (14 applications) for $39. It did come down to the end, with the final two applications not being unlocked until today, but it still would have been worth it even if those apps weren’t unlocked. You have one more day to take advantage of this great deal, if you own a Mac, it’s money well spent.

Tags: mac, software

The MacHeist III bundle officially launched last night. This year’s bundle has some nice software in it. The total value for all of the software in the bundle is $627, and you can get it all for $39. I participated in all of the missions before the launch of the bundle, so I had already earned $402 worth of additional free applications, plus I earned $6 off the bundle, so I got a little over $1000 worth of software for $33; not bad. This bundle includes LittleSnapper, which is a great screen capture tool. This application alone would cost you $39, so it pays for itself in this bundle. It also includes World of Goo, which I play on the Wii. You should check it out, there’s software in there for everyone.

Tags: apple, mac, software

I started using Backblaze about a month ago. Backblaze is an offsite backup service. While I try to back things up to DVD every couple months, and I have Time Machine running and backing everything up to an external hard drive, I still felt it was a good thing to also have my stuff backed up offsite. This way if something awful happened, like a robbery, fire or some natural disaster; my important files will have been backed up away from my house.

The service is pretty painless to set up. I started with a free trial, and I saw the upload speed was nice, so I went ahead and signed up. It’s $5 a month for unlimited back up, or $50 a year, so you save $10. If the unthinkable happens and you need to restore your files you have the following options.

• You can download a zip file, which is the free option. I don’t know how they break up the zips, maybe each file is zipped up; otherwise you’d have a pretty big zip file to download. My initial backup was 46 GB.
• You can have your files sent over night on DVD(s). This option will run you $99.
• You can have your files sent on a 160 GB USB Hard Drive. This option will run you $189.

The back-up was painless, and I got great speed, but that also comes from my having the high speed Comcast internet connection. My biggest problem was remembering to leave the computer on so the back-up could take place. I’m used to putting the machine to sleep when it’s not in use.

Tags: apple, mac, software

This is another installment detailing software I use on the Mac. This post will revolve around software used for processing, viewing, and printing photos.

iPhoto - $79, or free with your new Mac

iPhoto is part of Apple’s iLife products, which ship with all new Macs. iPhoto ’08 is the current release, with iPhoto ’09 coming out by the end of this month. iPhoto is used for photo management, and has limited photo editing capabilities. One of the newer features of iPhoto ’08 is the ability to group your photos by Event. iPhoto will try and group your photos together by the amount of time between each of the photos taken. For example: a couple weeks ago Paige and I went to the Aquarium in the morning, and the King Tut exhibit in the afternoon, after stopping off for lunch. If I were to load my photo for the day into iPhoto, it would see that all of my aquarium photos were taken over the coarse of a couple hours, without any large gap of time. It would then see that the photos I took while at the King Tut exhibit were taken a couple hours later, so this would be considered a different event. You can tell iPhoto the amount of gap in the preferences. The default is to group everything together by day, you can take this down to an 8 hour gap between photos, or a 2 hour gap, like I use.

iPhoto is great for basic photo management. It gives you one place to organize your photos, perform simple editing (cropping, red-eye, straightening), e-mail photos, design books and calendars, and also upload to your Mobile Me account, if you have one.



Aperture 2 - $199

Aperture is a step up from iPhoto and is useful if you take a lot of photos, and useful if you use an SLR, taking photos in a RAW format. Like iPhoto, Aperture isn’t made for complex photo editing, it’s more for managing massive libraries, tagging and searching, rating, and processing RAW photos. This is where I spend a majority of my time when I work on my photos, and this is the default application I have open when I attach my digital camera. This is similar to Adobe’s Lightroom application, but this one is made by Apple, and takes advantage of Core Graphics, which provides its speed in handling lots of images.



Pixelmator - $59

I have talked about Pixelmator before. I was part of the beta testing for this application, so I have been using it from the beginning. Pixelmator is a powerful image editor built specifically for Mac OS X. It has most of the features of Photoshop that I ever used, and costs a fraction of the price. The user interface is beautiful, and it takes advantage of Core Graphics to use the GPU to process photo edits in real time. What does this mean? In Photoshop, when you apply a blur, or some other effect, you will see a preview window, showing a small portion of your photo, letting you see what the effect will do. When you are satisfied you click OK and the effect is applied. In Pixelmator, the effect is applied in real time to the entire photo, letting you see instantly what is happening. It does this because it uses your graphics card (GPU) to process the effect, not your CPU. I think the newest version of Photoshop may do this now, but I am not certain. Unless you are just tied to Photoshop because you own a lot of plug-ins or you have used it forever and are just super comfortable with it, Pixelmator should more than meet your photo editing requirements.



LiveQuartz - Free

LiveQuartz is a free, simple photo retouching tool. It’s very powerful for performing composites, and also comes with a nice library of effects and filters you can apply to your images. All of this is done in a non-destructive manner, meaning the original photo is never tampered with.



FotoMagico - $49

FotoMagico is an application designed to make it easy to produce powerful photo presentations. While a lot of photo software comes with the ability to perform a simple slideshow, FotoMagico gives you the tools to create a great slideshow, with music and transitions, and you can target different screen resolutions, even hi-definition. My mother is still on dial-up, so it is hard for her to hop on the internet and look at all of the vacation photos I’ve taken. I used FotoMagico to create a slideshow of all of my photos, and I added music to set the mood, then I burned it to DVD and sent it to her. It was simple and it turned out great.



Photonic - $25

I started using Flickr a while back, right before Yahoo! purchased it. I like the simple interface, and I am a pro user, so for $20 a year I can host an unlimited amount of photos, and download them in their original size. Flickr is great until you have a lot of photos to upload, then you find the web interface to be a pain. While Flickr does provide you with an uploader, it’s very unstable and doesn’t work all that well. This is where Photonic comes in handy. With Photonic you can connect to your Flickr library and upload a large amount of photos. You can also add your tags and comments at the time of upload, and choose to create a new set, or add to an existing set. Photonic also acts a a client for Flickr. You can use it to look at photos on Flickr without having to open your web browser and go to the Flickr site.



Snapshot - $24.95

Well, we’ve looked at software for importing and managing your photos, for editing, for creating slideshows, and for uploading to the web. The other big thing to do with photos is print them. This is where Snapshot comes into play. Snapshot is like a photo lab for your Mac. You have full control over the print size, cropping, borders, etc. It allows you to crop your photos in a non-destructive manner, so you can crop a photo just for that printing, and it doesn’t affect the original photo. It also integrates with photo software like iPhoto, Aperture and Lightroom, so you can print photos from your libraries.

Tags: mac, apple, software

Anyone who has read this blog knows that I like to check out the bundles of Mac OS X software that show up every once in a while. I find it to be the best way to find new software, and get software for a great price. One of the first bundles I ever bought was from MacHeist. This was a few years back. I received an e-mail the other day stating that a new MacHeist bundle is approaching. Hopefully there is some good software in this years bundle.

Tags: apple, mac, software

The default behavior of the Tab key in a dialog box is to only tab through the text boxes and lists, not to allow you to tab to any of the buttons. This is pretty annoying, and it’s strange that this is the default behavior. To change this do the following.

Open System Preferences, either by clicking the System Preferences icon in your dock, if it’s there, or click on the Apple menu (the apple icon in the top left corner of your screen) and choose System Preferences. Now choose the Keyboard & Mouse setting



Once you are on the Keyboard & Mouse Pane, choose the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. At the bottom of this tab you will see the Full Keyboard Access section. Choose the All Controls radio button to enable tabbing through all controls on a dialog.



As you can see at the bottom, the keyboard shortcut to enable this behavior is Control + Function + F7.

Tags: apple, mac

This post is a follow up to an earlier post where I was detailing some of the applications I use day-to-day on my Mac. This will be split among many posts due to the number of applications.

Utility Applications (cont.)

XSlimmer has a tag line of ‘Your Mac on a diet’ and this describes it perfectly. XSlimmer has the sole purpose of analyzing an application and determining what can be stripped from the application to make the binary smaller. The way it does this is two fold. First, many applications these days are packaged as Universal Binaries. A Universal Binary is packaged to allow it to run either on an Intel Mac, or on the older PPC Mac platform. This is great because it allows you to not have to worry about finding the correct version of an application, but this also results in your application having a lot of unneeded baggage. The second thing XSlimmer looks at is all of the nationalization’s included with the application. A lot of the applications you download have resources for displaying the UI and all messages and dialogs in the language the user has set up on their machine. A lot of these applications have 18 or so languages, while 99% of the time they will only be used in one language. XSlimmer will get rid of all the unneeded languages and the unneeded platform code, which can significantly cut down the size of the application. I ran it on all of my applications and got back 2.5 GB of space. While hard drive space is cheap these days, it is nice to have it used for important things, instead of stuff that will never be used.
Price: $12.95

Here’s some results from XSlimmer on my machine:

Safari Web Browser started off at 67.1 MB and was slimmed to 8.47 MB, saving 58.6 MB in space.
Mail started off at 289 MB and was slimmed to 24.7 MB, saving 264 MB in space.

Screenshot:



WhatSize is a utility that is helpful at recovering space just like XSlimmer. WhatSize will analyze your machine and will show you the size of a given folder and subfolders within that folder. This will let you see in a glance what is taking up a lot of room on your machine. You may find lots of unused files or applications you totally forgot about that are wasting space. Price: $12.99

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AppZapper is an uninstaller for Mac OS X. One of the great things about the Mac is the drag-and-drop nature of installing and uninstalling applications. To install an application on a Mac you drag it to the Applications folder. To uninstall you drag it to the trash and delete it. The problem with the uninstall is that some applications don’t keep all of their files in the Applications folder, it may store things in a preference file or in a cache file that doesn’t get uninstalled. This is where AppZapper comes into play. You drag the application onto AppZapper and it will search your hard drive for any related files that can be deleted, then you zap the files and delete them. Price: $12.95 with free upgrades for life.

Screenshots:





KeyCue is one of those applications you may look at and go, why would I pay for something like that, but it’s worth it if you are like me and like to use keyboard shortcuts a lot, to stop yourself from having to take your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. I’m sure most people know the common keyboard shortcuts you use very often such as Command-C to Copy, Command-V to Paste and Command-Q to quit a program, but what about the more obscure less used commands? In Safari did you know you can use Command-D to bookmark a page, or do you use the mouse to click the bookmark menu item? Did you know if you are on a web page in Safari you can press Command-I and the page will be imported into Mail so you can e-mail it to someone? These are the kinds of things you learn with KeyCue. It’s really handy when you are a developer and you use something complicated like XCode or TextMate, which can have hundreds of commands available through key combinations. KeyCue is simple to use, while you are in an application you can hold down the Command key, and an overlay with a list of the commands will show. It is that easy, and extremely helpful. Price: $19.99

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That’s enough for this time. I realize that you may look at all of these applications and notice that some of them cost a lot. If you were to just add up the price of the applications in this post it would total close to $60. That’s why I tend to buy my applications in the occasional bundle promotion that is found on sites like MacZot, MUPromo and MacHeist. You can sometimes pick up $400+ of software for around $50. Plus MacZot and MUPromo have daily deals too on software. It’s good to keep a watch on these sites.

Tags: apple, mac, software

There are a lot of people at my place of employment that are joining the world of Apple, and they often ask me what application I use to do such-and-such. I figured I would go through the applications I have installed on my Mac and tell a little about them, that way they can see what I use.

Utility Applications

Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X. It lets applications send you notifications. You know those annoying little balloon pop-up windows that come from the task bar in Windows, letting you know stuff like wireless networks are available, or your Exchange e-mail isn’t working; growl is something along those lines, but a lot nicer looking, and less obtrusive. Price: Free.

Screenshot



IStat Menus is an application for those computer geeks that like to know what’s going on with their system. It lets you add up to 8 separate menus to your menu bar. These menus will tell you about your CPU and Memory, Network Traffic, Fan Speed, Hard Drive, Temperature, etc. Price: Free (donations encouraged).

Screenshot



Hazel is one of those applications I got as part of a software bundle that runs every so often. When I first installed it, I didn’t really think much of it, but the more I used it, the more I saw its worth. Hazel lets you set rules on folders to take certain actions. For example, it comes with built in rules for your Downloads folder. If the file you download is a music file, after the file download is complete, the file will be moved from your Downloads folder, to your Music folder in your home directory. Same goes for Movies. Hazel will also monitor your trash can and automatically empty it after a file has been in there for a certain amount of time. Hazel will apply colors to the labels of folders, if there are files in it you haven’t accessed in a while. Price: $21.95.

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Default Folder X is a great application that makes the Mac OS X save and open dialogs easy and fast to work with. It’s hard to explain what Default Folder X has to offer, so if you want to know more visit the website. Price: $34.95

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Perian is called the swiss-army knife for Quicktime. It’s a free, open source Quicktime component that adds native support for many popular video formats. What that boils down to is Perian lets you use Quicktime to play videos other than the ones natively supported by Quicktime. This is handy when you don’t want to have multiple media players on your computer to handle all of the different video formats out there. Price: Free.

Caffeine is a simple application that stops your Mac from going to sleep. Don’t you hate it when you are on your Mac and in the middle of reading something, or perhaps giving a presentation, and the screen dims because you haven’t typed or moved the mouse? Caffeine will stop the screen from dimming and keep the Mac from going to sleep. Price: Free.

1Password is a password manager and automatic form filler. With all of the web sites out there that request for you to sign in, it’s pretty much necessary to have a password manager these days to keep track of it all. 1Password is nice because it will not only store your password, but can also generate a password for you. 1Password will also integrate itself into your browser, and automatically fill in the information for you when you visit a site. Price: $39.95.

Speed Download is a download manager. Download managers keep track of all your downloads, and will let you resume a download later, if for some reason your download doesn’t complete. Speed Download 5 is spectacular and worth the money. Price: $25.00.

Screenshot


Fetch is an easy to use FTP and SFTP client. While there are free FTP clients for the Mac, Fetch is the first FTP client I’ve used that doesn’t have a crowded, hard to use interface. Fetch has all its functionality in one simple window. Price: $25.00.

Screenshot




That’s enough for now, I will post about more applications in another post at a later time.

Tags: apple, mac, software

If you do any shopping or paying of bills online, you know you always come to the page that has your confirmation, and asks you to print a page for your records. Mac OS X has a feature that helps you store all of these receipts. When you go to print the page, click the PDF drop down



From here you will see a “Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder” menu option. Click this, and the web page will be saved as a PDF into your Web Receipts Folder, which is located in /Users/username/Documents/Web Receipts. This is a great option, because it gives you a copy for your records, but you don’t have to go through the trouble of printing it out and storing it.

Tags: apple, mac

The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook



I have a couple ideas for iPhone applications, nothing big, quick hit applications that would be available for free, so I picked up this book to point me in the right direction. I also have plans for a big iPhone application, that the people I’ve mentioned it to think is a great idea, but it’s one of those things that would take a team of developers, some venture capital, and some big company buy in, not something I think I can pull off at the moment, but maybe I can patent the idea

Silverlight 2 Unleashed



The application I am currently working on at work is a Silverlight web application. Silverlight 2 was recently released out of beta, so there are finally books showing up that are no longer referencing the beta build. I purchased this book to bring into our war room as a reference. I like the Unleashed books, and this one seems to cover a wide variety of subjects related to Silverlight 2, so hopefully it’s of use to the team.

Tags: books, development, apple, .net

I am part of alpha testing for a new service called boxee. I became interested in boxee when I saw that it added extra functionality to my Apple TV. One of the reasons I wasn’t a fan of sites such as Hulu or CBS.com or other sites where networks allow you to watch streaming TV episodes, is you were tethered to your computer. I liked iTMS and Apple TV, so I could subscribe to the show and watch it on my television, commercial free. Boxee adds the functionality to have these sites accessible from your television through your Apple TV, and lets you navigate the interface and watch the television shows.

It was pretty painless to load boxee onto my Apple TV. I loaded some software onto a thumb drive and inserted the thumb drive into the back of the Apple TV. I rebooted the Apple TV, the software loaded, I rebooted again, and I had a couple new menu options on my Apple TV menu screen. The first thing I did was make sure the Apple TV still worked as it had before, which it did. Next I went to the update menu in the boxee section and updated the software. After this I gave it a try. Now, I have to remember this is alpha software, and they are hacking a closed, proprietary system, so it won’t be the most stable application. I have gotten it to run successfully a couple times, watched a couple episodes of Family Guy from Hulu; but it does freeze up with a blank screen a lot, and the only recourse is to reboot the Apple TV. I’ll be interested to see how this progresses.

Tags: apple tv

I have a couple co-workers that have recently joined the Mac community. I figure I can pass along any development tips, programs I use, gotchas, and general tips that I’ve come across along the way.

My first tip is how to enable Apache Web Server on your Mac, so you can do some web development.

The great thing about the Mac is Apple has actually included a lot of development tools by default or on the installation DVD. Apache Web Server is already installed on your Mac, you just need to enable it, which is pretty simple.

Start up the Mac System Preferences. You can either do this by going to the Apple Menu and choosing System Preferences, or you can click on the System Preferences icon in your dock, if you have it there.

Go to the Sharing section, under Internet & Network, and click the checkbox next to Web Sharing. That’s pretty much all there is to it. If all went well, you can open your web browser and browse to http://localhost/, you should see the Apache Web Server start page. You even have your own personal web page located at http://localhost/~username, you can use iWeb to publish to this.

The other thing you need to know is where the actual directory on your drive is that’s mapped to localhost. Double click on your hard drive and open the Library folder. Navigate to the WebServer directory and then to the Documents directory, this is where the web site resides.

To access your personal web page you go to /Users/username/Sites.

One last thing you need to know, in case you are doing something like PHP development, or any other type of development that requires you to make a change to the Apache configuration file. This file resides in /etc/httpd. You need to be root user to edit this file, the best way to do this is to open the Terminal and type the following

cd /etc/httpd

Since your Mac is based on Free BSD, a Unix system, you have all of the great Unix editors built in. An easy one to use for editing the Apache config file is Pico, but you also have access to Vi and Emacs. To start Pico as root to edit the config file type the following

sudo pico httpd.conf

Type in your root password and you are now able to make your needed changes.

Tags: mac, development

With the recent release of the iPhone SDK I know a couple developers who have purchased a Mac and are thinking of doing some iPhone/Mac software development. Now, most of these developers are from a purely Microsoft development background, from the early days of Win32 and COM development, perhaps some VBScript, and now .NET development. They don’t have a background in a low level language, such as C. Objective-C has been around since the 80’s, it’s basically a very thin OO layer on top of C. If you know C you should have no problem learning Objective-C. I learned C back when I was going to university for my Engineering degree. I think it’s a good thing to learn a low level language such as C or Assembler, as it helps you later on when you are learning a lot of the higher level languages, such as Java or C#. I myself have been playing around with Objective-C, mainly for writing a couple little programs I use on my Mac, but I would like to try an iPhone App if I could think of one to develop.

Here are a couple good resources I’ve found for helping learn Objective-C.

The first place to start would be the Apple Developer Connection. It has good tutorials on Objective-C, Cocoa development, iPhone development, and using XCode, the Apple IDE.

There are a couple blogs I follow which are pretty good: Cocoa Is My Girlfriend, Mac Developer Tips, and iPhone Developer Tips.

There are also a couple books I recommend. These books mainly pertain to XCode, but you learn Mac development at the same time. Both of these books have taught me a lot.

Cocoa Programming For Mac Os X (Third Edition): Aaron Hillegass. Make sure you get the third edition, as this one is geared toward XCode 3, which is the newest release. I have the second edition also, and while you can probably follow along, the changes between XCode 2 and XCode 3 are pretty big, so you will have trouble following along with the code samples.



XCode 3 Unleashed. The great thing about this book is it walks you through developing an application from start to finish using XCode and the other tools provided by Apple for UI design, unit testing, and performance testing.



I will agree with a co worker of mine that the barrier of entry for a developer on the Mac platform is a bit higher than that of a developer on the Windows platform, but in a way I think that works to the Macs advantage. You don’t have every point-and-click coder out there creating crap applications for the Mac, a Mac developer has to be a bit more knowledgeable.

Tags: development, mac, apple, objective-c

If you install the software I spoke of in an earlier post: “Read/Write to NTFS on external drive with Mac”, you will be able to run a virtual machine from your external drive. You need to have write access to the NTFS drive to run the VM. You may think that running a virtual machine from an external drive would have bad performance, but it’s actually just as responsive as if the files were on your machine. The only times I’ve seen operations take an extended amount of time is when you perform a Suspend, or when you take a snapshot of the machine. The great part about running the VM from the external drive is it lets you keep the space on your laptop/desktop. My MacBook has a 60 GB HD, and my average virtual machine is weighing in at 30 GB, which is a huge chunk of space to give up.

Tags: development, mac

If you work with both a Windows machine and a Mac, and you want to hook up a portable drive to both, you will need to format the drive in a format that both Windows and Mac can read. Since FAT 32 really sucks, your best bet is formatting the drive using NTFS. A Mac can read an NTFS partition, but can’t write to it. You may also run into issues trying to read from an external/portable drive that’s formatted in NTFS.

I ran into this today when I used VMWare Converter to convert my work computer into a virtual machine. The resulting VMWare image was around 20GB, not exactly the size file our network folks would like me trying to copy across the network. The easiest way to move such large files is to copy the files to a portable drive. I formatted my portable drive in NTFS and copied the files onto it. When I hooked the external drive to my MacBook I received a read error. To fix this I did the following.

Install MacFUSE. This allows your Mac to use any FUSE (File System in Userspace). Once you download the disc image and install the package, you should download and install the NTFS-3g FUSE. You will need to reboot after the install, (something I haven’t had to do since my Windows days); but after the reboot you should hopefully now encounter no more issues.

Tags: development, apple, mac

I ran into some issues this past week using VMWare Fusion, it wasn’t issues with VMWare, it was an issue with our companies security software and an expired certificate I couldn’t get to install due to a script never running when I logged on using VMWare. To resolve this issue I have stopped using VMWare for the time being and have decided to remote into my work machine. Microsoft makes a version of their remote desktop client for the Mac, so I decided to give that a try. The lag on the connection was awful. I would be typing and the letters were always a step behind. This is tolerable for a quick task, but not to sit there all day coding. I decided to check out other options and came upon a free tool called CoRD, which works great. Connecting to my work machine is fast, and even though there is the occasional lag, it was nothing near what I was experiencing on Microsoft RDC. I spent all day yesterday coding with no issue. I highly recommend CoRD for anyone needing to remote into a Windows machine.

Tags: software, apple, mac

Do you have a favorite website and often wish that, while you enjoy it as a web site, it would be cool if there was a way to have it as a desktop application; that way you can just double-click the icon to start the application, and there it would be. Instead, you have to start up your web browser and navigate to the page. I have a couple web sites I feel that way about, one of them being Google Reader.

I enjoy using Google Reader as my RSS Feed aggregator, but I tend to use NetNewsWire on the Mac. The reason being, I like that I can leave the application open and it will let me know when new news feeds are available. Like Mail on the Mac, it will show you the number of new messages over the icon in the dock. If I didn’t use NetNewsWire, I would have to occasionally navigate to the Google Reader site to check for new items.

Well, now you have a way, if you have a Mac. There’s this great free application called ‘Fluid’. What Fluid does is it lets you set up a web site as an application. It’s known as a site specific browser. You can read more about it and download it from here. Once you download the small 3 MB file, unzip it and copy the application to your Applications directory. When you launch Fluid you are presented with the following screen:



All you have to do is type in the URL, give the application a Name, and choose if you want to use the Favicon of the site, or a custom icon. You can find custom icons in the Flickr icon pool located here. Once that is filled out just click Create and it will create the application for you.

I created one for Google Reader, using a Google Reader icon from the above mentioned Flickr pool. The great thing about it is it actually shows the number of unread items I have in the Dock, as you can see here.



So, now I have the best of both worlds. I have a web application I can use as a desktop application.

Tags: apple, mac, software

I've found a couple sites that have daily specials on software for the Mac. I've found that a lot of 3rd party software for the Mac is actually pretty good software, compared to a lot of the software I've tried for the Windows platform. A lot of the stuff is actually worth buying.

MacZot

MuPromo

Tags: mac, apple, software

Once I got myself out of debt I started an envelope system. If I find something I would like to purchase, I start setting aside money for it, and once I have the money if I still want it, I purchase it. This way I don't just throw it on my credit card and get into debt again.

I've started using my MacBook exclusively at work, and I love it. To handle the couple virtual machines I run, I needed to delete all the applications on my Mac to make room, so I figured I would get myself another Mac for home. At first I was looking at the iMacs, but I already have a keyboard, mouse and a 20" cinema display, so I figured I would pick up a Mac Mini. These computers are amazing. They are so small. The entire time I've owned my MacBook I've always felt it was fast and powerful enough for all I do, so I felt the Mac Mini was perfect. It's a core 2 duo with 2 GB RAM. That will handle all I use it for. I haven't loaded all my applications on it so far, but it's been running like a champ for past week and a half I've had it. I'm very happy with my purchase, and even happier that I used my system to purchase it without getting back into debt.

Tags: mac, apple

Occasionally I work from home. I used to bring home my work laptop and VPN into work off of it, but we got new machines, and I opted for a desktop. I just like having a desktop for development. It's more powerful, and is cheaper to upgrade.

Since I got a desktop I started working from home a different way. I installed the Cisco VPN software on my Mac, and I also installed Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection. This way I could remote into my machine at work and just work off that machine. There would be an occasional flicker of the screen while it's refreshing, but all-in-all it worked well.

Since I occasionally have to work in Visual Studio .NET 2005, and other times in Visual Studio .NET 2008, I decided to just have those environments running as virtual machines. That way when we go to VS.NET 2008 full time, I won't need to perform an uninstall, I can just delete that virtual machine and start using the VS.NET 2008 virtual machine exclusively. It also helps in the future if my machine gets borked, I can just revert to an earlier snapshot of the VM.

Since I am running off a virtual machine I've found it difficult to work from home using my previous technique. Remoting into a machine, then running a VM on that machine is pretty painful in the lag that occurs.

I decided a better option would be to just get VMWare Fusion for the Mac, and load the virtual machine directly onto my Mac and run it from here. Since I am VPN'd into the company network the VM connects to the domain with no problem (except I have to remember to have my machine at work off the network or I will get an error because of the duplicate machine names on the network). I ordered a copy and just tried it out and it works great. I will try to work some this weekend on the WPF project, and if all goes well, I may just start bringing my Mac to work and working off of it. My goal is to only use Windows for development and Outlook, all other stuff I can just do from my Mac.

Tags: apple, development

If you have a Mac I recommend an application called "AppFresh". It's a pretty simple, but very helpful application. AppFresh scans your computer to find all the applications you have installed. Then it checks those applications against various web sites to see if the version on your computer is up to date. If it's not up to date it will provide information about the update and allow you to download and install from within the application. With the recent upgrade to Leopard there are a lot of applications that are putting out new releases to provide compatibility. It's a free application I highly recommend.

Tags: mac, software

Earlier this year, at the MacWorld conference, Steve Jobs announced that the first go at Apple TV did not produce what they wanted, so they were giving it another go. Steve dubbed it Apple TV - Take Two. The update for existing Apple TV owners was delivered today. Here's what is new on the Apple TV

1. Movie Rentals
2. HD Movies
3. Improved User Interface
4. No need for a computer
5. Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound

Now, anyone who keeps up with this blog knows that I don't subscribe to cable, nor do I have a tuner of any sort hooked up to my TV to allow for me to pick up basic cable channels. I just don't watch enough TV to justify the cost. So, when Apple TV was first announced; a device that hooked up to your TV and allowed you to purchase just the shows you wanted and allow you to watch them when you want, I plopped down my money the first day. This is the al-a-cart solution I was looking for. The TV shows I was interested in were available on the iTunes Store, so I could subscribe, and let my computer and Apple TV take care of the rest. The iTunes store keeps track of when a new episode is available, the new episode is downloaded, and synced to the the Apple TV. It's waiting there for when I have the time to sit down and watch it.

The big change on the new update is Apple has removed the computer from the whole equation. All you need now to enjoy an Apple TV is the Apple TV device, an internet connection, and a Hi Definition television. If you do have a computer you can still download to your computer first and have it sync; but, you now have the option to peruse the movies/TV/music sections from the comfort of your living room on your big screen TV, find something you like, purchase it at that time, and start watching/listening to it. It will sync back over to your computer if you have one.

On the earlier version of Apple TV you had to purchase a movie to watch it, usually costing around $10 - $15, depending on if it was a newer movie. Now you have the option to rent the movie, for between $2.99 and $4.99, depending on if it's a newer film and also if you want the HD version. If you rent a movie you have 30 days to watch it. Once you start watching it you have 24 hours to watch the entire movie as many times as you like.

While I don't think Apple TV is for everyone, especially if you already have cable with on demand and a DVR; this is a nice update and it makes a great product for people like myself.

Tags: apple, apple tv

Like most everyone else in the modern world I subscribe to RSS Feeds and use an RSS Aggregator to gather all of those feeds and present them in a nice manner. Unlike most people I use a desktop application to read my subscriptions instead of an online application like Bloglines or Google Reader. I tried both of those services, but in the end I always enjoyed using a desktop application. For a while now, on the Mac, I have been using NewsFire. I received it with one of those bundles of software I've purchased. It works nice, but I'm always on the outlook for new software to try out. Recently another RSS Reader was brought to my attention through some blogs I read. It's called NetNewsWire. This software used to cost money, but a few weeks ago the developers released it as a free download. I downloaded it and gave it a try, and now it's my new RSS Reader. Here's what sold me on it

1. It has a built in web browser interface, so if you click on a link in a post you aren't taken out of your feed reader into your web browser.

2. It has an online counterpart, NewsGator, which is also free, and it keeps in sync with your desktop application. That way you can view postings on your local machine or from another machine on the web, and everything keeps in sync. I don't read blog postings at work because they tend to take up my time, but this would allow me to hop on at lunch and check out what's going on.

3. It has a nice interface for saving posts or clippings from posts.

The company has a Windows application called FeedDemon. I can't speak for how nice it works, but if it's anything like NetNewsWire it's worth checking out.

Tags: mac, software

I did a post a little over a year ago detailing some of the software I enjoy using on my Mac. Since the time I wrote that posting I have started using other software on my Mac too, so that's what I'm writing about in this post. I recently purchased a bundle from Macheist in their second annual bundle offering. It's pretty nice, they offer a bundle of software, usually valued at a couple hundred dollars, for around $49, and part of the proceeds go to charity. I purchased a bundle last year, and purchased another this year. Even if there is one or two applications in the bundle you like, it's usually cheaper to purchase the bundle than to purchase those applications separately. You also get the benefit of trying out new software you may have never thought of trying before. There were a couple applications in this years bundle that I already owned, Pixelmator and AppZapper, but I have a friend that has a Mac that I will gladly pass those along to. Some of the applications I got this year that I have started using are

Vector Designer - this is a vector graphic program, similar to Adobe Illustrator. I currently use an application called Intaglio which I received with last years bundle. I'm always up for trying another application to see if I like it better, so I went ahead and installed it and will be trying it out.

1Password - in todays world you probably have a lot of web sites you visit that require you to register to be a user. Most of us probably get to the point where we use the same username/password at each site, that way we have a lot less chance of forgetting it. 1Password is an application that not only keeps track of your username/password and can automatically fill it in for you, but you can also use it to generate a strong password for you. This is a great feature, as long as you plan on visiting that site from a computer that has 1Password installed on it, since you don't know the password it creates for you. You can also use 1Password to help fill out forms for you. You can create a profile, and within that profile enter your name, address, e-mail, etc. Then, once you are on a form asking for that information you can have 1Password fill the form out for you. All of your data is stored encrypted on your computer, which uses a master password to unlock.

Speed Download - this is a download manager on steroids. You can have Speed Download integrate itself into all the browsers on your computer, plus it's supported in some other software, such as iTunes and Growl. A download manager is a nice tool to have. It sets itself up to communicate with the site you are downloading from, which allows you to resume a download which may have been interrupted earlier. Speed Download can also be used for basic FTP tasks, allowing you to download/upload to your FTP server.

CSSEdit - if you do any sort of web development these days I certainly hope you have hopped on the CSS bandwagon, so you are now separating your styling from your presentation. CSSEdit is an application that helps you with real-time CSS styling. You can make a CSS change and see it automatically without having to save and upload the changes.

Cha-Ching - I currently use money management software called iBank. I've been pretty happy with it, I use it to track my Checking, Savings, Roth IRA, Sharebuilder and Credit Card accounts; but, like with the vector graphics software above, I am always up for trying another application to see if it provides a nicer way to accomplish what I currently do in the current software.

Taskpaper - this is what is commonly referred to as GTD (Get Things Done) software. It has a simple task and it does it well. You create projects, and for those projects you create tasks. Once you complete a task you can cross it off your list. This is very similar to the web application I am creating with RoR, which I have been detailing in a couple blog posts. I am a big fan of working in the GTD fashion. I like breaking a project down into manageable, trackable tasks. I like being able to look at a list and see what I have left to accomplish. I also like being able to cross off a task when I'm done. It adds a finality to the task, makes you feel like you accomplished something throughout the day when you can look at your list and see stuff crossed out.

Tiki Magic Mini Golf - yes, this is a game, something I don't have many of on my computer. I installed it and gave it a try. It's actually pretty fun. Think of it as putt-putt golf on your computer. My laptop handles the 3D graphics pretty well, I have it run at 1280x1024 and a high graphic setting and I don't receive any sort of frame delay or flickering. It's something I will fire up every once in a while.

There are a couple other applications that were included with the MacHeist bundle: SnapzProX, Coversutra, iStopMotion, Awaken, and Wingnuts 2, but I haven't installed them at this time, so I can't speak for how I like them, but will definitely review them if I install them in the future.

There are a couple other pieces of software I have been using that I got separate from this bundle.

iSquint - once NBC decided to take their shows off iTunes I started downloading the shows from the web. These shows are generally in DivX AVI format, which doesn't natively play on my Apple TV or Video iPod. iSquint takes care of this. Drop the video on iSquint and it will convert it into the format needed to work with Apple TV / iPod, and can also import the video into iTunes once it's done with the conversion. This way I still get to enjoy the shows out on my big screen TV.

Yummy Soup - strange name, but a great program. I like to cook. I don't do it often enough, but I do enjoy it when I get around to doing it. Yummy Soup is a recipe manager. It comes preloaded with a lot of recipes and can import recipes from a couple different web sites.

Calorie King - I purchased this software to help me keep track of what I put into my body every day, so I can see what I need to cut out to lose weight. It has a huge database of food and you can add your own custom food to the database too. When I first started using this it let me see that even though I was never going above my daily allotment of calories, I was going way above my fat and carb allotment.

Tags: mac, software

So, the rumors were true. The MacBook Air did turn out to be a thin, super-light, notebook. It looks like quite an engineering feat, like a lot of Apple products. It's not something I'm interested in, since my MacBook isn't exactly something I lug around with me everywhere; plus the MacBook is pretty small and light (I have the 13" one).

Other things announced today are a wireless storage device called Time Capsule, to work in tandem with Time Machine, the new backup framework built into Leopard. Looks nice, but I already have Time Machine working with an attached external 500GB drive.

Apple TV finally got an update. I've been very pleased with Apple TV, but hated the fact that it was introduced and never really had any major updates (aside from hooking up to YouTube). Well, that ends in 2 weeks. That's when the software update will be made available to update Apple TV with some new features. The main new feature is the fact that you no longer have to download to your computer first, then stream to the Apple TV. You will now be able to purchase Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, etc from the comfort of your couch. Also, you can now rent movies. I canceled my Netflix account a month ago, just never had time to watch the movies, so they would sit around for a month or so. Now, with this feature, I can rent movies when I feel the need, and get it at that moment. Once downloaded, you have 30 days to watch the movie. If you start watching it, you have 24 hours to watch it, before it expires. The last feature is there is now HD content available. I can put my HD TV to use again.

There's also an update for the iPhone, will need to see what Paige thinks of it, since she owns one.

Tags: apple, mac

Today starts MacWorld 2008. It's funny. For some reason I always get an image in my head of Steve Ballmer calling together all the project managers at Microsoft, getting them into a big room, and turning on Steve Job's Keynote Speech, saying, "Watch closely everybody, this is what we'll be working on this year."

Steve Job's Keynote has gotten pretty famous. This is where he introduces any new products and any new features coming down the pipes. It's also where lots of people have built up such high expectations, because of rumors, that they end up disappointed because some product featured in a rumor doesn't come to fruition.

Today's big rumored product is something called a MacBook Air. Some are thinking a super thin, lightweight laptop. Guess we'll see if this comes about later on today.

Tags: apple, mac

I haven't ever really been big on office productivity software. It's the one category of software I always find I spend more time battling the software than getting any particular use out of it. In my day-to-day job I open the occasional Word document or Excel spreadsheet, but it's very rare for me to create one myself, unless I am throwing together a design document, which I find Word an awful tool for, but it's what we're provided. At home it's pretty much the same, not much use for office software, but I do like to use a spreadsheet every once in a while, so I broke down the other day and purchased iWork. Now I know I could use the free OpenOffice.org, or the NeoOffice version for the Mac, but I find them to be rather bloated and providing the same hindrance that I find with Microsoft Office. There is a version of Microsoft Office for the Mac, a new version comes out next week, but it costs over $300, plus it's pretty much the same version as on Windows, which I'm not a fan of. Instead, I decided to try out Apple's office suite, and I actually find that I like it. It costs $79, and it contains a Word Processor called 'Pages', a Spreadsheet application called 'Numbers' and presentation software called 'Keynote'.

Pages has two different modes, 'Word Processor' or 'Page Layout'. I like the separation, so you have the tools available that you expect when you are doing each mode. It's fully compatible with .doc and .docx, being able to open and save in those formats, so you can still exist in a Microsoft world.

Numbers is pretty amazing. Never thought I'd be a fan of spreadsheet software, but I threw together a budget spreadsheet in no time; it even has a graph. To create a comparable paige in Excel I'd have to have the help file open or do web searches. It's just very straight forward in Numbers. Again, like Pages, it supports .xls and .xlsx formats, so it can be used at work.

Keynote is what Steve Jobs uses for his MacWorld presentations, and they always turn out great, so I know it's a great piece of software. I don't find myself doing many presentations, but if I get the chance to I will definitely use Keynote.

Overall, I am satisfied with my purchase. Office suites have been around for a while, and they've become behemoths, with little new innovation coming out, so it's nice to see Apple throw in some new features and new takes on how to do things.

Tags: mac, apple, software