Tag: mac
My partner Ryan shared this with me. It’s a 10-minute video showing the evolution from System 0.97 to macOS 13 Ventura. I had an original Macintosh 128K which is now enjoying its retirement at the Media Archaeology Lab. Enjoy!
Let’s start with my bias. I love Twitter, use it all the time (a lot more than Facebook), and will continue to love and root for Twitter.
I’ve been a Twitter for Mac user for a long time. I know it’s out of favor with all the cool kids, but it works for me.
It sits quietly on the left side of my giant screen and whenever a little dot shows up next to the second icon (I think it’s a tilted bell) I know I have something that has @bfeld in it that I should look at or respond to. And, when I feel like tweeting something, the app is right there on the left side of my screen.
Last week when Twitter for Mac was upgraded to raving from folks like Cult of Mac in their post Twitter for Mac doesn’t suck anymore I was psyched to install the update from the Mac App Store. So I did.
Here’s the problem. Suddenly refresh no longer works on the notification page (second icon). Now, when there’s a little dot there, I have to click the first icon (Home) and then the second icon (titled bell).
Sadness ensued. I presume that this has already been reported to gang at Black Pixel. I was hoping this would get fixed in version 4.0.1 which came out yesterday. But it didn’t. So here’s hoping for 4.02.
A few days ago, I noticed that my MacBook Air fully charged battery life had suddenly gone from around seven hours to under two hours and the fan was going full speed.
This has happened in the past and I couldn’t remember what I did to fix it. I blew it off for a few days until I got tired of having to plug my computer in every few hours. A quick look at Mac Activity Monitor showed me that Google Chrome Helper was eating up all my CPU (often at 100%) and subsequently crushing the battery life.
A search on Google didn’t turn up anything terribly satisfying. I found lots of complaints, a few suggestions to turn of automatic plug-in loading, and lots of “hey Google, fix this” dating back to 2011. Buried somewhere in one of the threads was a note to try clearing my browser cache.
Of course, there is no “clear browser cache” option any more, but there is now a “hamburger menu: More Tools: Clear Browsing Data” option.
That solved it. I saw over seven hours of battery life today. No fan. Simple, but buried.
Some day all this shit will just work. Well – maybe not.
I love when the combination of Google Search and the a great discussion board quickly solve something that has been driving me batshit for a while.
I finally stopped procrastinating and started the final two day edit push on Venture Financings: How To Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer And VC. However, for the last month I’ve become increasingly annoyed by the horizontal scrolling thing that happens within Microsoft Word 2011 on the Mac when I accidentally brush my fingers horizontally on the magic mouse. In an effort to continue procrastinating (which I clearly have succeeded at) I went looking for a solution this morning.
Two minutes later I found it after typing mac word 2011 horizontal scrolling with mouse into Google. The post is on the Apple Discussions board and titled “Topic : Magic Mouse – Disable horizontal scrolling ?” The solution is:
Run Terminal (in your Applications/Utilities folder)
Paste the following command into the Terminal window:
defaults write com.apple.driver.AppleBluetoothMultitouch.mouse MouseHorizontalScroll -bool NO
Turn off your magic mouse with the power switch and wait until it disconnects
Turn your magic mouse back on
I have now banished horizontal scroll from my life and exhausted my last good reason to procrastinate right now.
Now that my complete and total infatuation with my Mac has worn off and shifted into delight and love, I’m starting to explore the weaknesses of the Mac for not other reason than I’m trying to figure out where the real rough edges are.
So – if you are a Mac user, I’m very interested in the things you don’t like about the Mac, especially the things you hate. I offered up the Address Book as a burnt offering the other day. Anything else out there that blows?
I’ve been all Mac for the past six weeks and in general I’m loving everything about it. I am, however, starting to bump into a few things that are stinky.
The Mac Address Book is one of them. Mail and iCal are good, but Address Book just sucks. I’m constrained by an Exchange server on the back end which is nicely abstracted away across all my devices (multiple computers, iPad, iPhone). My actual contact database is just fine, it’s just that the Address Book app is incredible weak.
Is there a known alternative out there other than using an entirely different mail client such as Entourage, Thunderbird, or Zimbra? I just want a better Address Book – I don’t want to change Mail and Calendar.
No, Ross, you can’t have your $100 back.
On June 20th, I declared that I was going to try A Month of Mac. I took my Macbook Pro (an older model from about 18 months ago) up to Alaska, left my Lenovo x300 in Boulder, and went native Mac.
I’m typing this on my brand new spiffy MacBook Pro 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7 with 8GB RAM, with a 500GB solid state hard drive. I can’t figure out why I’ve been so stubborn about really switching to the Mac. This is a beautiful computer.
The key to this switch was that the native mac apps (Mail, iCal, and Address Book) sync seamlessly with Exchange. So I don’t have to deal with the abortion that is Entourage but at the same time I don’t have to mess around with our email server and impact everyone else in our organization. That’s sweet. I had a feeling this would work this time since it works flawlessly on my iPhone and iPad, and it did. The only thing missing is Tasks, but I started using Evernote instead which actually worked even better than the Outlook Task manager.
So – no Parallels or Fusion – I don’t even have a Windows image on this machine at this point. I didn’t use Windows a single time in the last month and now that I’ve rewired my brain for Mac shortcut keys I think it’d be a pretty amusing thing to watch.
I’ve found peace and happiness with iWork as a replacement for Microsoft Office – it’s more than adequate for what I do. MarsEdit is a spectacular blog post editor, Chrome works happily on the Mac as does Skype and TweetDeck, and Adium replaced Digsby. Pogoplug works just like it did before – all my files are where I want them to be. Best of all, my iPhone actually does what it’s supposed to with iTunes.
Did I say that this is a beautiful piece of hardware? Sleep mode – check. Flawless super high resolution screen – check. Super fast everything – check. Find a piece of software you want to play around with – download and run.
The most remarkable thing was the transfer of all my data, applications, and settings from my old MacBook Pro to my new MacBook Pro. I connected them by Firewire. I restarted my old MacBook and held down the T key. After the transfer started, I went and had a meeting for a hour. I came back and my new Mac was set up exactly like my old Mac. Perfect.
Ross – you owe me $100.
Well my Mac experiment is going extremely well. I’m not sure I remember how to use a Windows PC, nor am I sure why I’d want to. I’m using a Mac that is at least a year old (2.4 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4 GB RAM) so I’m not even tuned to the max but I’m absolutely loving the overall experience. As so many people have told me, “shit just works.” And so far, whenever I’ve had a problem, I’ve been able to quickly find the answer with a Google search (e.g. “three pane mail view in Mac Mail” – two choices: WideMail or LetterBox).
As I’m starting to go well beyond the things I did with my Windows PC, I’m starting to bump into some issues. I’m using Skype constantly for video and audio calls, including regular phone calls. It’s way better than my iPhone (oh – the irony) and given how solid the audio / video on the Mac is I feel like I can just use it whenever I’m in front of my laptop.
But – there are a few things I’m struggling to figure out. I’ll lay them out here for y’all in case anyone has suggestions. I’m also interested in any Skype-related Mac happiness people have found – please leave hints in the comments.
Issue 1: I’m still using Exchange for my mail, address, and calendar store. Mac Mail, iCal, and Mac Address Book are working great – no issues at all other than sending large attachments through the Exchange server (which is a well documented issue.) But for some reason I can’t figure out how to get Skype to include all my Address Book contacts. I only seems to integrate with the contacts listed in the “On My Mac” folder, which is empty since I have all my contacts stored on the Exchange server. Any clue how to get Skype on the Mac to read the Exchange contacts?
Issue 2: I can’t find a Safari plugin for Skype. I’ve got a Firefox one – where any phone number gets highlighted. But I’d like one for Safari also.
Oh – and if you want to reach me via Skype, it’s just bradfeld.
I’m a week into using a Mac as my primary computer and loving it. Every day I discover at least one little thing that makes me go “why the fuck didn’t my PC ever do that.”
Today’s was the time zone thing. For two decades I’ve been bedeviled by time zones whenever I travel. For a long time I had to manually set the time. Eventually on the PC I got things into a state with my calendar where changing the time zone worked, but I still had to do it manually.
On the Mac, I simply check a box on the Time Zone screen that says “Set time zone automatically using current location.” Voila – I’m in NY and the time zone is set correctly on my Mac.
While I know this is a trivial little thing, but I’ve spent N hours of my life changing the time zone manually on my Windows box. I want those N hours back.
When I reflect on the week, I’ve started to master Quicksilver, found an automatic natural text widget that lets me type “lunch with dad from noon to 2pm on Saturday” and an item appears magically on my calendar, and I’m enjoying Ctrl-1, Ctrl-2, Ctrl-3, and Ctrl-4 to quickly switch between screen states (or “spaces”).
I’ve been stubborn for a while about this Windows / Mac thing but I’m starting to get it.