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Mac Development

by Chris Pirillo on April 7, 2008 at 7:46 pm · Comments · Related Posts
Categorized in Apple, Feedback

Gnomie JavaBeans writes:

Hey Chris,

I’ve noticed the recent videos involving programming. Seems like that is a pretty popular subject as of late. My questions are aimed at development on the Mac OS platform. I’ve never programmed outside of Windows. I have really been debating on switching over and developing for the Mac. I have heard that Apple is great toward its developers and provide a nice array of tools that are free with the OS. To me this is pretty amazing coming from using the bloated Visual Studio IDE. Not that Visual Studio is bad, but it is bloated and it does cost too much.

With Mac giving these tools out with the OS, you would think it would make more mention of it. If I had known that a long time ago I would have started in that direction. What do you think? Does Apple limit itself developer-wise because it doesn’t advertise this aspect enough? I am always seeing something about Windows development, but never anything about the Mac. Just thought it was interesting. I don’t want to spend a ton of money on my first Mac, so I guess I will pick up a Mac mini to start development on; it’s more than fast enough for that I think.

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Is OS X For You?

by Chris Pirillo on April 7, 2008 at 9:51 am · Comments (1) · Related Posts
Categorized in Feedback, Talk

Gnomie Matt (itubepro in our chat room) writes:

Is the Macintosh for everyone? Here’s a list to test if you should switch to Mac.

  1. Go to an Apple Store or visit a friend who has a Mac and see if you can limit yourself to using a Mac for a couple of days. I am a big Mac supporter, but I wouldn’t suggest buying one until you know what you’re getting yourself into. As a safety net, remember that you can also run Windows — so don’t throw away your install disk!

  2. If you get frustrated, keep trying — you will get used to it. I know the first day of using my MacBook was a mixture of excitement and frustration!
  3. Remember that OS X Macs operate differently from Windows machines. It took me five minutes to discover that the options are on the top bar! Not everything’s intuitive if you’re used to the way Windows works. Expect initial confusion.
  4. Get used to Finder and Spotlight. These applications will start you off on OS X as finder is Mac’s Explorer. If you cannot figure out the OS by yourself, go to the Apple Store and the Mac specialists will be more than helpful.
  5. The price shouldn’t scare you! I know this is a advertising thing, but they have better bang to your buck is completely true. The iLife suite is amazing and the software is very simple to use. I can find a file using Spotlight in five seconds while in Windows it might take me five minutes. (As a side note, I am only 14 and bought the 2.2 GHz model myself by selling RAM on eBay)
  6. The way the Mac is organized is much simpler. Start off with a lower-end Mac like a Mac mini or the lowest end MacBook if you need a notebook. But as I said in the first step, test Macs before you buy them. I personally like Mac better, but you may not. And no I did not pull the virus card this whole entire list!
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Dealing With iPod Classic Static

by Chris Pirillo on March 28, 2008 at 7:05 pm · Comments · Related Posts
Categorized in Audio

Gnomie Ryan Hall writes:

Hey Chris,

I don’t know if others have emailed you about this, or if you’re experiencing this problem, but after you turn off the iPod, there is audible static from the headphones.

From what I’ve discovered from various forums, this only seems to affect the 80 GB iPod class — not the 160 GB model.

I’ve found a few was to cope with this problem:

  1. After you maually turn off your iPod, put it on hold; the static goes away.
  2. Pause your iPod before you turn it off (pause, then press and hold play/pause to turn off).
  3. After you turn off your iPod, unplug the headphones, then plug them back in.
  4. Unplug the headphones altogether! (Ugh, I know.)

Nevertheless, it’s still a very annoying problem that I hope Apple fixes very soon with a new update.

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The Power of Dashcode Compels You!

by Chris Pirillo on March 28, 2008 at 3:30 pm · Comments · Related Posts
Categorized in Feedback, Resource

Gnomie William (MacintechStudios on YouTube) writes:

Hey Chris,

I just read your 50 Reasons to Switch from Microsoft Windows to Apple’s Mac OS X article, and saw that you mentioned Dashcode. It’s quite timely as over the past few days I’ve been fiddling around with Dashcode myself. While it does take the “geekery” out of widget-designing, it does offer a lot of power with the integration of JavaScript to help increase the flexibility of Dashcode.

I decided to put it to the test and create what I call the “Ultimate Search Widget.” It’s technically not the “ultimate” search widget out there, as there are others which can do slightly more, however those sacrifice simplicity for power while I tried to stick to simplicity and balance out the power.

What my widget will do — and again, it was created entirely in Dashcode — is allow you to search Web sites like Google, Yahoo!, Mahalo, and the like right from its interface. However, that’s not all. It’ll also allow you to search YouTube, Flickr, Digg (and yes, I Dugg your podcast), Apple.com, eBay, Wikipedia, and other sites similar to those. Again, that’s not all. With my widget I also was aiming to prevent clutter in the dashboard (this also reduces system resource use as it’s simply one widget versus four or more to do the same task). So I also included searching of YellowPages.com to find phone numbers and home addresses, weather.com to find out the local weather or the weather of a place you’re going to (not as fast as a weather widget, but far less system resources are used), and Google Maps to get directions.

All of this from a simple to use interface that is easily browsed. Probably the best part is that Dashcode allows anyone to easily edit widgets created in it… So of course I opened its source for anyone to edit and add things they want.

I attached a zip of the latest build for you to mess around with (as well as its source), just in case you were looking for a dashboard widget with this kind of functionality.

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New Mac User

by Chris Pirillo on March 18, 2008 at 4:58 pm · Comments (1) · Related Posts
Categorized in Feedback

Gnomie bGeorge writes:

Dear Chris,

Two days ago I received my very first Mac, a MacBook Pro 15″, and I am astonished with the experience. I have been a lifelong Windows user and have used every Windows operating system except Vista. My previous machine was a five-year-old Dell with little RAM and a failing hard drive. I thought it was about time to purchase a new machine and, since I was in need of more portability, I decided to purchase a notebook.

In the beginning I looked at many different brands of “PCs” and was settling on a Dell XPS notebook. I then learned that a friend of mine had purchased the same model I was planning on and was having a terrible experience with Vista. This was about the same time I happened upon your stream back in about August/September and have been watching you ever since. From my friend’s and your experiences with Vista I seriously began to question whether I really wanted to go with Vista or not.

Months passed and, around the time you decided to purchase your MacPro and post more Mac stuff, I started to rethink my computing experience and stopped defending Windows like I did in the past. Purchasing a Mac soon seemed like the right way to go and here I am now, happy.

The overall experience with the Mac has been great and spending a little bit more was definitely worth it. Using a Mac is different and it is taking a little bit of time to get the hang of it, but the Mac community is great. Last night I spent several hours reading the “Mac 101″ section of TUAW and learned a lot.

I justed wanted to say, “thank you” to all the members of the Mac community: Chris Pirillo, the folks at TUAW, Datalore, and other member of the #chris chat room, and that old guy that used to be on TV.

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Prolonging iPod Battery Life Tips

by Chris Pirillo on February 21, 2008 at 3:09 pm · Comments · Related Posts
Categorized in Tip

iPod from our chat room writes:

I have some tips on keeping your iPod battery alive as long as possible (because we all hate the day where we have to replace it).

  1. Dont keep your screen too bright! 50% brightness is a decent level. You don’t need it at a high level just to listen to music, even watching movies it should not be too bright. This tends to wear down the battery very quickly, as it is a major part causing iPod or iPhone battery to run out

  2. If it’s on a dock, turn it down. Turn the volume down pretty low, but turn your dock up high. This saves battery life, because it takes lots of battery to keep the volume high — the same if you’re listening to your iPod with headphones. Don’t keep it too high. Set a volume limit for your needs, and for the sake of your battery.
  3. When you power down, turn the hold switch on. This prevents unwanted power-ups and playing unwanted music or videos. Obviously if its turned on, it’s going to wear down its battery. Enforce this especially if you’re on a long trip with no USB port close by.
  4. If it’s in a case, take it out when it’s connected via USB. Your iPod or iPhone will warm up and this would wear down the battery, speeding up the time until the battery fully dies. If it’s just a case that is meant for not getting scratches on your iPod, then that’s okay because there usually thin and have spaces for air to escape.
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Buy AppleCare (Especially For MacBook Batteries)

by Chris Pirillo on February 21, 2008 at 10:14 am · Comments · Related Posts
Categorized in Apple

Michael Trimm also sees the value in getting AppleCare:

If you buy a Mac (or most any big electronic), get the warranty. I purchased the extended warranty for my MacBook Pro back in November and it’s already halfway paid for itself. See, I’m one of the lucky people who received a MBP battery that has a health issue. According to iStat Pro (which I referenced to the tech, who understood), I have 65% health at 132 cycles. That’s not natural. After trying everything I could think of (which was only one thing — calibrate), that’s the numbers I had. System Profiler shows “Fair” battery health.

So Apple’s gonna swap out my battery no charge. Now, if I hadn’t purchased the warranty this may not have been as easy. (Apple includes a year of warranty support, but I know some extra services are provided for those who extend Apple Care). Also, don’t be afraid to call support (Apple: 1-800-APL-CARE) and tell them you’re concerned with something on your system. The best they can tell you is that your stuff is fine and nothing to worry about or it isn’t and they’ll replace it. The worst that could happen is they’ll tell you that you have nothing to worry about it. (If you don’t have a warranty, they could tell you that you’re on your own because you didn’t fork over the extra cash).

I’ve had to deal with Apple’s support channels a few times before as well, and the experience was just about as “nice” as it could be (all things considered).

In-store appointments are easy to set up, and the only phone call I made was handled astoundingly well — the CSR even gave me his email address for follow-up responses, not long after Leopard was first released. I don’t know if that’s common practice or over-the-top dedication, but I was impressed either way.

Ponzi had similar “happy” experiences when she called support for iPhone issues back in the first days of ownership.

So, what about your computer / vendor of choice? How are their support lines doing these days? I’m sure this is a case of “your mileage may vary,” but I’d still be interested in detecting general tech support trends from my readership.

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Widgets, Widgets, Widgets!

by Chris Pirillo on May 13, 2005 at 6:21 am · Comments (2) · Related Posts
Categorized in Resource

I’m not a widget addict - yet.

Hello. You may remember me from a few years back - my name is Steve Lundstrom. I ran the Pocket PC Themes Web site. We also met at Gnomedex 3 in IA. Anyway, I thought I’d let you know about a new website / project that I just started. Similar concept to the PPC themes, but for Mac OS X Widgets instead. It’s located at HandyWidgets.com. I’m 100% new to the Mac world, so this is kind of new and exciting for me. I like the Widgets a little better than the themes because a Widget actually takes some skill and time to create whereas the themes were endless wastes of time. I sold the themes website in January to a company in London.

Anyway, I thought the Widgets site might be a good candidate for your Mac OS X newsletter. I just launched the site with the release of Tiger and it already has a pretty good following. Thanks in advance for considering. Can’t wait to hear the discussion tonight on Delicious Library.

Well, they couldn’t make it this week (due to a slipped disc), but I’m sure we’ll get ‘em to sit in with us at some point in the near future. Until then, feed me more widgets!

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Automatic Maintenance, the Manual Way

by Chris Pirillo on July 20, 2004 at 6:18 pm · Comments · Related Posts
Categorized in Uncategorized

If you shutdown your Mac every night, it won’t run the automatic Unix-level scripts that are necessary for occasional file system maintenance. By using a little geek power, you can run those scripts manualy. Use the Terminal and the following commands to force Unix to perform maintenance:

  • sudo /etc/Daily
  • sudo /etc/Weekly
  • sudo etc/Monthly

As the commands imply, each performs different maintenace procedures at different intervals. It’s perfectly OK to run the scripts one after the other. [Submitted by Justin Sloan]

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Your Favorite OS X Utilities

by Chris Pirillo on June 29, 2004 at 12:22 am · Comments · Related Posts
Categorized in Uncategorized

Via Dave Taylor: “Hey all. I’m working on an article for a major computer magazine on must-have Mac OS X utilities and would love to hear about your favorite shareware/freeware utilities for Mac OS X. The more obscure, the better. As an example, Synergy is a great iTunes controller and well worth the download, Fire is a superb multi-IM client and I can’t say enough about the remarkably cool and useful Shubert IT PDF Browser Plug-In…”

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Brian Boyko’s Personal Picks

by Chris Pirillo on June 5, 2004 at 10:43 am · Comments · Related Posts
Categorized in Download

Thanks for bringing OSX fanatics back, Chris! The only thing that I miss, however, is the reviews of shareware in the email itself. That said, I’m sure I picked up a a couple of Mac-centric programs over the past couple of months that are useful.

Handbrake - http://handbrake.m0k.org/ - OSX - Free (GPL) - Handbrake’s a DVD to MPEG-4 converter, useful for those people who care more about filesize than quality and don’t really feel like carrying tons of DVDs everywhere they go (like, say, laptop owners on long flights.)

VideoLan - http://www.videolan.org/ - OSX - Free (GPL) - Videolan is a video-playing software program. Let’s face it, DVD Player and Quick Time for Macintosh are good programs, but they don’t play everything. VideoLan is the closest thing on the Macintosh TO playing everything. It plays both file-based and streaming MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and DivX files, and television channels. It will also play DVDs, although you still need DVD player for Macintosh to decode DVDs. (Darn DMCA!) This has been ported to just about every platform there is, including windows and Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE and Debian linux, and there’s complilable source code for BSD based and Solaris systems.

X-Chat Aqua - http://sourceforge.net/projects/xchataqua/ - Free (GPL) - The waiting is over! IRC fanatics can now enjoy a free, full featured IRC chat client without having to boot up into the X11 platform, having to settle for less than full features, or paying shareware fees. X-Chat is free, newly native to Aqua, and about as full-featured as you can get. Functionally similar to the Linux and Windows version of the program, X-Chat is a robust chat client with tons of tools to make your chatting easy.

Colloquy - http://colloquy.info/ - Free (GPL) - Colloquy is a beta version of a free IRC client that adheres to the Aqua look and feel, with more than a passing resemblance to the iChat application (although a more standard text-based IRC view is available) Newbies familiar with iChat but new to IRC will find this progam worth a try. Even better looking than the commercial shareware application Snak, although I have found it to be a bit buggy. More development will soon be forthcoming.

Poisoned - http://gottsilla.net/ - Free (GPL) - Poisoned is a free peer to peer application for MacOSX which supports the Gnutella, and Fast Track networks.

Azureus Bit Torrent Client - http://azureus.sourceforge.net/ - Free (GPL) - This BitTorrent client for Macintosh is as full featured as they come. Easy to use and setup.

Furthernet - http://www.furthurnet.com/ - Free (GPL) - For those who like to tape-trade live concerts, Furthernet is one of the more interesting and more innovative uses of Peer to peer software. It’s designed to ONLY allow material that has been approved by the copyright holder to be traded - as such, most of the files on Furthernet are full-length concert recordings of live concerts. As such, all the files on Furthernet are legal to own and share. Even if you’re not into concerts, this “proof-of-concept” P2P program is with supporting for it’s implications of academic and scientific work.

iRate - http://irate.sourceforge.net/ - Free (GPL) - Speaking of free and legal, IRate radio is peer-to-peer in reverse. It sends music files directly to your computer for as long as you want to listen. You then get to rate the music files you liked well, and the music files you didn’t like poorly - then iRate will send you more of the type of music you do like. Like Furthernet, all the files on iRate are free to download and have been approved by the copyright holder.

AbiWord - http://www.abisource.com/download/development.phtml - Free (GPL) - AbiWord, the free multiplatform word processor, not to be confused with OpenOffice, the OTHER free multiplatform word processor, looks like it’s soon going to be available for the Macintosh as Aqua-native in it’s next build 2.1.2. Those who live dangerously might wish to download the development build. Those of us who have been waiting for a native word processor to replace the dependance on Microsoft Word (and the less-than-fully-featured AppleWorks) may soon rejoice.

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