Matisse Enzer’s Unix for Mac OS X Tiger is on its way to bookshelves near you. This is a complete overhaul of the previous edition, which covered 10.3. For the GUI-centric Mac user curious about the command line, this is a great book to own. Matisse is another Well denizen, and I’ve followed his progress on the book with interest. Also see his blog entry on the book’s release.
ScreenCastsOnline and MacTV have posted a great screencast that demonstrates some of the wonders of LaunchBar. I’m a longtime fan and user of LaunchBar, but it can be hard to evangelize because it’s so unlike anything most users know. (Spotlight has changed that a bit, but that’s a post unto itself.)
I thought the use of the Keyboard Viewer was particularly clever. When the utility you’re demonstrating has “Keep your hands on the keyboard” as its motto, just following the mouse won’t do.
This is really one of the most maddening things that OS X does:
The disk "Foo" is in use and could not be ejected.
Try quitting applications and try again.
Hey, you’re the damn computer – try telling me what those applications are! Try telling me what files are in use! Try letting me override!
Quentin Stafford-Fraser commented on Tue Sep 13 04:29:25 2005:
Agreed - this has always bugged me, and Windows does just the same.
After invoking Expose, most people use a mouse to choose windows. But it can be controlled by keyboard, too. After invoking Expose for all apps (F9) or the current app (F10), you can use these keys:
Once or twice I’ve definitely confused the window manager this way – ending up with a foreground window with a greyed out title bar, for instance.
Choice of FTP clients has long been a minor religious war among Mac users. I stopped having strong opinions on this a couple years ago when I realized that transparent, read/write FTP/SFTP should really just be built into the OS. Apple’s KEEPING ME DOWN again.
Anyway, somewhere along the line I switched from Interarchy (which I had relied on since “Anarchie” days) to David Kocher’s Cyberduck. There’s no doubt that Interarchy is the more powerful and mature program. But what I need, and what most people need, from this type of program is fairly simple. It’s a graphical client, after all. There are plenty of freely available ways to accomplish more complex file transfer magic tricks – notably rsync and friends. Cyberduck does support the ODBEditor protocol, also known as “Edit With” – this lets you open a file from your FTP client directly in editors like BBEdit, TextWrangler, TextMate, SubEthaEdit, and Smultron that support the protocol. I use this feature pretty heavily.
DoctorMac Direct, a remote tech support service for Mac users, has a very handy Quick Checks and Fixes page that walks through a lot of good standard “try this first” troubleshooting techniques. If you’re an experienced Mac admin or power user you know most of this stuff already, but bookmark the page for the next time you get asked for advice. We all have succumbed to the temptation to try short-circuiting the troubleshooting process, but often we just end up discovering the disconnected cable twenty minutes later that way.
Last fall I posted a blog entry titled “Serving Notice” about the inadequacies of OS X notifications compared to their OS <=9 predecessors, and about my hope that Apple would look to cool projects like Growl for interface ideas. Well, Apple is holding out on me, but good work on Growl continues and the list of applications using it is growing.
One of my favorites is the unassuming NetGrowler, a faceless app which uses Growl to display information about changes in your network connection. If you’re a laptop user like me, often changing networks many times a day, it’s nice to know the exact moment at which you’ve received your new IP; and if you deal with flaky wireless connections it’s good to know whether that IP is real or “self-assigned” (i.e. non-functioning).