For various reasons, mostly because the vast majority of business users are in a “Windows” environment, I also run Windows XP on my iMac (with Unix isn’t that out of this world?). All compatibility issues can be tested some applications that simply won’t run on  a Mac, can be installed. (and yes there are still fonts and Quicktime issues between the two platforms when exchanging multimedia files)

Trade software (stock exchange, financial analysis, legacy, third party utilities) developers often only cater to the largest market out there: the Microsoft hegemony. Although 

And the first one now
Will later be last

The Times They are A-Changin’. mostly because of the iPod’s and iPhone’s popularity, the design of the Mac and the overall flexibility and robustness of the Mac OS X feline releases. Tigers and Leopards are eating up market shares.

Read this fascinating article on Apple’s recent progression. The most dramatic aspect of their inroads are in the sales and profits they are making in comparison to Microsoft’s. In terms of OS installed base Microsoft has roughly ten times more but, in terms of profit, Apple is making a third of Microsoft’s (hardware and software combined). Microsoft is selling about 770,000 VISTAs a month and Apple is selling about 1 Million copies of Leopard monthly. Count me as both a Mac and Windows advocate when foes coexist… where do I fit in? I just think one should always consider the best tools for any given job, setting aside a priori opinion. I’m buyest for my personal computing but that’s another story. (end of intro I guess)

I picked Parallels over Bootcamp because I wanted the Mac to coexist with its PC foe to fight it out for CPU cycles. Yes this Mac is big enough for the “boot” of them. I recommend 1 Gig of RAM for Parallels as anything under that will make you wish you had chosen Bootcamp.

your ads here (468x60) - after 1st post.

We invest a lot in hardware, network gear and connection to the Internet but we often leave out one essential aspect of browsing: domain name resolution. I recommend that you use OpenDNS to gain more control over an essential part of your network. It’s very easy to set-up and creating a free account will allow you to configure settings for phishing prevention, typo correction and browsing statistics. OpenDNS caches a lot of Internet domain names so accessing them is much faster. The more you use the service, the more your favourite places are cached. Now if someone could get me fiber optics, we’d be off to the races.

One of the thing that saves me a lot of time these days are keyboard shortcut. Sure, every applications and OSes have some, but some take the concept a little further.

One of these application is the incredible text editor TextMate. If you’re into programming, be it HTML, PHP, Ruby or any other type of text-based work, TextMate can help you quite a bit. It’s not a cheap software per say, but it’s a great tool for those of us coding all day. The reason why it’s so good is that its entire programming language support is based on a scripting language and macros and shortcuts that can be triggered by using a keyboard shortcut. You type a word or a few letter and TextMate will do the rest of you and all it this is done within context so that typing something in a CSS block will do a different action than if you are typing within an HTML block.

If you like that idea but don’t need an advanced text editor, one software I like a lot is TextExpander from Smile On My mac. The software does exactly the same as textmate (it expands a word into a bigger text) but it does so anywhere in the OS. It works within Mail, within Safari, anywhere. It’s a 30$ piece of software, but if you need to write a lot of repetitive text, it’s pretty nice. I’ve been using it lately to answer some repetitive emails and forum support. Since I sometime answer questions in Mail.app, in Firefox or in Safari, it’s useful to have a global software so the shortcuts are available anywhere. The latest version added .Mac synching, which is one of the thing that I really missed before.

The Mac community has a lot of cool productivity software. The problem is actually finding the right one for the right task. I’ve bought a lot of them and I’m just now getting to know all of them and finding out which one works well for me.

I’m proud of myself today. Perseverance and research, trial and error have yielded a new way to install OS X Leopard remotely. My problem was that I own a PowerBook G4 with a broken DVD drive (long story) that I wanted to update to Leopard. To make a long story short, I used a strange combination of hardware and boot up key secrets (sooooo specific to Apple), to achieve the desired result.

I did quick research on the Internet and could not find a simple way of doing this aside from the usual forum best advice… I had tried to mount the PowerBook on my iMac Core Duo using a FireWire cable and “T” for target and then installing the system off the iMac’s drive with the PowerBook as the target installation drive.

Much to my dismay, Leopard’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Universal Binary installed an Intel personality on my perpetually “? booting ” PowerBook.

The solution was to mount a MacBook as a target Firewire drive on my PowerBook and boot the PowerBook using the”Alt”key to find a volume with an OS that would be the Leopard disk inserted in the MacBook’s DVD drive. Wow, how geeky can it get? I was running out of fingers, keyboards and wires. Are you up on your keys?

Here is a good primer for you:
On boot up  
hold the C key to start from CD 
hold the T key to put computer in FireWire Target Disk mode
hold the ⌥ key to show all startup disks 
hold the ⌥⇧⌘⌫ to start from external drive or CD

In the Finder
Pressing ⌃⌘-power will restart
Pressing ⌃⌥⌘-power will put computer to sleep
⌘-tab cycle forward through applications
⌥⌘-esc Force Quit Applications dialog
⇧⌘3 screen dump (entire screen)
⇧⌘4 screen dump (drag a rectangle)
⌘-space Spotlight

Read more for OS X keyboard shortcuts.

There is a lot more on the rixstep web site. They are programmers who chew UNIX like we chew gum. They make a couple of practical programs that they release under a suite. They are known for XFILE and CLIX that I had fun using for clearing caches. Check out Spike if you need a “real” file shredder. Outbox sounds like a very practical mailing application.

The main argument for their approach is that you should take control of your data, including hidden files. It makes sense to me. Revealing iPod_Control for example might be useful if you got your computer stolen and were left with your iPod as consolation.

Well, so much for QuickSilver, that great app that that François described a few post down. In a recent post on a mailing list, the developer recently mentioned that the future of the application was less than certain now that he’s too busy with other projects and that the current version “works well enough” for him. He did mention being interested in the new “branch”, basically a major new version, but that’s several months or a year or so away at best.

QuickSilver on Leopard has been less than perfect. For one thing, stability lately has become an issue and while the latest beta release (b.53) is quite a bit better, it still isn’t quite rock solid. One thing to note though is that the software is now open source, which will hopefully lead to a more stable release. One developer has started cleaning up the code so this does look promising. Can’t wait to see what comes out of this.

Meanwhile though, I had to start looking for alternatives. One of them is an old favorite of mine that had taken a backseat to QS for a while: LaunchBar. While not free, it’s quite solid, does most of what QS does (and in some cases, more) and doesn’t cost too much. At 19,95$, it would be a steal if not for QS’s no-cost license. It’s still a great deal none-the-less.

The problem with these software is that they take quite a while to learn and get used to. There’s a lot of shortcut keys, hidden tips and tricks and undocumented features that make them very powerful yet very intimidating. It’s the kind of software you need to use for a while before really using the software to it’s full potential. I’d wager that most people using either software aren’t even using 25% of what they can do. I know I’m certainly in that category.

Still not convinced that you need Leopard, Apple’s latest Operating System (10.5)? You can watch this excellent video from Macworld explaining 4 different major improvements to iChat, the gauche Finder and Spotlight pair and Preview.

I think these improvements are definitely in line with being more productive on a Mac.

You can now do phrase searches in Spotlight in a tip of the Google iceberg style (a complete list of Google search operators can be found here) by putting your search terms between quote marks. You can also do quick calculations with 40 mathematical operators (geeks rejoice).

Preview allows you to annotate a PDF file on the fly and finally select its text. You can also do an alpha channel (transparency) just like in Keynote on images to detach the subject from the background. You can send an image directly to iPhoto.

iChat allows you to open multiple IM accounts at once, it has three levels of compacted views to squeeze more conversations in a given window. It can now record a voice chat and a video chat (great for podcasts).

Finally the Finder is improved with the possibility of displaying the path in the Finder window. I like the look of the new Finder and its ease of use. I especially like he way the Dock stacks up my downloaded files and my Applications. I really enjoy Spaces that enables multiple Desktops (stop laughing Linux fans).

For those who want multiple Desktops (upgrade or not) I recommend Desktop Manager, a neat little utility even more powerful than Spaces. Hope you enjoy these features, I recommend you upgrade to Leopard and do the upgrade to 10.5.1 immediately after. A clean install is the way to go, provided you have backed up your user folder previously.