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.

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.

Quicksilver is the greatest keyboard or mouse extension for the Mac depending on how you look at it. It is now an open source project (as soon as they get the source code it seems) so expect more features in future releases. For now you can get it here. It really simplifies your life at the Mac as it reduces greatly mouse clicking and window pane aiming and displacing.

I find myself clicking more on a Mac than on a PC.

I know it does not make scientific sense. Look the Mac is windows driven (really no pun intended) and the PC is keyboard savvy, filled with keyboard shortcuts.

I use COMMAND+Tab to switch from an application to another (this is nice when you’re in a full screen presentation and you want to surf the web for your audience) and COMMAND+H to hide an application (and its obtrusive window pane).  I also find myself searching the awkward Spotlight with COMMAND+Space bar. I find Spotlight slow and unpleasant to use when I’m frantically awaiting results that keep updating.

I took me years to structure my folders in a workable manner. Using the project’s title works best for me. All files within are then broken into subfolders (background, images, text, presentation). Most of my search requests are for recent files, a few clicks away. You can also use the Apple and Recent elements on the Finder. And that’s about it if you don’t install Quicksilver.

The fundamental difference, in terms of semantics between Spotlight and Quicksilver is that Spotlight indexes a given file’s content (except if it is crypted) and QS only indexes file names. So you can see why one does not replace the other. You need both. Quicksilver is so rich in features that you can turn into a power user in no time. Once you have mapped your favourite keys to evoke it (I use OPTION+Space bar) it allows you to quickly find an application or a file and launch it with a simple carriage return (Enter key). It does much more but you’re going to have to dig in for the rest.

Today, let’s have a look at the utmost plague of contemporary life at the computer: SPAM. I am way above average in terms of the spam I receive according to the stats below. And I practice the art of mailbox management (always process all emails received with one of the following actions: delete, respond, flag for later retrieval, never ignore an email) hence the additional aggravation. 

SPAM seems to be getting worse. And I have a wide definition of SPAM. It englobes most non-sollicited mail even “legitimate” one. Like you, I have many email accounts and some of them have been active since the beginning of times (modern times, circa 1999). I am active on the Internet (to say the least) and I have filled out forms from New York Times, Technology Review, Google, Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, The Globe and Mail,  World Screen, Web Buyer’s Guide, Digital Signage Today, Wired, ZDnet (what a mistake), JOOST, SKYPE, facebook, Digg, Zinio, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, NHL and others. Add to this list all the software we register online.

Only a few enforce the “no email form third party” option. That field should read:

“no matter what you do, we will most certainly send you advertising of some sort from our brave sponsors who in their magnanimousness have really agreed to support this web site to get at you in any way they can, especially ignoring the no email from third party clause that we include to legally protect ourselves from infringements on the privacy of your records and your right to know how we share the information we have on you”. 

Hey the Internet is a public place. Don’t ever forget that. Privacy, huh?

I think organizations are so happy to obtain an email that they flood it forever with conferences, promotions, webinars, events, exhibitions, training tours, products, updates, documents, specials and what have you. I suspect the emails pulled are also shared among departments. Perhaps I should stop reading white papers, responding to surveys, participating in betas, subscribing to communities, registering software, voting online, commenting on blogs, reacting to editorials and simply put, interacting with the web. No way. 

Marketing should be more targeted, responses (and lack there of) should be measured and message frequency tweaked according to receiver’s behaviour. Current practices should be refined and automated with AI. Start-up money needed.

Firewalls should join the SPAM resistance. Email software should be more intelligent. SPAM sources should be scanned by spambots, matched against email response. Say more than a 1,000 users have filed certain messages in their SPAM folder, that information should be sent back to a web service, compiled and these IP adresses blocked in  a live Firewall IP table or at least filtered by all email software instantly… P2P spam filtering. Learning from all. Seed money needed.

Apple’s MAIL is fairly intelligent when it comes to filtering time wasting messages. Although why anything with the word Viagra would still make it to my mailbox by now really puzzles me. I also use Microsoft’s Entourage because it has so much more features than MAIL. Both are not perfect. Why are they not training and learning constantly? Why isn’t there artificial intelligence built into such a crucial application? I want my mailTV, so I can zap. 

Here are some SPAM statistics:

40% of all email are considered SPAM.

12.4 Billion spams are sent daily.

Are you the visual type? Look at this, the Junk-o-Meter.

The only person I know of who does not receive any spam is John Dvorak (famous for his infamous “I get no spam”). At least he’s suggesting an Apache trick to reduce blog spamming. 

I’m amazed, astonished, astonied, astounded, stunned, dumfounded, flabbergasted, stupefied, thunderstruck, goggle-eyed, openmouthed, popeyed, startled and honestly jiggered (www.synonym.com) at the amount of spam that makes it on the network of all networks. Variants of V!4gr4 almost always make it to my mailbox. Whatever happened to the whitelist idea? 

In the mean time, here is something to consider when you’ll be filling out a form on line asking you to:

“absolutely provide a real email as an activation link will be sent to the email you provide and it must be valid, blah, blah, blah”

 Mailinator.

It may help reduce the risk of SPAM and the ensuing side effects of mailbox congestion. Get some rest, rent a movie and clean your delete key!

Allright, I was told to keep it shorter as were are not yet part of the “20 domains making up 39% of all the time spent online by US consumers“.  Just kidding.

I just feel like providing a simple Blog category for placing useful Mac bookmarks without going into great lengths about they are an important part of everyday computing. When I recommend software or links and I suggest you give it a try, it is because I use them.I’ll start with Version Tracker  the place to go to track all software updates for applications that are not necessarily part of the OS.

One irritating aspect of owning a Mac is that you might own multiple Macs with multiple system disks and that your house might not be in order when it comes to salvaging “a” hardisk needing repair. It is best addressed with using a system disk to boot while holding the infamous “C” keyboard key. Add traveling to the above example and chances are help is needed. This is when Applejack comes in. It is an alternative to fixing a Mac’s hardidsk or repairing file permissions without a system disk. Once installed, you boot in single user user mode (pressing Command and S simultaneously) and you have access to all sorts of command prompt options. Be careful with any hard disk manipulations as caches and other hidden files can really throw your system off balance when deleted. Check it out and see if it is for you: Applejack. 

A nice complement to hard disk problems (especially hopeless ones) is DiskWarrior that you can get here: http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/  

Nothing will ever replace a good backup plan executed on a regular basis. Bye for now.

One of the most “productive use” of your Mac is being able to exchange files with a remote destination. There are many ways of doing this (since the Mac is also a derived UNIX machine) but I tend to prefer the less complicated ones. This is all about production—simplicity and ease of use are an essential part of the equation.

One of my favourite (notice the Canadian spelling, Hey) FTP client is TRANSMIT with Cyberduck closing in rapidly (the nostalgic years of Fetch belong to the past). There is also YummyFTP and the nice and free open source FUGU. 

There is a pretty extensive list here of a lot of FTP and SFTP Mac servers and clients. The key is that they support native Mac OSX SSH authentification for smoother integration with your distant machine.

Transmit will allow you to synchronize two destinations very well. Since most Web software already have addressed the”sync” dilemma, let me show you how I use Transmit to sync my laptops (I have three, two MacBooks and one 17″ PowerBook, told you I love Macs) with my 20″ iMac.

First, you should know that I think we never have enough security. Jonathan thinks I’m overdoing it in general. It seems the more you learn about computers and networks, the more you dread the obvious—your data is not safe.So, go into System Preferences of any of your remote computers containing the files you want synchronized and enable “Remote Login” and “FTP Access”. Remote Login will activate an alternate Terminal based access for those of you who are handy with UNIX (ssh user@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) but hey you already knew that. It will also allow us commoners to access the remote computer via SFTP, a “safer” FTP protocol. I know that I’m overdoing it for my example since I’m on a local network. But imagine building all these nice “safe” habits and not having to think next time you will be in a noisy public place…

Once this is done, obtain the IP address of your remote computer (System Preferences, Network, TCP/IP) and make sure you know a valid user and password for that machine. You’re ready to sync (and yes I know about Carbon Copy Cloner but I did not get it to work right off the bat and that bugs me and there is also Retrospect  but in general, I tend to sway towards simplicity and this about Transmit anyhow).

Start Transmit, build a favourite for your remote access (provide user, password, folder path, and pick SFTP as the file transfer protocol) connect, select the source and destination folders you want to synchronize and pick the method you prefer (in my case it’s almost always “download” and “update” since I am claiming back files from my laptops to my iMac). Bear in mind that whatever local address you set in your Transmit favourite for that remote computer in this particular case, it will most likely change if you have multiple computers on your network and you dis/reconnect them once in a while. In general people accept default DHCP for their Routers. The beauty of dynamic IP addresses is their very essence—they have a tendency to change.

I’ll tell you more about what I do in other posts so you know why I have so many laptops. You are now ready to synchronize to your heart’s content.

There are two other features that you might use in the action. The “Preview” button allows you to see PDF, jpeg, gif, png, etc. on the remote system. Neat little feature. The other one is the report Transmit compiles at the end of the synchronization session. Save it and go through it rapidly to make sure everything went as planned.Transmit also offers Automator workflow possibilities (let me know if you ever use Automator, honest please). As we have seen it has SSL, an essential remote access prerequisite for Internet Cafés and anything goes public access.

I really like the interface, I can’t imagine how it could be made simpler. If you’re like me and trust your intuition for digging into a new software (i.e. no reading) you will feel at home quickly for the basic file transmission operations.

Finally, you have the possibility to connect to iDisk. I’m using the .mac service for an additional (yet another) storage area, the glamourous .mac mailing address and because of the numerous trips I make in a year. I know you can share all sorts of pictures with the rest of the world, you can create movies and publish them there and you can even produce your own web site with iWeb and get it up and running in no time. I use the Mac essentially to work remember.

My pictures are private (except for those I published on JPGMagazine and GooglePages ) and I’ve produced so many web sites since the beginning of the web that I lack the inspiration to build one for fun (except for this one, but it is all automated so where’s the challenge?). ((Aside on the aside, I guess one is allowed to get sidetracked in a personal blog, it goes with the turf and that was such a nice demonstration of that instance.))

Since I started on an FTP client discourse, I might as well point out another nice little utility you might need to enhance your Mac’s productivity. Whatsize  enables you to measure file sizes of entire folders very neatly and applying filters to the indexed results. I often find myself having to locate quickly the biggest files on a given hard disk. That’s the ticket.I have to leave some room for Jonathan so you can enjoy his Mac server review. Bye for now and feel free to write to us and comment in this beautiful Web 2.0 world wide web…

Well, it looks like we finally made it out to the Web. It took us me a while to get the site ready, but it looks like we’re finally ready to roll with the blog.

First, let me introduce myself. I’m Jonathan Grenier, I’m a big Mac fan, vice-president of the local Mac User Group here in Montreal and I just so happen to be working full time with a MacBook Pro.

Hopefully I’ll be able to bring some good stuff to this blog. I’m planning on bringing a lot of the tips and tricks I give every month at the LCMM to you here.

As a first step, I’m going to Apple Canada tomorrow for a one day bootcamp on 10.5 and 10.5 server. I’m hoping to get some tips out of it. In the next couple of posts, I’ll be posting some cool tips to boost your productivity on your Mac.

So, did you get your 10.5 installed yet ? By the way, 10.5.1 is now out, so it’s a good time to update if you haven’t already. There’s a ton of stuff in there that’ll make you which you had upgraded before.