macBlogger – Apple Mac Blog

I was a bit disappointed when Preview failed to open up a .chm file which accompanied some software which I recently downloaded.

.Chm is a filetype devised by Micrsoft which compresses HTML files into a single document, usually for the purpose of software manuals and the like.

A quick Google lead me to an open source application by the name of  Chomx which effortlessly opens CHM files. The interface for the application is as simple as you’d expect and resembles Preview in many ways. It even has a “drawer” for jumping between pages.

Is it just me or is the below message confusing to anyone else?

Okay, so Adium has been updated. – Grand.
Do I want to allow the updated version to use the same keychain settings as the previous version? – Yes.

So what should I click? Don’t Change or Change All?

I want to keep my settings so I should click Don’t Change as that probably means Don’t Change any settings …. or …… should I click Change All because that could mean to change all the keychain settings from the old version to settings I would like to use in the new version….Mmmm.

What did I do?

I clicked on Change All and it used my settings from the previous client.

Could they not just supply a Yes or No option instead of Don’t Change / Change All? System messages should be clear and concise and not confuse the user. I would have expected the rule of thumb of suppling a yes/no solution to a question to be followed in this instance.

Is the system message in this instance delivered by the Operating System or Adium?

Either way, it’s a crap user experience. The primary reason I clicked on Change All instead of Don’t Change is because Apple consistently place the positive button (yes, confirm) to the right of the negative button (no, cancel). Besides from that, I was in limbo and dreading having to remember my passwords for my messengers in case I bolloxed up.

Genoswatch is an app for both Mac and PC which can effortlessly highlight matching colours for your projects. It displays corresponding colours via a colour palette but the application is severely let down by the lack of a colour picker

Genoswatch is a free download in this months Mac Format magazine.

If you’re looking for an online variant of this application, then the excellent Color Blender is what you’re looking for….or maybe Colorzilla for Firefox might be worth considering?

Roland from Mac Tips has pieced together some very helpful screencasts which demonstrate some equally useful applications and how to ‘pimp’ your Mac a bit.

At the time of writing this post there are seven screencasts in total on the site. Some of which include:

• How to include the date in the menu bar
• Add web search to the menu bar
• Ways to cool down your Mac

The videos are excellently put together and are very easy to follow for novice users.

The Monocle application, which places a search bar in the menu bar is especially useful.

Monocle is a simple search tool that puts a universal search field at your disposal. When you want search, you can choose from a number of engines to perform the search in different places. Monocle comes preloaded with engines for Google, Wikipedia, Windows Live Search and Yahoo! Search. You can easily add your own engines by performing an example search inside a web browser window in Monocle

The above quote is taken from the excellent iUseThis site.

I know we have dedicated a few posts in recent days to running native Windows applications on Mac but we can’t help it!

So, what options are available for running Windows apps on Macs?

• Parallels allows you to run XP/Vista virtually within Mac OS X, but for a price.
• Fusion is the alternative to Parallels, but that too comes at a price.
• Crossover can run .exe files within OS X, at a price.
• Bootcamp permits you to boot up XP/Vista on an Intel Macintosh machine, for free!

So that makes Bootcamp the only solution for those who hate parting with their cash. While the other three products allow you to run Windows and OS X simultaneously, Bootcamp restricts you to either choosing to load up Windows or OS X at start up. If you want to run .exe applications on top of Mac, you’re going to have to splash some cash, or maybe not..

Enter Darwine
The Wiki entry for Darwine states that it’s a port of the Wine libraries to Mac OS X. So what is Wine?

Wine is a project which aims to allow a PC with an x86 architecture processor running a Unix-like operating system and the X Window System to execute programs that were originally written for Microsoft Windows

There is more technical jibberings about Wine on its Wiki entry but all you need to know is that Darwine works and it’s an Open Source project hosted on Source Forge. In other words it costs €0.00 to download, install and use.

Of all the applications which can run .exe applications in a Mac environment, it is Crossover which resembles the functionality of Darwine the most. Crossover doesn’t come for free though.

When I first found Crossover, I attempted to run and install the Windows application; Google Talk. Crossover didn’t install the application correctly but nor did Darwine. I assume it’s due to an authentication feature on Google Talk to prevent a cloaking of the user agent or something like that.

After failing once again to install Google Talk on Mac, I attempted to install the Windows version of Filezilla. While Filezilla is available on Mac as a beta, it is very buggy. The below screenshot was taken during the installation process and it indicates a successful installation (click image to enlarge).

The good news is that Filezilla worked a charm! I managed to install, run, connect to a FTP account and install all these beautiful screenshots without any issues. Click the image below to see Filezilla running under Darwine.

With Darwine, you can do some pretty cool things on Mac which you couldn’t do before. Such as install Internet Explorer on Mac.
Why would you want to do that?
- Well, if you’re a web developer then you’re a slave to Internet Explorer no matter which Operating System you use.

But, if you’re a serious developer you should have a Windows machine close to hand for testing against browser and OS compatibility. If you can’t afford or justify having a dedicated Windows machine, then Bootcamp or maybe even an online emulator such as Site Vista might suit you better.

So that’s Darwine. A handy application to have close at hand. It may not work with every Windows application but it won’t cost you past a free trial of Crossover, Parallels or Fusion to find if a compatibility issue exists.

I received an email at the start of the week from Skype notifying me of their newest release. I was a bit disappointed when I arrived at the Skype site to find a Windows only update. What about us Mac folk? Huh? Fear not..

Skype this evening released version 2.7 of their popular VoIP application for Mac consumption. Thank you Skype. I was wondering if you forgot all about us!

The beta release introduces Skype to the OS X Address Book for the first time. This allows you to grab and share your contacts between the two applications.

There is an improved management of your contacts list within the application too. You can now group them into more manageable categories. You can get to this feature by clicking on the cogwheel icon on the main screen.

You can download the beta release by following this link.

Be weary though. A lot of users are reporting issues with this beta release. Users are saying that Skype is running slow and dropping connections at regular intervals. This may be related to the beta release but it also could be related to a general outage issue. You can read up on their encounters via the comments in the press release for Skype beta.

I earlier blogged about Transmission closing the gap between its features and those of uTorrent’s. The only problem being that one was solely a Mac application and the other a Windows application.

While that is true, it doesn’t mean that uTorrent can’t run on a Mac. I’m not talking about using Bootcamp or Parallels either.

Crossover is a beautiful piece of software which allows you to run native windows .exe applications on Mac.

CrossOver Mac allows you to install many popular Windows applications and games on your Intel OS X Mac. CrossOver includes an easy to use, single click interface, which makes installing Windows software simple and fast. Once installed, your application integrates seamlessly in OS X. Just click and run your application directly from the OS X Finder. Clicking a Windows file or document — including email attachments — will launch the appropriate Windows program, allowing you to work on the files. Best of all, you do it all easily and affordably, without needing a Microsoft operating system license.

Adding new Windows software is easy. Just place your install CD in your Intel Mac, and CrossOver will recognize it and offer to begin the installation process. CrossOver then completes the installation and configures your application to run on your Mac. That’s all there is to it.

While you’re waiting for uTorrent Mac to come out of beta, you can load it up using Crossover by simply double clicking on it like you would do to any mac.app file.

Beautiful, uTorrent running on Mac!

This method does works, but it’s not without its issues.

Finder doesn’t integrate with uTorrent under Crossover but you do get a ‘windowsy’ file navigator to work with. The navigator names your local Documents Finder folder as ‘My Documents’. This is the most feasible location in which to store your downloaded torrent files.

Each time you double click on uTorrent.exe, it goes through the installation process. But that process is hardly an issue as uTorrent is approximately 300kb in size. You’re asked whether or not you wish to add shortcuts to your desktop and start up menu, just untick these options and uTorrent should load up fairly instantly.

Running uTorrent via Crossover on the Mac might not be the most ideal scenario but if you aren’t happy with any of the native Mac torrent applications, such as Transmission or Tomato, then you’re going to have to bide your time until uTorrent comes out of closed beta for the Mac.

The only other application I have attempted to install using Crossover was the Google Talk client. The application successfully installed but it didn’t run properly as it failed the authentication process when sending my login credentials. This is more of a security feature on Google’s side (disallowing unauthorized clients to login to the system) than a feature issue on Crossover’s side.

Crossover is available as a 30 day full trial and costs $59.95 for the full license.

Why not check it to see if you can get your favorite Windows apps running on Mac? I’m not sure if they each will work, but that’s what the trial is for.

Transmission, the best torrent application on Mac, have recently released version .80 to the world. The updated features include:

• Ability to selectively download and prioritize files
• Torrent file creation
• Speed and CPU load improvements
• Fix to UPnP
• Rechecking torrents is now done one-at-a-time to avoid heavy disk load
• Better rechecking of torrents that have many files

The most noticeable of the new features is Transmission’s selective downloading of packaged files. This allows you to prioritize files for download if the torrent contains separate and multiple files.

The screen shot below illustrates this feature in use. Unfortunately the downloaded file, Ubuntu, only has one file referenced from the .torrent file but if a few files were referenced I would be able to select which should be downloaded and which have a higher priority than others.

You can access this feature by right clicking on the file within Transmission, then select Show Inspector, then go to Files. Here you can tick the boxes of the files which you want to download and you can rank them in order of priority of download.

The other noticeable update is Transmission’s ability to create torrents for publication.

Both of these features have long been features of uTorrent, the most popular client on Windows, but uTorrent isn’t available on Mac (yet).

uTorrent for the Mac is currently in closed beta. Torrentfreak has more info available, including screenshots.

uTorrent is my personal favorite Torrent application but with Transmission’s recent feature improvements, will uTorrent be able to dominate the torrent world on both the Windows and Mac platform? Competition is always a good thing and I look forward to uTorrent’s arrival on Mac but at least we have a suitable mainstay in Transmission already freely available.

Safari is the only browser which allows you to open pdf files inline. All other Mac based browsers force you to download the pdf.

This greatly upsets me

How many times have you clicked on a pdf link without realising it? Before you know it Preview or Acrobat is loading up in the background and you’re going to have to switch windows in order to view the desired content.

Being forced to relinquish control over your actions because of your browsers’ shortcomings is simply not on.

There are no Acrobat or Preview add-ons for Firefox, Camino or Opera to come to your rescue. This is where PDF Browser Plugin saves the day. Download and drop the PDF Browser Plugin.app file into your Library > Internet Plug-ins folder and relaunch your browser. Navigate to a PDF file and click on it.

Ahhh! It begins to download again

This is because this plugin doesn’t work on Intel Macs. But there is a solution. You can switch your browser to open under Rosetta to rectify the situation.

Rosetta is basically a translator which allows native PPC based applications to run under Intel Macs.

In order to open your browser using Rosetta, you must click on the ‘Get Info’ option when you right click on your browser.app folder within Applications. Simply tick the box which says Rosetta. And there you have it! You can open PDF documents inline with your browser.

If you use Firefox or Flock you can control PDF files within your browser even further. PDF Download is a very nice plugin which prompts you when you’re about to open a PDF file. It asks you whether you want to download, open in the browser, open using HTML view, or cancel.

All in all I have to say that I’m disappointed with the handling of PDFs on Mac based browsers. Safari being the only browser to interact without any user configuration is a real let down. Mozilla and Opera need to get in gear and improve their handling of PDFs. I’m sure better PDF handling is a feature request they have seen before..

I recently went looking for a program to easily draw up some diagrams.

I knew quite a few utilities for Linux and Windows, and of course the OpenOffice drawing tool, but all of those take quite a bit of work to create a diagram not only fast, but also beautifull.

After a bit of searching I encountered OmniGraffle and I played with it for a bit. Within 24 hours I bought it. It’s just great, drawing diagrams, using the auto-layout to apply different styles with a single mouseclick, and fine-tuning the looks by dragging and dropping styles from one object to another.

What I also found surprising is that the manual is actually usefull. It shows a beginner what is possible with OmniGraffle without too much work, and you can immediately try it out.

It is also a perfect tool for mindmapping; I never knew my thoughts were so interesting untill I saw them in colour:)

Some pictures of a simple mindmap, in order:

• Type in your thoughts, a simple map is drawn
  
• A single click switches styles and layout
  
• Drag a style (Lineair…) from the box on the right to the cloud to apply it
  

So, if you have some spare time, download omnigraffle and request a free 24 hour license (fully automatic). And have fun!