So, today we’re learning about spurious screen-dimming, screen savers and an emergency exit…

Auto-Dim Screen

If you move about a bit with your MacBook, like me you may have been annoyed by the screen randomly dimming and brightening.

Turns out this is because your MacBook buddy is trying to be clever by sensing the ambient light and automatically adjusting the screen brightness. Moving around and variable lighting can confuse the wee soul.

Easily fixed through by switching off the cleverness:  Go to System Preferences > Displays > uncheck “Automatically adjust brightness as ambient light changes”

Screen Savers

Next up, screensavers. I downloaded one, unzipped it and then went looking for the ‘install my screensaver’ option in the ‘Desktop and Screensaver’ section of System Preferences. But there is none! I spent longer than I really should have looking for one.

Then I realised I had reverted to Windows expectation mode. Installer? Pah! I tried the obvious – just double-clicking the file, et viola, installed and working. D’oh.

Force Force-Quit

Finally, for now, we have an escape route. In the couple of years I’ve since moving to Mac I’ve had occasion where an app (often MS Word) will stall or go into a tailspin.

Symptom: Spinning CD cursor and you can’t get anything to react, not even get the Apple Menu to open to get to Force Quit, which you know holds the key to your frustration.

Previously, I’d have resorted to a force-shutdown (hold down the power button for 5 seconds), but not anymore.

Keyboard shortcut Option(Alt)-Command-esc – brings up the Force Quit menu.

A while ago when I plugged my iPhone into my MacBook all was seamless, syncs downloads etc.

Then I got my ‘proper’ camera and installed the EOS utilities on the Mac. All was working fine, but the next time I plugged the iPhone in, I got a little popup dialogue saying there was no camera found.

Everything else still synced OK, but I couldn’t see any way to get pics off the phone. Tonight I wanted one of the pics off the phone, so decided I’d better have a look about.

Turns out there’s a handy app on the Mac called “Image Capture” you can utilise to do just this.

Just search for it using the spyglass search on the top right of the Mac toolbar. Start this app and you can download the pics from the iPhone. You can create a folder on your drive and download them all to there.

Short and sweet, but there you go!

A pet-hate of mine is that annoying noise that plays when your machine starts up. Whether it’s a PC or a Mac, I have no idea why someone would think it was a good idea to by default play a sound at startup, or shutdown for that matter.

What is the benefit of that? No, I can’t think of it either.

Strange thing is, on the Mac it’s not something you can easily get rid of. So, other than remembering to mute the sound before shutdown, you’re was stuck with it. Grrrr.

However, after a little bit of digging about, I’ve found a method to stop the startup sound on the Mac without the rest of the sound being muted.

Unfortunately it’s an add-in as opposed to a hack, but it does the job.

Just go to the Arcana Research site and download their little add-in – StartupSound.prefPane – and follow the instructions.

Once you install, an extra icon, called “Startup Sound”, appears in your System Preferences app. Just click it and check the ‘mute’ checkbox: Job done. No more annoying startup noise.

(although for some strange reason it also lets you set a specific volume for it should you so wish; more craziness!)

I’ve admired them since the early days, but until relatively recently never owned any of their products. A bit too expensive and not mainstream enough to be in use where I worked.

That all changed with the iPod. Still expensive but luckily I received one as a gift. I liked the simplicity; the controls, the minimalism. Then, more recently and long overdue, I got myself an iPhone; even better. Finally I took the big step and plunged into OSX and a MacBook; rock ‘n roll!

It’s all about the little design things for me. The way it looks, feels. The buttons are just right, the precision machining (the sim drawer on the iPhone for example), nothing is superfluous; all form, fit and function.

You’ll be hard-pushed to persuade me against any of the Apple products I own,  other than with newer, better versions of them.

And therein lies my gripe about Apple…

But back to that gripe in a minute.

General criticism of Apple falls into two areas; price and, well, price.

Apple products are damned expensive by comparison to others vendors in the same sector, and deliberately so. They’ve developed a knack for creating demand from their great product design, courtesy of Johnathan Ive, with an appropriate level of function and then they’re premium-pricing it. An almost arrogant, “If you don’t like the price, don’t buy it”, if you like.

As the oft mis-quoted saying goes, “If you build it, they (sic) will come.”

I think it’s more like, “If you build it beautifully, they will lust after it. And then they will put their hand in their pocket and pay. Handsomely.”

I’ve been following the hype and speculation about the iPad.

I did laugh when I saw Steve Jobs proudly holding one an iPad at the launch; it did look like a mini-Steve holding up an iPhone.

I too want an iPad. Of course I do, it’s gorgeous. I have no idea what I would use it for, that I don’t already have covered by my iPhone and MacBook. But I know it will be great.

Apple have hit the spot again; they have created yet another product that invokes the tech equivalent of lust.

But I’m not going to get one. Not just yet.

The problem with Apple is their penchant for continual evolution and therefore rapid ‘obsolescence’. No sooner have you saved up your hard-earned dosh, rush down to the Apple Store™, or online equivalent, and get your hands on a gorgeous piece of Apple kit, than a new one comes out.

The changes are usually small and subtle. Maybe a slightly glossier finish, or a different trackpad, or more rounded corners. But you’re still left feeling like the shop-staff changed the display the moment you left the store. A feeling compounded by the fact you’ve paid a premium price to start with.

Perhaps obsolescence is a strong word for it. After all, your iPhone, MacBook, etc. are all still great, but there’s a better one out now. So people who pay the same money you did, now have something better than you. We don’t like that.

I got my ‘standard’, white 13 inch MacBook in May last year. And a thing of beauty it was, but there are other posts about that.

However, comparing it to the ‘standard’ 13 inch model available in November, only 6 months later, I see the following differences:

• Glossier: The white finish is indeed glossier, it’s not my imagination.
• Thinner: The lid is thinner, and the corners more rounded.
• Trackpad: My dual touch with button is now multi-touch glass.
• Power: Slim magnetic-plug & the wire is no longer at 90 degrees.

All of these are nice form and/or function improvements, they’re all the right thing to do. The galling part is that at least the latter two of those improvements were available at the time I purchased mine, but only on the MacBook Pro model.

It’s as if Apple are rewarding those who held off buying one with features they could have included first time round but were using as a differentiator between models. That’s good for the late(r)-adopters but, dammit, that’s no good to me.

Bizarrely, and as if to contradict my rant here a little, I found an instance where they seem to have gone the wrong way.

• FireWire: No firewire port on the new MacBook.

Now that is a definite backwards step. I like my firewire drive, it’s quick. It gets its data and power from a single cable. The alternative on the new machine is to use 2x USB ports (one for power, one for data) and obviously lose the circa. 50% speed benefit.

That said, I’d probably swap that for the glass trackpad…

I’ve not had the Mac long in the big scheme of things, but up till now, pretty much everything ‘just worked’ which was a welcome relief from Microsoft-land that I know and love.

That was until today, and it was a kinda strange one.

The much hyped Snow Leopard OS came out recently and I decided in my nice shiny world of Mac-iness I’d give it a go to try and keep up with the trends. So I got my nice shrink wrapped package with the nice picture of a… Snow Leopard on it at the weekend.

The documentation that comes with it is the usual simple Mac stuff I’d come to expect; stick it in and double click it. So, in full expectation of an easy ride, slapped the disc into the drive.

It was indeed really easy to install. It took about an hour, which I suppose is not bad for an OS re-install. The ‘time remaining’ dialogue throughout the install was even pretty accurate (compared to Windows, but then a random number generator is closer to reality than the Windows progress bar). It rebooted at the end and then automatically pulled a couple of updates down. All looked to have worked fine…

Until I started up Firefox. Some webpages were rendered using some sort of scripty handwriting style font. Particularly noticeable in, but not limited to, the Google search page. Not an unpleasant font, but not the kind of thins you want entire pages rendered in. On checking, the same problem existed in Safari, so not solely a Firefox problem.

Time for my first proper Inspector Clouseau-style Mac problem hunt.

I searched for the problem, but there wasn’t much out there on it yet, maybe too new, or unusual? But there were a couple of clues around, suggesting font problems. Looking in the ‘Font Book’ app, turns out there were a number of duplicated fonts, indicated with a little yellow triangle. Don’t know if they were duplicated before the Snow Leopard install as I’d not looked for that before. Anyhoo, there’s an item in the Font Book menu called ‘Resolve Duplicates’ which did what it said on the tin; all my little yellow triangles disappeared from the font list. But it didn’t resolve the problem.

I dug around a little more and concluded it was the Arial font that was the problem here. So I tried the ‘Validate Font’ from the Font Book menu for Arial. it showed me I had a font in the Arial family called “Laurent_HW_by_oOo_n3o_oOo.ttf”. Hmmm, something purporting to be in the Arial family that wasn’t called Arial? Gotcha. The HW was a bit of a giveaway too. Viewing it, I could see it was indeed the offending scripty font appearing in Firefox and Safari (and I suspect any other app using Arial).

A quick delete of the offending font and restart to be on the safe side and bingo, all sorted.

No idea how it got there but it wasn’t there before the install…

So, as if you needed any more reasons to buy yourself a MacBook, or other Mac model for that matter, here’s another couple for free…

Thing 1: Printing

I typed up a letter last night and it was pretty late when I finished and realised I hadn’t ever printed anything from the Mac since I got it. So with heavy heart, I took it out to the Bothy where my printer resides, previously attached to my PC but now standing alone.

I switched the printer on and gingerly plugged the USB into the Mac. Nothing.

I was half expecting a printer dialogue to come up saying it had detected a printer and wanted a driver disk or somesuch. You know the kind of thing Windows looks for. But no, nothing. Had a look in Finder, then Settings and finally Applications; no mention of printers or anything.

A quick search on the Apple site told me the Mac will likely know about the printer, so just press ‘Print’ in the application.

Guess what? It just works.

Thing 2: Backups

Like probably 99% of the PC using community, I am at best sporadic in my backup regime. I do copy docs and sheets and stuff onto my pen-drive, for security and transfer between machines. I know I have a recovery disk somewhere, I think, from a while ago and I’m sure I have the installer disks and drivers and stuff I’ve put on since then, probably, maybe.

I just bought FreeAgent 320Gb drive, on offer. It’s nice and small, and silver. It has both FireWire and USB connection, which is nice.

Plugged it in to the Mac, using the FireWire connection for speed and the Mac pops up a dialogue saying it’s spotted a drive it can use as a Time Machine backup disk and do I want to use it. Well, I think I do, so “Yes”.

It then scheduled the first backup for 30 minutes time and also sets up a backup regime. The first backup took a while; just over an hour in fact, but that was to be expected.

Not bad for one click.

First, I had a CD that wouldn’t eject from my MacBook drive.

It was really stuck; the drive was spinning up and down but nothing in Finder, not even an icon. I was getting an occasional colourful spinning CD mousepointer, but nothing else. Pressing the eject button showed the eject icon on the screen but didn’t actually have any effect.

Not only that, it pretty much ate up the resources preventing starting of other apps etc. or even get to display the dock.

I searched around, and while there were a number of suggestions, none of them worked for this particular disk, but the following did…

My more forceful way of getting the machine to eject the little blighter:

• Switch the MacBook off.
  Do a nice shutdown if you can. If you can’t, hold the power button down for a few seconds to force an immediate shutdown.
• Switch it back on again, and hold down the ‘opt’ key (marked ‘alt’ on my keyboard), the one with the line-style menu on it.
  The Mac will boot up to a ‘Hard Disk’ icon.
• Let go the ‘Opt’ key and press the ‘Eject’ key.
  You should hear the magic sound of the disk ejecting.

Second tip:

If, like me, you spent ages scanning your MacBook keyboard for a hash (#) only to arrive at the conclusion it’s just not there, let me reassure you; it’s not.

But fear not, help is at hand. It’s easy really; just Alt 3. Not much of a tip I suppose, but hey.

While I was looking around, I came across this handy reference for a whole myriad of the less frequently used characters and symbols.

Note: Feedback from the family, who are a mix of casual and regular PC users, would suggest the Mac is easy to use. So fear-ye not Mac virgins, this is not a platform (only) for the uber-geeks.

That said, if you *are* an uber-geek, there’s lots (and I mean lots) to float your boat here.

So, what do we have in the bag this time?

1. Read PC formatted disks (NTFS 3G)
   Windows kindly has it’s own, proprietary disk formatting method; NTFS. This isn’t a problem if you only ever live on Windows but, should you wish to stray elsewhere, like Linux, or MacOS, or anything else for that matter, you won’t be able to access those disks, meaning you can’t use your USB stick between machines, or your nice 1TB USB backup disk. Well, just install this little util and you can. (thanks JohnH)
2. De-duplicate your files (Chipmunk)
   If, like me, you have a few machines kicking about the house, chances are you’ve got a number of iTuneses with different collections of music on them. Also, you may have collections of photos and images you’ve downloaded over the years. This handy little app compares stuff on a byte by byte basis and finds the duplicates for you, so you can tidy up in a fraction of the time. (thanks JohnH)
3. Access the hidden option in MacOS X (xMod)
   I wanted to modify my .htaccess files to make things look a bit better on my sites. Found a nice post explaining what to do, but fell at the first hurdle when I found I couldn’t even see the files. Turns out MacOS X Leopard hides any files that start with a . So found this nifty utility that allows you to override this and quite a few other things that are hidden in MacOS X.
4. Coding (Firebug for Firefox)
   Now, this is one of the coolest development productivity aids I’ve come across. I posted abut this a while back, and only just now getting round to installing on Mac. If you code for the web, you *need* this. Also noticed, from a cool post I came across on Twitter, that there are add-ons for Firefox plugins now. Who knew? So also added FireRainbow, a funky code colouriser (note UK spelling )
5. Playing WMV files (Flip4Mac)
   While the rest of the world stick with PC’s, us Mac-heads will have to interact with them, and get windows-formatted funnies from then, which occasionally come in .WMV form. Of course, the Mac don’t play them, normally, but this handy little app gets Quicktime to play those WMVs for you.

I know there are alternatives to all of the below, but these are the ones I plumped for. One prevailing factor influenced the choices below; they’re all open source/freeware. My budget for toys is dry following the arrival of the MacBook, so it’s cheapies or freebies for me for a while.

So here goes:

1. Browser (Firefox)
   With the advent of FF3, I was finally teased away from IE on the PC. The time taken to develop css sites and make them work cross-platform was hugely reduced, I was a convert. I’m sure Safari is truly great, but I’ll be sticking to FF for dev for the foreseeable future.
2. Messaging client (MSN Messenger for Mac)
   A no brainer really, need to retain the continuity with my previous MSN contacts. That said, I’ve hardly used it since I installed it.
3. Twitter client (TweetDeck)|
   If you’re into Twitter, you need a client. This one fits the bill nicely, lets you group your followees and has a nice user interface. It has a few nice features, like url shortening and picture display.
4. Music (Spotify)
   Obviously iTunes features quite heavily on the Mac OS platform. And, with the iPhone, you need it to sync and for app download, which is fine, but only works for music you already own. That’s where Spotify comes in; Spotify gives you free access to the music you don’t own. It’s like having a radio where you’re the DJ.
5. Fonts
   Gotta have fonts. In fact, gotta have loads of fonts. The Mac comes with over 100, covering the main requirements. But now I’ve extended that a little to include some of the more funky ones. I’ll leave it to you to search for them yourself.
6. HTML Editor (Smultron)
   I’ve been using EditPlus for years now, it’s a great little editor. Unfortunately EditPlus is a Windows only app, so I needed an equivalent. The EditPlus Wiki recommends this one (amongst others), so I’ve gone for that. Still to try it out, but it has a good reputation, so expecting some great things from this. No idea where the name comes from.
7. FTP Client (Cyberduck)
   To upload files for bimbogami, I need an FTP client. Was using File Explorer on Windows previously, so reckoned I’d better get something proper for the Mac. Cyberduck, despite the bizarrely unrelated name, fits the bill nicely (see what I did there?).
8. Image Editor (Gimp)
   GIMP is a bitmap image editing app. So far I’ve only used it for cropping and re-sizing, but from the menus it looks as though it can do pretty much everything I’ve ever done in Photoshop in the past. BTW, GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, nothing to do with fetishists, so they say.
9. Image Editor 2 (InkScape)
   This one’s for vector graphics. not had much time to play about with it yet, but it comes highly recommented and on first impression, it looks pretty good.
10. Productivity (OpenOffice)
    I hate calling it that. Word processor, Spreadsheet and presentation, otherwise known as MS Office. Well, I’ve plumped for the free, compatible OpenOffice. Not had to do much more than open and update a few MS Office things so far, but it seems OK.

So I’ve been spending time getting to grips with the myriad of differences between Windows, which I’ve used for the last 20 years or so, and the platform of choice for the creative world. The butterfly finds another flower to alight on, so to speak.

So, how’s it going so far?

The machine stats up and shuts down in a fraction of the time of a Windows box. While this may seem like a small thing, it makes dipping in for a quick check of something so much more convenient.

As I knew, the UI is significantly different, it’s quick and has a nice look and feel to it. The taskbar, or ‘Dock’ as it’s called here is quite funky and there’s a cool concept called ‘Spaces’ which gives you a number of virtual desktops to reduce clutter on your main desktop space. There’s lots of opensource apps kicking about out there for OS X so I’ll be playing with a few of them too.

Bizarrely (well I thought so) there’s no delete key on the keyboard. Nope, I looked and looked for it; definitely not there. Maybe it’s just the MacBook keyboard to conserve space, but definitely not there. I didn’t realise how much I used it till I didn’t have one. There is a Backspace key though and so with a little digging it apears that fn + Backspace works the same as Delete. Phew.

While I was at it, I dug around for a few more keyboard shortcuts and compiled a little list for things I do when in Windows:

Text manipulation keyboard shortcuts

Note that these are broadly similar to Windows keyboard shortcuts. All you need to do is change the equivalent Windows shortcuts (prefixed with Ctrl) to be prefixed with the Mac’s Cmd key, with a couple of exceptions.

Navigating text

• Left/right arrow – move one character left
• Right arrow – move character right
• Alt + left arrow – move one word left
• Alt + right arrow – move one word right
• Cmd + left arrow – move to beginning of line
• Cmd + right arrow – move to end of line
• Cmd + up arrow – move to beginning of document
• Cmd + down arrow – move to end of document

Selecting text

• Obviously you can click and drag with the mouse, but we’re talking keyboard here.
• Shift + left/right arrow – select character
• Shift + any of the above navigate text combinations – select same

Other text manipulation commands

• Cmd + C – Copy selection
• Cmd + X – Cut selection
• Cmd + V – Paste previously cut/copied selection
• Cmd + Backspace – Delete (on MacBook keyboard)
• Cmd + Z – Undo
• Cmd + Y – Redo
  
• Cmd + B – Bold
• Cmd + U – Underline

File/Application actions

• Cmd + O – Open
• Cmd + W – Close
• Cmd + Q – Quit
• Cmd + S – Save
• Cmd + P – Print
• Cmd + Tab – Switch between apps

Misc

• Cmd + Shift + 3 – Take screenshot

I’m sure there will be more as I progress on my fairly steep learning curve.