Entries Tagged as Apple
I consider myself a bit of a power user of my Macs. On an average day I have a dozen or so programs open at once and I like to organize them very particularly. In addition, I have a pretty decent sized external monitor that I use at work to enable me to see more and work on things without task-switching so much. For example, I might have Aqua Data Studio open on one monitor, showing me the DB schema, and CFBuilder open on the other, writing code. Sure, I could still do the same work using a lot of Cmd+Tab to switch back and forth between the two, but that switching comes at a time cost, and a mental context switching cost -- and then what is this giant external monitor good for?
Spaces was awesome. Exposé was awesome. And I get what they're trying to do with Mission Control: combine the two. Less is more. And it could have been awesome, if it weren't for a few big mistakes.
As of Snow Leopard, when you hit your Spaces hotkey (F8), you would see all spaces given the same amount of screen space -- now with Mission Control spaces you weren't already looking at are tiny, making it almost impossible to see what's open on them. Um, hello? I'm here because I want to see what's on other spaces. How about you give them more than 100px?
Additionally, when you would combine Spaces and Exposé (press F8 and then F9), the windows on each space would do the normal Exposé behavior within the screen real estate allocated to that space. What was wrong with this? This was powerful. This was beautiful. This was perfect.
The only conceivable problem they were trying to solve here, in my opinion, was that all spaces were pushed onto the primary screen, and the secondary screen would just be black. Sure, that's some wasted screen space, but it worked well.
So now, with Mission Control, you can drag windows or even a full application-stack (drag the icon, not a window, and it will bring all of that application's windows) to another desktop... BUT only on the same screen. So if I want to move an application from the left screen of space 1 to the right screen of space 7, I have to first move it to the right screen of space 1 and then open mission control and move it to space 7. (Or move spaces then screens, order doesn't matter. The problem is that it can't be done in one swoop.) This sucks. Not only does it add additional work and take away existing functionality, I was so used to the way it used to work that even now, months after Lion's release, I still fumble around a little bit when I want to do this. It still aggravates me to no end.
If I could disable mission control and go back to Spaces + Exposé, I would in a heartbeat.
Posted in
Apple
| 8 Responses
September 20 2011
Don't get me wrong -- I love my laptop (mostly). I'm currently using a 15" Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro, which I purchased used in May of 2010, at which point it was approximately 2 years old.
Prior to purchasing this laptop, I was using a 13" Macbook:
The new laptop is a step up from the old one in just about every way imaginable:
- Faster processor
- Bigger monitor (Though I've since decided that 15" is the limit of practicality. A 17" laptop is just too much. Not to mention the extra weight, no fun for a commuter like myself)
- Bigger and faster hard drive
- Dvd burner (the Macbook would only burn cd's)
- About twice the ram
For me, the one thing that's fallen short of my expectations is the battery. Effectively, I've found that the battery life is approximately the same as I had with my Macbook, but that's because I wasn't aware of the biggest pitfall of purchasing a used Mac laptop: the batteries are a known issue for customers -- but apparently Apple refuses to admit it. Threads in Apple's support forums tend to live a short lifespan of multiple customer complaints about decreased capacity after a few years or around 200 load cycles, before ultimately being silently deleted.
What it boils down to is that the batteries used in these laptops tend to lose their maximum capacity. My model is rated to charge up to 5600 mAh, and its current maximum charge is approximately 2093 mAh, at least as described by Coconut Battery. I've run multiple battery calibrations, and never seem to get any better perceived battery life, and never notice any improvement in Coconut Battery either.
The important section of the above image is the middle one: Current capacity vs. Design Capacity. With my capacity what it is, I'm able to work unplugged, with brightness turned way down, wifi and bluetooth disabled, sound muted, and peripherals disconnected, for about 90 minutes, depending on what I'm doing.
When I purchased this laptop I wanted to do my due diligence and make sure I wasn't buying a lemon. I tested to verify that...
- Wifi works
- Ethernet works
- DVD burner works
- Bluetooth works
- Trackpad works
- Webcam works
- Built in Microphone works
- Headphone & Microphone jacks work
- Keyboard works ("Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs")
- USB ports work
- DVI port works
What didn't I check? Battery capacity. And I wish I had known to, because I might have changed my mind or offered less money to cover the purchase of a replacement battery. So this is my warning to you. If you're buying a used Macbook or Macbook Pro, check the battery capacity. Coconut Battery is free and easy to use. Don't make the same mistake I did, or budget to purchase a replacement battery.
Posted in
Apple
| 12 Responses
April 08 2011
I have been a long time user of Visor, and the last time I got a new laptop and was downloading the latest versions of all of my favorite apps, I found out that the maker of Visor also makes a plugin for Finder, called TotalFinder, to make it suck a little less. I don't think I know a single Mac user that doesn't hate Finder at least a little bit, so making it better in small ways goes a long way.
TotalFinder rips the tabs out of the Open Source Chromium project -- the base of the Google Chrome web browser -- and adds them to Finder, so that you can now have tabs in Finder, instead of a bunch of finder windows all over the place. Not only that, but it adds a lot of other great features, like a "Visor" feature that -- you guessed it -- makes Finder act like Visor which I'm sure I don't have to tell you is awesome. If you're not familiar with Visor, it makes the OSX Terminal application pop out from the top edge of the screen (or any other edge, for that matter), very much like the command prompt you would get in Quake 1 if you pressed the tilde (~) key, if you remember that. And I'm sure you remember that, because that is where you went to enable God Mode.
I started using TotalFinder immediately, which was during the beta phase. The beta was free, in exchange for bug or crash reports, which were pleasantly infrequent; and Antonin, the developer, was up front about the fact that once the beta process was over, TotalFinder would cost a small fee. I generally try to avoid paying for software, at least when there is a free option or I can just deal with some small added frustration. (I realize that is kind of heresy, as a software developer myself, but it's the truth.)
It didn't matter. The day that I got the notification that TotalFinder 1.0 was available I cracked open my wallet, let the moths fly out, and entered my credit card number without hesitation. I am not exaggerating when I say that I hate using Finder on someone else's laptop if they don't have TotalFinder, which is to say that, as far as my own daily life goes, I couldn't live without it.
TotalFinder does some other great things too:
All of this for $15? That's a steal. However, you can get it for free...
On a recent trip back to the TotalFinder website, I noticed that Antonin was offering licenses in exchange for reviews and publicity. Having already purchased my license and being more than happy with my purchase, I proposed an alternative: Let me raffle off the license to one of my fine readers. He agreed and has been patiently waiting while this review has been sitting on my to-do list. Time to mark that item off. I will pick a random commenter number using random.org at roughly 12:00 Noon Eastern time, on Friday November 12th, and post the winner -- the corresponding commenter -- here (in this post) at that time. To be eligible, you must leave a comment and use a valid email address with which I can contact you. I will send the license information to the email address used in the winning comment.
This should go without saying, but in case it doesn't: Stuffing the ballot box (commenting more than once) will disqualify you from winning.
And the winner is...
Commenter #5, Eapen. Congratulations! I'll be emailing you the key information shortly.
Posted in
Apple
| 11 Responses
November 10 2010
When you create a new ColdFusion project in CFBuilder, you end up with 3 things in your project folder:
- A .project file -- this is par for the course in Eclipse
- A .settings folder
- And a settings.xml file
During the pre-release process I voiced my opinion that this was too much meta and that they should find a way to cut back or combine where possible. That hasn't happened. In addition, I complained that the file name "settings.xml" is too generic and quite likely to be something that the average developer would want to create for their project. This, too, seems to have fallen on deaf ears.
Oh well. Maybe next time.
However, in the meantime, I've created a quick shortcut for my Mac to create a new git repository and ignore all of the CFB Project Meta files all in one step. On Snow Leopard, edit the .profile file in your account folder (/Users/[your username]/.profile) and add this line:
alias cfgit="git init;echo '.project' >> .gitignore;echo '.settings' >> .gitignore;echo 'settings.xml' >> .gitignore;echo '.gitignore' >> .gitignore;git status"
It all has to be on one line to work properly, but I'll break down each command individually here so that it's easier to read.
alias cfgit="..."
Here we're creating a bash command alias. This translates to, "When I type cfgit I want you to do [this] instead." Where [this] is what you put inside the quotation marks. You can put multiple commands here as long as you separate them with a semicolon.
echo '.project' >> .gitignore;
echo '.settings' >> .gitignore;
echo 'settings.xml' >> .gitignore;
echo '.gitignore' >> .gitignore;
Each of these appends a new line to the file .gitignore with the contents of the single-quotation marks; so in this case it's adding a new line for .project, .settings, settings.xml, and .gitignore (ignore itself). By using >> instead of >, you append to the file if it exists, or create it otherwise. If you're unaware, the .gitignore file tells the local git client which files in the folder are to be excluded from the repository.
Lastly, it runs git status to show the current status of the folder/repository; mostly just as a sanity check to make sure that everything that I want to have happened has.
Posted in
Apple |
CFBuilder |
Git
| 4 Responses
July 06 2010
