8 months after switching here are my favorite applications

As I've now crossed the 8 month time frame since I got my first Mac it's time to update the applications that I use regularly. When I made my switch I made a real effort to find native Mac replacement applications for everything I use and for the most part I have been successful in that.

I'll list these applications in the order in which I find myself using them and will include internal OS X applications as well. Many of these applications are related to the way I am using my Macs now, which is starting up a new company. I am doing lots of development, marketing messaging and content creation, building spreadsheets, etc. and am in front of my Macs anywhere between 12 and 16 hours a day.

This my friends is the life of an entrepreneur in start up mode.

LaunchBar
I am completely addicted to the Spotlight / QuickSilver / LaunchBar model of activating applications and documents and more importantly tying them together in helpful ways. Virtually everything I do starts up with Command-Space and LaunchBar has proven to be a solid and stable companion for me.

Spaces
I would be severely limited without Spaces. The ability to have my windows arranged properly for each of the tasks at hand is incredibly powerful. Running on a Mac Pro or even my MacBook Pro with 12GB and 4GB of memory respectively means I can keep everything up and running and get to it in an instant.

Firefox
Though I still use and like Safari I spend the majority of my time in Firefox. I have Foxmarks installed and it keeps my book marks synchronized between my Macs and my Ubuntu workstation. The add-ons for Firefox are incredibly helpful, especially those that help in web based development.

1Password
Once again, I nearly forgot to mention 1Password because it fits so seamlessly into my workflow I often forget that it's there. Between remembering my passwords but also securely keeping track of my sign-up information and credit cards, 1Password helps me complete most forms very quickly.

Adium
Since I work from my home I keep in touch with my friends and family through instant messaging. With accounts on AIM and Google Talk I can use Adium to consolidate it into a single application. I like the compact way it presents itself and the ability to quickly search through previous conversations gives it an edge over iChat.

Mail
I have several e-mail accounts and the Mail app does a decent job of consolidating them into a nice, single place. Though the IMAP performance with Google's Gmail can be trying at times, I like the interface for Mail and enjoy the integration is shares with the Address Book.

Preview / QuickLook
One of the things that I love about OS X is that it includes a very nice file viewer in Preview. I don't have to load Adobe's bloated Acrobat Reader in order to see PDF files and it handles many of the formats I need easily. I lump QuickLook in there with it though it's more of a Finder extension than an application. Being able to simply select a file in the Finder or on the desktop and hit the space bar to see a quick preview is very handy.

TextMate
I've long been a big fan of true programmer's editors and TextMate is one of the best I've used. The best part of TextMate? The numerous bundles available to make the most of everything programmers do on a regular basis easier. Since I'm doing my development work in Ruby on Rails I've gotten heavily into the great bundle available for TextMate. We're also using Subversion as our source code management and the bundle for it in TextMate is great.

Skype
I recently wrote about how I've set up my office phone around using Skype and I've really enjoyed using it. Occasionally I have problems with calls to land lines, though that's pretty rare. Combining Skype with LaunchBar is a game changer in my mind; my productivity around phone based activities is easily triple what it was with a conventional land line and it costs a fraction of what it used to be.

Address Book
The address book–especially since it synchronizes with my iPhone—is great. I also love that it is accessable from within LaunchBar, allowing me to simply find a person in the address book by hitting Command-Space and entering their name, then selecting one of the contact models I have for them (phone, e-mail, etc).

iCal
Since adopting the iPhone I also switched to using iCal as my full time Calendar. The integration between the iPhone and local iCal makes it very convenient.

iTunes
I am one of those people that likes to have music in the background most of the time and with iTunes 8 and the Genius playlist feature I find myself exploring my music collection far more than I ever did before. Combine that with syncing up my iPhone and it's a great application in my book. I added GimmeSomeTunes to iTunes and now I get more cover art and I get a nice pop-up with song changes showing the current artist, title and cover art.

VLC
I often find myself trying to look through older videos I've collected from a range of different video camera formats over the years and always seem to be able to play them with VLC. Though the video quality is not as polished as some other viewers (QuickTime for example) it always seems to be able to view the file, which is what I really care about.

NetNewsWire
RSS feeds are how I stay up on current events in technology, finance and sports news and NetNewsWire provides a great way for me to keep everything in one place. I wish the built in browser supported Flash and video so that I didn't have to open some pages in Firefox but other than that little nit I always have NetNewsWire up and running.

OmniGraffle Pro
I used to use Visio on the Windows platform and when I switched to Mac I needed to find a replacement. OmniGraffle does exactly what I need and has proven a fantastic tool for creating wireframe renderings of the application pages I then build. There are a lot of templates available for it and I'm also using it for building data models.

Pages
I picked up iWork and have become completely committed to using Pages. I find it much easier to deal with than Word though there is a bit of a learning curve if you're a heavy Word user like I am. I really like the layout controls in Pages and the overall UI is far less complex.

Numbers
I am rather reluctantly using Numbers. I say reluctantly because I've found the transition from Excel to Numbers much harder than the transition from Word to Pages. Excel has so many little quirks that I've become used to that are not in Numbers that I find myself constantly having to think about what I need to do instead of just doing it, which is unlike most of the other software I use on my Macs. My current use of spreadsheets is a bit infrequent so I don't have too much time to spend learning it.

Gimp
Though it can be a bit quirky at times it's open source and free, which means it costs FAR less than Adobe Photoshop. My needs are minimal and I use Gimp mainly to clean up images and in some cases combine a couple of images on different layers. Version 2.6 was just released on October 1 though I haven't bothered to build it myself so I'm still using 2.4. Sure, it requires X11 and is not a traditional Mac UI but it works really well and the price (free) is unbeatable.

Terminal / Bash Shell
Between using SSH to pop into my remote production servers and using the shell to run Rails commands I spend a lot of time in the shell. I always have several tabs open in the terminal, either ready for a command or running a local server so that I can easily monitor status.

iStat Menu
Whether it's because I need to see where memory is being used quickly or to see the temperature on my MacBook Pro, iStat Menu gives me instant updates. If something is acting strange on my machine a quick glance at the menu bar tells me what's up and one click later I can see what all the activity is about.

TextEdit
I've found myself using TextEdit more and more lately. When I have a quick list that I need to keep or need to push some relevant notes to the task at hand up I'll just pop open TextEdit and scribble away. Small, fast and included in the OS; what's not to like.

iPhoto
Though it took me a while to get adjusted to using iPhoto instead of Picassa on Windows, I have made the transition. I love the integration with the rest of the OS as well, especially with drag and drop targets and the ability to select my background image directly from my iPhoto catalog.

Cyberduck
When I need to move blocks of files to my remote servers I tend to grab Cyberduck and transfer away. It has simple, no-nonsense interface and it does what I need when I need it.

MySQL Tools
Between the MySQL Administrator and the MySQL Query Browser I have pretty much everything I need to work with my local copy of MySQL without having to resort to the command line. If you do any local development and run an instance of MySQL on your machine then you should have these tools at your disposal.

VMware Fusion / Windows XP
As my development efforts have come along I've needed to pull up my product in Internet Explorer and VMware gives me a great way to do that quickly. On my Mac Pro I've found that it's easiest to just keep it running all the time so that I can get to Internet Explorer quickly to do some testing. I still prefer Windows XP over Vista, if for no other reason now that it's memory footprint is smaller.

Time Machine
Always running in the background, Time Machine is not an application I actively use very often but when I do it jumps right to the top of my list. I've had files that were not under version control that I horribly mangled and was able to get back because TM was there to catch my mistake. Now if I could just get that stupid Time Machine error to stop I'd be a happy guy.

On My Shortlist
I've found most of the applications I need but I still have a couple more to get through. On the development side I would still like a decent XHTML / Web editing tool. To this day the best general purpose HTML editing tool I've ever used was HomeSite on the Windows platform and it has set the bar for what I am looking for. I've played with the evaluation version of Coda and it's pretty close but before committing to it I would like to get more feedback on what people like and recommend. I just need a lightweight editing surface that can help build up the XHTML code with helpers, perform quick previews, decent XHTML reference, etc. I like to write in the actual code, not in a WYSIWYG style design surface.

The second thing I am looking for is a decent financial management package. I bought iBank and have been using it and while it is an attractive Mac centered UI design it could be a lot better. A friend recommended I take a look at Jumsoft Money. If anyone would like to share their experience with that, or anything else in the personal finance category, please drop in a comment.

Adding a Logitech VX Nano to my wife’s MacBook

I really love the trackpad on my MacBook Pro and finally got to the point where I stopped using my Logitech Mx510 mouse with it. While the trackpad doesn't give me the control that a mouse does—especially when doing fine point adjustments in an image editor—I found myself quite comfortable just using the trackpad nearly all the time.

My wife however will be a different story. Her birthday is Monday and I've pretty much put the finishing touches on the MacBook I got her. I know however that she hates trackpads and since she's already going through enough of a change from Windows to Mac I figured I would get her a decent wireless mouse to help ease the transition.

I had a couple of people on this blog mention the Logitech VX Nano as a great little mouse and decided to give that a try. Though what I really wanted was a Bluetooth based solution I heard several reports of the Bluetooth mice having interference issues and as a result not being smooth all the time.

Wireless mice are not something I'm fond of when used with a laptop. I love the concept of no wires, it's just that virtually every wireless mouse requires a USB based receiver "dongle" to be inserted into the machine in order to make it work. This is the reason I liked Bluetooth based devices, since my Macs already have a Bluetooth device built in.

Having that receiver stuck into the side of a MacBook just looks obnoxious; it appears to me like a miniature diving board or a MacBook that is really excited to see you. This is where the Logitech VX Nano is different. The VX Nano came with a transmitter that is incredibly small, basically the size of a nickel.

When plugged into the side of my wife's MacBook it only projects a very small amount:



The mouse itself is excellent. I've always been a fan of Logitech mice and the VX Nano is a good example of why. It has a really slippery smooth surface on the bottom and glides over my desktop effortlessly. The primary buttons have a good solid feel to them. The roller ball is fantastic; it has nearly zero resistance and feels like a well oiled ball bearing. Spin it and let go and you'll scroll for a very long time. It can also pan right and left which is great for really wide web pages and images. There is a button below the scroll wheel that can be customized and set to pretty much anything. I set it to activate Spaces, something I hope my wife takes to.

The only thing I don't care for are the two buttons that would traditionally map to Forward and Backward on a web browser. If you look at the picture at the top of the screen they are placed just to the left of the primary mouse button. In my quick playing around with the mouse I found those to be harder to hit than something triggered by my thumb along the left edge of the mouse.

The size of the VX Nano is a bit on the small side. It's not one of those minuature laptop mice but runs about 2/3 the size of a normal Logitech mouse. I personally prefer larger mice because I tend to rest my hand on them while using them but I found this one pretty comfortable in my limited testing. My wife has very small hands so it should be perfect for her.

The software is an update to the Logitech driver. I've had miserable luck with the Logitech drivers in the past but decided to give this one a try. I don't know if I'll stick with it given my poor experience in the past but it does give me some nice control for the device, allowing me to remap any of the buttons and fine tune scrolling and click rates.

I'm going to be giving all this to Allison on Monday which is her actual birthday. I'm a little anxious to see how she takes to all of this.

Upgrade the memory in a MacBook in 3 minutes

When I bought my wife's refurbished MacBook I got it with the smallest amount of RAM I could get, in this case 1GB. The reason is that Apple charges a lot more for memory than what you can buy from an aftermarket seller like Other World Computing, which is a great resource for Mac memory and hard drives.

I purchased a 2GB memory upgrade from OWC for $41, which included the cost of shipping. For perspective if you bump the memory on a MacBook from Apple up from 1GB to 2GB there is a $100 charge for it as of this writing. The nice thing about the OWC site is that they will help you identify exactly which memory works for your model of MacBook. If you have another good resource for Mac memory please add it to the comments below.

While 1GB of memory is adequate to run OS X smoothly on a MacBook I think it's important to have as much memory as you are comfortable putting in your machine. Some applications— especially Firefox, my primary web browser—leak memory pretty badly and the longer you run those applications the lower your performance can get. As I compose this post on my Mac Pro my little iStat memory counter tells me that Firefox is using 855MB of memory. Ugh - time to restart Firefox.

The only downside to buying the memory from someone other than Apple is that you have to install it yourself or take it somewhere and have them install it for you. Installing memory on a MacBook is very simple and the only tools you need are a coin and a #0 phillips screwdriver.

While I was preparing my wife's machine I decided to put together a quick video to show how easy it is:



All told it takes about 3 minutes to do and can save you quite a bit of money by doing it yourself.

Setting up a Time Capsule

When I purchased a refurbished MacBook for my wife I also grabbed a refurbished 500GB Time Capsule from the Apple web site at the same time. At $249 it saved me $50 off the price of a new one and should provide a nice simple way to keep her MacBook backed up. Since I made the switch to Mac I've been raving about the simplicity of Time Machine and having a Time Capsule behind it sounded perfect.

Once again the device came in a non-descript cardboard box and included the Time Capsule, a package of instructions, a CD containing the AirPort Utility for configuring the Time Capsule and a power cord. I was disappointed to find that a standard ethernet patch cord was not included; fortunately I have a ton of them sitting around the house.

For those that haven't seen one a Time Capsule is a very sleek looking little device that includes not only a 500GB drive for backups through Time Machine but also has a USB port for adding printers, hard drives or even a USB hub to attach several devices. In addition to that the Time Capsule is also a full AirPort Extreme Base Station with 802.11n capabilities. The back of the Time Capsule also has a WAN port to connect to your existing network or cable modem and 3 10/100/1000Base-T ports to serve as an ethernet hub.

Setting this up was pretty straightforward. I installed the AirPort Utility on my Mac Pro and then plugged an ethernet patch cord from the WAN port on the Time Capsule into one of the ports on my local router, then plugged the power cord into a power outlet to fire it up. The Time Capsule spun for a little while then finally settled in and had a blinking amber light on the front display.

I loaded up the AirPort Utility and it quickly saw the Time Capsule and allowed me to connect to it. The AirPort Utility has a wizard style interface that walks you through some basic questions on how you want the device configured. The first thing it did was tell me that a firmware revision was available and asked if I wanted to upgrade it. That took all of a few minutes to do:



With that out of the way I went about configuring it. For my purposes I am using it as another wireless access point to connect to my network, I set up WPA2 as the security model and made sure to create a closed network. This means that the SSID of the Time Capsule is not broadcast, giving an extra level of security. At some point I am going to really go through my entire network at home and make it more secure.

Starting Up Time Machine
I grabbed the new MacBook I am giving my wife this weekend for a birthday present and started the process of connecting it to the Time Capsule. Since I named my wife's MacBook "Hope" (per Rasterman's suggestion that I "hope" she likes it), I decided to name the Time Capsule "Faith" as in "I have faith that my files are being backed up".

The MacBook immediately saw "Faith" and with a couple of clicks I had Time Machine pointing at it and beginning the process of backing it all up. Though this is a freshly minted machine I had already moved her iTunes collection over and reset all of her playlists, pushed in her existing files, etc. All told she had 34GB of data to back up. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it only took about 3.5 hours to complete the backup.

The amusing thing is that when Time Machine kicks in it mounts the Time Capsule drive and it appears on the MacBook's desktop as "Backup of Hope":



It sounds like some kind of campaign slogan to me. 'Tis the season I guess. Once the backup completed the drive disappeared from the desktop. I checked it all out and sure enough, Hope's files are backed up on Faith.

Part of the Backup Strategy
With four Macs actively in use in the house I have a backup plan for each. My Mac Pro has an extra 1TB drive in it that serves exclusively as a Time Machine volume. My MacBook Pro has a 1TB WD MyBook drive attached via USB that also uses Time Machine; I don't take it with me when I travel but it is an option. Now my wife and daughter's MacBooks will use the 500GB drive on the Time Capsule.

Basically every machine is backed up every hour that they are on, unless of course I get one of those stupid Time Machine errors (I really wish Apple would come up with a solution for that—it is very annoying). What's your backup strategy?

Buying a refurbished MacBook for my wife

Ah, the sound of a delivery truck in front of the house is always a welcome sound for a gear-head like me. I've gotten to the point where I can distinguish between UPS and FedEx by the squeal their brakes make. After a 1 day delay because I left the house for 15 minutes yesterday and that happened to be the window for the FedEx Ground guy, I had to wait an extra day to actually get my wife's new MacBook in hand.

As you can see from the picture below, Allison's refurbished MacBook came in a rather nondescript cardboard box, a far cry from the slick version you get when you buy new.



The machine inside however looked completely flawless. There were no marks and it appeared like a brand new machine, though it cost quite a bit less than a new one at $949. I pulled out the machine, fired it up and started to go through the registration process. It quickly saw and attached to my wireless network and after a few minutes I was sitting at the OS X desktop.

The unfortunate part was that this particular MacBook came with Tiger installed. Apple did provide an upgrade DVD which I promptly placed in the machine and started the upgrade process to Leopard. I let it perform the consistency check on the DVD so that added a lot of time to the upgrade. After about 25 minutes of checking the actual upgrade started, with estimates of over 1 hour and 50 minutes to complete. The fans on that little MacBook worked overtime, generating a lot of noise—though very little heat—during the upgrade. All in it actually took about an hour and a half to get the machine upgraded from Tiger to Leopard.

Once the upgrade from DVD was done I ran Software Update on it and it identified 14 updates for various products and over 800MB of data to download. I killed the Airport and plugged the MacBook directly into a router port so that it would download everything more quickly. As it was it only took about 10 minutes to pull everything down. Man I really love Verizon FIOS. This upgrade ended up requiring several reboots and also involved several Firmware updates as well.

Moving Over the Files
The next step involved getting her files over from her Windows XP machine. Connecting to it was as simple as popping into the Finder and selecting Go / Connect to Server, then entering the SMB address for her old laptop. I also needed to specify the user name and work group for her machine:

smb://WGP;Allison@Bethany

Where WGP is the name of the Windows workgroup her machine is in, Allison is her login name on the machine and Bethany is the name of the machine. I had to make sure her My Documents directory on the Windows XP machine were shared. Once there I could see all of her files and quickly copy them over into the appropriate folder on her new MacBook.

Other Odds and Ends
I'll write more about this shortly but I also picked up a Logitech VX Nano wireless mouse for her. In addition I have some additional memory from OWC and a 500GB Time Capsule for her backups that is due in later today.

My goal is to get this all completely set up and her files transferred over from her Windows XP laptop before this weekend so that I can give her this as her birthday present on Saturday.

As for a name for the new machine, I really appreciate all the great suggestions and decided to go with Rasterman's idea of calling it "Hope". Short, simple and represents my hope that she really likes it. That plus it has a subtle play off the Star Wars theme I like so much. It is after all a new hope.

Remaining Decision: Word, Pages or Neo Office?
Like most people on Windows Allison primarily uses MS Word though not being a power user she battles it regularly, especially when it comes to trying to format a document. She is often culling together work from others, grabbing and editing DOC and to a lesser degree DOCX files that are heavy with tables. She uses it to build worksheets for her students and quick quizzes. Finally she does use PowerPoint, both to create some presentations and also to open the public works of other teachers and integrate their content. The common medium for this seems to be PPT files from PowerPoint.

I personally think she would love the interface for Pages over the more complicated UI in Word for Mac 2008. Numbers vs Excel is a non-issue for her, though Keynote vs PowerPoint is something I'm not sure about. Throw in NeoOffice and I've got several choices to put in front of her. Given this is a full switch for her and I'm going to be holding her hand through it I'd really like to get her started on one of these three and try to make the best of it, switching only if she finds that it's too difficult to deal with.

Any suggestions? If you're a teacher at the high school level you likely know the challenges she has to deal with in terms of integration with multiple formats. If so, I'd love to hear your perspective.

Skype + LaunchBar = Ultimate Landline Style Phone

Though I started playing with Skype a couple of months ago I did it primarily as an alternate video conferencing option to iChat. My family members in California running Windows never seemed to be able to get their video based AIM tools to work, yet once they installed Skype we were able to hook up quickly and easily. All was good and Skype became my occasional use tool for chatting with the family and a few Skype enabled friends.

The nice part about using Skype this way is that it's completely free. Skype doesn't allow you to call a land line for free though; for that you can pay as you go or set up a monthly account that gives you voicemail and unlimited calls (10K minutes) to various parts of the world. For access here in the US to any number in the US or Canada the cost is $2.95 / month. While you can't use it to place calls to 911, it's excellent for making a call wherever you happen to have a decent internet connection. That's what I set up - unlimited calls to the US and Canada.

The other option available with Skype is purchasing your own local phone number and having it tied to your Skype account. By doing this people with land lines can dial directly into your computer if you are running Skype. Don't have it running? The call rolls to voice mail, which you can see the next time you fire up Skype.

Using Skype
The calls to people through Skype—both to other Skype users or to people on land lines—are very clear. On my MacBook Pro I will occasionally get some very mild feedback if the volume is cranked up too high but it's very minor; a headset solves that problem. On my Mac Pro with a USB based microphone (and no video camera), the sound quality is excellent.

I've mentioned before that I'm a big LaunchBar fan. When you combine LaunchBar with Skype you get some great integration and the ability to call people very easily. Since LaunchBar can pull names out of my Address Book it makes looking up phone numbers and calling people very simple.

As an example, if I wanted to call my buddy Stuart I activate LaunchBar (Command-Space) and enter "stu". His name is displayed in LaunchBar from his Address Book entry. I hit the right arrow and then select his phone number (work or cell), then hit Return. Skype fires up and dials his number for me. This does take a little configuration to work properly out of the box; if you want to configure it yourself go to the LaunchBar help and search for Skype.

Additional LaunchBar Scripts for Skype
A gentleman named Dennis created a nice series of AppleScripts to control Skype from LaunchBar that really help out a lot. The ability to quickly call any number is there as well as the ability to hang-up the Skype call.

If for example I want to hang up a call I don't need to mouse over to the Skype window and poke at the red "Hang Up" button (unless I want to); I simply hit Command-Space and enter "hang", Return and the call is terminated. This is something I really appreciate while I'm using Spaces and the Skype window is in a different region than where I am working.

I now use this set up to make most of my calls. No more looking up a phone number and dialing it manually or burning up my iPhones minutes while I'm sitting at my desk. The other benefit is when I have to call an automated system that requires touch-tone entry I don't have to pull the phone from my face to see the keypad, instead I can use the nice big numeric keypad on my large Mac Pro keyboard.

I've always loved finding productivity boosters and this is one that has created a dramatic improvement in my ability to make and deal with voice calls.

Converting my wife from Windows to Mac is about to begin

Last Saturday my wife and I went to our local Apple store with the intent of buying her a new MacBook and taking advantage of the educational offer they had; buy a qualifying Mac and get up to a $299 iPod free. My hope was that we would be able to get one of the new iPods but instead they told us we could only get either an older 8GB iPod Touch or a previous generation Nano. We decided to pass this up and simply wait a little longer since Allison's birthday isn't until the end of the month.

I thought about holding off until the next generation MacBooks are released (highly likely they will be next month) but came to the conclusion that it was better to simply get her a new machine right now instead of waiting. I want to have the machine in-house and set up for her so that she has it for her birthday.

I've had good luck with Apple Refurbished systems—my Mac Pro being one of them—so I decided to go that route. Since her needs are really minimal and she likes both of my daughter's MacBooks I went with the least expensive MacBook I could find in the refurbished deals section:

White MacBook
2.16 GHz Core Duo
1GB Memory
120GB HD
8X Superdrive

While a pretty entry level machine it's more than powerful enough to handle the basic web surfing, e-mail and word processing that Allison does. The $949 price was great too. I also picked up a refurbished 500GB Time Capsule for her at $249 and added in Apple Care to round it all out. The way I see it the Time Capsule should be just what she needs to keep Time Machine working for her behind the scenes.

On my short list to pick up for her are a Bluetooth mouse and some additional RAM. Given the low price of memory I'll likely overbuy there and go with 4GB since there is no such thing as too much RAM, especially with Firefox leaking like crazy.

The other challenge will be to see if she wants to use Microsoft Office or iWork. I personally bought iWork and moved to that after my trial of Microsoft Office left me feeling... meh. Pages is a much less complex product and I may try to get her to give that a shot instead of Word.

So the countdown to converting my wife from Windows to Mac is on. The machine is due early next week and I'll be giving it to her that weekend. Hopefully before then I can get all of her files on the machine and set it all up for her so that she can just jump right in and start using it.

A little help with a name
One thing I could use help with; I'll need to name the machine. She's a high school teacher now but is also an accomplished attorney that served as a child advocate for many years. For her sake I want to avoid the Star Wars themes I've used for names since she's apparently allergic to science fiction.

Some quick terminal keystroke shortcuts

When I made the switch to Mac from Windows one of the things that I enjoyed the most was having access to a full featured console window. The Terminal in OSX is much more powerful than the Command shell in Windows out of the box. Not only do I have quick access to all of the great Unix commands for things like file viewing and management, I can quickly SSH into my remote Linux based servers very easily.

Most people are aware of the standard things you can do in a Terminal shell, much like you can do in a Windows Command prompt: hit the up arrow to cycle through previous commands and hit the Tab key to help complete the name of a directory/folder. There are a couple of other things that I've found that really help out:

Search Command History (Control-R)
Rather than hitting the Up Arrow 10 times to get to an older and lengthy command you can simply hit Control-R. This will give you a prompt that allows you to start typing in a command and the first match it finds from your command history will be displayed as you type. Since I found this I use it constantly and rarely hit the Up Arrow to repeat a previous command.

Cursor Navigation (Escape-F, Escape-B)
I'm a heavy keyboard user yet when I jump into the Terminal I feel like my fingers are tied sometimes. This is especially true when trying to navigate between words in a long command line; I hit Command-Right or Command-Left and switch tabs in my command windows. Instead of using Control modified keys the Escape key comes into play here. Hitting Escape, then hitting F (forward) or B (back) jumps the cursor from word to word in the command line. It's less efficient than hitting a Control or Command modified key but it beats standing on the Left and Right arrows.

Delete to End of Line (Control-K)
Very often I find myself executing the same command on a different target. This usually involves deleting the last portion of a previously run command. Before picking up some of these shortcuts I would simply up arrow to the previous command and then stand on the Delete key until I got to the point I wanted. Now, I use the Escape-B command to back up to the right point in the previous command and then hit Control-K to delete from that point to the end of the line.

So there are the three shortcut combinations I've found invaluable in the Terminal window, and the best part is they are pretty universal to the Bash shell so when I'm in my SSH'd into one of my Linux servers I can use them there as well.

Got a shortcut you use in Terminal that you use all the time? Drop a note in the Comments below.

I just don’t get the new MS commercials

The new commercials Microsoft is running are now out, disclosing the strategy Microsoft will be employing to make the argument to buy Microsoft based products now and in the near future. Apparently the strategy is to mildly amuse people and convince us that Microsoft has some great new stuff coming out, as evidenced by Bill's subtle gestures to Jerry at the end of each commercial.



As is typical of the Windows experience, there seems to be a lot going on in these commercials, in sharp contrast to the simple presentation of products and solutions in the Apple commercials.

I chatted with a good friend of mine online that's a Windows / Linux guy about this. His portion of the chat went like this:

Jeff: here's my take
Jeff: Mac commercials - plain, simple, easy to make sense of, not too many moving parts
Jeff: Win commercials - no f'n clue what they're doing, long, bloated, inscrutable, stuff happening everywhere and you can't relate it to anything that makes sense
Jeff: I think that about sums up the OSes as well
Jeff: I swear I want to by a Mac just as a protest against these moronic commercials

I was pretty shocked to see that coming from Jeff, who has observed my conversion from Windows to Mac user with detached amusement. I'm pretty confident that Mac users watching this won't be encouraged to pitch what they are doing and get WinTel hardware when Windows 7 comes out, and I'm sure MS is aware of that. This marketing has to be targeted at the average Windows user that is considering a platform change or whether or not to continue upgrading their Windows machines.

I'm with Jeff on this one; I just don't get it.

First impressions of iTunes 8

Since iTunes was released today I figured I'd try it out and see how it worked. It was a relatively quick download and included a new QuickTime Player update as well. All told it was 54.8MB for my Mac Pro and 67.5MB for my MacBook Pro.

After a reboot iTunes was ready to roll. It asked me if I wanted to turn the Genius on. Doing so requires that your song information is sent to Apple in an anonymous form so that trends in music can be established and dynamic playlists created. Here's a link that tells you a little more about what Genius is actually doing behind the scenes.

The process of gathering this information, even on my monster of a Mac Pro with RAM and processors to spare, took a very, very long time. Granted, I have a rather large music collection, having put virtually every CD I had ever purchased into my collection, but wow. At least 3 hours, though it did work in the background and I could use iTunes to listen to my music while it was going on. Be prepared for a pretty long wait on this one.

Using iTunes
The majority of the interface remains the same, though there are now some additional options when you select Grid view. Within the grid view you can see your collection by Albums, Artists, Genres or Composers. The album art is then displayed, which really makes me wish I was more diligent about grabbing album art for my ripped CDs. This mode operates incredibly fast, scrolling very quickly through the entire collection.

There is now a Genius Sidebar that appears to the right of a selected Playlist. Apple is incorporating a lot of the iTunes store in there, something that likely will generate some more sales. Why? Well, if you select a song in your collection it shows top albums from that artist, a list of the "Top Songs You're Missing" , an "Essentials" list and finally "Recommendations". Each of the items in the list has a Buy button in it so it's really simple to grab something that catches your fancy (ie. spend some money).

I was surprised to find that the "Top Songs You're Missing" seemed to take into account what I had pretty well. I have several duplicates because of "Greatest Hits" collections, yet even when that was the only version of the song it didn't appear to recommend a song I already owned.

Listening to the Genuis
Okay, so the cool part is selecting a song from the play list and clicking on the Genius button on the lower right status bar. It immediately creates a dynamic playlist from your existing collection. It's kind of like listening to a radio station that specializes in the genre that you like to listen to. I've never been a big fan of simply listening to the random songs in my collection because it will switch from Michael Andrew's version of Mad World to Burl Ives Holly Jolly Christmas. This technically will keep you listening to music that is basically similar, though it's not without flaws in the initial version.

Listening to current, popular music seemed to generate some pretty good playlists for me. It was only when I went out on the edge that it had some trouble. I was shocked that this is what I got when I opened my 80s collections and tried to Rick-Roll myself:


Oh well, maybe that was intentional on Apple's part.

Still, I do like the Genius feature and the generation of playlists. Great way of exploring my music without having to set up playlists beforehand.

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