However, depending on your browsing habits and needs, you may wish to do a little tweaking in order to get the most out of Safari. Read on below to see how to do just that.

Safari Extensions

Let’s begin by taking a look at the most obvious tweaks you can make to Safari, the Extensions Gallery. While unveiled with much fanfare by Apple, the Extension Gallery has failed to gain the sheer volume of extensions which can be found on Chrome or Firefox, for example. Still, what it lacks in numbers, it more than makes up for in quality, as is highlighted by these three choices of extension:

1. AdBlock

As one might imagine from its name, the AdBlock extension prevents advertisements from cluttering up your web page. While Safari users have always had this option with third-party apps, AdBlock is the most stable, secure and slick implementation of advertisement blocking software on Safari to date. Just remember to add your favourite websites to the whitelist so they still get supported by their advertisers.

2. ClickToFlash

Click To Flash prevents any Adobe Flash from being loaded within Safari as default, instead offering a grey box to click on if desired. This may sound a little tiresome but once one has set a whitelist to allow exceptions for those rare occasions when Flash is actually desirable, it makes web browsing much quicker and more stable. An additional benefit of ClickToFlash is that it’ll make use of HMTL5 when possible, meaning that websites like Youtube can actually be used without the need for Flash at all.

3. Facebook Cleaner

If like me, you find Facebook annoying but necessary, Facebook Cleaner may well be useful. The extension prevents those prompts to “like this” which turn up on many websites and also cleans up your actual Facebook page when logged in, by blocking most of the more annoying features of the site.

Customise Toolbar

I love Safari’s minimalist stylings, but the toolbar which Apple see fit to ship the browser with is a little too minimalist for my own tastes and I like to see a Home button, in addition to a New Tab button. If you’d like to add these buttons or just tweak the current layout, simply right-click on the toolbar and select “Customize Toolbar”.

This done, you should be presented with the above screen, from which new icons can be dragged and dropped onto the toolbar.

Top Sites

The Top Sites feature in Safari can be very useful as it already is, but perhaps even more so if you take the time to set it up to your favorite websites. To do this, click on the small “Edit” button in the bottom left hand corner. It’s a somewhat laborious process to get everything just right, but once you have done so I believe it’s worthwhile and saves significant time.

Set Up Preferences

Opening up the Preferences window within Safari will show options for fixing many people’s pet peeves with Safari. One can prevent the app from opening downloaded files which Safari deems as “Safe” automatically and also stop that most contentious of features implemented in the latest version of Safari; auto-correction.

Conclusion

Besides the tips and tweaks mentioned above, making use of Safari’s additional features can be what sets it apart from other web browsers. It may not do as much as some competing browsers, but what Safari does do, it does very well indeed. Reading List can completely replace the need for a “temp” folder to come back to read articles later, while fullscreen browsing is finally brought to Apple’s browser for those users who are currently running OS X Lion.

Have you got any other tips for making the most of Safari? If so, please let us know about them in the comments.

Read on after the break to find out more about this iPhone-friendly demo of Windows Phone 7.5 Mango.

Getting Started

To get started with the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango interactive web demo, navigate to http://aka.ms/wpdemo on your iPhone’s Safari Browser. This will bring up the above help screen, which details how to navigate within the demo’s UI. Sliding left or right moves between screens, whereas moving the screen up or down navigates between the tiles. Once given time to fully load, the action was smooth on my iPhone 4 and offered a surprisingly responsive user experience.

Using The Demo

So once you’ve loaded the demo, what can you do with it?

Well, the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango demo already contains content for you to check out and see what it would be like to use the OS. Buttons respond to touch and tiles can be browsed by swiping left or right, up or down. The demo also offers hints as to what the user should do next with a glowing blue icon denoting the action a user may take.

Opening various tiles will uncover demo content which is already available and this can usually be interacted with, at least to some degree. For example, opening the Pictures tile brings up a screen from which the Camera Roll can be accessed, in addition to organising these pictures by albums, date and people (tagging is integrated into the UI).

Sharing photos is equally painless, as the demo walks through the steps needed to upload a photo from Mango’s Camera Roll to Facebook.

When testing Outlook, the interactive demo directs the user to import emails from a Hotmail account and the process seems very slick and easy, soon providing a shortcut tile to access said emails from the home screen and a fake phone call can even be made to lend an idea of what it’s like to make a call on the Windows phone.

Conclusion

When compared with other mobile operating systems which followed in the wake of iOS’s massive success, Windows Phone 7.5 Mango should be lauded for its re-imagining of what a mobile operating system can offer. It really is an original phone OS and even with the natural limitations of it being housed in a mobile browser, the experience is impressively slick.

Will it tempt this iOS user away from Apple’s operating system? Not likely, though I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft’s demo won them some new fans after this strong showing.

With a Mac safely in Target Disk Mode, its hard drive contents can be read from another computer and it is essentially reduced to the role of external hard drive, from which it can be booted from, and an operating system can even be installed. Read on below for some tips on getting started with Target Disk Mode.

Getting Started

In order to use Target Disk Mode with two Mac’s, we’ll need a Firewire cable of the type 6 pin to 6 pin. With this Firewire cable ready, switch off both Mac’s and first connect the Firewire cable to the target Mac – this is the Mac which has the hard drive which we wish to read from, or write to.

Next, power on the target Mac while holding down the ‘T’ key. After a few moments, a blue screen should appear with a yellow Firewire icon – this denotes that the machine in question is in Target Disk Mode. Now plug the other end of the Firewire cable into your host Mac and power it on. Once OS X is loaded, you should be able to access your files on the target Mac and copy any needed data.

Booting From The Target Mac

If you wish to actually boot into the target Mac’s OS X, connect the two machines as outlined above, stopping short of powering on the host Mac. Once you’re ready and the target Mac is safely in Firewire Target Disk Mode, power on the host Mac and hold down the ‘alt’ or option key.

After some time, you should be presented with a boot screen, from which you may select your target Mac’s hard drive to boot from. This may not always work, depending on the compatibility of the two machines in question.

Installing OS X In The Target Mac

It can be very useful to place a Mac in Target Disk Mode if you wish to install an operating system without using the disc drive. For example, I wanted to install OS X Tiger on an old iBook Clamshell but could not because the iBook’s optical drive was broken.

By connecting the iBook Clamshell to another iBook with Firewire Target Disk Mode, I was able to use the second iBook’s optical drive to install OS X Tiger into the desired machine. This method can even be followed to install unsupported versions of OS X onto the target machine, provided the host machine supports it – just install OS X as normal, making sure to select the target Mac as the destination drive.

Conclusion

Whether wanting to retrieve data, boot an old computer or install an operating system, Firewire Target Disk Mode can be a very useful tool for Mac users who own more than one machine. Firewire cables are very inexpensive and can be left ready should the need arise.

Unfortunately, development was suddenly dropped for Quicksilver and as the project stagnated, its popularity faded. However, a new software team has taken over recently and injects the keyboard launcher with a new vigour, promising regular updates and new features. Let’s take a renewed look at Quicksilver and see if it can still offer users a compelling reason to make it a key part of their OS X computing experience.

Setting Up Quicksilver

To get up and running with Quicksilver, first head over to the Quicksilver download page and choose the relevant release for your Mac – Quicksilver is supported on all iterations of OS X from Panther onwards.

Once installed, the first-run of Quicksilver is relatively painless and one must choose which plugins to activate. If you’re not sure which plugins you would like yet, you can always return later but a few which I’d recommend are the iTunes, Safari, Mail and Address Book plugins.

Finally, Quicksilver must be allotted a keyboard shortcut. I choose to use the default Spotlight shortcut and move Spotlight to Option & Spacebar, but any such combination should suffice.

Searching and Launching

Hitting Quicksilver’s keyboard prompt will bring up the above pane and, like Spotlight, as you begin to type, search results will be thrown up. Where it differs from Spotlight however, is that Quicksilver allows you to control key aspects of OS X right from Quicksilver’s interface – with the correct combination, users can email a contact, listen to iTunes and more.

Triggers

By configuring Quicksilver’s Triggers feature, you may assign certain combinations of keys to specific tasks. This may not sound all that revolutionary in itself but Quicksilver allows some really great tweaking which brings this feature alive. For example, I have the following combinations set to open specific applications and bookmarks:

Applications

Ctrl + M = Mail
Ctrl + P = Pages
Ctrl + S = Safari

Bookmarks

Ctrl + Shift + G = Google Search
Ctrl + Shift + S = Soundcloud
Ctrl + Shift + M = Make Tech Easier

In order to set up some similar Triggers of your own, navigate to Quicksilver’s preferences and click on the “Triggers” pane. It should look something like the above screenshot, albeit without all my own Triggers inserted.

To add a custom Trigger, click on the + icon located on the bottom taskbar and then “HotKey” and a search prompt shall appear. Begin typing what you would like to set as a trigger (for example “Saf” will quickly bring up Safari) and then if you’re happy with it, hit Save.

Next we need to assign a keyboard combination to our Trigger, so make sure that your previously made Trigger is highlighted and click on the small information pane icon, which is located toward the bottom of the screen and looks like a small ‘i’. You should see something similar to that shown below:

As you can see, for the command to open the URL for Make Tech Easier, I have allotted the keyboard combination:

Control + Command + Shift + M

Pressing these keys anywhere while Safari is activated will launch a new window with Make Tech Easier in it. Other commands can be added in a similar manner.

More Basic Quicksilver Commands

To send an email quickly while using Quicksilver, one can launch QS’s interface as normal and type in the name of the person you would like to email. I’d like to email my friend Hannah so after typing in “han”, her name was brought up and then a hit of the tab key took me to the right hand column. From there, just select “Compose Email”.

In the same way, iTunes can be controlled from Quicksilver. Once again bringing up iTunes, hit tab and then move down to select Pause/Play, Skip Track, etc.

Final Thoughts

I’ve really only covered the very basics of Quicksilver here but hopefully it’ll be enough to pique your interest and in future articles I’ll set out some of the more complex tasks you can carry out at lightning speed with the tips of your fingers.

If you like the idea of a launcher like Quicksilver but find it too complex, another similar application is Alfred. The core application of Alfred is free to use but a Powerpack must be purchased in order to unlock its full potential. That said, once the Powerpack is indeed bought, Alfred is a powerful, flexible and perhaps easier to use application than Quicksilver.

Still, sometimes it’s fun to look back and play some retro console classics and if one desires, it’s perfectly possible to use your Mac to achieve this, with NES, SNES and even N64 games all attainable with good graphic and speed performance. Read on after the break to see how.

ROMS

Since we’re going to be emulating games on our Macs, there’ll be no need for cartridges, nor any way to use them if we had them. Therefore, one must attain ROMS, or files which contain the games. The legality of this is somewhat questionable and opinions vary as to it being piracy or not but most consider emulation fairly harmless. A quick internet search for “the old computer” will usually throw up a website which contains the required results.

1. NES

The Nintendo Entertainment System was launched in the US in the mid-1980′s and proved to be an iconic 8-bit classic, with worldwide success and many unofficial clones launched in Soviet Eastern Europe. To emulate NES games, we have a few choices in Mac OS X, but after trying most of them out, I’m going recommend you go with Nestopia.

Simply follow the link and navigate to the relevant Mac OS X download to install Nestopia – it’s a free download. That done, you can grab your ROMS and direct the app toward them via the built-in menu.

2. SNES

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System was the 16 bit follow-up to the NES and was no less successful than its predecessor. With such classic titles as Starfox, Super Mario World and Pilot Wings all finding a home on the SNES, there’s little wonder that its games are still being played today.

To get started playing SNES games on our Mac, we need to grab a copy of SNES9X, which is also free. Download and install SNES9X as normal and then launch the app.

SNES9X contains more options but is still very simple to configure and all you should need to do is navigate the menu to “File -> Open ROM Image” and select your ROM.

3. Nintendo 64

Coming a decade later than Nintendo’s original 8 bit console, the Nintendo 64 was, appropriately, 64 bit and featured significant graphical improvements over its predecessors. For this reason, it takes a little more resources to emulate Nintendo 64 adequately but there’s still plenty of games which run just fine on a Mac.

For our N64 emulation, I’m going to recommend Sixtyforce which has managed to handle the games I’ve tested on my MacBook Pro without many glitches. Sixtyforce is free to use but there is a charge to unlock all the app’s functionality. ROMS are loaded in the same way as SNES9X and Nestopia, accessible via a menu.

Conclusion

The process of running emulated retro games on your Mac really isn’t too difficult at all and probably the biggest challenge is sourcing all the game ROMS you wish to play. If desired, a joypad can be plugged into your Mac to complete the experience. In addition, there’s even an app which turns your iPhone into a NES style controller – I’ve tested this out and found it to be surprisingly usable.

Here’s some great lightweight media related applications and a program to help schedule your life too, all of which have much of the functionality of their heavyweight counterparts, often at a much more affordable price.

Pixelmator

Pixelmator is a lightweight graphics editor which is beautifully designed, easy to use and works on older Mac hardware, even those machines which are powered by the now abandoned PowerPC architecture. As a blogger, I often need to do basic image manipulation and resizing, exporting to different formats and similar tasks. However, I have terrible Photoshop skills and don’t wish to spend time learning to become better as graphics don’t interest me a great deal.

Happily, Pixelmator fits the bill as Photoshop for many users like myself and gives the tools of image manipulation to even the most graphically challenged or inexperienced amongst us.

Vox

Despite the hate which it often generates with some users, I personally don’t have a problem with iTunes and its overall performance. Having said that, I sometimes only want a lightweight, easy music player which will handle any format I throw at it and not require the management of a library.

Vox does this extremely well, has a beautifully minimalist interface, EQ and playlist controls in addition to some other tweaks available under the hood – and all for free!

Taskpaper

There are no end of GTD, or “getting things done” applications available for OS X and one of the most lightweight is Hog Bay Software’s Taskpaper. Lightweight and minimal often translates as simple and intuitive but Taskpaper does have something of a learning curve – to be sure, this should be a quick learning curve to the more technically minded, but those who wish something more intuitive might be better looking elsewhere for their time management needs.

Reaper

GarageBand is included free with every new Mac but for those who wish for something more lightweight and flexible, Reaper is an excellent choice of DAW. With several versions available for Windows and Mac OS X, Reaper also actively supports the PowerPC architecture – ensuring that even the oldest Macs should still be able to create and edit audio tracks.

Reaper is free to use, with an inexpensive product activation encouraged, though not demanded, as it will continue to run indefinitely.

Conclusion

Whatever type of application you’re looking for, there’s almost always a lightweight, low-cost option available for purchase or download – though due to the nature of independent software developers and their limited press coverage, it’s not always easy to find them.

Have you got any favourite lightweight applications? Please let us know about them in the comments!

However, this does not necessarily mean that you must do without all of OS X Lion’s best features, as much of the functionality of Apple’s latest big cat can be added to Snow Leopard with the tweaking of options, third-party applications and hacks.

AirDrop

OS X has always had good networking abilities but AirDrop certainly made sharing files over two Mac’s a lot more intuitive and streamlined. However, many Mac users have found upon installing Lion that they are not compatible with AirDrop. For these users and for Snow Leopard users too, the popular and free DropCopy application for Mac and IOS makes sharing files a breeze.

Wallpaper

OS X Lion comes with an updated selection of wallpapers. If you would like to make use of these wallpapers on a Mac not running Lion, just head to this Deviant Art page.

Swipe Between Spaces

When dual-booting OS X Lion and Snow Leopard, I found that the one feature I missed in Snow Leopard the most was the ability to swipe left or right to move between Spaces. Luckily, providing your trackpad supports the multitouch gestures needed, this can be achieved in Snow Leopard with the free application, Better Touch Tool.

First set up Spaces so that it has four columns, as shown in the above screenshot. Select the drop down menu to ensure that “To Switch Between Spaces” does not correspond to a keyboard shortcut for the time being.

Install Better Touch Tool and it should appear in your Menu Bar. Navigate to Better Touch Tool’s preferences and select the “Trackpad/Magic Trackpad” pane, ensuring that “Global” is also selected on the left, as we want to make this new gesture system-wide.

Now, select “Add New Gesture” and “Four Finger Swipe Left” then in the “Custom Keyboard Shortcut” enter control and right at the same time so it looks like the above screenshot, repeating the process for the left swipe gesture.

Next bring up OS X’s System Preferences and access the Trackpad preferences and change the option for “Three Fingers” to dragging.

Navigate to the Spaces preference pane in System Preferences and click on “To switch between spaces” – select the control key option so that it looks like the screenshot below. Finally, you may need to head to your trackpad options and untick the box “Swipe Left/Right to switch applications”.

Now you should be able to move between Spaces just by swiping left or right with four fingers!

Reverse Scrolling

In OS X Lion, Apple brought in reverse scrolling to make touchpad input more iOS-like. If you’d like to try out reverse scrolling on a Mac running Snow Leopard, there’s a few choices but for this guide, I’ll stick with Better Touch Tool.

Launch Better Touch Tool’s preferences once again and click on the “Basic Settings” pane. Head over to the top right of the screen to click on the box next to “Inverse Scrolling (Lion Like)” to complete the change. If you later decide that reverse/inverse scrolling is not to your taste, just head back to Better Touch Tool’s preferences and untick the box to return to default.

Remove Application Indicators From Dock

OS X Lion allows the user to remove the Dock indicators which show whether an application is running. This is meant to encourage a more “worry free” approach so that the user just uses each application as needed without worrying about whether it is running or not.

While Snow Leopard doesn’t have a simple option to remove the indicators, it can be achieved with a little light hacking:

Navigate to “/System/Library/Core Services/” in Finder and find the icon named “Dock”.

Right click on “Dock” and select “Show Package Contents” then double click to open “Contents” and “Resources”.

Make a search in Resources via Finder for files which contain “indicator” in their filename (as shown above) and copy them somewhere safe. With your backup copy in place, now move all the original “indicator” files to the Trash.

Launch Terminal and copy/paste the following command to restart the Dock and see your changes take effect:

killall Dock

To return your Dock back to normal, simply replace the filenames which contain “indicator” and repeat the killall command in the Terminal.

Launchpad

One of the more debated additions to OS X Lion is Launchpad, which brings iOS-style launching of applications – some love it, some hate it. If you’d like to get an idea of your feelings on the matter while staying in Snow Leopard, Araelium Group’s QuickPick application brings much of the functionality and look of Launchpad to OS X Snow Leopard.

iChat

iChat now enables all your contacts lists to be merged into one window, whatever account they’re on, helping to cut down on much needed screen space. There’s no hack or workaround that I’m aware of to pull this off on Snow Leopard with iChat, but Adium can. Adium is much more flexible than iChat for messaging but be aware that it does not allow video or voice calls – just text.

Conclusion

While the above tips and tricks can’t quite offer all the benefits of OS X Lion, they should at least serve to give your Mac some interesting new features to make use of and perhaps help you decide whether to stick with Snow Leopard a little while longer.

These new low-profile keyboards look great and have the benefit of no annoying noise, but there’s a minority of users who miss the physical feedback of a mechanical keyboard and some can even suffer RSI when typing heavily on the new style. For these users, Canadian keyboard manufacturer Matias offers the Tactile Pro 3 – a keyboard which promises to faithfully replicate the feel of classic keyboards like the original Apple Extended Keyboard, but with modern benefits, such as three USB ports.

Following In The Footsteps Of A Classic

The Apple Extended Keyboard was originally produced in the early 1990′s and is widely regarded as Apple’s finest ever keyboard. They are still in use by enthusiasts today and it’s possible to pick up an older model on the internet but this comes with complications as not only will you need a USB adaptor, but way the keyboard is designed means that it’ll also need its own power source.

Sourcing a mint condition Apple Extended Keyboard can be difficult and so many turn to the Tactile Pro 3 instead. The Tactile Pro 3 is a keyboard which is similarly styled but comes with modern benefits too – such as three USB ports and a great layout which includes all the lesser used symbols one could need, accessible at the press of an Option key, making typing out even obscure characters simple.

All this convenience and retro styling does come at significant cost however, the Matias Tactile Pro 3 is priced at an eyebrow raising $149.99.

First Impressions

The Tactile Pro 3 comes in well designed packaging and feels suitably heavy and expensive. It definitely does not follow Apple’s smooth aluminium minimalist look of recent years, rather harking back to a time when white plastic ruled supreme. Indeed, the keyboard looks great sat on my desk next to an iBook and eMac.

The inclusion of all the extra characters is welcome but gives the keyboard a slightly busy look which may not appeal to minimalists. Each key is placed in a very intuitive layout and the Caps Lock glows satisfyingly white when pressed. The three USB ports’ placement is well considered too and helps cut down on desktop clutter, powering a mouse and syncing an iPhone with ease, while the keyboard’s own USB lead is very long and heavy duty – it should prove up to the task of traversing even the most awkward desk layout.

Ghostbuster

Retro-styling only goes so far and so it’s probably the engineering behind the Matias Tactile Pro 3 which is its most compelling selling point. Matias have researched and designed the keyboard’s mechanism to work in the exact same way as the Apple Extended Keyboard which it emulates, making use of the same Alpine-style switches and it can read the signal from several keys at once, removing the possibility of ghosting when used by even the fastest touch typist. Unfortunately I’ve never had the opportunity to use the Apple Extended Keyboard so cannot compare the Tactile Pro 3 to the original, but opinion seems to agree that it’s as close as one can get to the real thing.

The action of the keys feels just perfect – typing requires some weight behind it but not so much as to need undue force and each key snaps with a satisfying sound. When compared to typical modern keyboards, the Tactile Pro 3 is definitely much louder and could drive some to distraction if used in a shared office environment.

Is The Matias Tactile Pro 3 Worth The Cost?

I write for a living and suffer from quite painful RSI as a result of my typing thousands of words a week. In the short time I’ve been using the Tactile Pro 3, I’ve found it significantly eases my wrist pain when typing and is more conducive to good typing technique – there’s a real and noticeable benefit in using the Tactile Pro 3 over my usual Apple keyboards and the ones on my MacBook Pro and iBook, so much so in fact, that I’m now loathe to use those built-in notebook keyboards.

Though expensive compared to even the most high-end Apple wireless keyboards, the Tactile Pro 3 feels like a quality product and seems built to last. If you would like a clicky keyboard or enjoy retro styling, or if you’re a heavy computer user and type many words as part of your job, then you may well find that the Tactile Pro 3 is good value for money.

The Matias Tactile Pro is configured for Mac, though I believe the company offers corresponding Windows keys and drivers as an option. Visit the Matias website for more information.

This tutorial will discuss some of the best and most popular beginner-friendly Terminal tricks and tips to be found on the Internet.

Disclaimer

Usually it takes destructive behaviour or terrible luck to ruin your Mac’s OS X installation beyond repair, but using the Terminal could potentially bypass such safety and enable a user to cause themselves serious headaches, or even (in extreme cases) a completely ruined operating system. This is very unlikely and as long as you steer clear from “sudo” commands which require you to enter your password, you should be perfectly safe. However, I strongly advise you to back up your Mac fully and proceed at your own risk!

Some tips may only work for a particular OS, though I’ve taken care to only select Terminal commands which should mostly work on Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion.

Show Hidden Files

Though OS X doesn’t really place much emphasis on hidden files and folders, some files and folders are hidden by default. This is usually for good reason and deleting the wrong thing can cause issues, but if you wish to show the hidden files, then enter the following code:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles true

To undo this command, replace true with false.

Enable 2D Dock

If you’ve ever moved your Dock to the left or right of screen (depending on which OS X version you’re running), you may have seen the 2D Dock shown above. If you’d like to enable the 2D Dock in all positions, enter the following into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES

Now restart your Dock to make the changes take effect by entering

killall Dock

To put your Dock back to normal, replace the “YES”‘ in the above code to “NO” and restart the Dock once again by entering the above killall command.

Disable Dashboard

I’ve never been a big fan of the Dashboard as it’s something of a RAM hog and I like it to be completely disabled in case I accidentally launch it. If you would like to do so too, enter this into Terminal and hit return:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

Once again restart Dock to make the changes take effect.

killall Dock

To undo this command and bring back Dashboard, just change “YES” to “NO” and restart your Dock by entering the killall command once again (note: the killall command can actually be inserted into the same line of code to save time, I’m making it separate here to give you a sense of what exactly is happening).

Show The Library Folder In OS X Lion

OS X Lion comes with the Library folder hidden by default but this can make troubleshooting any issues with your Mac, deleting the cache or just plain “tinkering” very difficult. In order to bring back the Library folder permanently, enter this command into Terminal:

chflags nohidden ~/Library/

Hide Desktop Icons

A nice clean Desktop looks great but sometimes it’s not practical to keep all your files organised. If you’d like to hide all the icons on your Desktop through a Terminal command, enter the following:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false

Then our friend the killall command once again

killall Finder

When you wish to bring your Desktop clutter back, copy and paste the following:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true

Then enter the killall command.

Launch An Application

In order to launch applications from the Terminal, just follow this template, replacing Twitter with the name of whichever program you’d like to launch:

open -a Twitter

Kill A Process

If you need to quickly kill a process or application, type the following into Terminal, replacing Twitter with whichever process you’d like to kill.

killall Twitter

Open A Finder Window In Current Directory

To quickly open a Finder window in whichever directory you’re currently in, enter the following into Terminal

open .

Change Grab’s Default Image Format

OS X’s built-in screenshot utility Grab is very useful but if you’d like it to save files as JPG, enter the following into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg

(note: You can also change jpg to png if preferred).

Conclusion

I hope that you’ve found some usefulness from these Terminal commands and that it encourages you to learn more about the power which can be unlocked from within the command-line. You can usually find an application which takes care of each of the commands posted above, but that’s a lot less informative and a lot less fun!

For the command-line veterans amongst our readers; if you’ve got any Terminal commands or tips which I’ve missed (and I’m sure there are several), please let us know about them in the comments below.

Here’s where MarsEdit comes in, offering a great tool to aid the creation and management of content. Posts can be written offline and stored locally in HTML or Rich Text and then uploaded to your blog once you’re finished – you can even add photos too! Interested? Read on after the break to see how MarsEdit can revolutionise your blogging routine.

Getting Started

Launching MarsEdit brings up the screen shown above (albeit without my added blogs) and one can add blogs to the interface with a simple click of the + button, followed by entering your blog details. For example, when adding my own personal Tumblr page, I simply entered the URL http://adamawilliams.com then added my username and password – that’s it.

MarsEdit then downloads all recent posts where they can be edited and managed within the application itself. Multiple accounts can be managed this way and I found the automatic settings to work flawlessly with multiple WordPress accounts and Tumblr.

The Benefits Of Offline Content Creation

You may be asking yourself if there’s any reason to move from your typical method of Internet browser and web client. One of the most compelling reasons I found to use MarsEdit was it’s ability to create a blog post completely offline. In the past, I would write out my posts in Plain Text, complete with HTML tags on a Word Processor such as Writeroom and then laboriously copy/paste into WordPress while fixing formatting errors and uploading photos along the way. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this method, but MarsEdit offers a much more seamless way of working offline.

Content is created just like in a Word Processor and one can add photos in the correct position too, ready for upload. Once you’ve finished and assuming you like the look of the post in the realtime preview within MarsEdit, you can choose to “Send To Blog” and either publish right away or save as a draft. This feature may not be such a big deal if you live in an urban environment with a stable Internet connection and coffee shop wifi should that go down, but for those of us who live in a rural area with poor Internet coverage, this feature alone makes MarsEdit more than worth the purchase price!

Beginner Friendly

I currently write for several blogs and have naturally picked up a little HTML along the way, but it can be somewhat confusing for novices to learn the various formatting rules, tags and codes associated with HTML. MarsEdit includes an excellent implementation of Rich Text editing and this will be a great boon to those who struggle with even basic code. It is also worth taking a moment to touch upon Red Sweater Software’s excellent online resources, such as their forum and FAQ. In addition, when contacting Red Sweater’s support due to an issue with WordPress on the server-side (and not a fault of the app), I fired off a question to support and was emailed back within the hour with a full response from the developer himself.

Other Features

Besides simple text editing, MarsEdit hosts several well thought out features, such as full screen editing, a Safari bookmarklet and “Edit With” buttons, in addition to a media upload interface. Clicking on the “Media” button within MarsEdit’s editing pane brings up the above screen and from there you can choose to select images residing within your Mac’s hard drive, Aperture library or Flickr account.

Conclusion

I find MarsEdit very useful and more than worth the $39.99 purchase price, however users who blog only infrequently may feel the price a little steep for what they need. A free 30-day trial is available from Red Sweater software here so one can at least give it a test-drive before purchase. If you like the idea of MarsEdit but would prefer a cheaper alternative, Blogo is billed as a similar application, with a 21-day free trial and a purchase price of $25 – though beware, the application does not currently support OS X Lion. Additionally, Ecto promises broadly similar functionality at the more affordable price of $19.99.

To purchase MarsEdit, visit this Mac App Store link or Red Sweater software’s own store.

I installed the Golden Master on an iPhone in order to test-drive the new features and, over the process of a week with iOS 5, had the opportunity to see how well it performs.

Setup

Users no longer need a Mac or PC to begin using iOS 5 and there is now a completely new and much more intuitive method of setup. This is a big improvement on the old system which required one to plug into a computer in order to begin enjoying iOS.

iMessage

Billed as Apple’s answer to Blackberry’s BBM, iMessage is integrated into iOS 5 under the “Messages” icon. It works by offering both SMS and internet data messaging, dependent on signal availability and the recipient. I live in an area with terrible mobile phone coverage so rely on wireless internet in my house and the cross-platform messaging app WhatsApp to communicate with friends.

I can’t help but question a system which has us using iMessage, Facetime and iChat on various Apple devices – it seems very complicated, inelegant and un-Apple. iMessage seemed a little less aggressive overall at pushing notifications than WhatsApp and there was an increased amount of messages which failed to send. Still, iMessage is a very slick, seamless way to communicate overall, though whether it’s good enough to tempt BBM users away from their BlackBerry’s remains to be seen.

Notifications

The notification system in iOS has come under warranted criticism for some time now and was already beginning to look dated when compared to some Android offerings on launch of iOS 4. Thankfully the whole system has been completely overhauled and users are finally freed from the endless and annoying popup messages of old.

As is often the case with Apple, now that they’ve finally addressed the problem of notifications, their solution is robust and intuitive. Notifications now pop up on screen and multiple messages can be accessed with a pull-down “curtain” which is similar in operation to the Jailbreak-only app SBSettings, though does not offer the same functionality. As you can see in the screenshot above, certain apps can also reside within the notifications area, such as Weather and Stocks, which move across the screen in a scrolling ticker-style.

Safari

Safari has received some welcome upgrades in iOS 5 and it seemed overall quicker to load pages and more responsive overall. Reader can now be used as on the desktop version of Safari and the addition of Reading List is most welcome too. As Twitter is now integrated into iOS, the “add bookmark” button now brings up buttons for “Tweet”, “Add To Reading List” as well as the usual options.

iCloud

iCloud is an important topic in itself and perhaps worthy of its own article but at time of writing, I unfortunately had little opportunity to test it. Based on the brief time I could spend with iCloud, I found it to work flawlessly at keeping my Bookmarks, Contacts and iCal entry’s synchronised. iCloud seems a great leap forward in usefulness when compared with its predecessor MobileMe and the fact that it is offered free of charge (with 5GB limit) alone ensures that it should be popular.

Reminders

Due to the proliferation of productivity (or “Getting Things Done”) apps currently available for iOS, Apple have come up with their own offering – Reminders. It works very simply and seems useful enough for basic tasks but I doubt that it shall be replacing my usual choice of Things for scheduling complex lists of due articles I am juggling at any one time. If you’re just looking for an app to remind you to purchase milk, Reminders is more than up to the task.

Final Thoughts

Admittedly I’ve only covered a few of the new features of iOS 5 and there’s a lot more to explore not mentioned here, such as the Newsstand, Wireless Sync, Camera’s new grid and the Photo Stream, but hopefully you’ll now at least have a slightly better idea of what to expect come upgrade.

I feel that it’s important to note that when compared to all the previous iOS upgrades I have experienced, iOS 5 actually did not slow my iPhone to a crawl, or even impact on performance in any significant way. In addition, all my usual apps worked fine in iOS 5, a welcome change from the usual frustration of broken applications.

In very sad news, Apple has reported that Steve Jobs passed away yesterday following his battle with cancer. In his all too brief life, Steve had a huge impact on each of his chosen fields and the entire technology world will be much poorer without his presence.

Early Life, Creating Apple

Steve Jobs was brought up as an adopted child in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Though a college dropout, he was a very intelligent and driven young man and following a stint working at Atari, where he co-created the classic game Breakout with Steve Wozniak, Jobs went on to co-found Apple Computers with Wozniak and fellow Atari employee Ronald Wayne (they were soon joined by Mike Markkula).

As the success of the Apple I and especially the Apple II computers gave Apple the chance to expand its workforce, the company took in more employees and Jobs famously enticed John Sculley to leave his post at Pepsi-Cola in order to serve as Apple’s CEO with the line “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”. Sculley, of course, joined and it was to be a fateful decision as the new CEO soon fired Jobs from the company he helped create.

Eleven Years Away

Far from spending these years away from Apple in the wilderness, Jobs went on to prove that his success was not a fluke and bought the Graphics Group, renamed it Pixar Animation Studios and steered it to great success, producing many animated cinema classics such as the hugely successful Toy Story. Pixar was eventually sold to Disney, making Jobs a major shareholder in that company too.

In addition to Pixar, Jobs also created NeXT Computer and though the company saw limited commercial success, it contained some really great ideas – many of which went on to be integrated into Mac OS X. It was a NeXT computer which served as the World Wide Web’s first server, created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.

Dominant Force

Eleven years after his sacking from Apple, Jobs returned to a company in stagnation, written off by many of its rivals. However, following a period of readjustment (and with a couple of missteps on the way), Apple returned to profitability, capitalising on a brilliant ‘Think Different’ marketing campaign and producing one hit after another with the help of design wizard Jonathan Ive. Apple now began to release real modern technology masterpieces like the iMac and iBook. It was with the launch of the iPod however, that Apple became a truly huge global name.

In typical Apple fashion, the original iPod drew upon ideas and trends which existed in other products, but made them easy to use, elegant and ergonomic. The iPod introduced Apple to many new consumers, eventually grabbing an incredible market share so that over 70% of digital music players sold was an iPod. The iPod was combined with a switch to Intel processors and another huge leap in sales. By the time the iPhone was announced, Apple had proven themselves a very special company at the top of their game.

Legacy

Jobs had such an active professional life that it would be difficult to list all his incredible achievements in one article, however, it is fitting that we take a moment to pause on the man’s real greatness. One need not own an Apple product to understand the impact that Steve Jobs has had on the world of technology and animation. Jobs’ stubborn refusal to settle for anything less than perfection also pushed other companies to do the same and the end result is a win for the customer, whichever platform you use.

Perhaps Steve is best remembered here on this famous speech he gave at Stanford University, outlining his life, his thoughts and the driving force behind Apple.

Goodbye Steve and thanks.

Below, we walk through the steps needed to get over these two hurdles and some more tips too.

Move Your iTunes Library To An External HDD

If you can get by with just a minimal iTunes Library and supplement it with options like Spotifty, Rdio or Last.fm then that’s great, but if you’re unwilling to part with a larger repository of local media, Apple make it quite easy to place your iTunes Library on an external hard drive, providing instructions for doing so here. Begin by making sure iTunes is not running and navigate to:

[User Name] > Music

Here you should see a folder named “iTunes” – just drag and drop the iTunes folder into a safe place on your external hard drive and let it copy. Once this has completed, launch iTunes, bring up “Preferences” and within the “Advanced” pane, you should be able to select your library’s new location.

Once you’re sure that all is working correctly and providing you have a full backup in place, you can now delete the iTunes folder off your Mac.

Share An Optical Drive

As we become less reliant on physical formats for media such as movies or music, the MacBook Air’s lack of Superdrive is not such a compromise than it was when Apple introduced the super-thin notebook. Still, some may find that they like the option there, just in case.

With a MacBook Air (or any recent Mac running OS X 10.4.10 or later), it’s easy to share another computer’s CD/DVD drive which is on the same local network. For instructions on setting up optical drive sharing on a Mac or Windows, head here.

Squeeze Out Each Moment Of Battery Life

The MacBook Air has very good battery life for a notebook computer but if you’re a road warrior and constantly away from home, you’ll want to maximise your productive time and there’s a few things you can do to achieve this:

Airport Settings

Navigate to your Network Preferences and untick the box marked “Ask to join networks” to prevent your Mac from scanning for new wireless points. In addition, if you do not need them, deactivate Bluetooth and Ethernet.

Backlit Keyboard

The backlit keyboard seen on the new model MacBook Air is great and doesn’t use all that much power but since we’re hoping to squeeze every last moment of battery life, head over to your Keyboard settings (located in System Preferences) and be sure to turn the backlight timer down to 5 seconds.

Energy Saver Settings

Make sure your MacBook Air’s screen brightness is set to the lowest you feel comfortable with and ensure that it sleeps within a couple of minutes of non-use.

Calibrate Battery

Apple recommends that you occasionally calibrate your battery in order to maximise its life. Click here for full instructions.

Setup Spaces or Mission Control

Whether you chose an 11 or 13 inch MacBook Air, your machine will be more than capable of getting serious work done. However, if you’ve got several applications open at once, that small screen can begin to feel a little crowded. Setting up a Desktop space for each class of application (word processor, web browser) will help give the impression of using a much larger monitor. OS X Lion and OS X Snow Leopard have different ways of handling spaces, so we’ll cover both below:

Snow Leopard

In order to manage Spaces effectively on Snow Leopard, open System Preferences and click on the “Expose & Spaces” preference pane, then make sure you are working under the “Spaces” menu. As you can see in the screenshot above, clicking on the small + will add an application to the list, from which you can then select the desired space. The user can also move between Desktops with a keyboard shortcut and set the number of Spaces to make available.

Lion

OS X Lion brings in a new style of handling spaces and it is one which may not be as intuitive on first use for Mac users used to older versions of OS X.

Navigate to System Preferences, then Mission Control to bring up the screenshot shown above. In order to keep more complete (and predictable) control over your Spaces, untick the “Automatically rearrange spaces based on most recent use” box. This done, your applications can be manually assigned a space by either placing them into your Dock or having them currently running.

To set which Desktop your Mac should launch individual applications, right-click the app in question and locate the “Assign To This Desktop” preference under “Options”. Since the application must be in your Dock to set this up, it can be a somewhat laborious process, though is very useful once complete.

Conclusion

There are a lot of other things you can do to maximise your MacBook Air’s usefulness, such as purchase a larger monitor, keyboard and mouse to transform it into a desktop machine, or use applications like Dropbox and Evernote to keep your files in sync – ensuring that a MacBook Air is more than competent to serve as your main computer, whether it’s needed for work or general web browsing.

Still, I have often wondered if a small iPhone keyboard would be useful, so when given the chance to try the iPhone 4 compatible Nuu MiniKeyboard, I seized the opportunity to take it for a spin.

First Impressions

When first unpacking the Nuu MiniKey, it’s fair to say I was impressed. Though constructed from plastic, the build quality is excellent. An iPhone 4 slots securely into the top of the MiniKey and once safely housed in the cradle, the whole mechanism snapped shut with a satisfying click, feeling solid and well designed. The keyboard acts as a case for the bottom half of your iPhone (at least for mild bumps and scratches anyway, I wouldn’t want to drop it) and all your iPhone’s buttons are accessible, as is the camera. To be sure, the MiniKey adds a significant size to your iPhone, making it roughly twice the depth, though this is to be expected due to the design of the device.

Holding the MiniKey is a little awkward compared to the compact elegance of the iPhone 4, but not overly so and the keys are well laid out. The only complaints I’ve got is that my unit’s keys seemed a little too stiff for comfort and the placement of the apostrophe was awkward. The MiniKey is powered by an internal rechargeable battery which is charged via a small USB lead, I found it to be excellent and it didn’t fully drain from a full charge in the five days I used it.

Using The Keyboard

The MiniKey works via a Bluetooth connection to the iPhone 4 and this is achieved simply enough with the usual technique of adding a Bluetooth device. The MiniKey has an intelligent method of sleeping and conserving battery and I didn’t notice too much of a drain on the phone. It also has an excellent backlit display, which is a nice touch and one which helps highlight its higher quality when compared to some cheaper competitors.

At first I found it very difficult to type on the keyboard after being used to Apple’s on-screen virtual keyboard. However, after some time spent persisting using the MiniKey, I found that I eventually got the hang of it and began to type at a reasonable speed, albeit with significant!y more typos than I would usually expect. Though a completely unscientific and subjective test, I wanted to try the keyboard on some other people so asked a few tech-savvy friends to try the MiniKey for a few minutes: On average, these friends seemed to adapt to the small hardware keys much quicker than myself (though I do have very large hands).

A big plus point when using the MiniKey is that you reclaim a quite considerable area of screen real estate due to the virtual keyboard no longer popping up and this helped compel me to use it even when I felt the virtual keyboard would be quicker.

Compatibility

As one might expect, the MiniKey is fully compatible with iOS and works well with all your favourite apps like Simplenote, Writeroom and Taskpaper, etc – though bear in mind that Apple inexplicably does not allow Pages to be used in landscape mode so the MiniKey cannot yet be used effectively with that app, not through any fault of Nuu, it has to be said. Using the MiniKey does not feel like a ‘hack’ and it is really quite a slick experience overall. Features like a button which toggles the virtual keyboard on and off and small touches like the timed backlit keys all help to strengthen this impression.

Who Should Buy The MiniKey?

Despite being impressed with the MiniKey, I can’t quite bring myself to recommend most people rush out and buy it. It really is a testament to the iOS virtual keyboard design that it’s preferable to a well made hardware keyboard almost all of the time, but that is the case.

However, if you’re an iPhone 4 owner who has never quite gotten the hang of a virtual keyboard, or you just want a physical one for whatever reason, I feel it’s reasonable to state that the MiniKey appears to be the best currently on offer and probably as good as an attachable iPhone keyboard will get in the near future – at least unless Apple does the unlikely and makes its own.

Conclusion

After almost a week of using it at home and on the move, I can’t say that the MiniKey has enabled me to become very much more productive, though it certainly had made me see my iPhone from a different perspective and I’ve enjoyed the experience. Does the MiniKey grant my wish of making the iPhone into a real word processor capable of serious work? Not yet. Though the MiniKey is a product which I really like, it doesn’t quite beat the iPhone’s own virtual keyboard and thus is not all that useful, at least for myself. For those who struggle with a virtual keyboard however, it might be worth considering purchasing a MiniKey.

The Nuu Minikey can be purchased from a variety of online and offline stores, click here for more details.

Most of the tips covered here will be applicable to Intel Macs too – after all, the first couple of iterations of Intel Macs are now beginning to look underpowered, but whichever your model of Mac, you may be able to get many more years use from it still.

What’s The Difference Between PowerPC And Intel?

While newer Macs sport an Intel-powered chip as their CPU, Apple have not always chosen this engine to drive their machines. Up until August 2006, Apple’s most powerful computer they offer, the Power Macintosh (later renamed Power Mac), contained a PowerPC chip, so they really aren’t all that old. Created by an alliance between Motorola, IBM and Apple, PowerPC chips are still utilised today in various environments, such as the F-35 Fighter Jet, Microsoft’s XBOX 360, Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3, in addition to many IBM server machines.

Hardware Upgrades

RAM

Should you wish to get the most out of your older Mac, some hardware upgrades will be in order. The single most important is RAM. A Mac without its maximum RAM is simply not running at its full potential and by purchasing a stick of RAM, you will see immediate results. To get the correct type of RAM, head over to Crucial Memory, especially if you’ve got a non-Intel Mac as they can be tricky to find the right match for.

Hard Drive

OS X makes extensive use of your hard drive’s free space as virtual memory, so a hard drive upgrade can boost your computer’s performance significantly. This upgrade will depend upon your budget, the model of Mac and your own technical experience. For instance, Apple deigned to fit the iBook series with hard drives which are classed as non user-servicable, further compounding this problem by placing slow and small 4,200 RPM HDD’s inside too. However MacBook’s hard drives can be upgraded easily – head over to this guide to see how.

If you’re confident with a screwdriver, it is possible to do the iBook hard drive upgrade yourself. You will need an ATA (not SATA) hard drive and Western Digital still make this kind of HDD in affordable products. Take a look at this guide on iFixit to get an idea of what is involved.

Finally, if your storage needs are slight, it may be worthwhile to look into fitting an SSD into your older Mac. For this, once again navigate to Crucial.

Which Version Of OS X Is Right For You?

If your Mac has a PowerPC chip of over 1GHz, is maxed out with RAM and is capable of running Leopard, upgrade! Despite what common sense would have you assume, upgrading from Tiger to Leopard will not slow down your computer very much, it’s a very well optimised OS which still runs fine on older hardware. There is much more software open to Leopard and some of the tips I’ll set down later will only work on that OS – though bear in mind that upgrading to Leopard will lose the OS X ‘Classic’ support.

If your Mac is Intel-powered, then I’d recommend upgrading to Snow Leopard. By now it’s a very stable, speedy OS with many great features, still fully supported by Apple.

Basic OS X Tips

Before moving onto the advanced tips, there’s some basic tweaks we can make in OS X’s preferences to help lighten the load on an old Mac.

Login Screen

Software such as Skype often make themselves open when your Mac boots by default without asking first. Besides being potentially annoying, this takes up RAM, CPU and adds seconds to your Mac’s boot time. To take control over which applications launch automatically on login, navigate to “System Preferences -> Accounts -> Login Items”. I’ve left a few important ones that I think are worth the trade-off in boot time, as you can see above.

Spotlight

The Spotlight is a core feature of OS X but you may wish to look at Spotlight’s System Preferences pane and drag the search results in order of what you would like it to search for. This will speed up your Spotlight results and make your computer seem snappier. Since the above screenshot is taken from my work computer, I’ve disabled a few search results to speed it up even more, but only do this if you’re sure you won’t need to search for them.

Dock

Unless you’ve replaced it with a keyboard launcher like Quicksilver, your Dock is probably the centerpoint of your Mac OS X experience. It does however use some resources and while they’re not very heavy, we need to cut down on CPU and RAM use wherever possible, hoping that when all put together, they make a difference.

Turn off magnification and disable the ‘animate opening applications‘ tick box to lighten the load yet further.

Wallpaper

Choosing a simple or solid colour desktop background will also decrease demands on your Mac slightly.

Intermediate OS X Tips

These tips should suit those not scared to get a little more advanced with tweaking their OS X installation.

Trackpad

It’s not cost-effective or practical to upgrade the trackpad of a portable Mac such as an iBook or MacBook but if you would like to gain some of the functionality of later MacBooks’ trackpads, then the free application iScroll2 will give you a very effective scrolling capability and two finger tap/right click functionality.

A Clean Upgrade/Install

Mac’s are not typically expected to be wiped clean and there’s no need to make a habit of this, but if you’re going to give your Mac a new lease of life and it has had the same OS on it for a very long time, it’s best to start afresh – if only because it will force you to consider getting rid of some lesser used applications.

Advanced OS X Tips

There is more which can be done to make your Mac run lighter and I’m going to cover a few of these below, but beware they will involve Terminal use. This shouldn’t be a problem but it’s technically possible to do something nasty to your Mac in the terminal, so proceed with caution!

Disable 3D Dock

Whether you prefer the look of the 3D Dock or not depends upon taste but personally I think that once disabled it looks great (as shown in the screenshot above). Entering these commands into Terminal will disable the Dock and free up a few resources for Mac OS X.

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

To return the Dock back to normal, repeat the above command but replace ‘YES’ with ‘NO’.

Disable Dashboard

The Dashboard can be useful and you may not want to disable it, but most people don’t use Dashboard often enough to justify the significant cost in RAM and processing power which it exacts. To disable the Dashboard, enter the following into Terminal.

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES; killall Dock

To return the Dashboard, repeat the above command but replace ‘YES’ with ‘NO’.

OS X Maintenance

Update & Disk Permissions

Always make sure that your PPC Mac is fully updated through the ‘Software Update’ interface in OS X so that it’ll run with the latest bug fixes and security patches. If installing any major updates and after installing a lot of software (such as after a clean install), it can’t hurt to Disk Permissions and might even help. To do this, navigate to Disk Utility, then click on your hard drive and select the ‘Repair Disk Permissions’ button, as shown in the above screenshot.

Cache Cleaners

Whether you choose my own personal favourite CleanMyMac or the also excellent (and free) Onyx, it is important to perform basic maintenance on occasion – however, this should be done infrequently, such as twice a year, or if your system feels slower than usual.

Delete Utility

Dragging and dropping applications into the Trash to remove them from your Mac is fine and won’t do any harm to your machine, but using an unobtrusive (and free) uninstaller such as AppTrap will ensure that all residual system files and preferences are also removed.

Final Thoughts

I think that when attempting to lighten the load of OS X on your older Mac, some people make the mistake of taking away so many of the cool OS X features that you end up with a functioning computer, but one which is nowhere near as fun to use. So with that in mind, be sure to ignore any advice above which you think you’d miss – just pick and choose the ones which you feel make sense for you.

Below we take an updated look at each of these options and a few wildcard alternatives too, in an attempt to see what it is that each web browser brings to the table.

Firefox 6

For a long time, the first choice for those not wishing to use Safari, Firefox lost significant market share to newcomer Google Chrome and was seen to stagnate somewhat. Mozilla seem to have taken note of this however and, after a period of adjustment to the new Gecko layout engine, have hit back with some big changes in an effort to once again give Firefox great speed, while retaining the features which has made it one of the most successful web browsers to date.

Though it hasn’t quite caught up to Chrome speed-wise, Firefox now comes close enough to be competitive and loading web pages is not a painful experience when moving from one to another. Of course, swiftness is not everything and Firefox offers far more customisability than any other mainstream Mac web browser, enabling power users to tweak it to their exact specifications.

Best Point: Unparalleled flexibility
Worst Point: Cannot match speed of Chrome

Google Chrome

If there is one thing which Google know a lot about, it’s the Internet. It’s no surprise that when turning their hands to web browsing, a fantastic application which bears all the hallmarks of a great Google product has resulted. A beautiful minimalist UI, functioning extensions and commitment to constant improvement all make Chrome a force to be reckoned with.

If you’ve never used Chrome before, one thing is immediately apparent; Chrome is fast. Websites load with remarkable speed and the strong library of extensions mean it’s no slouch with extensions either. However, for those who have privacy concerns and feel uncomfortable with a powerful corporation having access to so much personal data, Google’s patchy record on privacy may negate any such great features.

Best Point: Incredible speed
Worst Point: Privacy concerns

Safari

Apple’s own web browser has always been popular with OS X users due to its speed, stability and beautifully designed minimalist user interface, but it seemed to suffer slightly in the wake of the swift rise of Google Chrome (which shares Safari’s rendering engine, Webkit). However, a recent update has brought some well considered tweaks and features, especially to OS X Lion users, such as the Reading List, Fullscreen and increased gesture support. In addition, there seems to be a return to the perceived stability and speed which was lost with the introduction of extensions.

Despite being a long Firefox loyalist, Apple have, temporarily at least, won this user back to Safari due to its good overall compromise and excellent features, in addition to the OS X Lion gestures which it now makes use of.

Best Point: Seamless OS X integration
Worst Point: Fewer extensions than competitors

Opera

Long consigned to life as the “other” web browser which most people didn’t use, Opera has increased its user base significantly with its speed, stability and increasing standards-compliance. But perhaps it is the non-typical approach by which Opera approaches web browsing which wins its loyal support.

Opera’s clever approach to passwords and its ability to run widgets or check email may not be particularly striking, but the browser is capable of much more; downloading torrents, making use of a very impressive server-side compression engine ‘Turbo’ to speed up slow connections and extensive gestures support – all combining to make Opera the choice for web-savvy Mac users looking for something different.

Best Point: Unique approach
Worst Point: Still less standards-compliant than major competitors

TenFourFox

Considering PowerPC users may have bought their machines as recently as 2005 and that the higher-spec models are often still very powerful and capable computers, the dropping of PPC support by Firefox was understandably seen as an upsetting development for users of PPC Macs. Luckily, up stepped TenFourFox: a project with a commitment to producing PPC-compatible versions of the latest Firefox build, in a package which will work for those still using that architecture. There is no need to delve into TenFourFox’s features here as they almost mirror that of Firefox 6, just rest assured that it’s a great browser for your PPC Mac!

Best Point: Brings the power of FF6 to PPC
Worst Point: Dependent on the work of smaller third party developers

Lynxlet

I admit that the inclusion of Lynxlet may be seen as pointless, but don’t be too hasty to write this text-only browser off as a gimmick just yet.

For those of us who love to tinker in the command line but don’t want the hassle of launching Terminal, Lynxlet provides a clickable icon to launch the command-line Lynx web browser. Since it is text-only, pages load very quickly even on slow connections and it is also a very secure browser, owing to the lack of plugins for hackers to exploit.

Not to forget that Lynxlet looks so technical, that anybody who’s not computer savvy taking a looking over your shoulder in the library will assume you are working hard at programming rather than surfing the Internet.

Best Point: Fast, retro fun
Worst Point: Unsuitable for the vast majority of Internet users

Camino

The Camino browser was originally launched in an effort to make Firefox more ‘Mac OS X-like’ and made impressive strides as a lightweight, stable and swift browser – indeed Camino is the often the first browser which springs to mind when thinking of Mac web browsers. Camino is written with Cocoa which basically means that it is more integrated than most web browsers, working with OSX’s built-in dictionary and Keychain.

Unfortunately, the community-driven project has suffered slightly from Firefox’s dropping support of Gecko embedding and it faces an uncertain future, as outlined in the Camino Blog

Best Point: Lightweight, visually pleasing
Worst Point: Future of project uncertain

The Best Of The Rest

RockMelt

RockMelt is a social network orientated web browser based upon Chromium. Though still quite young in its development, it’s already proving very popular and has gained positive reviews.

iCab

iCab sports one thing not often seen in a web browser; a purchase price. Despite this apparent stumbling block, the shareware browser has many fans and has a commendable habit of offering support to older machines and operating systems.

Iron

Previously covered here on this site, Iron browser purports to be a safe, secure and privacy-respecting alternative to Google Chrome.

Conclusion

By their very nature, browser roundups go out of date quickly and each version brings more features, speed or bloat but hopefully this brief look at most of the mainstream choices of Mac browser (and some lesser known) will leave you better armed to make an informed choice for your browser without going through the hassle of individually testing each and every one. Have I missed out anyone’s favourite? Please let us know in the comments if there’s any other browsers which you feel are worth looking at.

Minimalist writing applications such as WriteRoom seek to close off the outside world, at least temporarily, and provide an immersive environment in order to get back to basics and concentrate on one thing – writing. Let’s take a closer look at WriteRoom alongside a couple of similar apps and discuss whether they may complement your workflow.

Do Minimalist Writing Apps Increase Productivity?

Whether you find minimalist writing applications conducive to your productivity will depend on your particular needs and working methods. Personally, I am something of a habitual ‘clicker’ and can rarely focus on one window for very long before I find myself checking out Twitter, catching up on emails or reading my RSS reader. For me, minimalist writing software has been a revelation and so much so, that I keep an old ‘beater Mac’ loaded up with WriteRoom and some relaxing music, given the job of word processor, in an attempt to draw a line between a computer for working on and a computer for relaxing on.

If you find yourself struggling to concentrate in today’s ever-connected and distraction filled world, or perhaps you just appreciate the aesthetics of minimalist user interface, then it may be worth considering a minimalist writing application.

Introducing WriteRoom

Whether the perception matches the sales figures or not, WriteRoom is often thought of as the platform standard on Mac OS X and the application which all others must measure themselves against. Indeed, this is with good reason, as developers Hog Bay Software have managed that rare balance of providing just enough features to encourage productivity, with an interface which contains extensive options to help you tweak the app to your own taste.

The classic WriteRoom interface as shown above is full screen and completely immersive, unceremoniously cutting off the rest of OS X unless the user navigates to the top of the screen or hits escape to reduce the app’s window size. The UI is also one which resembles an old style computer terminal and it is this no-frills, workmanlike approach which originally attracted me to the app; though to be clear, WriteRoom can be tweaked to use Rich Text fonts and various colour background and text, enabling it to resemble a more slick, Byword-style text editor too, as you can see from the screenshot below.

WriteRoom auto-saves every five seconds by default and unlike some other word processing software options, does so unobtrusively and without slowing down your writing (even on very old Macs). In addition, WriteRoom contains an option to add an ‘Edit In WriteRoom’ menu item within the ‘Edit’ menu of several other applications, such as Safari or Mail, lending the option of quickly switching to WriteRoom for composing your emails or web forms.

You can purchase WriteRoom for Mac from the Mac App Store here and though at $24.99, it isn’t the cheapest option, you can also try out a free 30-day demo, available from Hog Bay Software’s website here.

Alternatives To WriteRoom

WriteRoom is by no means the only such app currently available for OS X. In an attempt to bring something new to a genre which by its very nature limits additional features, competitors have found novel variations on the theme. I shall briefly list a couple of noteworthy contenders below:

Byword

Byword sets itself apart from WriteRoom and others with a novel (and optional) mode of scrolling text which developers Metaclassy refer to as ‘Typewriter scrolling mode’ – an interesting attempt to encourage the user to focus on exactly what is being written.

Though just as immersive as WriteRoom, Byword has its own distinctive feel in use and boasts Markdown compatibility, making Byword very useful for bloggers and web writers who use the text-to-HTML framework. I love Byword and it may have been my main focus of this piece if it did not require an Intel Mac and OS X Snow Leopard or later (WriteRoom works on PPC Macs and OS X Tiger).

OmmWriter Dana II

OmmWriter Dana II should appeal to those looking for something different. Instead of using a spartan interface, gentle rolling ambient tones (which can be disabled) are contrasted with soothing graphics in an effort to lull the listener into the correct state of mind in order to create.

Continuing OmmWriter’s unique approach to word processing, it is offered for a ‘pay what you like’ price, if you choose to buy on the developer’s own website here (minimum price of $4.11).

If you are not sure whether OmmWriter Dana II would suit your working methods, its predecessor OmmWriter Dana I (screenshot above) can also be downloaded for free here

Conclusion

Distraction free writing applications seem to be quite a polarising category of software, usually leaving users feeling strongly in favour or against, but for those of us who do enjoy using them, they can be an incredibly useful tool to help get work done.

All this began to change with the introduction of Steam for Mac, which brought a huge repository of titles and the credibility to make developers stand up and take notice. This was then followed by the Mac App Store and subsequent porting of iOS favourites like Angry Birds and Flight Control.

Read on to take a closer look at the current options for gaming on a Mac…

System Requirements

With Apple’s efforts to keep their product line simple, it can be unclear whether your Mac is powerful enough to meet various games system requirements. Though your Mac may be perfectly suitable for most other tasks, many of the early Intel Mac’s were shipped with underpowered and obsolete graphics cards. In order to find out your system’s specs, navigate to your “Menu -> About This Mac -> More Info -> System Report (OS X Lion only) and take a look next to Graphics/Displays to see which graphics card your Mac contains.

Though there are certainly exceptions, to put it very broadly; if you’ve got a recent Intel-powered Mac running Snow Leopard, 2GB RAM and enough hard drive space to spare, you should find a selection of modern games which run natively on your Mac.

Boot Camp

If your Mac is lacking specs-wise, an alternative option to gaming within OS X is to partition your hard drive and install Windows just for gaming. As most games are optimized for Windows, even a modestly powered Mac can produce surprising results. OS X’s Boot Camp Assistant makes the process easier, but it can still be a daunting task to setup, so here’s a brief guide to getting your Mac running Windows alongside your OS X install:

Before beginning, make sure your Mac is fully updated and backed up and you have a copy of Windows XP, 7 or Vista at hand.

Using Spotlight, launch “Boot Camp Assistant” located in your Utilities folder. This will bring up the introduction window. Once you’ve read the text, hit “Continue” and, depending on which version of OS X you’re running, you may have to install some additional software via download.

Now you need to choose how much space to allot Windows and it’s important to pick the right amount of space as Windows will not allow later resizing. The default amount is 5GB but that isn’t really going to cut it for gaming, so I chose to give Windows 80GB from my 500GB hard drive.

How much space you give to Windows is up to you but a good baseline amount for none-serious gaming is probably around 80GB, though you can get by with a lot less in a pinch and I have previously ran such partitions at just 10GB without issues for the occasional older game.

Once these steps are completed, your Mac will restart and begin to install Windows normally, just complete the installation process as you always would. Once Windows is installed and you’re booted into the operating system, it is very important to insert your OS X installation disc so that the correct drivers can be installed.

With this done, your Mac is ready for Windows gaming!

Steam

It’s hardly an exaggeration to state that Steam changed the state of Mac gaming overnight. Long a staple of PC games, developers Valve come with a large catalogue of games which can be bought on one computer, then shared via your unique Steam account on other computers you own, syncing data such as saves along the way too. This obviously means a big win for customers, but also for developers too as Steam’s fair pricing method and quick delivery ensures that piracy is kept to a minimum.

To get started with Steam, head over to the website here and click on the green button titled “Install Steam Now” to download the small installer file. This done, mount the Steam disc image and drag into your Mac’s Applications folder. Steam will then download approximately 37MB of additional data.

The next step is to create a free Steam account, the sign-up process is simple and does not require a credit card, just an email address and user name. Once Steam is installed, you can browse the store for the latest titles, free games and demos – make sure to keep an eye out for the great deals which come up regularly.

The Mac App Store

Though the Mac App Store will probably need little introduction by now to most Make Tech Easier readers, it is still worth taking a moment to remark upon the excellent games which can be found within. iOS favorites such as Angry Birds, Flight Control, World Of Goo – all relatively lightweight games which should run on most Macs running Snow Leopard and all available to Mac users. The Mac App Store is not limited to such lightweight puzzle games though and also features more immersive titles, such as; Rome Total War, Civilization V, Bioshock and Call Of Duty.

Final Thoughts

I hope that the above guide has helped to highlight just how far Mac’s have come for playing games. While a standard Mac notebook may not outperform a custom-spec PC gaming machine, it does at least offer much choice and value for money, with a minimum effort and time spent setting up. Though Leopard is the minimum required OS for Steam and Snow Leopard for the Mac App Store, even older Macs still have some great old games available to them by employing Boot Camp and Windows.

There’s a few ways to go about this, but overall, I believe Apptivate fits the bill due to its low cost, small memory footprint and lightweight, intuitive interface.

Read on to learn more about using Apptivate.

Getting Started

First head over to the Mac App Store and grab a copy of Apptivate for $2.99. Once installed, Apptivate will sit unobtrusively in your Mac’s Menu Bar and we can begin adding applications!

Adding Applications To Apptivate

Adding applications to Apptivate and assigning them a Hotkey is very easy and it shouldn’t take too long to have all your major programs added. To begin, click on the Apptivate Menu Bar icon and then ‘Add Item’. This will bring you to your Mac’s Applications folder, as shown in the above screenshot. Clicking on, for example, Safari, will then bring up the Hotkey sequence dialog. As you can see in the screenshot below, I have chosen to add the ‘ctrl’ and ‘s’ keys simultaneously to launch Safari.

Each application can be added in this way and the Hotkeys can also be used to navigate within apps themselves once launched. For instance, since ‘ctrl’ ‘m’ launches Mail and ‘ctrl’ ‘s’ launches Safari, moving between the two can be achieved without taking my fingers off the keyboard. Once you’re used to this method of launching and navigating, you should find that you can do so with great speed.

Adding Bookmarks To Apptivate

Apptivate is not limited to launching only applications. This app can also be used to navigate instantly to selected bookmarks too. I shall be using Safari in this example, but any web browser should work fine so long as it’s set as OS X’s default web browser. First open a new Finder window and create a folder somewhere to house your Apptivate bookmarks – I have created a folder named Apptivate Bookmarks in my Documents folder, as shown below.

Navigate to your chosen website within Safari and drag the favicon into your previously created Apptivate bookmark folder. You can do this as many times as you like for whichever websites you feel that you will visit most often. Bear in mind that if you have several websites beginning with the same letter then you may have to get creative with which key you use as Hotkey. Once you have your websites ready, click on the Apptivate Menu Bar icon once more and then ‘Add Item’. Then you should navigate to your bookmarks, as shown in the screenshot below and assign the bookmark a Hotkey.

Though you are free to use whichever combination of keys you wish for launching bookmarks, it often helps to have a system. For instance, while ‘ctrl’ ‘m’ launches Mail on my Mac, I use the combination of ‘ctrl’ and the ‘cmd’ (option) key plus a letter to denote a website: therefore, to navigate Safari to Make Tech Easier, I hold down three keys, ‘ctrl’ ‘cmd’ and ‘m’.

Another bonus of using this method to launch your bookmarks is that your web browser need not be running. So, hitting your Hotkey combination for Wikipedia for instance, will both launch your web browser and navigate to Wikipedia.

Other Tricks & Tips

Apptivate’s simple interface belies the surprising depth of features which it contains and there’s a whole host of uses you can put the app to. Here’s a few tricks and tips for tweaking Apptivate and making it exactly how you’d like it:

1. Stop the Add Item window from appearing on login

On booting into OS X, you may find it irritating that Apptivate’s “Add Item” window comes up as default without you clicking on it. To stop this behaviour, head over to system preferences and then the ‘Users & Groups’ preference pane. From here, you need to click on ‘Login Items’ and then make sure that the box under ‘Hide’ is ticked next to Apptivate, as shown in the above screenshot.

2. Use Apptivate to launch AppleScripts

Apptivate can be used to launch AppleScripts too, opening up a huge list of possibilities! Just add your AppleScripts to Apptivate as you would add a normal app, as shown in the steps above.

3. Hide Apptivate’s Menu Bar icon

As outlined in Apptivate’s support page, you can remove the app’s Menu Bar icon if desired. Though this is reversible, bear in mind that you won’t be able to access the ‘Add Item’ interface while it is invisible. To remove the icon, fire up Terminal and enter the following (Apptivate must be relaunched to make changes):

defaults write se.cocoabeans.apptivate TAShowStatusbarIcon 0

if you want to bring the icon back, just replace the 0 with a 1.

Conclusion

Hopefully by now, you’ll agree that Apptivate is a great little application which packs a massive amount of usefulness into its lightweight package and if used correctly, can boost your productivity significantly with a minimum of effort.

Mac users are not limited to Boot Camp to run Windows on their Macs however, with applications such as VMware Fusion allowing the user to run Windows within OS X; as long as your Mac is powered by an Intel processor and has enough RAM to do so (4GB recommended, though less is possible), you can now seamlessly move between each OS’s flagship programs and enjoy the increase in productivity which this brings.

Read on to see how this process works…

Why Run Windows Within OS X?

There are various reasons you may wish to run a copy of Windows within your Mac – sometimes there’s that last piece of legacy software which you can’t let go of, a printer or other hardware peripheral not supported in OS X, or a job which requires you to run Windows software. Whatever the reason, we’ve got you covered, albeit with one caveat; though great strides have been made with running Windows-based games within a virtual environment, unless you have a powerhouse of a Mac, your machine may struggle with any but the more lightweight or previous generation Windows games.

Getting Started

There are a number of ways to go about running Windows within OS X but the leading three programs are:

• VMware Fusion
• Parallels
• Virtualbox

Each have their own strengths, weaknesses and method of use. My own experience with the trio on various platforms has led me to believe that Parallels is the strongest for gaming, Virtualbox is best for non-gaming use and is less intuitive to get running (though the fact it is free negates this point somewhat), while VMware Fusion is the finest all-rounder and easy to use too – so I shall be using VMware Fusion in this guide.

To get started, first head over to the VMware Fusion website and download a free 30-day trial, then go through the installation process and move on to the next step below.

Installing Windows

Launch VMware Fusion and, assuming you do not already have a BootCamp partition in place on your Mac (if you do, select it from the menu), choose the second option titled “Install Windows or another operating system in a new virtual machine“. Now either insert your Windows disc or navigate to the place on your hard drive where your pre-ripped disc image is located.

This done, be sure to select an “Easy Install” and then a decision must be made whether to create an installation which is “More Seamless” or “More Isolated”, depending on your needs and browsing habits. As you can see in the screenshot above, I chose the former, since I will keep a close eye on what my Windows install is doing and feel comfortable I can avoid any issues. If in doubt, choose “More Isolated”.

Further settings can be customised at will to suit your particular system. For instance, I upped Windows’ RAM allowance to 2GB since I have plenty to spare on my MacBook Pro, though the default preferences be safely left alone if you’re unsure which values to enter. Once this initial setting up of your virtual machine is done, press on the green play button to begin installing Windows, which will install as it normally would in a typical environment.

Note: Though I am using Windows 7 for this walkthrough, most iterations of Windows should work without issue within VMware Fusion

Running Windows Fullscreen

You may prefer to run Windows fullscreen, just as it would be if you were running a normal Windows computer, to do so is as simple as launching VMware and clicking on your virtual machine, then waiting while Windows ‘unfreezes’ – this is an important aspect of running Windows within a virtual machine to note: You need not shutdown and power off your virtual computer each time you access Windows, instead VMware will ‘suspend’ your Windows session in its current state and allow an ‘unfreezing’ of this later.

As shown in the screenshot above, Windows 7 runs perfectly well and Internet Explorer, Outlook and all the other Windows applications run as normal. Since I’m running OS X Lion and make use of the new Spaces layout, a four-finger swipe to the left is all that’s required to move me back into Lion’s environment. This is a handy method of using both operating systems at once, but if you only want one or two Windows applications running within OS X, it seems somewhat cumbersome, so read on to take a look at VMware Fusion’s Unity and Application Menu options.

Making sure you quit any applications you do not need running in OS X will help VMware Fusion run quicker

Unity View

VMware Fusion also has the ability to integrate Microsoft Windows software within Mac OS X in a more seamless manner, even placing applications into OS X’s dock and making those applications behave as one would expect a Mac OS X application to behave, responding to Option-click ‘Quit’ commands. Running Windows in this way is called Unity View – to begin using VMware Fusion in Unity Vew, simply navigate to the view menu located at the top of VMware Fusion’s window and select “Unity”.

As you can see in the screenshot above, I have Windows 7′s Start Menu visible alongside OS X Lion’s Dock and can switch between Mac and Windows software without any noticeable lag.

Application Menu

Another useful tool within WMware Fusion’s feature set is the Application Menu. Sitting in the Mac OS X Menu Bar, the Application Menu serves as a shortcut to Windows’ Start Menu and enables applications to be launched without needing to first manually boot into Windows. Though there is some lag when initially using the Applications Menu, once Windows is fully loaded, it works quickly and unobtrusively. Utilising the Application Menu in this way is my own favoured method of launching Windows applications within Mac OS X.

Conclusion

Hopefully the above walkthrough will show you how surprisingly easy it is to have the best of both worlds and boot into Mac OS X’s stable and virus-free platform, while enjoying the ubiquitous software which can be found on Microsoft’s own OS. Though this is by no means an exhaustive guide to running Windows in OS X, it should serve as inspiration for your own experiments and a launching-off point to begin. The great thing about running operating systems in a virtual machine method as employed by VMware Fusion is that it does not require potentially destructive partitioning of your hard drive, so long as you’re careful, it’s a very safe and easy way to run Windows on your Mac