Apple upgrade to Snow Leopard, to average Mac user, ah hem.

August 17, 2009 By Leave a Comment

snowleopard-screen

Judging by the excellent Crunch Gear review of the forthcoming release of Snow Leopard, the new version of OS/X, this isn’t going to be the kind of release that makes you say “oh wow”.  Sounds like even at the $29 upgrade price, you might wonder what you get for your money.  It’s really is a refinement to the current Leopard 10.5 release.

It appears to be one of those OS releases that fixes some problems and puts new technology i place that will eventually allow developers to build cool new stuff, but for now, CrunchGear’s conclusion is probably going to be right for most users – it’s a release that you can wait for. 

Buy it on your next Mac.

Filed Under: Mac

Solving a Mac annoyance – Ejecting Volumes with Open Files

August 1, 2009 By Leave a Comment

whats-openEver try and eject a disk on you Mac and can’t because it says there’s a file open?

You close everything that seems obvious and then try again and you still can eject the darn thing?

At this point you either give up, restart or just throw caution to the wind and pull out the plug on the disk.

With this small free utility you don’t have to get frustrated– WhatsOpen will tell you what files are open on the  volume you’re trying to eject and allow you to close them so that the disk will eject. Simple.

Download WhatsOpen install and rid yourself of one of those frustrations that makes you want to toss you Mac out the door.
whatsopen-screen

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Filed Under: freeware, Mac, Utilities Tagged With: , , , ,

Google Chrome for Mac is so cool, now finish it!

June 8, 2009 By 1 Comment

The Chrome team has released a developers copy of the browser for Mac and Linux, so far Google Chrome has just been available for Windows.

While to call me a developer would be a gross misuse of the term, I’ve been using the browser ever since it was released last week.  It is so cool.  Well actually so fast!

The team admits it’s far from finished.  Among other things, it doesn’t print, it doesn’t display YouTube-like videos and there seems to be not much in the way of bookmark management.  So let’s give it a number and say it’s 75% done. What it does well is render a web page really fast and when I’m digging around the web that’s what’s most important to me.

The Chronium Blog warns you not to download this version unless “take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.

How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things , you won’t yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print.”

It hasn’t crashed for me in about 20 hours of use.  The only gotcha for me was when checking a blog post and panicking when I couldn’t see the YouTube video, but I had been warned.

mac_chrome_screen

Anway, if you live life on the bleeding edge and are so Type A that anything faster is better, download the browser and give it a try on Mac or Linux.

As for me?  I’ll probably use it for most of my work on my slight aging Macbook because it just makes the experience so darn fast!

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Filed Under: browsers, Google Chrome, Linux, Mac, Technology Tagged With: , , , , ,

Wow, hasn’t Hulu gotten all fancy?

June 1, 2009 By Leave a Comment

hulu-logoHulu, if you’re not using it, is a website that allows you to watch some of your favorite television shows and movies on you Windows or Mac computer for free.  That’s simple enough.  There are a “limited” number of commercials, certainly less than commercial television. Hulu’s content is all professionally produced with none of the YouTube-type amateur stuff.

Sometimes when I either need a break at my desk, or it’s late and I want a little non-challenging entertainment before bed and don’t want to have all the noise associated with turning on the TV and the risk of waking the family, for this I use Hulu.

The big recent news for Hulu is that they have created a set of experimental projects and are offering them for use to the public À la Gmail labs.  The coolest of the new offerings is a desktop Hulu video player that let’s you watch Hulu content without a browser.  The picture is sharp and clear and will look on your computer monitor or laptop.

hulu-desktop-screen

If you’d like to give Hulu Desktop a try, visit Hulu Labs and download it.  Or just stop by in an idle moment and watch a show in your browser.  I just watched Jay Leno’s last Tonight show episode.

If you’re interested in the background of the company, it’s owned by NBC Universal, News Corporation, and Disney.

You can even use Hulu to watch a little something while your working, like I did here.

Oh, yeah, this site is supposed to be about productivity.  Never mind.

hulu-chrome

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Filed Under: Desktop Apps, Mac, New features, Windows Tagged With:

Picasa for Mac, we’ve been waiting for you

January 6, 2009 By Leave a Comment

 picasa-mac-button

I’ve happy to report that at this week’s MacWorld, Google has released a beta of their superb free photo organizer and retoucher, Picasa. 

Picasa was available first on Windows, then curiously on Linux, all before the Mac.

My own first use and other reports show that the Mac implementation of Picasa is both very feature-true to the Windows version and seems faster than Apple iPhoto which since included with a Mac has always been the top choice for Photo organizing on that platform.

I could say that having Picasa now available for the Mac eliminates on the few remaining deficits in the Mac vs. PC debate, but it’s probably more accurate to say, having Picasa for the Mac eliminates one of the last reasons for using Parallels or VMware Fusion to  run Windows on a Mac.

 

From the Google Press Release:

Picasa for Mac makes it easy to manage large photo collections and helps users make professional-looking edits without any technical knowledge, including:

  • A drag-and-drop photo collage tool that gives users control over layout and content
  • A retouching brush to wipe out scratches and blemishes – and repair old photos
  • A slideshow movie maker that uploads users photo montage videos to YouTube with a click
  • Smart auto-cropping that guides user

Picasa for Mac "plays nice" with iPhoto, and takes a read-only approach to editing photos stored in the iPhoto library, duplicating files as needed, so that users’ iPhoto libraries are never affected when they use Picasa. Avid iPhoto users who currently use our Picasa Web Albums Uploader plugin can continue to do so, although features like automatic web sync, photo collages, and more will only be found in the Picasa application.

This first beta of Picasa for Mac matches the speed and most core features of Picasa on Windows — and we’ll be working on more refinements to the Mac interface and feature set as time goes on.

Download Picasa for Mac (beta)

Picasa for Mac running on my laptop.

picasa_mac

Filed Under: Digital Pictures, freeware, Mac, Photo Sharing, Windows, Windows Vista
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