The Chrome team at Google always does ambitious and interesting things. Be it the SPDY protocol, or Dart language or the recent Chrome apps which run outside the browser.
If you’re on Windows, you probably did try the Chrome launcher. Now it’s available for Mac OS X.
The launcher contains shortcuts to Chrome apps which you have installed. As you click an app icon, it’ll be opened in a separate window (app icon shows up in the dock).
You can also search your browser history and bookmarks via the launcher.
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Chrome Webstore is updated with a new category called ‘For your Desktop‘ – which lists all the Chrome apps that run out of browser. The category includes some great ones like Any.Do, Google Keep, Wunderlist and more.
I use Google Keep on Android and web. The Chrome app is a good improvement over the web app, as it brings offline support, and runs in its own window.
Apparently Chrome apps have a long way to go, to reach the level of native apps. But nevertheless, it’s a nice opportunity for web developers.
While researching something online, you might get an important call or need to go somewhere to a important meeting. That can be irritating especially as you need to save your files and sync them over Google Drive or Dropbox and save your browser tabs with a handy extension. CupCloud gets both syncing files and tabs working with a single click.
Firstly download CupCloud and install it on your computer. It works with Windows and OS X. I have tested it only on my Windows PC.
Now start working and when ever you need to save a bunch of tabs and word and excel documents open on your computer, just start the CupCloud software and click on “Cup”.
How Cup Cloud Works
Once done, it will store all your open tabs and files with a single click.
Save and manage multiple collections of tabs and files you need
If you create an account with Cup Cloud, you can open and sync tabs and folders across different computers. Currently Cup Cloud supports Chrome, Safari and among browsers. It also supports MS Word, Excel and Power Point files along with support for Windows Explorer and Mac Finder.
Do note that the product is still in beta and promises to support more file types.
Do try out Cup Cloud and let me know what you think of it in your comments.
Quick Look on OS X is a really neat feature allowing you to browse and preview files in Finder. The best part about Quick Look is that, it’s extensible. There are quite a few plugins available, but are scattered on the web.
Here, we’ll look at five Quick Look plugins which make browsing code much easier.
Installing Quick Look plugins
The procedure is pretty simple, you just have to move the Quick Look plugin file to ~/Library/Quicklook/ and run qlmanage -r in terminal (that’ll reload QuickLook generators).
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QL Color Code
Quick Look by default doesn’t do syntax highlighting for code. This plugin fixes it.
It supports quite a lot of programming languages and you can choose between themes. For example, running defaults write org.n8gray.QLColorCode hlTheme ide-xcode will set the highlight theme to that of Xcode. You can find more defaults in the Readme.
This is a must have if you use Markdown formatting for storing notes. The plugin even lets you change the styling – including fonts, margin, padding, and more, by letting you edit the style.css file.
It also works regardless of what extension you use for Markdown files – .md, .markdown, .mdown or whatever.
This one is a little tricky. There can be a lot of cases where the text file you want to view doesn’t have an extension at all. Best example is repositories on Github having a README file (or Makefile etc.).
Not so long time ago, I was a happy Sync.Me user. It was named SmartSync then and as far as I remember was among top application in Apple’s App Store.
Out of the blue in one of its update they added support for some VOIP-service. As they already had access to my iPhone contact-book, they without my permission added a “cheap call” URL-field to every contact in my iPhone. You can see it below:
Initially, I ignored it but it created issues during next sync. This “cheap call” link on next-sync got added to my Mac’s Contacts book (Address-book on old Mac OS version). From their it got synced to my Google Contacts!
When I tried contacting Sync.Me support, I did not get reply for 5-days. After that, their support team said that cheap-call feature is pulled so that I need to wait for few weeks after which they will add an option to remove cheap-call fields from my contacts!
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AppleScript came to rescue
Sometime back I learned little-bit of AppleScript using it I first tried creating my own small AppleScript to clean this mess. When I stuck, I started googling which lead me to amazing AppleScripts collection by Trevor.
I used Trevor’s Remove Emails for Label script and after some minor changes got it working to remove this “cheap call” spam from my contacts.
How-To Use This!
Open Contacts Application on your Mac.
Take a backup of your contacts. Use File >> Export >> Contacts Archive... option.
You will see RemoveURLsByLabel.scpt file on your Mac. Just click it and it will open with AppleScript Editor application.
Now, go to your Contact and select contacts from which you would like to remove “cheap call” field. You can select all contacts. Script will not make any changes to contacts which do not have “cheap call” field.
After selecting one or more or all contacts, go to AppleScript Editor and click Run button.
The script will first remind you to backup your contacts, then it will prompt for URL label name. Default is “cheap call” which should work fine. For non-english users, if label name is something else, type/paste it there.
Just hit OK. Script will take some time to finish if you have large contact-book. At the end of it, you will see “cheap-call” spam gone!
Sync your Mac contacts to iPhone. Feel free to run this script again, if this field re-appears because of syncing to some other resource.
What’s Next…
I have removed Sync.Me. They might add an option to remove it in future but I hate it when some app leaves its shit in my contact book. I removed this application for now.
I am now using iOS6’s built-in Facebook/Twitter Sync options. iOS6 sync’s less data as compared to Sync.Me but I am happy with less data rather than more spam in my contact book!
Speakers are probably the most annoying thing in Macbooks, they’re just too low in sound, even if you set the volume to maximum. This happens mainly when you play YouTube videos in browser, but fortunately, there’s a simple solution for this.
Firstly, if you can afford to spend a few dollars, you can get Boom – an app that’ll increase the volume level of your Macbook drastically and that works system wide, not just for YouTube videos.
You can also solve this without spending any bucks, follow the below tutorial.
In the menu bar, hit File > Open URL. Paste the URL of the YouTube video you want to play.
Now you can set the volume for the video (in the app) to a higher level than what Mac actually provides.
Apparently, VLC had this option since a long time, but after the recent update this feature seems to be broken. So I gave MplayerX a try and was pretty satisfied with the results.
When Apple first released iCloud, it was only available on Apple devices and not on the web. After a few months they released a web app with iCloud.com and it was in beta.
Now that iOS 6 is going to available for download soon, they’ve removed the beta tag and the service is now public.
The service now features Notes and Reminders which have been added to OS X Mountain Lion, along with update to Find My iPhone – which has remote lock, remote wipe and play sound features.
Also, you will see notifications synced via Notification center on iOS 5 (or later) and OS X 10.8.
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The webapp is really neat in design, it will feel more like a native app instead. They should probably add iMessage to the list of apps, allowing you to send messages right from the website.
Getting your iCloud account hacked can be really nasty as the hacker can wipe out everything that’s there on each of your Apple devices, remember the story of Mat Honan?
You can setup an iCloud account with your existing Apple account via your iPhone/iPad or Mac’s settings.
Microsoft is about to release Windows 8 for public – which is a change that not only affects the Windows OS, but literally every Microsoft product, i.e. it’s a full blown change for the company. On the other hand, Apple has lately introduced OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, attempting to add more iPhone-like features to Mac.
So how do these both compare? Read on.
Windows 8 Vs. OS X Mountain Lion
Note: Just to be clear, here I’m comparing Windows 8 Release Preview (which will be largely similar to the RTM version) and OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.1.
Ease of use
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Like any other Apple product, Mac boasts a minimal and a simple interface, that’s something which has been there since years. Basics like app installation is very streamlined in Mac, simply dragging a .app file into the Application folder will install the app.
Windows 8 brings a mobile-focused interface to desktop – nope, it’s no more called Metro. There are two problems here – one, Windows Phone is not a popular OS and people hardly know anything about it. So it’ll be a real test for them to get adapt to something totally new.
Secondly. the mobile-inspired interface doesn’t go so well on a desktop – for example, there are so many invisible interface elements (on edges of screen), multi-tasking with apps seems to be more time consuming, etc. Heck, shutting down your system is a 4-step process.
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Winner: Mac
Features
Firstly, Mountain Lion has Notification center, a great addition to the OS. Next up, there’s Dictation built into literally every Mac app, just press the fn key twice and start speaking. There’s also built in sharing – integrating with Twitter and Facebook.
Though not specific to Mountain Lion, there are many unique OS X features like Mission control (for better multitasking), Writer tools (dictionary, grammer check, text substitution), customizing system-wide keyboard shortcuts, turning your Mac into a WiFi Hotspot (on Windows, you need Connectify), numerous trackpad gestures, setup hot corners, remapping keyboard keys and lot more. There is also Bootcamp which lets you install Windows on it, and this single feature can matter a lot if you’re someone who uses Multiple OSes.
On the other hand, Windows 8 does have some handy features like in-app search that lets you search content of any app from the charms bar. Then comes the Share feature allowing you to share to your social networks through Metro apps which are installed on your PC. In short, this works a bit like Android share intents. The downside? It only works in the Metro environment. So you got to use Google Chrome’s Metro version if you want to share.
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Windows To Go is one of those unique features which lets you boot into your WIndows from a USB, though the feature is only available in Windows 8 Pro. Syncing Windows settings to your Microsoft account is also a nifty feature.
While many of you might think Mac isn’t for power users (in fact I was one of them), the fact is Mac balances very well between interface and features.
Winner: Mac
Speed
I ran Lion for over 10 days on my new MBP, it was pretty fast, but Mountain Lion just ruined it. Be it booting or opening apps or shutting down – all these take more time. Apple seriously needs to release a fix for this.
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Speed is one of the major pros of Windows 8, it boots really fast and the OS is very responsive. As you’ve guessed, Metro apps are fluid and don’t lag at all. If you’ve got a Netbook, just blindly get this OS.
Winner: Windows
Interface
I won’t say much here, because it’s all about taste, which varies. But the reason I prefer Mac’s interface to that of Windows 8 is, here Apple isn’t shoving down your throat with a completely new thing which you’re not sure if you will adapt to. And if you want that ‘prettiness’, go to the Mac appstore and randomly checkout a few apps – most of them are very well designed.
Metro is beautiful, smooth and fast – that’s all the positive part of it. But there are many annoyances too, like – full screen apps, while I need a simple and small Twitter client, something like MetroTwit just won’t cut it for me. To close an app, you got to drag it from top and push it to bottom, I will prefer a simple exit button instead. Horizontal scrolling just feels weird.
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Winner: Mac
Apps
There is a reason why most of the designers, photographers, musicians use Mac. It’s the wide range of exclusive apps available for the OS – like, you have Coda for web design, Aperture for photos, Garageband for music, Cloudapp for sharing, etc. Especially, there are so many apps which come under Productivity category.
This is a part where WIndows 8 gets a big blow, simply put, the apps aren’t ready.The Windows store hardly gets updated, it is the same apps getting featured since months. Another valid question is, will developers come forward to write Metro apps or do they stick to desktop apps? This is all messy and can annoy the customers.
Of course, I’m not including Games here. If you’re a Gamer, then you should get a PC, but don’t forget that you can run Windows on a Mac (in fact, I use Windows on Bootcamp for gaming).
Winner: Mac
Choice of Hardware
With OS X, you’re restricted to a set of laptops and desktops, but with Windows you have hundreds of them to choose from. Apparently, you can even build your own PC with the hardware of your choice, if you’re a bit geeky. Freedom matters, so Windows wins.
Winner: Windows
Final comments
I’ve been using Windows for years and just recently switched to Mac – I love the OS and do prefer it to Windows. At the end of the day, it’s about choosing what works for you than anything.
Final Winner: Mac
Do you use a Mac? Or have you given Windows 8 a try? Hit up in the comments.
I’ve recently got a Macbook (mid-2012 MBP) for myself, and the experience has been awesome – be it the design or apps or the smoothness of OS, Apple has got you covered.
Apparently, like everyone else, I’ve been using Windows (and Ubuntu sometimes) all my life. The transition from PC to Mac wasn’t so smooth but I’ve come across a lot of apps (and tricks) which made Mac a lot more user friendly.
1. Setup the Mac trackpad to work like that of Windows laptops
The Mac trackpad is the best in its market, that’s for sure. It’s so large (even on the 13″ MBP) that can fit all your five fingers allowing numerous inbuilt gestures. The whole trackpad itself is a button.
But wait, there’s an annoying thing about the Mac trackpad – there’s no tap-to-click by default, along with no double tap-to-drag.
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Open the Settings app and go to Trackpad > Point & click, tick next to ‘Tap to click’. For one finger dragging, go to Accessibility > Mouse and Trackpad > Trackpad options, and select dragging ‘without drag lock’. Also, too many gestures can confuse you, so feel free to un-tick the ones which aren’t useful.
2. Better window management with Hyperdock
Hyperdock brings Aero Snap (a Windows 7 feature) to Mac, which makes window management a breeze. Just move a window to a screen edge and it resizes itself.
It’s not all about window management, anyway. You also get window previews when you hover cursor over any opened dock item.
Mac’s finder can be too simple (and incomplete) at first sight, without showing path and all the stuff you’re used to in Windows explorer.
First of all, you can enter path to open a directory in Finder: Right-click Finder icon in dock and hit “Go to folder”. Note that hitting Tab key will auto-complete the path, which can be useful.
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Windows converts who are used to Ctrl+X for cutting and pasting files will be easily annoyed as Cmd+X doesn’t work. The point is simple, there’s no ‘Cut’ option in Mac, but you can just drag a file to any folder and it’s moved. For keyboard junkies, Cmd+Alt+V does the trick.
4. Remap keyboard keys for easier typing
If you find yourself hitting Ctrl key too often instead of Cmd, then here’s a nice tip. You can remap keyboard keys using the built in Settings app in Mac. Go to Settings > Keyboard > Modifier keys, and now you can assign Control function for Cmd key, etc.
5. Booting from an external drive or an USB
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For some reason if you want to boot from an external drive, just hold the Option key before the Apple logo flashes during the booting process.
It’ll then show what all drives it can boot into – if you’ve Windows installed on your Mac through Bootcamp, it’ll show that too. Also, you’ll see a Recovery HD to boot into, if the Macintosh HD has failed.
Drop in your comments and more tips on how to make moving from Windows to Mac a lot easier.
If you are feeling your Mac is running “slow” AND if you have Microsoft Office installed, then you can try removing Microsoft Office. I removed it (Microsoft Office) and my Mac got all its speed back. To confirm this, my other friends also noticed considerable speed improvement for Mac, when they removed Microsoft office.
Microsoft Office 2008
For Microsoft Office 2008, Microsoft provides a small tool called “Remove Office” under /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Additional Tools. At first, it may look like it does remove office completely as its name suggest but that is not true. You need to follow official 2008 uninstallation instructions posted by Microsoft here.
For Mac, there are many alternatives. I found all of them very disappointing to be honest.
Its not speed-issue only about Microsoft Office.They have many more issues so no votes for Microsoft Office anyway!
For word files, I use Mac’s “Preview” application as default application to “open” documents. 99% of the time I need to “read” only word files I come across.
If I need to “write”, I prefer Google Docs. In cases where I need to “edit” existing word files, I either upload them on Google Docs or open with them on LibreOffice. I use LibreOffice for opening Powerpoint as well as Excel files also.
Sometimes LibreOffice breaks formatting but this occasional breaking of formatting is better than using a slow Mac always! 🙂
Over the time, file permissions get messy on a linux/mac server. It really annoys (me) to see static files like images have 0755 i.e. executable permission set for them.
You can use following commands to fix permissions:
find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 0775
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 0664
I found many scripts and tools to do this job. IMHO, above command does what we really need!
For WordPress
Ideally, on a wordpress site, no files under “wp-content/uploads” directory should be executable. In case of WordPress multisite, it will be “wp-content/blogs.dir” directory.
Its better to fix file-permissions periodically on your WordPress setup.
