Well, it had to be done.

Two years later, and still going strong! What started out as a diary of a Linux-to-Mac switcher has gradually evolved into a general blog about using Macs day-to-day.

I must say, I’m thoroughly enjoying writing this blog and, judging by the number of readers, you’re enjoying reading it too! I’d like to say big thank you to everyone who has read and commented on my ramblings over the last couple of years. Having such a good audience really makes writing this blog worthwhile.

It looks like the most popular topics are the software reviews and Mac tips, so I’ll continue to produce more of these in the coming months.

If you have any topics you’d like to see covered in this blog, please write and let me know! You can contact me (Matt) via the ELATED.com contact form, or simply post your comments below. I’d love to hear your suggestions!

I admit it: With my hunt for nice widescreen wallpapers, and my reviews of DeskLickr and Desktoptopia, I’ve gone wallpaper-mad over the past month. I now have a collection of over 100 gorgeous desktop images, with new ones coming in all the time. Somehow, though, having these beautiful images lurking behind my Mac windows - occasionally revealed with Exposé via the F11 key - doesn’t do them justice.

So how to make my wallpaper more front-and-centre? Ideally I’d like some sort of utility that faded my windows away when I’m not really using my Mac, revealing the wallpaper behind. Then I was hit by an attack of the blindingly obvious: Use a screen saver!

(This tip is not rocket science. But it took me a while to think of using a screen saver, so maybe it’s not that obvious. )

Luckily the Mac ships with the ability to display one or more images as a screen saver. I already had all my wallpaper images stored in a ~/Pictures/Wallpapers folder, so it was just a case of choosing Apple > System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver > Screen Saver, then opening up the Pictures screen saver in the left-hand list and clicking Choose Folder. After selecting my Wallpapers folder, it appeared in the list:

And that’s it! I set the screen saver delay to 5 minutes, and now I get to see my lovely wallpaper images in all their glory whenever I come back to my Mac. And because the images are already designed to look great on the desktop, they make for a fantastic screen saver. Simple but effective.

By default you get the old Ken Burns effect on the images; to turn this off click Options, then deselect the Zoom back and forth and Keep slides centred options. Now, when your screen saver kicks in, it’s almost exactly as if your windows have simply faded away. (And your menu bar. And the Dock. And mouse pointer. Err, and any icons you happen to have on your Desktop. But you get my point.) Read the rest of this entry »

I recently reviewed DeskLickr, a nifty, free menu bar app that regularly feeds your Mac desktop with lovely Flickr images. It’s nice enough, but it does have a few drawbacks, as I mentioned in the review.

There’s an alternative to DeskLickr, though, and it’s also free: Desktoptopia. It does a similar job to DeskLickr, downloading new desktop images every few minutes. It installs itself as a preference pane rather than DeskLickr’s approach of a stand-alone app. Personally I like the preference pane idea more. As with DeskLickr, you can set how often it grabs a new image, and also pause the current desktop image or manually fetch a new image.

What makes Desktoptopia great

Desktoptopia’s key difference is in how the desktop images are sourced. Whereas DeskLickr draws its images from public Flickr photostreams, Desktoptopia’s images come from a hand-picked selection on the Desktoptopia website. Users can upload new images, but only the best make it past the selection process. This gets round DeskLickr’s problem of displaying low-quality images, or images that just don’t work well as wallpaper. The quality of the Desktoptopia images is very good indeed, and they nearly all make fantastic desktop backgrounds.

Read the rest of this entry »

The next version of the OS X operating system - 10.6 “Snow Leopard” - was quietly announced at WWDC08 at the start of this week. Unlike previous versions, 10.6 will not focus on new features (though doubtless there’ll be a few here and there). Instead, Apple have decided to concentrate on making the OS leaner, meaner and all-round nicer. (Maybe this is how they came up with the name: It’s a slicker Leopard, but they’ve frozen the features. Feature freeze? Snow? Never mind…)

They’ll do this by:

• Making it easier for developers to code apps for multi-core processors, using a technology called “Grand Central”
• Introducing Open Computing Language (OpenCL), which lets applications use the Mac’s GPU (graphics processing unit) almost as an additional CPU
• Increasing the RAM limit to 16 terabytes (16,000 GB) - a limit not likely to be reached anytime soon
• Including QuickTime X, which will run all your latest codecs much more smoothly (so they say)
• Making Safari run JavaScript “up to 53 percent faster” apparently - which will be good for all those AJAX-driven websites
• Reducing the OS’s footprint (i.e. the hard drive space it takes up). This has caused a bit of controversy as many think this means dropping support for PowerPC Macs, but this remains to be seen. Maybe they’ll ship 2 versions: one for Intel, one for PowerPC?

One new feature they are announcing now is full support for Microsoft Exchange using the Exchange Web Services protocol. This will let Mail, Address Book and iCal play nicely with Exchange servers. Read the rest of this entry »

The latest major version of the Firefox web browser - 3.0 - is due out any day now. I thought I’d download 3.0 Release Candidate 2 - which is near as dammit to the final release - and take it for a spin.

I must say, I assumed Firefox 3 was going to be much like Firefox 2, with a few tweaks here and there. Nothing could be further from the truth. With version 3, Firefox has had a major overhaul, both on the inside and on the outside. Let’s take a look.

First impressions

As you can see from the above screenshot, Firefox 3 looks much more like a proper Mac application than Firefox 2 did. It has the Leopard grey gradient toolbar, and the shaded tabs look lovely. (Speaking of tabs, I love the way the tab bar scrolls smoothly left and right if you have a lot of tabs open. Very slick.)

It behaves more like a Mac app, too. It uses Growl to notify you of completed downloads and updates, and it also uses standard Apple keyboard shortcuts such as Cmd-Shift-[ and Cmd-Shift-] to move between tabs. (Personally I preferred version 2’s less finger-twisting Ctrl-Page Up and Ctrl-Page Down, which thankfully are still available.) Read the rest of this entry »

This is a lovely idea. DeskLickr is a free menu bar app that regularly updates your desktop with photos from Flickr. If you’re bored with the same old wallpaper images, it’s a great way to revitalize your Mac desktop.

Feature-wise, the author’s thought of pretty much everything. You can, of course, say how often you want the image to change, and you can also choose New desktop thanks from the menu bar if you don’t like the current image. A grey floating window shows you info on the current desktop image; if this annoys you (it did annoy me) you can choose to have it hideable under other app windows, or stick it right on the desktop. You can also turn it off altogether using the Show info on this desktop menu option.

It even supports multiple displays (you can choose between having the same image on all displays or a different image on each), and you can make it choose a random image each time, or get the latest published image.

Problems, problems

The main problem with this app is that many photos, while they look great on the Flickr site, don’t make great desktops. Reasons for this include:

• They’re just too low-res
• The aspect ratio doesn’t match your screen (especially true of portrait photos of course)
• They’re too “busy” and get in the way of your desktop icons

DeskLickr gives you a couple of ways to mitigate these problems. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone loves a nice screen saver - they give you something to stare at when you’re bored, and an eye-popping screen saver is a great way to impress your friends and colleagues when they amble past your Mac!

Here, in no particular order, are 10 free Mac screen savers that I love. Installation hints are at the end, if you need them.

Hyperspace

One of my favourite screen savers, written by the very talented Terry Welsh over at Really Slick Screensavers. Take a trip down a wormhole with this psychedelic extravaganza, reminiscent of many a game and sci-fi movie. This one’s pretty CPU-hungry, so if it’s a bit jerky try reducing the Resolution of geometry setting.

Strands

A lovely screen saver from Martin Thorne. Beautiful, ever-changing strands of light move across the screen. Strangely hypnotic in a darkened room!

Filigree

Another saver from Martin Thorne, in a similar vein to Strands. This one features glowing snakes of light darting around the screen. Read the rest of this entry »

My recent comparison of Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion attracted a lot of comments, many of which pointed out a third, free virtualization app for the Mac: VirtualBox. I confess that I’ve been blissfully unaware of VirtualBox, despite it being around for a couple of years. To be fair, the Mac version only came out of beta at the start of this month - at least, that’s my excuse! - and this is the version I’ll review here.

VirtualBox actually comes in two flavours: an open-source GPL edition, and a proprietary “VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL)” edition. The latter is free as in beer, provided of course it’s just for personal use or evaluation purposes. It also has more features than the GPL edition at the time of writing, including USB support and an RDP server for remote access (here’s a full list of the differences). For the purposes of this review I tested the PUEL edition.

VirtualBox supports a wide range of guest operating systems, including most flavours of Windows, many Linux distros, FreeBSD, DOS and even NetWare. VirtualBox includes tools for both Windows and Linux guests. These are called Guest Additions, and work in much the same way as Parallels Tools and VMware Tools - you get smooth graphics and mouse performance, as well as the ability to resize the guest desktop simply by resizing the VM window.

Creating a new VM. VirtualBox supports an impressive range of guest systems.

I gave VirtualBox a spin with both Windows 2000 and Ubuntu 7.10 guests. Installation of both operating systems was flawless. However, the Ubuntu installation process was noticeably slower than with VMware, taking well over an hour to install from the live CD. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the great things about Intel Macs is that you can run Windows on them. Why would you want to run Windows on a Mac? Well, there are many applications - including most games - that are only available for Windows. By running Windows on your Mac as well as Mac OS X, you get the best of both worlds - the loveliness of MAC OS X, and the compatibility of Windows.

There are two applications that you can use to run Windows simultaneously with Mac OS X: Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. How do they compare?

I’ve been using Parallels Desktop since I bought my Mac back in 2006 (in fact I bought Parallels before the Mac!). It does the job well enough, but recently the nice folks at VMware gave me a review copy of VMware Fusion. So I thought I’d give Fusion a quick spin and see how it compares. The versions I’m reviewing here are Parallels Desktop 3.0 (Build 5582) and VMware Fusion 1.1.2 (87978).

Migrating virtual machines to VMware

I didn’t want to muck about installing a fresh copy of Windows, or deal with Windows XP reactivation grief, so I used the VMware Importer to migrate a Windows 2000 Parallels virtual machine across to VMware Fusion. The Importer was a bit ropey - it spent 15 minutes converting the drive before informing me that the VM was suspended, so it couldn’t finish the import - but to be fair, it’s still in beta.

Once I’d successfully converted my Parallels VM to a Fusion VM, I fired up Fusion. I have to say, I’m not a big fan of the Parallels user interface; it always seems odd how it opens new instances of itself for new VMs, and some of the dialogs seem like they were written by someone with English as their second language. I’m pleased to say that Fusion’s UI is a breath of fresh air in comparison, and behaves more like I’d expect a Mac app to behave. Read the rest of this entry »

“Apple Inc. will become the hub of the digital home by 2013.”

So says Forrester Research, according to Darren Waters on the BBC News site. Forrester argues that Apple will build its home-entertainment empire on 8 key pillars:

• The Mac platform
• Apple TV
• The bricks-and-mortar Apple Stores
• iTunes
• A home server
• A universal music controller (whatever that is)
• Network-aware devices such as music players, photo frames etc
• Hardware installation services for home users

In fact Darren disagrees with this statement, arguing that many of the above 8 pillars are unlikely to ever make their way out of the Apple factory gates. I agree that some, such as Apple iPhotoFrames, sound a bit far-fetched. Also, why no mention of the iPod or iPhone? Does Forrester think these won’t be part of Apple’s digital media strategy?

There can be little doubt that home digital entertainment is the direction in which Apple is headed. The signs are all there:

• Its renaming from “Apple Computer, Inc.” to “Apple, Inc.“
• Its stubborn refusal to get seriously into the corporate server market
• The Apple TV, and Front Row on the Mac
• iTunes, the iPod range, and AirTunes
• The way the iTunes Store is going with movie rentals and so on

Sure, Apple will continue to make great inroads into home entertainment, but will it be the “hub of the digital home”? I’d say it’s quite likely for existing Apple users like myself, who already watch and listen to most of their content on the iMac or Apple TV in the living room. But I’d imagine that most families of the future will likely have a mixture of brands making up their digital life, much as they do now. Read the rest of this entry »