The Mac is the web builder’s weapon of choice - at least, it is among the web designers I know - and practically all pro web design software is available on the Mac as well as Windows. But what about those of us who don’t want to fork out thousands of dollars to build websites with our Macs? In this series of posts I’ll explore how to create great websites on the Mac using low-cost - and in some cases, free - applications.

This first post takes a look at creating your website’s graphics.

Photoshop is, of course, the granddaddy of image editors, and it’s well suited to designing websites. However, it does come with a hefty $650 price tag for the basic version. There’s also Fireworks, which was designed as a web image editor from the ground up, and is priced at a more affordable $300.

If you’re a pro then you can afford these prices, but they’re a bit steep for the average web designer on a budget. So what other options are there?

Photoshop Elements

Photoshop Elements is Adobe’s cut-down version of Photoshop aimed at hobbyist photographers, and it has a mini-me price of $90 to match. Elements on the Mac lagged behind the Windows version for a while, but Adobe recently released Elements 6 for the Mac, bringing it into line with the Windows version.

On the whole, Elements includes most of the important Photoshop features that you want for web design, such as a fully-featured Save for Web command and limited layer styles. One notable omission is layer masks, but you can cheat and use a Levels adjustment layer to get a layer mask if you need to. It also doesn’t support editable layer groups or guides, so if you open a Photoshop file containing these features then there’s not a lot you can do with them.

You can download a trial version from the above link (but beware, it’s a monster download at 1.27GB). Read the rest of this entry »

Inside Steve’s Brain is the third book about Apple written by Leander Kahney, the managing editor of Wired News and head honcho of one of my favourite blogs: the well-known Cult of Mac blog. His two other books are The Cult of Mac and The Cult of iPod.

I was intrigued by the title of this book, so I picked up a copy. (I haven’t read Kahney’s previous two books.)

While the book’s title is obviously an exaggeration - Kahney hasn’t been at Steve Jobs’s head with a scalpel, or stuck him on a psychiatrist’s couch - it does offer some insights into how Jobs might think about product design, marketing techniques and the user experience. It also offers a decent-enough potted history of Apple and Jobs’s involvement with it over the last 30 years (though there are other books out there that do a much more thorough job of this).

Fascinating facts

Some of the interesting things I learned from reading this book:

• When Jobs returned to Apple, he cut the product line from around 40 products to just 4 core products - 2 laptops, 2 desktops - a move that undoubtedly saved Apple from going under.
• He hates having multiple windows open. (This makes me laugh, since the zillions of windows you get with many Mac apps was one of the things that put me off Macs initially - yet now I love the multi-window approach.)
• One Apple store can make as much as 6 other stores in the same mall combined; they’re “insanely profitable”. (Which reminds me, I really must get off my backside and check out the new Sydney store this week.)
• Jobs understands what design’s really all about. “Some people think design means how it looks. But of course … it’s really how it works.“
• Apple is so secretive that no single department sees the whole product, and even the head of marketing can’t tell his family about the latest iPod until after it’s launched.
• Jobs got his family involved in a constant 2-week debate over which washing machine to buy (actually I do this as well - I’m terrible).

One good thing about the book is that is looks at both sides of Jobs and his career. Yes, he’s done a lot of things right, but he’s also made some big mistakes like the G4 Cube, which sold poorly because he misread the market. And he seems to have an irksome habit of screaming at an employee for having a bad idea, then turning round the next day and saying it’s a great idea. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the much-heralded new features of Mac OS X Leopard is, of course, the Time Machine backup system. Its key selling point - apart from the Dr Who-style restore screen - is the fact that it’s a “no-click” backup solution; you just plug in an external backup drive, and Time Machine gets on with the job of backing up automatically.

This is all nice and reassuring - or is it? Well, not when you get errors like these appearing every couple of weeks:

I’ve seen the Unable to complete backup error on both our iMacs over the last few weeks. It’s a fairly common occurrence. I tried the trick of repartitioning using GUID rather than MBR on my Mac, which certainly reduced the errors, though I still get them.

It looks like there are quite a few other Mac users experiencing this error, too.

And what’s with that second error? The backup needs 13.8 GB, but only 20.3 GB are available? Looks like someone at Apple needs to go back to maths classes. How can I trust a backup system that can’t subtract two numbers?

Frankly I’m tempted to go back to using rsync for my backups until Apple makes Time Machine more stable. At least I know rsync works!

Nothing is guaranteed to bring the smug Mac user brigade out in force like a discussion on viruses and trojans. “Oh, we don’t get those - we use Macs!” they proudly announce. And they have a point; Mac malware is pretty thin on the ground right now. Indeed, the first virus to specifically attack Mac OS X didn’t come out until 2006 - five years after Mac OS X was launched.

Well the time for such smugness may be coming to an end. In the past few weeks we’ve had a published root escalation vulnerability, not to mention a Mac-targeted trojan in the wild that takes advantage of said vulnerability, and is evil enough to wipe the smile off even the smuggest Mac user’s face. Furthermore, Mac hackers have produced a tool to make future production of similar trojans almost trivially simple.

Maybe we’re seeing an increase in Mac malware now because Macs are getting more popular, with 80% of businesses allegedly now using them. More Macs make for a bigger, juicier target.

But Macs are secure - aren’t they?

Yes, Macs are built on UNIX, and yes, UNIX is generally pretty secure and battle-tested. But UNIX and Linux servers are compromised every day. Maybe not as much as Windows machines, but there are plenty of worms and rootkits out there for Linux. If malware authors start targeting the Mac in earnest, it’s unlikely that Mac users will get off that lightly. We can only hope that Apple starts tightening up security in Snow Leopard, as Dino Dai Zovi suggests.

Here are some quick tips that are handy if you work in a Terminal window a lot (I know I do!). They show various ways to open files and folders right from the command line.

Opening a file

You can open a file using its associated application by typing:

open filename

For example, opening an image file with open usually displays it in Preview, while opening an HTML file displays it in your default Web browser.

Wildcards are allowed, so you can open all PNG files in the current folder with:

open *.png

You can also specify the application to use when opening the file by using the -a option:

open -a /Applications/Preview.app myimage.png

If you want to edit the file in TextEdit, use:

open -e filename

You can even open URLs:

open http://mac.elated.com/

Opening a folder

This trick also works on folders, in which case the folder opens as a new Finder window:

open foldername

For example, you can open the current folder in the Finder with:

open .

Read the rest of this entry »

If you use Mac OS X Leopard, you’re probably aware of the Web Clip widget. This is a new type of widget that lets you display part of any Web page right on your Dashboard. To use it, simply visit a Web page in Safari, then click the Web Clip button in the toolbar:

Drag the mouse around to highlight the area of the page you want to capture, then click. You can then fine-tune the area with the resize handles, and click the Add button in the top right (or simply press Return) to create the widget. Now, whenever you switch to your Dashboard, you’ll see that area of your chosen Web page right there in the widget.

If and when the Web page is updated, the widget updates too. This makes Web Clip very useful for any Web page content that gets updated frequently, such as news and sports results pages.

Here are a few tips for using Web Clip:

• You can go back and edit a Web Clip widget. Click the little ‘i’ button in the bottom right corner of the widget to flip it round, then click Edit. The widget flips round again, and you can click and drag with the mouse to reposition the Web page within the widget. You can also resize the widget at the same time. Nice.

• The widget reloads its “page” every time you enter the Dashboard, but you can also reload it at any time by clicking it and hitting Command-R.

• If the page you’re clipping is text-heavy, and you want to make your widget as small as possible, first use Command and - (minus) to make the text smaller in Safari, then clip the page. The widget remembers your selected text size. You can then revert to your normal text size in Safari.

So that’s how you create and use a Web Clip widget. What sort of things can you use this feature for? Here are 6 of my favourite uses for Web Clip:

1. Weather forecasts

A classic use for Web Clip. Visit the weather forecasting site of your choice - for example, Weather Underground or AccuWeather.com - find the forecast for your local city, and turn it into a widget. Of course, the Mac comes with a built-in Weather widget, but by using Web Clip you can get much more specialized info. For example, I’m in Sydney, Australia, and I like to have the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s Sydney Radar Loop on my Dashboard, so I can see where the rain is right now:

(By the way, speaking of the BoM, if you happen to be in Australia then check out TheBom Weather Widget - it’s lovely!) Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been pondering this question for a while now. I think that the folks at Adobe probably don’t hate the Mac, but they do seem to have a preference for Windows. Here’s why.

Exhibit A: Windows-style UI elements in Mac Photoshop

I’ve been using Photoshop since around 1995 (even written a nice book about it) so I feel like I know this beast inside out now. I’ve used both Windows and Mac versions heavily, and the Mac version is full of little Windows UI quirks. For example:

• Non-standard shortcut to bring up the Preferences pane (Command-K, not the standard Command-,). Just because Windows users have to suffer from the lack of a consistent Preferences shortcut, why should Mac users have to do the same?
• Non-standard shortcut to hide Photoshop (Command-Control-H, not the standard Command-H - fair enough in a way, as Command-H is used to hide stuff within Photoshop).
• Non-standard shortcut to switch between document windows - i.e. Control-Tab, not the standard (and much less finger-twisting) Command-`. This one really bugs me.
• The odd shortcut that only works in Windows (I’m thinking of Alt+I, then hold Alt and press D to instantly duplicate an image - a quirk that relies on Windows’ keyboard shortcuts for menus).

Exhibit B: 32-bit Mac Photoshop CS4

Photoshop CS4 will be 64-bit on Windows, 32-bit on Mac. ‘Nuff said. (Although Adobe blames Apple for this.) Read the rest of this entry »

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 »