Fast Dial - Making The Fox Even Better
I´m sure you´ve already downloaded the brand new Firefox 3. Want something to make the new fox even better? Here it is, Fast Dial!
Personally, I´m not a big fan of bookmarks. I always pile up a large collection but never use most of them because it’s painful to digg through them. Fast Dial solves this as it replaces the home page of your Firefox with icons of your favorite websites.
Sites can be added easily, allowing you to create a personal front page with quick access to your daily surfing needs. The design of your Fast Dial page can be fully customized, Fast Dial works with Firefox 2 and 3…. and even on Windows PCs 
Snow Leopard - New Features Video
Shortly after Apple announced the development of Snow Leopard, the first screenshots of the new Mac OS X version popped up around the web, showing not much more than the system’s version number 10.6
Even though Snow Leopard’s improvements will mainly be found under the hood, some new features start to surface now. The following video shows some of them, the icon video-playback feature looks pretty neat 
Software for Mac Switchers
When you switch from Windows to Mac OS X, the first minutes of using the new and flashy OS are pretty exciting. But once the excitement wears off a little, you’ll be up and looking for equivalents for all your windows software.
In the following guide, I´ve collected some applications that won’t make you miss your PC for a single second.
Firefox 3 RC1 - A Sleeker Fox
On Mozilla.com, interested users can now download the first release-candidate of the upcoming 3.0 version of the popular browser. The fiery fox is available as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X version - I´ve tried the latter to see if it offers any improvements.
Once you open the downloaded disk image, Firefox is installed by dragging the icon in your applications folder. If you have Firefox 2.0 installed, the RC1 asks if it should overwrite the old version. If you´re not sure if you want to keep the new fox, simply rename the existing version so you can easily fall back.
At the first start, Firefox will warn you that certain addons (if you have any installed) are not compatible with 3.0 and offers to search for new a version. Once the main window opens up, you`ll immediately notice the new-look header. Mozilla claims that Firefox 3 finally looks like a real Mac OS X application. While that is somewhat true, I personally don’t like the new look too much as it looks kind of cluttered.
The address bar brings us two new features. If you click the RSS icon, you`re not just redirected to the RSS feed like in 2.0, the new version lets you choose between all available feeds including Atom and other RSS versions. Besides the RSS logo, the new bookmarking button can be found
Hit it and the star turns blue, indicating that the site has been bookmarked. By clicking on it once more, you can organise the bookmark and tag it. Bookmark tagging is one of the new version’s interesting features. Especially if you have a rather large collection of bookmarks, tags can help you organise them and find stuff quicker.
For example, you can tag all sites that offer certain features like a forum, a blog or whatever and find them even if they don’t belong in the same content category. The bookmark menu displays your bookmarks the classical view or you can choose to see them organised by tags.
Other features of the new version include a zoom feature, hitting Apple -> + or - will zoom in an out of pages. Version 3 also offers an improved download manager and the addon-manager now offers direct downloading of new addons and themes. Also, Firefox 3 now supports Growl notifications.
On a more serious note, Firefox 3 offers a few important technical changes. The fox now warns if you open a page which contains mallware or any other harmfull content. While this is not a very big issue with Mac OS X, it’s certainly good to have.
Maybe the most important feature is the improved memory management. Firefox users know the problem, if you used the browser for some hours, it will most likely eat up hundreds of MB ram because the browser is not able to free up used memory. The new version fixes this issue, I did not manage to make the browser eat up more than 200 MB of memory. This improvement alone is worth downloading the 3.0 version. Stability of the RC1 version was fine and very well usable in your daily routine.
Macs Outsell Windows Computers
In the $1000+ price range at least. 66% of all computers that were sold in Q1 2008 for 1000 dollars or more have been Macs according to the NPD group. This is a very pleasant market share for Apple in the United States,however the numbers are somewhat inaccurate as sales numbers from the country’s largest computer retailer are missing.
Because Dell does not sell their computers in stores, their sales are not included in the figures. And since Dell is limited to Windows-PC, the numbers would look a lot different. Nevertheless, these numbers are a huge success for Apple. The overall market share is 14% as the Mac Mini somewhat struggles to beat the countless competitors in the market of cheap computers.
Found on Applewatch
KVM’ing Extreme
Until a few minutes ago, I thought of my KVM solution to be rather clever. Being able to control two computers with one set of mouse and keys is pretty neat. Turns out that I am a lousy amateur as other people have taken that to a whole new level.
The photo above shows 11 screens connected to nine computers (Five Macs, three PCs and a Linux machine) - And all controlled with one set of keys and mouse.
Found on Flickr
New “Get a Mac” Ads
Apple is known for funny “Get a Mac” commercials and here are the newest two. Ever wondered what Windows PCs do when you turn them off? Right, they share all of their problems in a support-group…with mixed success
A Week of Mac - Oh Happy Days
It`s been seven days since I started my “Mac-Career” and a week later, it’s safe to say that my expectations have not just been met but exceeded.
My reasons to get a Mac were to get a comfortable and user-friendly computer to work with. I certainly got that as Mac OS X is a blast to work with, even though I probably don’t even know half of it. But it’s another surprising feature that makes using the Mac very pleasant: It’s silent!
In the PC world, silent often means that you can still have a conversation in the room… if you talk loud enough. In case of the Mac Mini, silent means no noticeable noise.
When both the optical drive and the harddisk are not working, the Mac Mini can not be heard - Very usefull when full concentration is needed.It does have it’s downside though, now I barely can stand the noise my PC is making.
Another “feature” I like a lot is the Apple Keyboard. When I first tried it, I thought the keys felt sort of “Notebook-like” and not very good to type on. After a few tricky days, I’m completely used to the feeling and typing longer text is very comfortable. What’s not so pleasant is that some keys are aligned different compared to the PC. I`m still not used to look for the @ under the “L” key… I think it will take some more weeks until I´m totally used to the layout
Besides that, I spent most of the week getting Mac equivalents for all my favorite software and trying to make me feel at home on the new computer. A set of nice racing wallpapers (I´m a motorsports freak after all) helped…and the Mac OS-X changing-wallpapers feature helps making the most of them!
Firefox Makes Switching Easy
When it comes to switching from one operating system to another, a multi-platform application like Firefox makes some things very easy. I have worked with Firefox on my Windows PC for about two years, collected tons of bookmarks and cookies.
Starting in a blank browser can be pretty annoying. You don’t have your bookmarks and even worse, no passwords for all your accounts. You can now start to do it all again, have password’s sent to you and whatnot.. Or, you simply copy over your Firefox profiles directory and everything is just there.
This is what I did and it worked like a charm. Simply copy over the profiles directory from Documents and Settings/<user name>/Application Data/Mozilla on your Windows PC to /Library/Application Support/Firefox/ on your Mac.
That’s it, all bookmarks, cookies and everything else is there!
Mac OS X Music Video
Here’s a cool idea for bands running out of money to make a real music video - Your Mac OS X desktop offers enough eye candy to serve as a substitute
Dennis Liu has composed the following video to the song “Again & Again” by Bird & the Bee.
Found on Macenstein
Access to my Files - Not that Easy
With my new Mac up and running, the first order of business was getting access to my files. Most of my data is stored on my Windows PC and one Western Digital USB drive.
Getting access to the USB drive is as easy as it gets - Plug it in and the Mac can work with it. All was fine until I tried to write new data on the drive. That did not work, a closer look revealed that the drive was write-only.
Thanks to Microsoft not giving out required info, Macs can read from NTFS drives - but not write on them…ugh! Since there was no choice, I had to copy 700 GB of files over to the PC, make a brand new HFS+ partition and copy everything back. For those of you unfamiliar with USB drives, that task took roughly 14 hours!
connection between a Mac and a PC is very easy. Just assign Accessing the files on my PC was a bit easier. Thanks to recent improvements, setting up an EthernetIP’s, set drive permissions and off you go - This guide explains it perfectly.
One little glitch crossed my way though as the Microsoft XP firewall was blocking access first. Was that a last try from Microsoft to keep me from enjoying the Mac? If it was, it was already too late!
My Mac - Getting Started
After watching a promotional video of Leopard a few weeks ago, I´ve made the decision to join the fun - Get a Mac.
But it was not quite as simple as that as I had to find a way to integrate it in my personal workflow. Being a passionate PC sim racer, I was not willing to give up my Windows PC at all.
After quite some thinking back and fourth, I decided that going with a KVM switch would be the best route. It allows me to share a set of Screen, Mouse and Keys with two computers.
The decision which Mac to get was not a pretty hard one. Since I did not need another screen and don’t like glare type displays either, the iMac was out of the question. I wasn’t really keen to spend that much on my first Mac either, there was the possibility that I don’t enjoy it.
With those factors in mind, the Mac Mini was the way to go. I opted for the 1.83 Ghz one and did not mind the rather small 80 GB harddrive since most of my data is stored on USB drives and network devices.
The only modification I needed was more ram. With lots of Windows experience, I figured that 1 GB could be a little small, especially when working with applications such as Photoshop. And with another 1 GB, there is more to be eaten up by mallware and stuff like that….wait no, that’s the Windows user speaking…. I would actually be able to use the additional memory
Because of the recent price drop, I was able to pick up my 2 GB Mac Mini for very reasonable 529 Euros.
Along with the Mac, I bought the Apple Wireless keyboard since I would need all the fancy special Mac keys.
Taking it all home, I was facing the challenge to connect both computers with the KVM switch. To my surprise, it all went rather smoothly and now I´m able to switch between the Mac and the PC with the click of a button.
But who wants to think about the old PC when Leopard is booting up for the very first time…
