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 
Growl 1.1.3 - Finally Mail-Growling
Most Mac users will know (and probably use) Growl, a powerful notification system for Mac OS X. If it’s a finished download, a new message or something else - Growl delivers notifications from many applications in a customizable, uniform look.
Growl supports a heap of applications but ever since Leopard came out, Apple Mail was no longer supported. This changes with version 1.1.3 which is supposed to support Mail. But after installing it, nothing changed - Growl was still not reacting to incoming emails.
After various de- and reinstalls, I finally did the right thing - Read the documentation. To make Growl work with mail.app, you have to install growl.mail which can be found in the “Extras” folder of the Growl disk-image. After that, you´ll find a new Growl-tab in the Mail preferences and everything works flawless. Looks like sometimes, reading the f*** manual really does help
Stuff for Perverts - iPhone Vista Theme
Okay, the pervert part might be a little rough, the following is a bad case of taste disorder though. Imagine having an iPhone and thinking: “I`d like this thing to look and feel like Windows Vista!”. Sounds weird, doesn’t it? Obviously, some people seem to have that desire…
Interested in turning your iPhone into a Frankenstein-like transvestite of a phone? Then head over to ModMyiFone.com where you can find the full theme called Vista Perfection. It comes with 90 new icons, boot and shutdown screens and whatnot. If you like it or not, the theme itself seems to be rather well done, coming with lots of features and details.
Still…this somewhat feels like throwing dirt on your brand new Ferrari….
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.
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!
