Entries tagged with “Mac” from O'Reilly Digital Media Blog

Mid-January, yet another interesting software project was introduced by the Google labs: the Google Quick Search Box. According to its project page, Google Quick Search Box -- or "QSB" for short -- "is an open source search box that allows you to search data on your computer and across the web". That is a _big_ understatement.

After a full year+ of writing about Mac apps here, I took a look at which ones I still use. The process of going through my old blog items and figuring out which apps I use frequently, infrequently, and nearly-never was an interesting one. Here's what I found...

Today is the Mac's 25th birthday. Watching this YouTube video of Steve Jobs pulling it out of the bag in 1984, I was amused to see how sound has been part of this computer from the beginning. The speech synthesizer comes in around 2:51. It sounds like FM synthesis; anyone have more details?

For the first time in years, the Mac has been widely publicised as being used in a governmental setting. For the Mac community, this can only mean great things are afoot, regardless of the technology choices made by the new administration in the long run. Indeed, while it is no secret that governments and governmental agencies have dabbled in Mac...

In a very tough environment, where consumers (supposedly) aren’t spending and high-end products don’t get bought, Apple just took industry analysts’ projections out to the proverbial woodshed and gave them a good old fashioned whupping.

I took a quick look at the free ClamXav anti-virus software for OS X last month. However, I didn't have any malware to test with it. Well, I found my archive of captive test malware and tried it out with ClamXav.

In the comments to my near-desaster story of last week, several readers suggested I should have a look at a utility called AppleJack. In hindsight, I cannot tell whether AppleJack would have been able to fix the problems that caused my Mac to refuse me access to my main user account. I sure wish, though, that I had it installed so I could at least have given it a try.

Steve Jobs is sick, and may never come back. Apple's a consumer company with high-end products in a bad economy. But the reality of why the company's being punished in the stock market may be nothing more than the Yin-Yang of Apple's Reality Distortion Field at work.

The current AirPort base station combined with iTunes, Apple TV, the iPhone, a handful of printers, and powered speakers have enabled me to configure an "upstairs/downstairs" network complete with printing and remote-controlled music streaming. Here's an overview.

Windows 7 Beta runs surprisingly well on Mac with only 512MB virtual RAM allocated to Windows 7 by VMware Fusion. VirtualBox also works but has more quirks. If you need Windows on a Mac for a specific app, read on...

Reader Petra Hildebrandt recently suggested that I share with you a few of my favourite freeware applications. Since yesterday's post was about networking and troubleshooting, it seems only appropriate to continue in the same vein and look at a few tools that can neatly assist the budding trouble-shooter. Much like yesterday, none of it may be earth-shattering, but I find...

Reader Petra Hildebrandt recently suggested that I share with you a few of my favourite freeware applications. Since yesterday's post was about networking and troubleshooting, it seems only appropriate to continue in the same vein and look at a few tools that can neatly assist the budding trouble-shooter. Much like yesterday, none of it may be earth-shattering, but I find...

Once the news was out that Apple would pull out of Macworld Expo after this year's show, and that it was Phil Schiller, and not Steve Jobs, who would present the keynote speech, many assumed that there were no major announcements to be expected from Apple at this event. And still, I was surprised to overhear discussions about how "underwhelming," "boring," or simply "weird" the presentation was. After all, what Apple did announce were solid upgrades to existing products and even a bit more. Let me highlight three cool things presented last Tuesday.

Thanks to its UNIX underpinnings, Mac OS X is a remarkably robust network client. I knew not what this really meant until I had to build a QuickTime streaming server broadcasting all around France over a NAT-protected WiFi link crossing the Seine river and get it to play music in front of the national press. However, despite its outstanding resiliency,...

In recent months, my MacBook has occasionally slowed down to a sleepy snail's crawl: applications would respond with a major lag, switching between applications would take a few seconds, and the time for launching another application -- including Activity Monitor for hunting down the culprit -- could be measured in minutes. I still have not found a general root cause for this behavior yet, but force-shutting down and rebooting would always get the machine back to its proper performance without any further problems. The last time I had to apply this remedy, though, I could no longer log into my main user account after the machine had rebooted. And this was just minutes after I had left Phil Schiller's keynote, looking at a full week of Macworld Expo '09 still ahead of me. Bad timing, really bad timing...

Wow, CNET's Rafe Needleman sure raised a ruckus with his Mac switcher's lament article. If you are thinking about moving from a Windows PC to a Mac and want to avoid the feeling of lament, read on, I have some advice that might help you make the change.

The current economic climate and the old-world flair of traditional trade shows are often blamed for Macworld's slow, and somewhat humiliating, demise. After its move back to Boston — a thinly masked prelude to the cancellation of its east coast edition —, its original version is now widely suspected to be on its last legs. Certainly, IDG has announced there...

I sometimes want to move large files (digital video home movies and virtual hard disks) between my Mac and my PC. Unfortunately, OS X can read NTFS but not write to it. Fortunately, the free and Open Source NTFS-3G combined with MacFUSE solves this issue very nicely.

If you live a highly Internetworked life, there will likely be certain types of files that, after downloading them from the 'Net, you perform the same regular tasks on: say, archiving bank statements to a folder, printing electronic invoices, etc. You can highly automate processing such files by using Folder Actions attached to your downloads folder.

There are a ton of people attracted by the iPhone gold rush who want to write iPhone apps without taking the time to learn Cocoa. Come for the phone but stay for the Mac.