In our “Ten OS X Command Line utilities you might not know about” article, we briefly mentioned FinkCommander, a GUI frontend to the ‘fink’ command line utility. It is the easiest way we know of to explore the wonderful world of free Unix software on the Mac. We think it is such a useful app that we decided to pay some special attention to it.
The popular Mac programming website CocoaDevCentral has put together two great online tutorials for learning Cocoa (Apple’s object-oriented programming environment). These tutorials are geared towards total programming newbies, and are a fun way to get your feet wet with Mac software development. On the software side, all you’ll need is Mac OS X 10.4 (or later) and Xcode installed. So if you have the tools, the patience, the curiosity, and willingness to learn, this is a great place to start!
If you’re a sucker for system stats and monitoring widgets, then CoreDuoTemp is for you. This little app stays quietly put in your menu bar displaying some useful stats including CPU usage, the current operating speed of your processor, and the current temperature of your Intel CPU. Of course this means you have to have an Intel Mac to get usage out of CoreDuoTemp. I have found it a necessity to have some kind of CPU monitor open at all times since certain Mac OS X applications tend to spaz out and make the processor run out of control. CoreDuoTemp is inconspicuous and lightweight, and thus far my monitoring app of choice.
Ok, I admit, I’m easily distracted while on my Mac. I’ll intend to do something productive, but then my favorite webpage will refresh or an instant message will pop up and I’ll get sidetracked reading an article or chatting. It happens to the best of us.
If you are worried about desktop distractions, you can thank Freeverse software for their app called Think, which allows you to select a specific application and then forces a darkened screen over the background tasks.
Productivity saver? Maybe. Cool app? Yup.
The title says it all, you can send and receive SMS text messages through AIM, Messages, or iChat by following these simple instructions. If you are so inclined, there is even a simple bash script allowing you to interface with iChat through the command line for such purposes. This is a great tip, and apparently the ability to send SMS messages through the AIM protocol has been around a while, and it still works today as long as you have AIM setup.
Want to change the name of your Mac computer? You can change the identified computer name of a Mac easily from the Mac OS system settings. This not only changes the Macs computer name, but it also changes what the name of the Mac is as identified by other users on a network, and by default it will adjust the name shown at the command line prompt in Mac OS too.
You can change the name of a Mac at any time and for any reason. Changing the computer name of a Mac is really quite simple, and the setting location is within the file sharing portion of system preferences, whether you use file sharing or not. Let’s walk through this easy process to change the name of a Macintosh, you will find it’s the same in all versions of Mac OS X.
Spotlight is probably the greatest feature to hit the Mac OS in years, once you get used to using it, going to a PC without it feels hopelessly inadequate. I use Spotlight for everything from launching applications, retrieving pictures, searching for old emails, literally just about everything. If you aren’t using Spotlight, you’re missing out. If you are using Spotlight, every now and again, the Spotlight menu mysteriously stops working (apparently this is more common since some OS X updates), and we’re going to give you a few methods to troubleshoot Spotlight and get it back in full working order.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog is confirming older reports from MacRumors that the upcoming version of iChat (to be bundled with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard) will include voicemail features. The MacRumors report from December of 2006 says that users will be allowed to create a video greeting to serve as an answering machine message of sorts. A couple screenshots have surfaced of this feature, with TUAW posting the most recent, reproduced below. Of course like all Apple related rumors you should take this with a grain of salt. Concocted screenshots and fake imagery have long been part of the Mac rumor mill, and although these look legitimate, we just won’t know until the release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, scheduled for later this Spring.
If you’ve ever wondered how to extract flash videos (or any others) from a website, here’s a good way to do it using Safari and the command line download tool ‘curl’.
Here’s the description from Chris Martin:
“So say you come across a video online that is so great you would really like to save a copy locally to watch over and over again (assuming you are allowed to). For sites such as youTube and the other majors this might not be a problem… there are numerous tools available to grab content. However, some sites don’t work with the commonly available tools, or maybe you would just rather use tools that are already included in OSX, well here’s how.”
Essentially what you do is view the page source, then locate the .swf or .flv file in the source code of the webpages HTML.
Then, once you have the source URL from the HTML, you can plug that into the curl command to download the file for example (this is not a live flash file its just sample syntax) this would download a flv file this way:
curl -O http://samplewebsite/sample.flv
The file would download like any other.
If you want more a bit more details about this, you can check out the easy to follow how-to on his site:
Howto: Extract Flash Videos from the Web with curl
Pretty cool trick, huh?
Do you like geeking around with paths and jumping about the file system with the Go To trick in Mac OS X, but you come from a background in unix? You’re in luck, because OSXDaily reader Shane submitted this great tip relating to an alternate method of accessing Go To Folder in dialog windows you encounter, here’s how it works direct from the inbox:
Here is a great little app that works exactly as advertised, creating icons instantly with just a matter of dragging and dropping an image file on the program. Whether you want to create icons for personal usage, desktop customization, or you’re a developer and you need an icon for the latest shiny cocoa software you are working on, img2icns works flawlessly. It doesn’t get any simpler than this, and the app is totally free.
UNO is a nice interface enhancer for the Mac. Mac OS X looks great, no arguments there, but if you ever get tired of the various themes of Brushed Metal, iTunes, and Aqua, then you might consider unifying the appearance with UNO. Installation is simple, and you’ll be given three choices for various aspects of your Mac’s appearance. My personal favorite is the simple UNO interface which features a simple, clean, and modern look. It is worth nothing that UNO is free but donationware, so there are no shareware fees and unlock codes to worry about.
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If you have a Mac with broadband, and you want to remotely administer your Mac or someone else’s, you should be using Apple’s Remote Desktop. Remote Desktop is basically just VNC with a fancier and more user friendly name, and it works great for its intended purpose.
Setting up a VNC server enables you to connect to your home or office Mac from any computer running a VNC client, meaning you can access and use your Mac desktop from Windows, Linux, or even another Mac. Likewise, you can connect to other peoples Macs too.
Want to email a picture to someone from a Mac, but the photo is too large? Did you know you can quickly resize photos and pictures directly in the Mail app for Mac OS X? That’s right, you can resize attached pictures right in the Mail application without having to leave to resize through another app like Preview or Photoshop, instead you can handle the entire photo resizing process directly in the Mail app instead.
Here’s a very useful feature that is widely overlooked by Mac Safari users, the ability to enable Private Browsing. What does that mean exactly? Basically it allows you to browse the web without a trace; nothing is added to the history, autofill, downloads window, and no information about what you are viewing or reading on the web is saved or cached.
This handy privacy trick is extraordinarily useful for many situations, particularly if you are on a public computer and you’re doing anything private, say checking your email, bank balance, or one of those special websites that you may or may not partake in viewing. These perks make this little known trick something that should be better known and certainly receive more widespread usage, whether to satisfy personal preferences to maintaining some secrecy or just because you like the added benefits to your own privacy, it’s valuable for all Mac users.
We all know that navigating around the Mac Finder is quick and easy, but you can speed things up by memorizing a few keystrokes that’ll be sure to come in handy. With that in mind, here are six quick keyboard shortcuts to make navigating around the Finder a tad bit speedier.
iChat is a great instant messaging client, but Chax makes iChat even better with a slew of feature improvements that add to the functionality. My personal favorite is the ability to use tabbed chat, I frequently have several instant message windows going at once, and on a relatively small MacBook screen it sure is nice to be able to have them all in one window, this feature alone makes Chax worth installing. Another interesting option with Chax is the ability to auto-accept video conferences, allowing you to setup a remote spycam of sorts where ever your iSight equipped Mac is placed.
Many Mac users avoid the command line altogether, a reasonable amount probably don’t even know it exists. For the curious out there, here are some basic and essential commands and functionalities to know if you want to get started using the Mac OS X Terminal. We’ll cover simple file manipulation, maneuvering in the file system, displaying and killing processes, and more. Remember to remove the brackets or the commands won’t work.
