GLTerminal – Get Retro with Mac Terminal
Dec 14, 2006 - 4 Comments
Remember the old days, where we’d all be peering at little 10″ fisheyed black screens with green or amber text? Well you can relive the computing 70’s and 80’s with this funky app that emulates the appearance of an old terminal. Complete with display curviture, shoddy colors, and even settings for simulated baudrate lag, you’ll be thinking it’s 1979 in no time. The GLTerminal program is not without error though, and getting it to run properly requires some minor digging around in the preferences.
By Bill Ellis - Command Line, Fun, Mac Apps, Mac OS, Retro - 4 Comments
This is a rumor as of now, and uncomfirmed. Apple seeded a new version of Leopard (build 9A326) to internal Apple employees yesterday. This latest build is reported to have fixed bugs from the last build (9A303) such as Quicktime crashing, printing problems and issues with .Mac such as iDisk synching. Apple continues to gloss over the interface, refining it even more and there is an overly presence of black gloss. This build is also completely stable on Apple’s latest Core 2 Duo MacBook and MacBook Pro. Apple is trying to gear down development to get this build out to developers before the New Year. 
Think of this program like a Mac encyclopedia. Mactracker provides detailed information on every Apple Macintosh computer ever made, including vitals such as processor speed, memory, optical drives, graphic cards, supported Mac OS versions, and expansion options. Also included is extensive information on Apple mice, keyboards, displays, printers, scanners, digital cameras, iPod, AirPort Base Stations, Newton, and Mac OS versions. This is one of the most useful tools I have seen for system administrators or general Mac geeks, a simple must-have app. And the best part? It’s free!
On tuesday, Blizzard released its infamous 2.0 patch to its hit online role playing game, World of Warcraft. This patch is significant as it is the first main stream game to support multi-threaded OpenGL on the Macintosh. Support for multi-threaded OpenGL is limited to Intel users, and if you are a lucky owner of such a machine, people are reporting up to 2x better frame-rates with the new version.
Gizmo is a cross platform (Linux, Windows and Mac) VoIP client. I’ve enjoyed Gizmo for the six months that I have had it, and suggest you give it a try over at 
Spotlight is one of my favorite features of Mac OS X, I probably use it more than even the Dock. Being able to hit command-space to quickly locate documents, emails, and launch Applications is endlessly useful. For some of us, it’s necessary to be in the terminal, and wouldn’t it be cool to have this ultra seach feature in the command line? Well it’s there, open up your Terminal (or 
Virtually every kid in the late 1980’s and early 90’s has fond memories of horsing around on a Mac LC in some schools computer lab with Kid Pix, the super friendly and incredibly entertaining paint program for children. The inventor of Kid Pix, Craig Hickman, is now developing a similar program called Beautiful Dorena. Beautiful Dorena is self proclaimed ‘half baked unfinished software’, but that doesn’t stop it from being a total riot.
System Maintenance is probably everyones least favorite part of owning a computer. It’s one of those necessary chores to keep everything running smoothly, but it tends to be such a pain in the butt that we often put it off. Enter MainMenu, a great little app that adds an item to your menubar that allows you to run all sorts of maintenance scripts, all from one easy to use and centrally located place. This really is a must have for Mac owners.
Max is a tool that simply no iPod user should be with out. This program can generate audio in over twenty compressed and uncompressed formats. Whether it be FLAC, OggVorbis, MP3 or AAC, just drop the file onto the Max icon and away you go. Max can also handle ripping your personal audio cds to your hard drive. It can even preform error correction on cds that are less than pristine. Whats even more amazing about Max, is that it’s totally free! Yet another program for the Macintosh that has harnessed the power of open source, resultlng in a robust, solid and stable application. For you open source heads, some of the internals that make up Max include libsndfile, cdparania, LAME and libflac.
Have you ever thought it’d be cool to use a screensaver as your desktop background? Freshly Squeezed Software thought it would be, so they made a super easy to use application to render any Mac OS X screensaver as your background. BackLight provides a menu to easily select a screensaver and turn the desktop effect on and off. BackLight is pure eye candy, and it easily satisifies your desktop indulgence.
Something that has long bothered me about Apple’s Terminal.app is its lack of the ever so common “tabbed” navigation option. We see it in Safari, why not also benefit from this space saving technology when using the terminal? Behold, iTerm, a GPL’d (open source) free alternative to the Terminal.app. iTerm’s features matches what Apple’s Terminal.app has to offer on every front plus more, like tabbed terminals and Growl notifications. Apple has a history of taking good ideas from the community and including them in their operating system (widgets for example) and I hope they do the same with some of the quality work that has gone into iTerm. I haven’t noticed any downsides to using iTerm, as it appears to open just as fast as Terminal.app and it effectively gets the exact same job done. Check it out.
It’s December, the Christmas season is in full force, and it’s time to celebrate on your Mac desktop. Last week’s article on 
