Windows vs. Mac: a picture that says it all

I've just stumbled upon this picture, which made me laugh inside and think: "This is so true!"

The picture actually says it all, and I know what I'm talking about. I've been a Windows user for many years until I recently decided to switch to a Mac. And due to the Apple philosophy of "things just work", the switching process was pretty peaceful.

But getting back to the picture, it really represents my state of mind towards the two operating systems. On Mac OS X, things are made simple and for most of them to work you just have to find the on/off button, which most of the times it is as easy to find as that big yellow button on the picture. It's really that simple and intuitive. Whereas in Windows, things are by nature complicated and most of them don't even work properly. And if you decide to pop up the hood and fiddle around with the settings, you may end up with a busted machine.

And while the picture may seem to favor the Mac way, it actually also reveals the dark side of Apple. Ok, things are simple, intuitive and they work. But what if you would like to change something? For example, what if instead of having the big yellow button on the engine of the car on the picture, you would like to see that button on the dashboard of the car? That's where things can go wrong.

Apple designs things to work in a specific way and they do it very well. But they do it by controlling what the user has access to. By limiting the user experience to the known-to-work-without-any-problems features, they avoid any "bad press" about their products.

Don't get me wrong, as I said above I love the Apple philosophy since it is the way to go with unexperienced users. But sometimes, when my nostalgic college Linux-geek part of the brain kicks in, I wish I could change some of the settings of Mac OS X. And to do so, you have to be an experienced user because if you take a wrong turn somewhere, you may end up like the guy in the picture. But not the one with the smiley face...I'm talking about the frustrated one next to the broken car.

How to force Safari to open a new window on a tab

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While I was making a face-off between Safari and Firefox, one of the things that I didn't like about Safari was the default behaviour of opening '_blank' links on new windows. Even though I posted a solution for this before, this required the installation of a specific plugin in Safari.

Now, with the new 3.1 version of Safari, a more elegant solution is available. In order to change this default behaviour and force Safari to open new windows on new tabs, just execute the following command on Mac OS X's Terminal (located in Applications/Utilities):

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

To return to the default setting just execute the same command but with false on the end:

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool false

Source: Mac OS X Tips

How to play (almost) all video codecs in QuickTime?

If you have ever used the combination FrontRow + Apple Remote on your Mac, you know what an amazing feature this is. It allows you to easily navigate through all of your music, photos and movies stored in your computer.


Well, not exactly "all movies" since it is only able to play the videos encoded in a QuickTime-supported codec. If you have any AVI or MPEG video files encoded with DivX or XviD (or any other video codec), they won't play on Front Row (or QuickTime for that matter). In order for them to play, you have to encode them into a QuickTime-supported format, which can be done using applications such as iSquint.


iSquint is mainly an iPod converter application, which is able to convert almost all kinds of multimedia files into a QuickTime/iPod acceptable format. However, you can also use it for converting to the Apple TV format, which in turn is accepted in Front Row.

Even though this application is a lot faster than QuickTime Pro (and free), it is still quite a time-consuming task to convert a whole bunch of videos to that format. It would be a lot easier to just use the files directly in QuickTime/Front Row.

Luckily, there are some amazing applications that allow you to do just that. Perian, as stated in its website, is the swiss-army knife for QuickTime.


Perian is a free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats. It enables QuickTime application support for the following Media Types:

• AVI, FLV, and MKV file formats
• MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivX, H.264, FLV1, FSV1, VP6, H263I, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Windows Media Audio v1 & v2, Flash ADPCM, Xiph Vorbis (in Matroska), MPEG Layer II Audio
• AVI support for: AAC, AC3 Audio, H.264, MPEG4, and VBR MP3
• It even supports SSA and SRT subtitles

Once installed, as you can see, Perian will allow QuickTime to play all these formats natively, which means that you don't need to do anything different to play them on QuickTime or Front Row.

The only common format that Perian does not support is WMV. That's where Flip4Mac comes in handy. It does exactly what Perian does in QuickTime for all those formats but only for the WMV format.

To sum up, all you need to play all video codecs on QuickTime (at least, the most common ones) is to install Perian and Flip4Mac. Guaranteed success :-)

The fight of the "thin" laptops

The Lenovo ThinkPad X300 laptop may never be as cute and appealing as the MacBook Air, but you have to admit that this ad does bring the MacBook Air down:

I especially like the "no-compromise" and "everything else is just hot air" statements :-)
The war for the "ultimate ultralight thin" title in the world of laptops has begun! And right now, it seems that the Lenovo is ahead of its competition.

Source: Engadget

How to quickly resize your Dock

I've just discovered the most interesting trick about the Mac OS X's Dock. If, for some reason, you need to resize the Dock because an application is beneath it or you just need the extra space at the bottom of the screen, all you have to do is click and drag (up or down) in one of the Dock's separators. This will immediately resize your Dock to the corresponding size.

Check out this video I just did to have a clear idea of what I'm saying:

iPhone SDK and the Gaming Industry: a perfect marriage

So far the accelerometer feature of the iPhone has only been used in simple functionalities like the automatic adaptation of the display (from normal to landscape view) when the user rotates the device. But ever since I have a Mac that it puzzles me why has this feature been so underestimated in Apple products, especially in small devices like the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Ok, I understand that this feature may not be the best practice for laptops (to avoid any accidents or damage to internal moving parts) and, except for some really fun applications (like LiquidMac and MacSaber), this feature is not really needed.

But now that Apple has released the iPhone SDK, we'll see (in the near future) some interesting games that will take advantage of the accelerometer feature of the iPhone. Check out this video, featured in the iPhone SDK launch event:



Uau! It makes you wonder why wasn't the PSP built this way, doesn't it?

Even virus are prettier on a Mac

Mac OS X doesn't have a lot of virus. Or at least I think it doesn't (my experience with Mac OS X is still only a few months old). But when the Newton Virus hits your Mac, at least you won't feel bad about it having caught a virus. Here's why:



Source

That's not fair, Apple!

Remember when I discussed about which browser I was going to use on Mac OS X? One of the things I pointed out on the comparison between Firefox and Safari was that scrolling web pages in Safari seemed a lot smoother than in Firefox. This is especially valid for pages that have embedded videos. Scrolling these pages on Firefox sometimes makes a video trail appear across the entire page.

Well, Vladimir Vukicevic (who is part of the Firefox developing team) has come across some questionable practices from Apple while he was trying to improve the Mac OS X version of Firefox. It seems that Safari uses undocumented APIs to get some advantages over other browsers, which (among other things) explains why Firefox is unable to smooth scroll pages just like Safari does.

Given that Microsoft has already suffer the consequences for performing this kind of unfair application development, it makes you wonder why Apple has the need to take a part in similar practices.

Source: Slashdot