You say QuickSilver, I say LaunchBar baby!

We just were graced with an update to 4.3 - please excuse me while I revel in the new update.

LaunchBar is so much more than an application launcher, it is a true productivity and efficiency tool. Definitely check it out if you haven't already.

If your task at hand is to combine several PDF's into a single PDF, there are many [not very good] solutions.

A great solution to this task is Combine PDFs 2.1 from MonkeyBreadSoftware.

It allows you to drag and drop PDFs onto the application, re-arrange page, rotate, trim, crop and more before combining them into a single PDF. I've tried a few solutions before, but Combine PDFs is the best I've used yet.

For some unknown reason Camino only ships with the option for Google as your search engine of choice in the search box. I have switched from Google search to Yahoo! search, so wanted a way to be able to use the Camino search box for Yahoo! and not Google.

My temporary work around was to just initiate my web searches with LaunchBar, where I could quickly and easily search with Yahoo! (or any other service of my choosing.) But some times it's handy to use your web browsers search engine.

I just ran across an article on MacOSXhints on how to add search engines to Camino's list! Wahoo, and it's really easy too.

All you have to do is add a new key in the file :
/Users/[Your User Account]/Library/Application Support/Camino/SearchURLList.plist

In the Pref Setter image below you can see the strings I used to add Ask and Yahoo!, if there are others that you would like to add, you can search out how to do that, or just try doing a simple search at the engine of your choice, and replace the search text with %s in the searchurl file.

You can see that I now have Yahoo!, and added ASK for the heck of it too.

You can edit the plist file in a text editor, but a much better option is the free plist editor Pref Setter.

Here is what editing a plist file looks like in Text Wrangler:


Here is what editing a plist file looks like in Pref Setter

Transmission has been my day to day BitTorrent client ever since I found it. It isn't as full featured (bloated) like Azureus is, but it worked great for most things.

All of a sudden Transmission has checked off two important features that I've been hoping would happen for a long time now. Creating torrents and selective downloads. These two new features can be found in the most recent build of Transmission, they warn that it may be unstable, but it's certainly working well for me.

If Transmission is your torrent client of choice then you know that it wasn't ever able to create torrents. Well that has now all changed.

I'm not sure if the news that uTorrent is heading for the Mac had any impact on these two features getting completed all of a sudden, I guess we'll never know - but whatever the reason I'm certainly very happy that we've got these features now.

You can see here that I've customized my icon bar to include Create [Torrent]

If you select Create [Torrent] here is the screen window you are presented

The next great feature that has been implemented is the ability to selectively download. Say a torrent has 3 files, 1, 2, and 3. And each is 1GB big, if you only need 2, then you would have previously had to wasted a lot of bandwidth and download all 3 files in the torrent - even though you only wanted file 2. Now you can selectively choose which files in the torrent you download. Additionally you can set priorities for individual files at Low, Normal, or High.


If you go to the Inspector window for a torrent that you are downloading, you will see checkboxes to the right of each file, you can uncheck the box if you do not want to download that file, additionally, there is a little pill looking icon if you mouseover the file, this is the priority setting.

Priority Setting & Selective File CheckBox

Now, more than ever, is the time to check out Transmission for ALL your torrent duties.
Admittedly, I do wish that Transmission were a single window application, not the main window for torrents and a separate window for Inspector information. I think a condensed version like they show now is good for some and maybe that should remain an option, but it would be really nice for many other people if they gave you more information on a single unified window. But I promise I won't complain about that what with the two nice gifts!

Latest Build, Home page.

The HDHomeRun device has been very well received. It's a dual tuner HD OTA, Over the Air, and unencrypted HD cable tuner. It is not a DVR device but can work with one. This tuner gets rave reviews, even saying that it is the best OTA tuner available.

I wrote the guys over at CenterStageProject just two weeks ago asking that they consider looking at integrating the HDHomeRun function with their Media Center project using some drivers that an enthusiast had created to get the HDHomeRun working on the Mac.

Well now Elgato has come along and done all the hard work for us. They have made their Eye TV software compatible with the HDHomeRun dual tuner, and they are selling two licenses to the software, and the dual tuner device for $199 total. Here is the Elgato package.

This bodes well for the Mac community. Keep it coming!

From Elgato:

If you frequent MacSeven you may know that my favorite web browser is Camino. No matter what I try, I never find anything that just feel right the way Camino does.

I recently used Safari for a week or so at work on my Windows machine, one thing that I learned I really liked about Safari is how it does inline autocomplete in the address bar.

Safari has inline autocomplete enabled by default, and Camino, like most browsers, has it disabled by default.

Here is an image showing how Camino defaults, inline autocomplete not enabled:

You can see that as you start typing in a URL, it shows you items from your history under the address bar, you can select from the list. But I much prefer how Safari is by default, with inline autocomplete enabled.

Here is an image showing how Safari defaults, with inline autocomplete enabled:

In the image above I enabled inline autocomplete with Camino and now by typing the same three letters as before "mac" it now autocompletes the URL. As you type more the inline autocomplete will continue to narrow your results. I find this to be a much faster and easier way to get to where I want to go.

To enable inline autocomplete in Camino:

1) open a termainal session, and paste in the following line
2) defaults write org.mozilla.camino "Autocomplete While Typing" -bool YES
3) hit Enter, and restart Camino.

FTP clients are not used by everybody, there are certainly heavy FTP users, but there are also many occasional FTP users. While Transmit has the mojo in most peoples opinion, I prefer CyberDuck.

I've certainly got nothing against Panic, developers of Transmit, or Transmit itself. These guys are pretty cool when you get right down to it, effective software that is elegant - how Mac.

But the thing is, I'm not too excited to pay $30 for software that I only use occasionally, especially when CyberDuck is a damned good FTP client in it's own right. The Duck is opensource, and while they don't require money for it, they do ask for donations. If you use it and like it I would suggest throwing a few bones their way, they work hard to develop CyberDuck - and there are frequent updates.

One area where the developer and I don't see eye to eye is in regards to multipane for local and ftp server. I prefer ftp clients that display your local volumes as well as the remote ftp volumes like FileZilla does. However, I'm willing to live with the fact that the Duck only shows the remote ftp volumes, because it is otherwise excellent in it's design and implementation. I don't think FileZilla is in the same league as CyberDuck. By the way, I always thought that FileZilla was a blatant rip off of FlashFXP, the best ftp program I ever used on Windows.

Oh, and here's a great update on CyberDuck, they recently built in the functionality to be able to set specific upload and global throttling. Throttling is limiting your up/download speeds. Throttling your upload speeds is necessary in my opinion because if you max out your upload speed you will affect your download speeds in a bad way. With maxing out your upload speed you will get very slow download speeds. So by enabling throttling at a speed under your max upload speed, you will preserve speedy downloading. Great stuff.

If you need a nice FTP client, certainly take a look at the Duck.

If you like it, DiggIT.

Yes, OpenOffice is going Aqua on the Mac and yes alpha builds are available. But OOo without X11 is by no means ready for prime time day.

Aren't we all fortunate then that NeoOffice keeps on improving their very nice Office Suite for your Mac. Here's the goods on the new update:

This release includes support for the Mac OS X Spellchecker and Address Book and experimental support for Office 2007 Excel and PowerPoint files.

This update is for Early Access only right now, but all you freeloaders can download it on August 27, 2007 without having to cough up any money.

NeoOffice® is a full-featured office suite for Mac OS X created by Patrick Luby and Edward Peterlin

Yesterday I posted a how-to on preventing volumes from mounting when you boot, the near opposite it todays topic.

How to automate the mounting of filesystems of any of the following type AFP, FTP, HTTP, NFS, and SMB. How cool to be able to easily mount a volume on your desktop for not just network drives off various computer flavors, but also FTP and HTTP. Slick!

Disclaimer, I had great success and ease using this to mount my Windows LAN, I spent about 1 minute trying to mount the MacSeven.com ftp site just to test it out, and I wasn't successful. Since it was only a test I didn't pursue further - your mileage with FTP mounting may vary.

Update: AutomountMaker actually connects great to the MacSeven.com FTP - I had a setting wrong, on the "Volume" Setting I had an incorrect entry, by just leaving it blank it connects great and puts the mounted drive right on my desktop, very cool.

AutomountMaker is just the tool to make this happen. I used AutomountMaker to automate the mounting of a volume on a Windows computer on my LAN, so I used the SMB protocol. It's very easy to save pre-defined connections that you can run on demand, or you can launch any of the presets so that you can mount the volumes when you boot.

If you like it, DiggIT.

WARNING: While I have done this tip myself, and it works great for me, any time you are entering commands into terminal, please have a backup of your system in case of an error or problem. Please take caution.

I'm going to present this tip as it was necessary for me, using my situation should help demonstrate how this is a cool tip, preventing drive volumes from mounting when you boot into Mac OS X. My example is about preventing an external firewire drive from mounting, but you can prevent USB2, internal, or other volumes from mounting also.


Situation: I use SuperDuper! to maintain a clone drive of my Macintosh HD. Considering how inexpensive both an external drive and SuperDuper! (hard drive cloning software) are, we should all keep a cloned copy of our internal drives. Not only does it provide you with a safety copy of your drive, but you can also boot from it if needed. Several times I've been very thankful that I have a clone drive, saved my butt.

By the way, here is a current deal, an AcomData 500GB FireWire 400 for only $120 with free shipping (USA). I've got three AcomData external FW400/USB drives, they work really well.

With SuperDuper! you can schedule 'backup' clone activities, and SD! has the smarts to mount an external drive before the event if the drive isn't already mounted, you do need to have the drive mounted in order to setup the scheduled activity. SD! will even unmount the drive if it was unmounted before the scheduled event.

I don't want spotlight wasting resources indexing my Clone drive, and for some reason OS X won't let me add my Clone drive to my Spotlight exclusion list, or if it does add it to the list, it disappears the next time I reboot.



Question: Now the question which remained for me was how can I keep my Clone External firewire drive from mounting when I reboot? OS X offers no visible means of doing this.


Answer: Some digging around over at MaxOSXHints.com revealed the answer, you just need a bit of information from Disk Utility, and then to type in a line of code in a terminal session. Don't be scared of the terminal entry, it's really very easy.


Step 1) Open Disk Utility select the volume that you do not want to automatically mount when you boot into Mac OS X, click on Information, select and copy the "Universal Unique Identifier" code.

Step 2) Open a Terminal session, type in:
sudo pico /etc/fstab
hit ENTER, and then enter your password.

Step 3) Now enter the following line (using your own UUID). Note the "noauto" is what prevents the drive from mounting, see this page for more detail.

UUID=CDB15826-88A3-36AC-8009-3E71355F0B18 none hfs rw,noauto

You can enter additional lines for additional volumes.

Hit Cont+X to Exit, Y to Save.

Step 4) That's it, reboot and now that volume won't reboot.

Now when I reboot, my Clone drive is not mounted, I don't see it and Spotlight doesn't index it, nightly when my SuperDuper! scheduled event runs, it automatically mounts the volume, performs the clone update and then unmounts the volume. Perfecto!

Timing is everything right? Not more than a few days after I review and post about CoRD, a great Windows Remote Desktop Client for the Mac, Microsoft Mac Business Unit posts a note saying that the Universal Binary of Remote Desktop Client is finally coming out in just two weeks time.

I have been using CoRD daily since installing it, and it works fantastic, it's so much more nimble than Microsoft Remote Desktop (PPC via Rosetta) on my system. It will be interesting to put it up against the new UB of Microsoft's version in a few weeks. Until then, I'll have no regrets using CoRD.

Wow, this downright makes the Airport Extreme look pretty plain Jane. More details on this sweet router with a display over at Gizmodo.

I have been using Microsoft's Remote Desktop client to access my Windows box from my Mac for a long time. It works pretty well, but it was slow because it runs through Rosetta, it is not yet a Universal Binary. It seems like a year ago or more when the MacBU announced that they had a UB in the works, but alas there is still no joy.

I decided to poke around and look to see if there was any news or other solutions and I ran across a fabulous alternative to Remote Desktop, CoRD. It connects to my WinXP box just the same way as RD did, only it does it better! It's faster, does full screen correctly. It's a real gem, and it is also freeware.

If you have the need, I highly recommend CoRD.

This sums it up pretty well: CoRD is a Mac OS X remote desktop client for Microsoft Windows servers using the rdp protocol. It is easy to use, fast, and free for anyone to use or modify.

I've been a NetFlix subscriber for a very long time, I always wished that I could drag and drop items around in the Queue instead of numbering them and selecting update.

Guess what finally happened....

Wahoo!

If you are a real NetFlix fiend, you may want to check out NetFlix Freak. Despite it's brushed metal appearance, it's a great alternative to going to NetFlix.com, it costs $15.

IneedFlix is a freeware alternative to NetFlix Freak. It is more basic in what it offers, but you may find it useful.

I think it was over at TUAW where I saw this tip posted not long ago, I certainly realized that you can press the oblong button at the top right of a window to show/hide detail at the top of a window. What I didn't realize is that this is a great tip for installing applications faster, from a mounted DMG file.

By pressing the oval on a DMG install window, it will allow you to see all your drives and quick access locations, making it super easy to drag the application onto your Applications folder. Some developers show your Applications folder on the DMG window, but many don't and this is a great tip to make it easier for those instances.

I put together a quick video to demonstrate. Click here to see the video.

I noticed that Engadget listed 10 "Useful Dashboard Widgets". Some of these I haven't run across before, they're all worth a quick look.

Full story at Engadget here.

I've been using Camino as my primary browser for a long time on my Mac. Love it!

On Windows at work I used to use CrazyBrowser for a long time which is a custom multi-tabbed interface that uses IE as the core rendering engine. I started using this way back when, because it offered a clean interface with tabbed browsing long before IE did.

I've been running Safari 3 for Windows quite a bit since it was released. It's kind of growing on me. There are certainly things that I wish it had. I have some thoughts on Safari, and a wishlist for Safari for Windows (and Mac):

PRO's:
- Fast rendering, very fast.
- Renders very well, extremely few issues.
- Text looks great

CON's:
- Often times when trying to load a page I get an error "Safari Can't Open Page"
- Clicking on a link from external opens in a new window not new tab


The text looking great is very interesting. When I switched back to the Mac, the way the text looked with the anti aliasing look bugged the crap out of me, now I find that a year and a half later, I prefer it! Holy crap, how did that happen? (I never ran ClearType on Windows)

MISSING:
- Clicking on empty tab space should open a new tab
- Close a tab, and you should go to last viewed tab
- Ability to save USR/PWD for all sites
- Ctrl+click bookmark bar favorites should open in a new tab
- Ctrl_click search box should open in a new tab
- Should restore all tabs open in previous session upon re-opening
- Site Favicons should show up on the BookMark bar and tabs


Text samples. I mentioned how I've grown fond of how Safari renders text. Some pages that I've compared in both Camino and Safari - they look exactly the same. But on other sites the two browsers have a completely different look. I've put some sample pages of a page on Yahoo that looks different, and I find that I far prefer the look of the Safari rendering over Camino and the other browser examples I've shown.

As you can see from the screenshots it is clear that OmniWeb uses the same rendering engine as Safari, it looks nearly identical to Safari.

Hmm...

SAFARI


CAMINO


FIREFOX


OPERA


INTERNET EXPLORER



OMNIWEB




Alright, why do you suppose it is then, that the following page look nearly identical in Camino & Safari? Both have the anti aliased text rendering that I suddenly realize I'm so fond of, but in the previous examples, only the Safari based browsers have the same look.

SAFARI



CAMINO

After trying out VMware's Fusion (think Parallels) for a little bit, I've decided to take advantage of the 1/2 price offer. You can purchase Fusion while it is still in Beta, before it goes retail, for half of it's regular $80 price. I went ahead and bought it today for $40. May as well take advantage and save a few dollars.

(RC1 is release candidate 1, this means that they are close to coming out of beta.)

Perian allows you to play more media file types via Quicktime, they recently updated to version 1.0

You can grab it here.

I recently pointed out a file made available by the fine Perian folk. They have updated and enhanced their utility which gives a proper icon to media type such as FLV, instead of the blank icon that you would otherwise see.

Grab the updated installer and file type Perian't Type Installer here.

IGG Software's upcoming iBank 3 won the runner up for the best designed Leopard Application, behind Delicious Library 2.

Previously I've talked about how I found the Mac personal finance applications lacking and that I'm still running Quicken 2007 for Windows. I had looked at iBank, but the main drawback to iBank 2 for me was the fact that it doesn't directly download your data from financial institutions. Rumor has it that version 3 will be able to do this.

This could be very good news for a lot of people, there is a lot of talk on the internet similar to what I have said about the sad state of affairs for Mac personal finance.

Instead of just bemoan the situation, I'm going to see if I can get onto the Beta, possibly even the alpha for this project, and see if I can help in some small way to influence it towards a world class application that we can be proud of the fact that it's a Mac app.

Here are some screenshots of iBank 2, you can click on the large thumbnails for full a size view. You can see that it is a very nice looking application. Hopefully if direct downloading happens, and a few more features come into it, this could be what Quicken should have been on the Mac.

This is great, an iPhone taken apart already, hats off to Think Secret for this gallery.

Click here for the full gallery of photos.

I have been meaning to do a write up of some of the better bittorrent clients for the Mac. Then I happened to run across a write that largely echos my sentiments. It was done by TorrentFreak.

In this review from Sep 2006 TorrentFreak took a brief look at the following BitTorrent clients: BitTorrent, Transmission, Azureus, Tomato Torrent, Bits On Wheels, and Acquisition.

TODAY

Here are some quick thoughts in addition to the review.

BitTorrent's official client is sparse, it may work for a utilitarian need, but there's not much there.

Transmission is a really nice client that is very actively developed. It does a few things in a non-standard-protocol way, but it's never caused me issue. You can always grab the absolute latest build of Transmission here. I run Transmission all of the time, and it is my client of choice for downloading and casual seeding. Note that you cannot yet create a torrent with Transmission, why this key feature is left out of an application that is so constantly updated is beyond me. I would prefer that the Information Window where more integrated into the main window of Transmission and not as a secondary window.

Azureus may do a lot, but it just doesn't gel with me, it's too busy and offers more than I'm interested in.

Tomato Torrent is stale, it's not been updated in a long time, and there just really isn't a good reason to go with it in my opinion. It isn't as sleek as Transmission, and it is nowhere as full featured as some of the other clients.

Bits On Wheels must have been some client when it came out a few years go. Unfortunately it is still a PPC application. The forums on the website have recently been disabled, previous to that happening the word was that the developer of it was going to make it a Universal Binary but it ended up not being a quick and dirty exercise but he did intend to see it through. With the forums going offline I would say that is sketchy at best. But my fingers are crossed, BoW is a great client, by far my favorite when it comes to creating an seeding a new torrent. It is well laid out and informative in how it presents all the information. And the visual representation of your inbound and outbound activity is very cool. If BoW where a UB, and with some minor modifications it would be the killer torrent client.

Acquisition This is a client that at the heart is based on Transmission. Given this fact, and that's its a pay client, well - no thank you.


Tomorrow



uTorrent is arguably the best torrent client for Windows, and has been for quite some time. Before I switched back to the Mac uTorrent was my client of choice. uTorrent was recently bought by BitTorrent, I'm not sure what that means for the future, but I think it is positive. Recently uTorrent announced that they are coming to the Mac. I think this is great, shake up the tree a little bit. They are also brining uTorrent to Linux. I'll certainly be checking it out when it makes the official debut.

Don't be surprised if uTorrent becomes the consolidator in the Mac torrent client arena and gains the largest market share in an already crowded field.

You can check out a screenshot here.

Check out Previous posts on MacSeven.com

MacSeven Posts from June 2007

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