Mac Usage Improves Tolerance?

by Anand Lal Shimpi on 4/22/2004 1:57 AM EST
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  • RK - Tuesday, June 29, 2004 - link

    The tolerance comes from less stress, the more you use the Mac OS, the less stress you are around computers. : )) Seriously...
  • OoTLink - Wednesday, May 5, 2004 - link

    As I've said many times before (I think), I HIGHLY suggest trying one of the latest camino nightly builds (they're rather stable.. not perfect but MUCH better than firefox)..

    http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/camino/nigh...
  • Anonymous - Wednesday, April 28, 2004 - link

    Do you use iTunes Anand? v4.5 is out now, with some nice additions.
  • jhh - Tuesday, April 27, 2004 - link

    "Part of making the change to OS X is that you don't use the desktop."

    Agree. Had to change my habits from OS 9 and Windows a bit, now resulting in a very clean desktop. I only use my desktop to store temporally files and to access my drives. I think that's how it's ment to be.

    But that's just me. :)
  • dan - Tuesday, April 27, 2004 - link

    Part of making the change to OS X is that you don't use the desktop.
  • SmurfTower - Monday, April 26, 2004 - link

    <Forgive me if there are any spelling mistakes as the Sun I'm posting from does not have the oh-so-useful system wide spellcheck that my G5 has spoiled me with. >

    hahaha...... :P I know the feeling. ;)
  • thePurpleGiant - Monday, April 26, 2004 - link

    One more vote for the PDF viewer plugin. Loads PDFs in Safari to save you downloading them. Very nice interface.

    http://www.schubert-it.com/pluginpdf/
  • Anonymous - Friday, April 23, 2004 - link

    I like the latest Opera for browsing on the Mac...

    http://www.opera.com/download/index.dml?opsys=MacO...
  • RonNCSU - Friday, April 23, 2004 - link

    One possible issue with the DivX playback (other than what has been mentioned) is maybe the Quicktime plugin folder (either user or global) got its permissions borked... You could check them manually, or try running a permissions repair...

    Also, as someone else mentioned, the 3Ivx decoder has noticeably better playback quality than most any other codec for Divx I have ever seen (on any platform)... THe only drawback is that it's not point and click. Files often have to be doctored first to fix a supposed issue with quicktime not being able to see the sound in AVIs... This process is fairly quick however... www.3ivx.com has more info on it.

    Also, OS X's desktop icon placement seems buggy to me too... OS 9 was more "predictable", and didn't seem to randomly move things around/put them wherever...
  • Anonymous - Thursday, April 22, 2004 - link

    Re 1: There's a bug icon in Safari, you might want to enable it, and when you hit a site that doesn't work, click on it and have Apple lean on the German car manufacturers.

    Re 4: It's sorting by type, not by extension, I think.
  • MacDuff - Thursday, April 22, 2004 - link

    FOLDER ACTIONS

    Great idea :)

    I too have a downloads folder and what I call "my junk drawer' folder AND a temporary URLs folder of pages I want to refer to again but don't wnt to add to my already rediculous bookmark file. these three folders are Docked, unique icons and all.

    OS X's system-wide spell checking is a crutch for me for a couple off words I have never workd to get write -- er, I mean "right". I am slo a two-finger typer, having to lok at the keybpoard as I go. Spell checker really helps to clean up the mistyped words as a result...

    as a matter of fact, I'll NOT spell-check this entry nor clean up my missed keys, just so you can see how itt can get ussing the "typing while blind" approach. One thing that I find is that I type kind of hard and get double-strokes on occasion :-( (eg: "ussing")
  • Anonymous - Thursday, April 22, 2004 - link

    "oh-so-useful system wide spellcheck that my G5 has spoiled me with"

    rather than 'spoiling me' I use it to help improve my spelling.
  • Coombs - Thursday, April 22, 2004 - link

    When I notice that the computer is using too much memory, I run MacJanitor to clean up cache etc. That usually releases a significant amount of memory. I ran it just now: 902MB Used vs 378 Free memory changed to 510MB used and 770 Free and MacJanitor is not done yet.
  • T Money - Thursday, April 22, 2004 - link

    To #11, how do you set up that floating cube thing? That would be a fun toy for when i'm bored.
  • pbrice68 - Thursday, April 22, 2004 - link

    I have a "Downloads" folder set up in List View organized by descending Creation Date. I then have a Folder Action attached to "Downloads" that, when the folder is opened, creates a folder with the current date. As subfolders, it creates a Media folder, Picture folder, Archive folder, and Documents folder. I forget where I picked this script up, but it might be called "Download Sorter." It is excellent.

    The first time you open the folder each day (I've got my Downloads folder sitting in my Dock) it creates a folder named, for example, April 21, 2004. It then files all the items neatly into the appropriate folder based on file types. Any unrecognized are just filed with the dated folder.

    It seems odd, at first, because you would think that stuff would be easily lost within the dated folderrs. But, the dated folders make it easy to find items that you have recently downloaded. Anything older than a few days is easily found with the Finder's live search toolbar item set to selection.

    Also, a little tip, when using List view in the Finder, holding in Option when you click a folder's disclosure trianlge opens and closes all subfolders, as well.
  • Jon - Thursday, April 22, 2004 - link

    For Divx playback, 3ivx is definitely the superior decoder. The only thing the official Divx codec has is VBR MP3 playback, but I haven't hit that snag in quite a while. 3ivx will have superior quality than either the Divx codec or VLC/mplayer2, so I use that when I can. But VLC is cool because you can make it use OpenGL and tile the video to a floating cube.
  • Anonymous - Thursday, April 22, 2004 - link

    "4) I have yet to figure out the sense behind the icon organization on my desktop. I swear I've done this a tremendous number of times - I set the desktop to keep icons arranged by modification date, yet I still get seemingly randomly placed icons. The same applies for keeping icons arranged by name, type, creation date and just about anything else I can think of. It's a bit annoying, especially with so much stuff on my desktop - thus problems 3 and 4 are somewhat related."

    When organizing by type OSX will sort by the way the sort key appears in list view. So '.SPRG' files which have the default kind 'Document' appear after '.dmg' files with kind 'disk image file' and before folders with kind 'Folder'

    Also I think maybe some weird things count as modifying a file, so that might screw up the sort by last modification date.

    "6) DivX files no longer seem to want to play under Quicktime for me."

    I've noticed that some DivX files don't seem to play correctly or at all in Quicktime. I have no idea what the problem could be (anything from many DivX files not being to spec to serious bugs in the Quicktime plugin) but VLC seems to work pretty well and I like it better than MPlayer.

    "7) Once I'm sure that the 1GB sticks play well, I'm going to try and throw in another 4 x 512MB sticks to see what 6GB feels like. Before you scoff, I have run out of memory once under OS X with 4GB installed - but I have a feeling it was due to Excel just being its ornery self."

    I think you've already established that OS X will fill an infinite amount of RAM given enough time. ;) How much performance degradation did you notice after filling 4GB?

    Excel? http://www.quantrix.com/ is supposed to be better (pricy, windows only, flash demo on site) It's a clone of Quantrix from NeXTStep (The Omni guys also came from NeXT) There's a free beta clone for OS X called FlexiSheet http://www.materialarts.com/FlexiSheet/index.html
  • Scott - Thursday, April 22, 2004 - link

    On...

    4) I have yet to figure out the sense behind the icon organization on my desktop. I swear I've done this a tremendous number of times - I set the desktop to keep icons arranged by modification date, yet I still get seemingly randomly placed icons. The same applies for keeping icons arranged by name, type, creation date and just about anything else I can think of. It's a bit annoying, especially with so much stuff on my desktop - thus problems 3 and 4 are somewhat related.

    ...I have my desktop set to organize icons by name, and it works fine. But it organizes them alphabetically in columns from right to left, rather than the more-standard left to right (file names that start with a number are first in line).

    Maybe the right-to-left setup is throwing you off?
  • TMoney - Thursday, April 22, 2004 - link

    I second the recomendation of VLC for your DiVX movies. VLC is much nicer under OS X than under windows, and seems to deal with problem files a bit better.
  • galactusofmyth - Thursday, April 22, 2004 - link

    And you should check out Notetaker at aquaminds.com. Its just about become my favorite application. If you're familiar with OmniOutliner, MS OneNote or such, its like those programs on steroids.
  • ViRGE - Thursday, April 22, 2004 - link

    3) I second Lucian's plugin reccomendation. That's all I use, and it works great.

    6) Adding codecs to Quicktime is just flat out kludgy. I would personally reccomend going with VLC, which has a good interface, and a swiss-army knife's worth of features, like Mplayer2.

    8) Office in CT!? I hope you're dragging the rest of the team with you. ;-)
  • galactusofmyth - Thursday, April 22, 2004 - link

    there is nothing on my dekstop, not even hard drive icons. I create 3 folders: 1 for downloads, another for expanded files (which I dragged to the dock) and 1 called "My Other Desktop", which is where I temporarily put odds and ends I need to get to as if they were on my desktop (attribution - kind of like "Desktop - not" Bob LeVitus talks about in his book The OS X Files). Since its a folder, everything in it stays nice and tidy based on your preference settings. And my desktop is always clean and minimalist. Definitely send all your downloads to a download folder. You can clean this out fairly easily and often. Stuffit Expander can be set to expand files to a default folder, thus the expanded folder. Keep both the download and expanded folder sorted by date in list view, which makes things easy to find (mostly - caveat is if you d/l something 4 years old).
  • Diggory Laycock - Thursday, April 22, 2004 - link

    3 - Downloads:

    Many people (including me) have an "incoming" folder in their home - download to this and clean it out every so often.
  • xype - Thursday, April 22, 2004 - link

    You could use Folder Actions to automagically sort your downloads when they are copied to the Desktop or the folder you have selected as your main download folder. Or use Folder Actions to automagically delete older downloads. And you can try out QuickSilver (http://blacktree.com/apps/quicksilver/) while you're at it, it improves productivity quite a bit.
  • Lucian - Thursday, April 22, 2004 - link

    For viewing PDFs from within your browser, try installing this plugin: http://www.schubert-it.com/pluginpdf/
  • bakshi - Thursday, April 22, 2004 - link

    Re: DivX troubles

    1. Check to see that you don't have another codec hijacking DivX files (open your file and Show Info on it to see what codec Quicktime has decided is appropriate).

    2. Check /Library/Quicktime (and possibly also ~/Library/Quicktime) to see which other components you have installed. You can add/remove components as necessary. Quicktime Player only requires a relaunching to reflect any changes you make.

    3. Quit QT Player and trash your Quicktime preferences (~/Library/Preferences/*anything with 'quicktime' in it).


    I've found the best playback of DivX files under OS X is achieved by installing the DivX5 component (for its AVI reader) and following up with the 3ivX codec (for its superior performance and decoding quality).

    HTH.

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