mac stuff
Keep this checked.
My “Entire Message” search in Mail.app hasn’t worked for a long time, always just inexplicably returning zero results for any search. Today it was finally causing enough of an inconvenience that I searched for a fix.
I learned that for “Entire Message” searches, Mail just uses Spotlight on the message files. So if you leave this box unchecked (my reason for unchecking it in the first place was that mail messages always cluttered up the results when I was simply trying to launch an app or find a document), “Entire Message” searches simply won’t work, and neither Mail nor Spotlight felt it necessary to tell me this when I unchecked this box in Spotlight Preferences. (You also need to ensure that
~/Library/Mailisn’t excluded from settings in that Privacy tab.)I was impatient, so after fixing that setting, I told Spotlight to manually import the messages immediately:
mdimport ~/Library/MailAs soon as that completed, “Entire Message” searches started working.
Interesting results from OpenCL Benchmark on my 8x2.8 Harpertown Mac Pro:
- The 8800GT, despite being a top-of-the-line video card at the time, doesn’t even come close to the 9600GT (that currently comes in every 15” MacBook Pro except the $1699 configuration) in this benchmark.
- The Mac Pro’s obscene core count helps it remain extremely competitive with modern non-workstation CPUs even when it’s nearly two years old. Despite the Mac Pro’s high price, it stays useful and performance-competitive for many years after purchase — at least 2-3 years longer than a similarly specced laptop. So far, the only limitation I’ve hit on my Mac Pro is I/O performance, and that’s only because I’m holding out on buying SSDs until the X25-M’s next capacity bump and price drop.
- For the admittedly narrow range of operations for which the GPU can be beneficial with OpenCL, a great GPU can significantly close the performance gap between desktops and laptops. (But I can’t stress how infrequently this will be used for the foreseeable future.)
Finally moved iPod out of my iPhone dock because, um, I barely use it and SMS is a major part of my regular communiques. Also I never listen to voicemail.Since you’re a voicemail slacker like me, I suggest PhoneTag, a service that intercepts your voicemail and instead sends you an email with a human-done text transcription and the audio as an MP3 attachment.
Then they become emails that you can quickly skim (and possibly ignore).
The only disadvantage is that it completely takes over from the built-in voicemail, so voicemails will no longer go to Visual Voicemail at all. It was worth the trade-off to me.
Top 5 things you can do RIGHT NOW with your Mac.
MAX OS X TRICKS
None of these will harm your machine or interfere with what you’re doing in any way.
1) Press Cmd, Alt, Ctrl and 8. INVERT WOAH
2) Hold Cmd, shift and 4. Drag a box. PRINT SCREEN CITY
3) Hold down Shift and then minimise something or use Exposé or the Dashboard. SLOW MOTION MADNESS
4) Go to Finder: find your Applications folder. Turn on Cover Flow. Make Cover Flow as big as possible. Look at the icon for TextEdit. IT’S ACTUAL WORDS.
5) This one’s slightly more complicated but worth it. Go to an application called Terminal. You don’t need to click anything once it’s open, just type the word “emacs” (without quote marks). Then press escape. Then press the letter x on the keyboard. Then type tetris or pong. INSTANT GAMING FUN.
(via markuswalcott, holdens, alexisjulian, & ericnelson)
Parallels should be ashamed for spamming their customers with this.
The web version isn’t much better.
Now that I’m on the subject, having owned Parallels Workstation since the beginning and having used VMWare Fusion at work, I can confidently say that VMWare’s is the far better product. It’s much more polished, and most importantly, much more stable than Parallels. I highly recommend that Parallels users give it a try.
What’s the worst Apple application program, and why?
OK, I’ll start. It’s a tie between Safari 3.x and Mail. Safari because it’s slow, and temperamental - I’ll do the slow and temperamental around here, thank you very much - and so much worse than the boring-but-at-least-it-worked 2.x. Mail for pretty much the same reasons, and especially because it’s the poor man’s GMail.
Mail is awful. Safari is tolerable, mostly because it works with the new multi-touch trackpad motions and Firefox doesn’t. I’m not a huge iChat fan either.
I think Mail and Safari are both pretty good, especially considering how bad the competition is and how young they both are. But that’s it — “pretty good”. Neither is great. But my standard may be a little different than yours — I don’t believe anyone has made a truly great web browser or desktop email client. (Having used each of them for long periods, I can confidently say this at least about Eudora, Outlook Express, Outlook, Thunderbird, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Camino, and Safari. Some, like Lotus Notes and Opera, were so awful that I couldn’t use them for long enough periods.)
My vote goes to iCal. It’s not that it’s bad — it’s just inexcusably mediocre for such a simple program. It takes a lot of effort and money to truly improve on mail clients and web browsers, but improving iCal should be cheap and easy — Apple just never seems to think it’s worth the resources, receiving almost no meaningful improvements since its 2002 release. The only significant update was in Leopard a year ago, but this only yielded two major changes:
- Two-way synchronizing with CalDAV. This is great when multiple people need to edit one calendar, such as an executive and an assistant, or a team of people organizing events.
- Moving the “drawer” event-editing interface into an annoying popup, introducing even more interface quirks and unnecessary clicks.
Many simple interface adjustments and minor feature additions could make iCal much better, but for some reason, they just don’t happen.
Re: MacBook Pro comparison
I’m torn between the $1999 and $2500 MacBook Pros. Here are the big factors for me:
Advantages of the $2500 MacBook Pro
- Has extra GPU ram, which is useless to me because I’m not a gamer. BUT, Snow Leopard will take advantage of this extra processing power for normal tasks as well. Is it worth it?
- 6MB of cache. Will I notice it?
I’m opting for the 250gb 7200 rpm drive either way, so the extra capacity the more expensive MBP offers is moot.
Video RAM is mostly used for texture memory in games. This matters if you like playing high-end 3D games with the options cranked up, but for anything Snow Leopard is doing with the GPU, it’s unlikely that the difference between 256 and 512 will ever be noticeable.
The 6 MB of L2 cache is significant (up from 3 MB in the $1999 model), but the clock-speed difference isn’t (2.4 vs. 2.53 GHz), especially since the FSB is the same (1066 MHz). Bigger caches increase performance noticeably in some CPU-intensive tasks, especially number-crunching and typical server roles. But there are diminishing returns, and 3 MB is already pretty good.
My vote’s for the $1999 model. Save that $500 for current and future component upgrades that you’ll actually notice every day: max out the RAM (4 GB, +$150) and always buy the fastest hard drive you can afford. And don’t forget to get AppleCare sometime within the first year of ownership.
