mac

OK forgive the linkbait title, but since it apparently got you here I’ll make it worth your while, because this is funny. This video will have more impact if I say nothing to introduce it, but if you are looking for a chuckle on your Sunday take a look at Simon Pierro’s iPad, sporting some downright unbelievable features that may or may not be included in iOS 5. Okay, they are absolutely not going to be included on IOS 5 but you should still check out the vid! I know it’s been possible for a while but I still find it amazing that someone with a sense of humor can potentially become world-famous for 15 minutes by way of YouTube…

At the moment (May 2011) Apple has approximately $77 billion in the bank. You never hear the company speculate publicly about what it might or might not do in terms of acquisitions with all that cash, which is probably no surprise. That doesn’t keep industry watchers from making prognostications though,and here’s one of the better ones I’ve heard recently.

It’s an interesting read postulating that the best thing Apple could do with this cash cache would be an end run around ATT, Verizon, et al. and spend it on a data-only carrier. Matthew Panzarino examines whether buying an existing carrier or creating a new one would be the best way forward for “AppleNet”. Pure conjecture, but thought-provoking.

In 1997 Michael Dell proved that no one was so far down that he couldn’t still kick them, when he said that a competitor seemingly on its last legs should just shut down and ‘give the money back to the shareholders.’

From the excellent investment site Bespoke comes a chart showing just how close Apple is now to being the biggest company by market capitalization in the world.

To me this is the most interesting thing of all:

Imagine the question mark that would have popped up in your head had someone said 10 years ago that Apple would be the biggest company in the world but still have less than 10% of the PC market? There isn’t a “pc” in “biggest,” but there surely is an “i”.

This is really a story about the differentiation of ‘computer’ into many different devices, each more appropriate to their function than the Model T- I mean the computer! – was in the 1990s. It was a wonder of versatility then, but the inefficiencies had to go.

Since ‘computers’ are being/will be outmoded by smartphones and pads and jesus boxes that jack into ubiquitous screens, and god knows what else is coming (from myriad companies, not just Apple), Apple may never get to 10% of the computer market. Who would’ve thought it might not matter?

So back to the analysts’ harping on market share. That’s the problem with ‘metrics’: they measure what is known, more or less, and imply that the importance of what you don’t see coming is diminished by being unmeasurable.

MacFUSE allows you to extend Mac OS X’s file handling capabilities. It’s basically an interface that lets the OS see almost anything as a filesystem, and it has a lot of potential uses. The variety is such that I thought a post on how to use Macfuse by way of some existing examples would have some value. On a related note, Digital Media Minute did a post on MacFusion for MacFUSE a while back that you might find interesting.

**Amit Singh’s was the initial developer of MacFUSE. Here’s a 12 minute video of his Macworld 2007 talk “Taming Mac OS X File Systems”, on some of the things you can do with it.

**Go check out iTunesFS, by mulle-kybernetik.com, a way to make your iTunesâ„¢ playlists available as folders in Finder, which some people might find useful…

**Mbleigh.com has a how-to on how he used MacFUSE & sshfs to mount a torrent dropbox to save torrents right to his dropbox, without having to SCP them manually over to Apple TV.

**If you have both a PC and Mac you might be interested in a guide over at Ehow on using MacFuse to share an external drive between both of them. (Mac OS X 10.5)

**Macosxhints.com has a quick tutorial on using MacFuse to read and write to NTFS volumes, for OS X 10.4 and 10.5.

**Wonderhowto has a video on using MacFuse to browse an SSH server through the Mac File System.

If you like to have an organized Dock in OSX, here is a quick hack that will let you organize the applications that live on your dock by placing spacers between them. Here we go…

1. Open Terminal and type (or copy and paste) :

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{"tile-type"="spacer-tile";}'

2. While still in Terminal we will restart the Dock by typing:

killall Dock

Once the Dock has restarted, you will see a space between some of your icons. You can reposition the space, by clicking on it and dragging it to a new location. You can also delete it by dragging it off your dock. You can even have many spacers by typing in the above commands as offen as you like!

A colleague just asked me if I knew of a good CVS client for OSX. Being a Subversion user myself, and having never used CVS, I did not have a recommendation for her.  This is one of the benefits of having a website that is visited thousands of times a day by people from all over the world, many of whom have incredibly good technical knowledge on just about every subject under the sun. So, after all that flattery, I was wondering if anyone reading this would have any experience-based recommendations on a good CVS client for OSX? Please leave a comment. Thanks.

MacOSaiX is a slick freeware program for MacOSX that allows you to make those nifty mosaic photos. You can choose between a number of different shapes for the mosaic tiles and you can choose between images on your computer or images from Google Images to fill the tiles. Especially since I’m a photography buff I love creating this sort of cutting-edge collage or mosaic; I think it’s a more engaging method of presentation sometimes than simply offering a slide show, which we see so much that they’re starting to feel a little bit boring.

Anyway I tried this out and it could not be easier to install and use. I’m thinking that creating some of these mosaic photos on a rainy day with the kids is a great plan!

Chmox is a OSX viewer for Windows Compiled HTML Help (CHM) files viewer. If you develop using PHP, one of the most useful references you can get your hands on is the CHM file from the php.net site. Most PHP developers will be familiar with this tool already, bu t just in case you aren’t, here is your reminder. Chmox lets you view this file, and many others on your Mac.

Some Features provided by HTML Help are:

• Full tree like TOC menu of pages, with even the smallest parts included
• Alpabetical index of all pages [with quick access to functions]
• Full text search (see the chapter about FTS in the CHM)
• Personal favourites listing

Poisoned is a Mac client for the popular Kazaa peer-to-peer file sharing network. Poisoned is a free download for Mac OSX 10.2

Poisoned uses the giFT daemon which is capable of facilitating the communication between the end user and specific filesharing protocols (namely gnutella and FastTrack). This means that when you use Poisoned, you are not only searching the Kazaa network, you are searching the Gnutella network as well (Limewire uses the gnutella network).

Best of all – Poisoned is a native Mac OSX application, so it performs very well (unlike Limewire which is a slow Java app). Poisoned does not use adware or spyware – unlike Kazaa.