Category Archives: Software

Useful apps – in the Menu Bar

Software

For OS X users.

Setting up the economy Hackintosh which my buddy FU Steve built the other day made me realize just how many little applications I use which require installation on a new machine.

Several of these appear in the menu bar on my desktop and here are a few words about the ones which add greatest value.

Dropbox:

You can download Dropbox here. It provides 2gB of free cloud storage and is handy for exchanging large files with friends when Mail rejects them as attachments. Equally, it stores your 1 Password key chain allowing you to use 1 Password on any computer. MobileMe does not work properly with 1 Password, in case you were thinking of going there. Plus MM will soon be shuttered by Apple and who knows what their cloud offering will support? 1 Password availability is a tremendous time saver when setting up a new machine which invariably requires the input of many cryptic serial numbers for newly installed software.

Dropbox will install a folder in your Finder which makes it very easy to access and to move files as with any Finder folder.

Fingerprint:

When Apple added wireless printing to its iOS devices only selected printers from Hewlett Packard supported it. Given that the worst run US computer company, HP, is now getting out of the PC (and printer?) business (who knows with these jerks?), it’s not a great place to depend on for your printing needs but you can get iOS to work with any Bonjour printer using Fingerprint. Just remember to switch on Printer Sharing in System Preferences. More here.

Ralink:

If you use an aftermarket USB wireless dongle for broadband, Ralink provides updated drivers which work with Lion and allow wireless to work. This used to be an ugly dock icon but is now a discreet menu bar one. More here.

Moom:

Moom rocks! Not only can you finally get the green button in app windows to work properly – it’s still broken in Lion – you can save your favorite window arrangement in Moom and restore it at the click of a button. More here.

Air Display:

Air Display allows you to use your iPad as an additional display at a pinch. More here.

LogMeIn:

Need to access a file on your home or office machine when you only have the iPad or a notebook with you on the road? LogMeIn is the answer. It’s surpisingly fast to refresh screens and works perfectly with my three display setup, showing any one of the three or all three at once, though that’s a bit of an eye strain on an iPad display. More here.

SMARTReporter:

SMARTReporter tells you about the health of your drives – spinning disc or SSD. If a drive is failing the icon turns red. Why wouldn’t you install this? More here.

Temperature Monitor:

If you forced me to have just one menu bar icon, it would without a doubt be Temperature Monitor. This utility shows you temperatures at selected points in your machine and I have mine set to display CPU Core #1 for my Core2Quad and Core i3 CPUs. For whatever reason, core #1 in these multi core CPUs always seems to run warmest. Having lost any number of Apple’s poorly engineered iMacs and MacBooks to overheating, you can understand just how sensitive I am to proper temperature management. More here.

Airport status:

Wonder why I have this in the Menu Bar when I use a wireless dongle with Ralink software, above? Well, I also use a PCI-E TPLink internal wireless card set up to emulate Airport. In other words, I have two wireless systems working simultaneously, in case one goes down. Without wireless you are literally dead to the world, something I cannot afford in my day job. It’s like that old joke about Jaguar car owners. You always own two. One to drive, one with the mechanic. Of course, now that Jags are made in India, you only need one.

DVD ejection ‘button’:

Arrogant Apple doesn’t want you placing this in your Menu bar and makes no such option available in System Preferences. Simply follow these instructions and you can open your DVD drive regardless of the keyboard you are using.

Time Machine:

I use an external Time Machine versioned backup HDD and take it with me when traveling, in the event of fire or earthquake damage to my office location. You can invoke this icon from System Preferences->Time Machine. My backup philosophy is on display here.

MobileMe sync:

One thing MobileMe does well, when it’s not down that is, is to keep your Calendars, Address Book and Safari bookmarks sync’d across all your OS X and iOS devices. Essential to me and an incredible time saver when setting up a new machine.

Time and Date:

Not as obvious as you might think. It took Apple until Snow Leopard to finally provide a full Time and Date display. If you haven’t realized that, check System Preferences now.

That’s it for selected Menu Bar icons. The beauty of all these apps is they work on a Hackintosh. Why, they even work on your overheating iMac. In a follow-up piece I’ll address some of the other applications I find essential in my daily OS X use.

ClamXav

Software

Mac virus scan.

Macs don’t get viruses. Well, OK, not much anyway.

In my decade of using Macs I have never run any anti-virus software and, as far as I know, never got a virus. If I have it has made no difference, as I have seen the grey OS ‘kernel panic’ screen maybe three or four times in that decade (absent when hacking and it was my own fault!). The last time this happened in regular use was maybe 4 years ago, so it’s not like I’m worrying.

This is why I tend to view the scare stories put out now and then by the major anti-virus app makers – McAfee and Norton – as so much disinformation intended to ramp up sales of their products. Indeed, while Apple constantly patches security holes in its Apps, the first time I recall them making an OS update for a virus was the 10.6.8 update of Snow Leopard a few weeks ago to stave off the MacDefender virus, whose Russian creator was just arrested a few days ago. The virus was funded by ChronoPay, Russia’s PayPal and evidently a brother under the skin when it comes to business ethics. Doubtless, they are paying off the KGB as you are reading this. (That’s Russia’s version of the plea bargain – Putin gets richer and life goes on as usual). What Apple was really staving off is user stupidity. This thing would pop up on the screen from nowhere asking you to download an anti-virus program, and would infect your Mac once you did so. Well, there’s one born every minute, as the old saying has it.

The other common invasion attempt is emails from fraudsters representing themselves as PayPal and asking that you ‘update your information’, part of which ‘update’ requires you enter your password. Well, duh! Known as ‘phishing’, the victim here deserves everything he gets and finds out soon enough when his PayPal account has been emptied. So now instead of PayPal and their partner in crime, eBay, cheating you, someone else has. Same difference. Good luck recovering a dime from PayPal, by the way.

However, the other day my eye was caught by a free virus scan utility curiously named ClamXav. A Mac source mentioned it so I downloaded it and scanned the 1tB HDD where my data – some 650gB – reside. 311 minutes later it reported 7 viruses among the 3 million + files it had scanned, all being phishing viruses in deleted and unopened emails. I zapped those and went away happy. Note to self: Trash deleted emails in future. Not bad when you consider those data files had gone through many migrations among successive machines over the past decade.

You can download ClamXav by clicking the picture below; the maker says its fully compatible back to OS Tiger, 10.4:

Click the picture to go to the ClamXav download page.

You really want to set this up on a ‘set-and-forget’ schedule, so after doing the first lengthy scan of all my data drives, I set ClamXav to do a daily virus definition update and to scan just my data directory (10 minutes) right after, thus:

Daily update and scan setting in ClamXav.

I’m using the app with OS 10.7 Lion, and tell ClamXav to quarantine infected files in a separate directory whence they are easily zapped. Remember to Empty Trash after deleting the bad files. Be sure to download it using the above link; the version downloadable from the Apple AppStore does not have full functionality, for some reason lost on me.

Upgrading to iPhoto ’11

Software

Don’t pay twice!

Until I downloaded OS Lion on my MacMini a week ago, I had never made an online OS X AppStore purchase. So while the experience was painless, and I suppose over-the-air app downloads make sense for all but those cursed with bandwidth limits or poor broadband, I was still fighting an old prejudice whuch has it that you really want DVD versions of all your software in case something blows.

This is really a dated view and when I thought about it I realized that I have been buying and updating key applications from the likes of Adobe for at least a couple of years. My Photoshop CS5 upgrade from CS2, large as it is, was by download and if the installed app ever fails I can simply download it again, the input of my serial number ensuring that the replacement is at no charge.

And it’s time to move to the AppStore way. The iPad works flawlessly with the iOS AppStore and on the occasions the AppStore goes down a restart of a download has never resulted in any additional charges. Still, at almost 5gB, Lion did give me pause.

The AppStore approach for OS X devices brings with it Apple’s rapid obsoleting of the DVD drive. Having been among the early adopters of shipping software on DVDs, they have pretty much said the DVD is now dead. The MacBook Air has no DVD drive, the latest MacMini has removed it (causing much angst for Netflix mail renters) and I would expect it will not last long on the iMac either. For those pining after the DVD there’s a $100 plug-in DVD drive available at your local Apple Store and, to be fair, the latest non-DVD Mini is $100 less. Indeed, when Apple releases a ‘hard copy’ of Lion next month it will come on a minuscule USB flash drive, not on a disk. By the way, until streaming movie databases improve, I’m sticking with Netflix mail rentals where the 120,000 movie catalog compares favorably with the 12,000 or so available for streaming. Worse, owing to licensing agreements, the streaming catalog frequently drops movies. So for movie fans, the DVD is far from dead.

Whether you like Apple’s pushing of the limits here or not, there’s everything to like about their new licensing approach for software. Simply stated, any software purchased can be used on any Mac you own at no extra charge. So to test this out I went to the AppStore on my MacBook Air and bought the latest iPhoto ’11 for $15. No problem. I did not have to buy the whole iLife suite, as the AppStore lists the component parts separately.

Then I hopped over to the Hackintosh, and into the AppStore, but when I went to the iPhoto page it was asking me for another $15. What gives?

Call it poor instructions or user error; what you have to do is click on this icon in the AppStore application:

You will then see all your purchased/installed apps and subsequent downloads – click on the word ‘Installed’ – are free.

I suspect iPhoto is looked down on by many serious snappers as so much of an amateur toy. That’s doing it an injustice. The processing (Edit) controls have steadily improved, the integration with book making and card creation is excellent and it’s just the ticket for family snaps where Photoshop or Lightroom are overkill. Exporting to your web site is easy as can be. I have been using the BetterHTMLExport plugin with iPhoto for many years and am pleased to report that iPhoto ’11 is the first version which did not require reinstallation of the plugin.

The processing controls in iPhoto ’11.

Hit the option key on your keyboard and the ‘Exposure’ slider, top right, becomes a highlight recovery slider. Very handy and very fast and easy to use. iPhoto ’11 has no problems handling RAW files – the image above is from my G1 and the original is RAW, as indicated in the histogram.

My iPhoto library contains some 20,000 snaps and the update of the database to iPhoto ’11 from ’09 took some 15 minutes on my HackPro.

One week with Lion

OS X

A hype update, so far.

The real story of Lion.

While committed Mac OS X users have little choice but to update to Lion sooner or later and, at $30 it’s hardly a big deal economically, how much better is Lion than its rock stable predecessor, Snow Leopard?

I think there are two answers to this. For the casual user who grew up with iOS on the iPhone or iPad and who has a Mac laptop or is willing to spend another $80 on a trackpad for his desktop Mac, Lion probably works well. Many of the familiar iPad gestures are there, software is available by download only from the Mac store and eye candy in the guise of Mission Control and the like is there in abundance. Further, if you like the rendering of ‘Conversations’ in Apple iOS Mail, where it’s easy to scroll through a thread of exchanges, then you will also like this added feature in Lion.

But for longer time users Lion is nothing more or less than a pain in the you-know-what. You lose all your prized PPC applications, Apple having deleted the Rosetta emulator to force those with PPC iMacs to upgrade their hardware and software, making Lion the most expensive OS upgrade ever for these users. If your broadband is slow or bandwidth limited, forget about downloading the OS and many of the larger apps from the App Store. Life is too short and the telcos and cable companies too greedy. And if you use peripherals which require dedicated drivers, then you are going to be hunting around for these – or waiting for them to be released – before your hardware can be ‘un-bricked’. This happened to my external USB wireless dongle and my third display driven by a USB-to-DVI adapter. Mercifully, both vendors were really on the ball, and new drivers have been installed and functionality recovered. Also, thankfully, my Brother HL-2170W and HP DesignJet 90 printers continue to work every bit as well as they did with Snow Leopard.

Those suffering from confirmation bias – you paid for it so it must be good – will regale you with tales of how much faster Lion is than Snow leopard. Utter nonsense. Objective test measurements show it is 2-5% slower and your machine will run 5-7F hotter. Good luck if you are using one of Apple’s cooling-challenged iMacs where sleek design has made CPU and GPU cooling an afterthought. And if you choose to install your own SSD, search out TRIM Enhancer for garbage management because Apple has made sure that Lion’s built-in TRIM capabilities will be denied you, reserved for Apple-installed overpriced SSDs only. An indicator, if ever one was needed, of the growing ‘make a buck at any cost and squeeze your customer until the pips squeak’ mentality becoming increasingly pervasive at 1 Infinite Loop.

And those same long time OS X users will find they have to spend time reversing all the garish, dumbing down of Lion to make it look and feel like what was so well done by Snow Leopard. I address many of the more common issues here.

So what’s good? After one week of intense use with many applications I have had no lock-ups or glitches on any of my HackPro (Core2Quad 2.83gHz, 8gB RAM, Nvidia 9800GTX+ graphics, 2 SSDs, 2 HDDs), MacBook Air (11″ mid-2010 Core2Duo 1.4gHz, 2gB RAM model with integrated Intel 320M graphics. SSD) or Mac Mini (2010 model, Core2Duo, 5gB RAM Intel 320M, HDD). On my main work machine, the HackPro, hacking Lion for installation was the easiest yet, Hackintosh support having improved mightily in the past few years. Further, running a half-dozen big apps simultaneously is no big deal. This includes Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 3, iPhoto, Safari, Firefox, iBank, Word 2008, Excel 2008, Numbers, Pages, you name it. Just like Snow Leopard.

For that we should be truly grateful. Most of the other ‘enhancements’ are simply a waste of time – the time it will take a demanding user to reverse them. But if you do not want to be locked out of the Apple ecosystem and its upcoming iCloud, updating to Lion becomes a requirement.

Lion with three Dell 2209WA displays.

An efficient Lion installation

OS X

Saving space.

If you use a Solid State Drive for your Mac OS and apps, then you know that the small, costly SSD can fill up quickly. If you download Lion from the App Store onto a machine with Snow Leopard installed, the download is what Apple calls an ‘incremental’ one. Only changed files are updated. OS X aficionados swear than the only real OS X installation is a ‘clean’ one, meaning you install Lion on a fresh drive or partition and then migrate over from your Snow Leopard drive or partition just what you need. I have never seen any comparative performance measurements to substantiate this claim so, until I do, I disregard it as so much urban myth.

So assuming you do an incremental install, one thing the installer will not do is erase apps and files you no longer need.

Which are these?

First, any PPC app – one written to run on Apples using IBM G3/4/5 CPUs, will no longer run. The brilliant PPC emulator software known as Rosetta, included through the last version of Snow Leopard, is no more. Which of your apps are PPC? Go to Applications->Utilities->Activity Monitor and click on the ‘Kind’ column heading to sort your apps by Intel, Intel (64 bit) and PPC.

Activity Monitor displays which CPU apps run on.

Well, guess what. As long as you have copies of your PPC apps in a Snow Leopard disk or partition, you might as well delete these from your Lion installation because there’s no way they will ever work.

Well, how about all the other crud which has built up from generations of machines? Time to fire up the free Omni DiskSweeper which, after a few minutes grinding (or few seconds if you use an SSD) will tell you where all your files reside, sorted by size in decreasing order. Now you can get serious about purging stuff, but do make a backup before you go ballistic.

Here’s my Users directory – the biggest part of which is MobileSync (backups of iPad/iPhone etc which could be erased); Music can be moved to an HDD. VirtualBox is only needed if you must run Windows. That lot comprise some 18gB of the 30.3gB,meaning you only really need 12gB for Users:

Add to that Applications, which means Applications+Library+usr:

All the Lion stuff adds another 5gB.

Here are my biggest Apps:

From the above approach you can figure what you need on an SSD boot drive which is to contain OS Lion + Users + Apps/Library and hence how large the SSD needs to be, allowing +10% for free space used for temp/scratch files, Mac OS X updates and any new apps you decide to add.

I suspect that, unless you have tons of big apps and/or a huge mail database, 40gB will do it nicely for you – meaning use 36gB and keep 10% free. My SSDs are 120gB but if I was normal you wouldn’t be reading this.

Update:

Reader Fazal Majid has pointed out below in his Comment to this post that there’s a free app named Monolingual which does all of the above and more. I used it and gained 0.51gB on my SSD (Monolingual erroneously reported a gain of 1.0gB) compared to the status immediately after upgrading to OS Lion. It took a couple of minutes to run and I could see it extracting PPC code from many current apps like iPhoto and Lightroom. The apps remaining on my HackPro continue to run fine.

You can download Monolingual by clicking below:

Click to download Monolingual.

However, a check of the Library->Application Support directory disclosed that related files in this directory were not removed. They are, for the most part, small, but it’s a shame the app authors did not go all the way. Still, the price is right.

Thanks Fazal!