Posts Tagged ‘mac’

Lets say you are running Mac OS X Lion and you have installed Scala to /usr/local/scala. To access scala from the terminal you need to do the following.

cd /etc/paths.d/
sudo vim scala

Add one line with the following in.

/usr/local/scala/bin

Save the file and restart terminal. You’ll now be able to use scala from the terminal.

We see so many broken displays showing their Windows backdrops, it’s a refreshing change to see a Mac one.

Btw, does everyone else still remember when Bed used to be Gatecrasher? I’m so old…

There are quite a few different VNC clients available for Mac, and most of them are, in my experience, pretty disappointing. And totally unnecessary, because OS X actually comes with a build in VNC viewing client which works fine. For some reason though, Apple have kept it pretty well hidden.

Never fear though, because once you know the location, it’s easy to find and use.

/System/Library/CoreServices/Screen Sharing.app

It’s pretty simple, but then I’ve never found the need for all the extra crap a lot of the viewing clients come with – I just want to be able to control a remote computer!

One utility Mac OS X seems to be lacking is a simple text editor such as Notepad for Windows. It comes with TextEdit but the problem is that this uses rich text format (RTF) which is very annoying when editing system files or code.

Thankfully, you can reconfigure it to use plain text.

Simply go to TextEdit on the menu bar and hit Preferences. The top option should allow you to toggle between Plain Text and Rich Text.

Snapz really annoys me because I paid money for what is supposed to be the best product out there, but it’s actually incredibly hard to use because every time I want to take a screen shot I have to google for the shortcut key. By default, it’s this.

Cmd + Shift + 3

I recently updated my MacBook Pro to the new version of OSX, Lion.

So far, I’m not overly impressed. Firstly, when I upgraded Finder totally broke itself. It added a number of documents to the devices bar on the left, which I couldn’t click on, but because they had a long filename they would expand the devices bar all the way over, so every time I opened a Finder window I had to drag it back.

They’ve also got rid of Spaces which allows you to have multiple desktops. They’ve replaced this with Desktops, which is basically the same thing, except that you can only tile them horizontally, whereas before you could set up a grid and scroll each way. Desktops is quite good because you you can gesture from one to the other, but I Miss my grid.

They’ve also taken Dashboard and moved it onto it’s own Desktop which is annoying because the only time I use Dashboard is when I need a calculator, and I need it as an overlay because I want to input some figures which I’m currently looking at.

Some of the new gestures are quite nice, but I now need to use five fingers to show my desktop, which is quite a difficult gesture to perform. I’ve also noticed that it’s just not quite as fast as Snow Leopard and the new full screen apps system just isn’t as seamless as it is in Microsoft Windows. Finally, there are just a few bugs too that need working out, especially with the new scrolling system.

Other than that, it has some quite nice features. I haven’t used Launchpad or Mission Control so I’m not too fussed about those, but gesturing between Desktops is good and being able to turn wi-fi on and off without being prompted for the admin password is good. Unfortunately, if that is all I have to say about a brand new version of an operating system, it’s a bit of a poor show.

I knew there was going to be a fairly painful adjustment phase as I got used to OS X but there are some things that are really bugging me.

Like bugs. For example when I close my final tab on Opera it should go back to my quick launch screen so I can access a shortcut easily. But it doesn’t, it closes the window meaning that if I want to get back to my start screen I have to close the window and open a new one.

Then it’s the little things. For example if I’m selecting a series of files to upload, I move my select file dialog to just over the file boxes to make it a lot easier. But in OS X the file dialog box jumps back to it’s old location between every file.

The image viewing is rubbish as well. On XP I just clicked an image and it opened and then I could just use the arrow keys on my keyboard to navigate through them. No such luck on OS X on any of Preview (the default application), Quick Look (the integrated OS X viewer) or Xee (a little image viewer I grabbed to try and solve the problem). Indeed OS X has nothing that can stand up to the might of IrfanView.

I’m sure I’ll figure it all out in the end and a lot of the problems I will find a workaround or just get used to. I’m sure I’ll eventually find a convenient one keystroke way to lock my screen and remember not to use the scroll bar. But until I do they’re irritating problems.

This sounds far too negative though, in general I’m quite enjoying it, much like having a fly in your drink on a tropical beach – it’s annoying but you’re still on a tropical beach.

I love spaces (same as workspaces for you unix geeks, I can’t for the life of me understand why Windows doesn’t have them), I love the fact I can get 7 hours out of the battery, I love the fact it shuts down in 2 seconds flat rather than the 2 minutes XP takes and I love gestures. Stick with it and good times are ahead.

For those of you that aren’t aware, due to some unfortunate events that have befallen my recently I now have a new laptop. This one is going to be named Tolima and is a rather shiny MacBook Pro.

I went for the higher spec 2.5Ghz Core 2 Duo with the extended hard drive and so far performance seems reasonably swish. I haven’t really put it to the test beyond some big installing but it potters along quite nicely and does some lightening fast shutting down.

The battery life is also very nice, I squeezed around 7 hours out of it last night, a small amount of that time it was on sleep but I certainly wasn’t taking it easy installing going on 20gb of programs and I began to put my life back together. It’s also not much heavier than my old laptop while squeezing another inch into the screen which makes quite a difference to the point I wish I could run it at a higher resolution than 1280.

Only time will tell if I love it or hate it but I’m planning to duel boot it anyway as 7 really is a sexy piece of work.