mac os x

Oct 25 2010

Bodega: The Mac Apps Store for the rest of us

featured 318x122 Bodega: The Mac Apps Store for the rest of us

If you were watching the “Back to the Mac” presentation by Steve Jobs1last week, you heard about the upcoming Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and the announcement of a Mac Apps Store. Jobs suggested that people like the iPhone Apps Store and how it’s so easy to find new software and buy it all from one place. And he’s right.

But what people don’t like is Apple restricting their access to the applications with the functions they want and refusing developers who don’t create applications that are in keeping with what Apple wants for its hardware.

People might want an application store for Macs, but they may not like Apple being the go-between in their search.

The funny thing is, we’ve had an Macintosh applications store available to us for some time. It’s called Bodega and it has been brought to you by Fresh Code. Bodega offers a great selection of applications and, when you choose to make your purchase, you’re directed right back to the developer who created it. All of your application (all of them, not just the ones purchased through Bodega) are listed in the Applications section of Bodega from which you can see if you have any updates to apply—you can even revisit your receipts and serial numbers there.

This free application serves to fill the need for a Mac Apps Store and it’s available for free right now for Snow Leopard.

Bodega: The Mac Apps Store for the rest of us
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  1. if you missed it, here is it really fast [↩]

By RickMacMerc • announcement, apple, Featured, MacMerc.TV, Mini Video, osx, RickMacMerc, shareware, softwareupdates • 4 • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 22 2010

VIDEO: Windows Management with Divvy

Divvy 318x278 VIDEO: Windows Management with Divvy As boring and uninspiring as managing onscreen windows is, Divvy from Mizage makes it dead sexy. I know Mac OS X has Spaces and Exposé and I was all excited about those before they came out too but, now that I have them, they drive me crazy. Spaces I just have turned off and Exposé, though it helps me every so often when I lose a window, is just not a part of my geek utility belt as much as I had envisioned.

Divvy, on the other hand, does what I need doing and does it well. I can tell it, “I want this window to take up exactly 4/7 of the left side of my screen and I want this other window wit take up the other 3/7.” Heck, I can even tell it to make them overlap a bit. All I have to do is summon Divvy’s little window, drag and draw the area on the miniature screen it shows and the window snaps into submission.Then I can save those dimensions and setups to Divvy’s shortcuts menu and reduce the whole procedure down to summoning Divvy’s window and hitting a shortcut key.

Divvy does suffer from some logistical problems with complicated application interfaces like Adobe Photoshop, where there are windows and palettes and multiple navigation bars, but it does work—you may have to adjust the grid in Divvy’s Appearance tab to get better handling around the toolbars. Divvy is fabulous and sells for $14 US.

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Hey, someone said something about a discount code?»
VIDEO: Windows Management with Divvy
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By RickMacMerc • Featured, MacMerc.TV, Mini Video, News, osx, poweruser, productivity, productivity, RickMacMerc, shareware, tutorial, Tutorials • 2 • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 27 2009

Intro to Darwinism

By
Jon
Gales

No,
this isn’t going to be a religious or scientific battle about the origin of
our universe. It’s going to be a first look at Darwin, the underlying level
of Mac OS X. Right now you are probably asking yourself why, how, or are confused
as to what Darwin really is. I can give a you a great nutshell answer for each.
Strap on your geek boots, here we go!

 

What:

Darwin
is FreeBSD for the PowerPC processor (G3 and up actually). It is open source
and can be downloaded free of charge from http://darwin.org/projects/Darwin/1.3/release.html
(an Apple site). The download is about 120 megs and the installation can’t
be easier. If you have ever tried to install Linux you will envy Darwin’s
install. It is truly drag and drop (and there’s not even any dragging!). Just
double click, select an empty partition and you are in UNIX. I said before
that Darwin is the underlying level of OS X. Here is what that means:

Aqua
Carbon Classic Cocoa
Open
GL		 Quartz QuickTime

DARWIN

As you can
tell, Darwin is on the bottom of our chart; this means it controls all the
base level OS operations. You can access Darwin in the Terminal.app in OS
X (in the Utilities folder). That’s all good but we power users want more.
For that we move to why.

Why:

Why not? Well,
it isn’t user friendly, has no native GUI (X Windows can be installed but
isn’t part of Darwin), can’t run any of your applications, and the list gets
longer. What it does, it does well: all UNIX functions. Aqua is beautiful
but takes RAM and CPU cycles. That is a waste if you are using your box as
a server. OS X has real powerful server tools like Apache built-in, and MySQL
and PHP can be installed making OS X a powerful web server. The same server
can be run from Darwin without the wasted RAM and CPU cycles that Aqua brings.
In fact, Darwin can be your network’s NAT server (for sharing net access).
You can have an older G3 serve as your router/firewall/webserver all without
paying a dime. Even if you don’t want to use those features there is no easier
way to learn UNIX (except using it in the terminal).

How:

Once you run
the installer, go up to the startup disk control panel and select the disk
(or partition) with Darwin on it. If you don’t want to make it the default
disk, just hold Option at startup and select the boot disk at that point (instead
of using the startup disk control panel). After a few minutes you will have
a blinking cursor; type the following:

root

You will get
the following message: "Welcome to Darwin!". This signifies that
you are all logged in and are ready to do anything you choose. Here are the
commands I found most useful:

ls
= list files in current directory
cd
= change
directory (cd / takes you to the main directory)
mkdir
= make directory, creates folder
pico
= opens
up pico (a text editor). A file string followed by pico will open that file
in pico (Ex: pico /files/test.pl will open a file called test.pl located in
the /files directory)

All the OS
X directions in my Perl
tutorial apply to Darwin (since it is OS X).

To connect
to the internet I edited the /etc/iftab file in pico to read:

en0
inet 192.168.1.102 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
en0 inet -DHCP-

The IP address
is specified by my router so that will change depending on your setup. If
you aren’t on DHCP try following the directions on this site: http://www.excel.net/~clobrien/darwin/Network.html

After I was
on the net I did an FTP transfer. To connect to an FTP server type:

ftp
ftp.servername.TLD (replace TLD with the ending tld)

It will prompt
you for a username if necessary and then a password. You can use the cd and
ls commands to move around the file tree. Type: get FILENAME to download
files and: put PATH/TO/FILE.txt to upload files. Type ? for
a list of all commands.

That was my
experience with Darwin… I will write another article once I get PHP and
MySQL going (I am having some difficulties forwarding the right ports to my
computer at the moment).

 

If
you are having trouble or would like to ask me a question, please send me mail:
jonknee@macmerc.com

By admin • Articles, Coding • 0 • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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