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Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action

Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action  (aka “Why Apple is so successful)

How to make Mac OS X awesome

I’ve recently started using Mac OS X (Snow Leopard) – having just bought a MacBook – and there are few things about it I found annoying, and some functionality I was missing, so this blog post is an attempt to list the “hacks” I’ve made to get Mac OS X doing what I want it to.

There are plenty of “obvious” customizations (disabling the middle mouse button from showing the dock, changing the default text selection colour, etc) that I’m sure you can figure out on your own. So here goes:

1. Launchy – I’m not sure what the appeal of “Quicksilver” is, maybe I should give it a try sometime, but I’ve been using Launchy in Windows for ages and can’t live with out it – it’s like “Spotlight”, only much better. If you’re going to use Launchy, you may as well disable Spotlight and save on some processing (it scans all new files and extracts “metadata” for it’s search results).
2. RightZoom – When I “maximize” a window, I want it maximized… full screen… not to some size Mac OS determines based on how much content there is in the window. This app fixes Mac OS’s “green button” to maximize windows to full screen.
3. Dock Dodger – Some applications (such as “Launchy”, in my case) display an icon in your dock when they really don’t need to… this app prevents applications from doing this. You can also make these changes to an app manually by following these instructions.
4. xGestures – A Mac version of “StrokeIt”, which lets you setup “gestures” (basically drawings with your mouse) to do various things from opening applications/sites to controlling iTunes. My main use for it is minimizing, maximizing (see script below) and closing applications – much faster than moving your mouse to the other side of the screen and clicking a button.
5. “Maximize” script – An Apple Script for maximizing the active window, I use it with xGestures, but it doesn’t seem to work with “RightZoom” (it does a regular “calculated size” maximizing, not fullscreen).
6. Symlinks – This a console command, in most *nix operating systems including Mac OS X, which allows you to create a link to another file or folder somewhere else on your system. With it you’re able to “redirect” where files are saved – most applications store their settings in a specific location. Using symlinks I have all my applications with saved passwords (eg FireFox and FileZilla) reading and writing their settings to an encrypted TrueCrypt container, which is a really good thing if ever my MacBook gets stolen.
7. BetterTouchTool – I found this program while looking for a way to enable “window snapping”, which it asks you if you want to enable at the start of the installation, but I must say my windows don’t seem to be doing much snapping. It still has a ton of other useful features, such as Windows 7′s “snapping” a window to quarter/half screen depending where you drag it to, and a bunch of extra touchpad options.
8. Fixing “Screen Sharing” – While it may appear as simple as ticking this box in “Sharing” (under “System Preferences”), I wasn’t able to connect to my MacBook after doing this and instead got an error saying “Incompatible Version” with my VNC client. The forum post linked to explains how to fix all of that – it’s a bit lengthy, but works. You might need to enable your root account and then “su” (switch to the “root” user – just make sure to “exit” when you’re done) to execute the commands.
9. ControllerMate – Although I haven’t used this yet, it’s meant to be like AutoHotkey (for Windows, which I’ve used often), which makes it easy to write powerful scripts to automate stuff and control stuff.
10. scplugin – TortoiseSVN for Mac… doesn’t work quite as well in Snow Leopard as it does in Windows (you have to install a toolbar item) – an essential. In case you’re having problems with a certificate, read this.

I’ll probably update this list on my quest to make using Mac OS X more efficient and enjoyable.

Why I love Macs

I used to hate Macs, but Apple have made 2 clever decisions recently that changed that… first they switched to Intel CPUs making it far easier to convert existing applications to Mac, secondly they build their Mac OS on top of BSD… so you have a “bash” terminal and (nearly) all the “linux commands” at your disposal, and the interface (“window manager”) is WAY better than anything Solaris or Ubuntu could hope to pull off (have you seen the size of the dialog windows in Ubuntu 9.10?). The best of Linux, replacing the crappy window managers with something far superior, applications with native ports (eg: World of Warcraft, soon to be all the Half-Life Source and Telltale games, ScummVM, even Microsoft Office etc) that make life so much easier than trying to run them on Linux. It might be worth mentioning that there’s also a Mac port of “wine”… just in case you need to run something that there isn’t a Mac vesion of ;)

As if that wasn’t enough to win me over, Macs also do something wonderful from the good-old-Dos-days… keep all the files for an application self-contained (often in a single “.app” file) in ONE place, unlike Windows which needs “Common Files”, DLLs in your Windows directory, and it’s a folder in “Program Files” – why can’t I just put the application where I want it, and run it from there? What about uninstinalling an app on Mac OS? Well you just drag it (normally in your “Applications” folder) to Trash – doesn’t get much simpler than that.

Everything “just works”, sure there was some “getting used to” having come from Windows, but everything makes enough sense. I’m sure at some point I’ll come across something that annoys me, but I’ve pretty much got all the programs I use daily setup and running on my new MacBook, and everything’s working great. My friend even got his 3G through his Nokia cellphone working better on his MacBook Pro than he could on his Windows 7 HP laptop – all he did was plug it in and his Mac detected and setup everything. The quality of the hardware is also brilliant, everything is properly finished off and solid – the way it should be.

I bought my MacBook so I could develop apps for my iPhone – yes, I bought one of those too. The iPhone is without any doubt the best cellphone in the world – especially if you “jailbreak” it, which allows you to install all kinds of extra programs and games on it, even “Bochs” which is an open source virtual machine app (yes, that means you you can run Windows XP on your iPhone). The iPhone, like Mac OS, is built on BSD which means you basically have a Linux box in your pocket – I can SSH into, and out from, my iPhone and even open a terminal on my phone itself. How about setting it up as a wireless access point (should there not be a wireless connection around, and you want to share your 3G connection with a wireless device… like an iPad). You can also get a “video-out” cable which allows you to connect your iPhone to a TV, projector, etc – perfect for business presentations, or just playing games on a bigger screen (it also has an “audio-out” plug, so you can connect it to your sound system).

There seems to be a huge element of “simplicity” in iPhone apps, and I actually prefer the iPhone app versions of YouTube, eBay and Facebook to the browser versions we all know. You just finish thinking that everything you need or want is missing, only to realize you don’t actually know what it is you’re missing… you’re just so used to having far more menu items, tabs, drop downs and buttons than you actually need. Simple, pretty, and efficient.

Moving away from “Macs” and more towards “Apple” quckly, it’s no secret that Apple have pretty much kicked Adobe Flash’s butt – something I’m happy about, I’ve hated Flash for nearly as long as it’s been around – sure the interactivity of it, being able to watch videos and play games, is cool… but it eating up your system resources and crashing so often isn’t. Steve Jobs (of Apple) said that Flash is no longer needed thanks to HTML5. Microsoft’s head of Internet Explorer agreed (that’s right, Microsoft agreeing with Apple, can you believe it). Opera have also gotten on board and echoed the two operating system giants. Not a good time to be Adobe. Apple are also coming out with (or, possibly “stealing”) some really exciting technology.

Admittedly Steve Jobs and Apple aren’t all good, I’m sure anyone with that much power is probably at least a little corrupt… but I have two uber-geeky devices, that work flawlessly and let me do all kinds of “l33t” things. Am I a “fanboy”? I certainly hope not. Do I think Apple have some awesome devices, that I’m able to do everything (and more) that I could/would with non-Apple alternatives? Yes. Would I buy the next iPhone and MacBook? Definitely. I might even end up selling my PC to replace the 2nd had 2.1GHz MacBook I bought, with a brand new MacBook Pro i7 and use it as my “main” machine.

I have been converted, and I’m enjoying every minute of it. It’s easy to hate Macs… when you haven’t tried one.