You can get an early build of Google Chrome for Mac here. Use at your own risk!
I’ll let you know if it blows up my Mac in my next post…
Posts Tagged ‘mac’
Google Chrome for Mac
June 9th, 2009Apple 24″ LCD Cinema Display – WOW!!
January 16th, 2009As I mentioned last month I was considering getting an Apple 24″ LED Cinema Display to compliment my Macbook Pro. A few weeks ago when I finally got my fantasy football winnings for this year I pulled the trigger and ordered it from PC Connection. After checking around with a few places I was pretty happy with the deal I got from PC Connection. Due to them not charging for any taxes I was able to get a better deal there than I could have gotten through my neighbor who gets discounts from Apple through his work.
Considering that I work with dual 19″ monitors at work daily I didn’t think I’d be too impressed with a 24″ and was really actually kind of bummed that a decent 30″ like a Samsung 305T or a Dell UltraSharp 3008WF was so expensive. I must say that I am more than blown away after using the 24″ Apple display. At first I was really considering not getting the Apple since it didn’t have any HDMI or DVI inputs (for watching HDTV, etc). But after I realized that I really wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) be using this monitor to watch TV and the fact that without this monitor I would have to buy a Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter ($99 – to hook up a different monitor) and an extra power adapter ($79 – for convenience) the decision got much easier.
What really stands out the most with this display is just how bright the thing is. With the LED display it goes from off to maximum brightness in an instant. Also since it’s LED based the power it uses is much less than a comporable LCD display. Having both LED displays in the laptop and the monitor really make you realize how crappy older flat panel monitors are. Once you use an LCD display, you won’t want to go back. In addition to the power savings that the LCD offers this monitor boasts the same environmental (“green”) changes that Apple made to the Macbook. Everybody’s “going green”!
Overall I’ve been very happy so far with the display. Unfortunately the room that I’m turning into my office here at the house is a work in progress so I haven’t been using it daily, but when I have used it I have really been sad when I’ve put it away. As much as I may like to, having it sitting on the dining room table with a family of 5 just isn’t practical 
Once the office is done and I get it mounted (I picked up the VESA compatible mount too) I’ll definitely post more about it and how well the dual setup with the Macbook Pro works.
Picasa for Mac, finally!
January 11th, 2009Google has finally released a version of their Picasa desktop application for Mac. I have been waiting for this for a while and it couldn’t come a minute sooner.
Our iPhoto library here at home is over 63GB and has almost 16,000 items (photos and movies) and gave me a big scare a few weeks ago when the library wouldn’t show any pictures except for the ones that I had imported from my camera in December 2008 (this was still in December). Luckily I was able to copy the library off to another hard drive, open the backup copy and do some maintenance to get it working. But we did lost the pictures that had worked from that December upload.
I think what I would need to do with iPhoto is break our 1 big library into smaller libraries, maybe by year to keep that running more smoothly. I think I’m going to work on pulling everything out of iPhoto and moving it into Picasa. This is also because our Flickr service is up for renewal and I don’t think I want to continue with it. I have been putting pictures on Picasa’s Web Albums lately and I like that much more than Flickr.
Between Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Picasa, I really must say that I’ve been very impressed with all of the Google products that are now a part of my daily life.
Control multiple computers with a single keyboard and mouse
July 16th, 2007I recently reformatted my Dell Laptop and put Windows XP back on it. My wife had been using it for the past year or so and I found that I was wiping it every few months. So at one point I put Ubuntu Linx on it to help prevent the “wipe cycle”. It worked out well but she really was’t using it much anymore and I found I wanted to get it setup to work with the VPN we’re setting up at my office.
So, I got Windows XP back on it and got all my development tools setup on it. I’ve been running it at the office next to my desktop and remembered seeing an article on Lifehacker a few months ago about some software that let you basically have a software based KVM switch. So, I went back on their site and found this article. And, after about 10 minutes of setup time, I’m happy to report that Synergy, the application they used, works like a champ!
Even though I’m not taking advantage of it at the moment, the best feature about this app is that it’s cross platform. Oh, and did I mention that it is free? Gotta love the opensource!
Here’s a snippet from the article I linked to above…
You don’t need a hardware switch to share one keyboard and mouse amongst several different computers. All you need is the free, cross-platform application, Synergy.
Synergy connects one keyboard and mouse to any computer on your network, making a dual- or triple-computer setup work more like a dual- or triple-monitor setup. Synergy even allows you to share clipboard data across your computers and operating systems.
Today I’ll detail how to set up Synergy on your home network to control all of your desktops with one mouse and keyboard.
How it works
Synergy uses one computer as a server – that’s the computer that will be sharing its keyboard and mouse. The rest of your computers – the ones you want to control – will need to be set up as Synergy clients.
The great part about Synergy is that you can customize the program to work with the layout of your computers. For example, if you’ve got your MacBook running to the left of your Windows PC, you can set up Synergy so that moving your mouse to the left of your Windows monitor will seamlessly jump your mouse across virtual space where it lands safely on your Mac. Whichever desktop currently holds your mouse is also the desktop to which your keyboard’s keystrokes will be sent. Make sense? Add to that Synergy’s clipboard sharing and you’ve got one helluva convergence app.
Comments (from previous blog):
Synergy is a good cross-plaftform tool. But UltimateMouse is a much simple to use, fast and efficient tool among Windows platform, including copy/paste files among computers and open files from one computer to another one to fully use the computer screen real estate for design and multitasking.
