apple « Irfan’s Corner on the Web

12Jan/090

Spotlight Hacks

Find some awesome and highly useful spotlight syntax hacks in this blog here

Filed under: apple, software No Comments

29Oct/080

The MacOSX 10.5.5's Finder sucks at handling WebDAV. I was at first glad to connect to the WebDAV server, but it can't sustain a connection while downloading something. After the connection is closed, I can't reconnect because Finder assumes that I'm still connected. The only way I can reconnect from finder is to kill the process manually from the terminal, then I can reconnect to the WebDAV server.

I have tried other WebDAV clients too, including CyberDuck, which seems to have some problems of its own. The best client by far is Transmit, so far it has always worked for me.

Filed under: apple, macosx No Comments

27Aug/080

Get the MacUpdate Promo Bundle!

The Mac has an amazing shareware ecosystem. Currently a bundle is being offered in MuPromo.

The Bundle just costs a standard $49.99 for potentially 10 applications.

The bundled applications are great, and I consider it a real bargain. There are numerous applications, which I already loved using (but trials till now ).

DevonAgent is great application for complex searches, it really allows you to make sense of a complex subject and have all the results categorized for you in easily understood common keywords.

Bookends is an amazing tool for generating bibliographies - a godsend if you write a lot of research papers. If you're just writing the occasional college paper it's probably not worth the normally high price, but it's useful enough for any paper that would need a bibliography, so if you're tempted by something else in the bundle it's absolutely worth it to be able to get Bookends too. MacJournal is a great journaling program, but it's true there are other solutions out there that are free or less expensive. Personally, I like MacJournal enough that I bought a license, but it would really come down to whatever program of that sort you'd be most comfortable with - try several, but again, be happy if you're getting it with the bundle because you wanted some of the other programs anyway (since it's a safe bet it will be unlocked before the promotion ends).

I haven't heard much about the other applications, but reviews seem to be universally positive.

Tagged as: mac, shareware, software No Comments

26Aug/080

JungleDisk: Backup your data on the Amazon S3 Cloud

I've been thinking for quite some time about creating an online storage system, similar to time machine but instead of backing up against an external HD, it backs up against a cloud service such as aws.amazon.com/s3 S3, in order to provide worldwide availability to my data.

Its a pretty neat idea, and today I realized that it had already been done, and done with class its called JungleDisk. JungleDisk for a low fee of $20 allows you to download a client, it supports Mac, Windows and Linux and allows you to backup using the S3 Cloud.

The OSX client, allows you to seamlessly backup at regular intervals, or/and use your S3 account as a network attached storage device. S3 is cheap: 1GB/month costs only 0.15$. So if I where to backup my home directory, currently 100 something GB, I calculated it would only cost me round £100 to keep it on amazon/annually.

I'm keeping my 1TB external storage for time machine for now, I think JungleDisk would be very useful if I were to move/travel abroad then I could keep my backup on S3, and in any contingencies restore when I'm in need.

Another good online Backup software is Carbonite.

Filed under: apple, macosx No Comments

2Aug/084

Convert MKV to IPOD/IPhone format without using the command line in Mac OSX

Quicktime natively doesn't support MKV, which is becoming an increasingly popular format to exchange videos in.

To achieve the seamless conversion of mkv to ipod format follow the following steps (you need Quicktime Pro for this).

1. Go to this site, and install Perian. Perian is a "swiss army" knife for Quicktime, it supports numerous file formats

2. After installing Perian, open the mkv file in Quicktime (you may need to restart quicktime).

3. Go to File->Export select Movie to Ipod, and your done!

Tagged as: Leopard, quicktime, Untitled 4 Comments

23Jul/080

How Leopard Shows Windows PCs in Finder

Today I realized how Leopard shows Windows PCs in the network in Finder. I found it a little funny.

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A closer look:

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Tagged as: Leopard No Comments

21Jun/080

Firefox 3 has problems in some long websites

I love the current release of firefox 3, there is only one thing that is bothering a lot:

Since I've started using firefox 3 I can't properly browse long pages. Firefox 3 seems to stutter when browsing long pages which severely impacts my experience on those websites. I've created this video to show what I mean, I opened reddit and tried browsing using Firefox3 at first, and then Safari. You would notice a stark difference in the really fast browsing in Safari compared to the stuttered experience in Firefox3.

The system I'm using a Macbook pro with 2.4 Ghz, 4GB RAM and Leopard 10.5.3.

Tagged as: firefox No Comments

1Jun/080

The Joys of Mac OSX Applications

Its been quite a while since I've switched to the mac, and one of the most consistant things that impresses me are the applications on the mac.Recently I came across Papers, which I would recommend to every PhD student. Papers is a like an iTunes for your research papers. It integrates every concievable index you would like to use: Google Scholar, ACM, IEEE, CiteSeer etc..You can search for related papers, and add them to your library in a snap. Additionally, if you cant find the pdf of your papers, you can just press Google, and it will google the pdf for you.There are just so many highly useful features in Papers that it would take me a while to list them. Now having all those features is actually no big deal, what is a big deal, is the interface, which blends with the Mac OSX environment. The application uses native leopard GUI features which make the application very very appealing.
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