Man Plus Machine

Ever since I switched from a regular PC with Linux I’ve missed the middle-click (i.e. pressing down on the mouse wheel) function in Firefox. I used to middle click interesting links to open them in a new tab in the backrgound. Very handy for further reading.

However, when I switched to my iMac I realised that the mouse wheel on the Mighty Mouse isn’t very clickable. It’s just a small ball that doesn’t do anything when pressed down. Recently I discovered that the mouse in fact does support middle-click - you just have to do it the right way. The entire front of the mouse acts more or less as one big button. If you press down the mouse wheel and then continue to press down the entire button (while holding the wheel down) you will perform a middle-click.

It was a relief to discover this. Why I didn’t try this before, I don’t know. Maybe it’s piece of cake to somebody and rocket science to others. Any case, now you know too.

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There’s a new website on the block. My First Mac is intended for - you guessed it - people who got their first Mac computer or are thinking about getting one (just do it, already!). As it says on the header of My First Mac: “Help Buying and Getting Started with Your New Mac”. That’s what they do.

I haven’t spent very much time on the site, because most of the articles I looked at are about topics I already know about. However, there is A LOT of content for a site this young, and there is no doubt that newcomers will find a lot of useful knowledge at My First Mac.

If you’re new to Macs and stuff like that, I suggest you take a peek and see if there is anything useful to you. Enjoy.

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Google has revealed a page with Mac versions of their software. At this moment, Google has the following programs to offer:

• Google Notifier, a Gmail and Google Calendar program.
• Picasa Web Albums Uploader, a tool for uploading your photos to the Picasa Web Albums service that works both as a stand alone application and as a plugin for iPhoto.
• Google Desktop, searches your desktop.
• Google Earth, see the world from above.
• Google SketchUp, a nice tool for creating simple 3D objects.
• Google Toolbar for Firefox, that brings Google functionality into your browser.

These programs are not all equally useful and not all need the same presentation. We all know Google Earth, for instance. If you don’t, I suggest you stop reading this (but of course bookmark the page for later use ;-) ) and head over to Google Earth and download the program. It is that good.

Google Toolbar is very nice if the built-in Google functionality in Firefox isn’t good enough for you. I had some problems with Firefox 2.0 and the toolbar some months ago, so I’m actually not using it at the moment. However, I plan to give it a try as soon as I have some time on my hands for testing.

I haven’t got any experience with Picasa Web Albums and therefore I can’t tell you whether the uploader is any good. Try it out yourself, if you’re a Picasa Web Albums user. I use Flickr instead. Feel free to post your experiences as a comment below.

The Google Desktop is in my opinion useless on Mac. I’ve only tried it on Windows XP, where it is very useful because the built-in search functionality in Windows XP is everything else than … functional. But Windows XP doesn’t have Spotlight and Dashboard which do the same as Google Desktop. I wouldn’t use Google Desktop but if you have another opinon, please let me know.

Now, Google SketchUp is a great program and this I have seen up and close. A friend of mine is waiting for his new appartment to be built. To kill time he found out that Google SketchUp could help him visualize the appartment. He scanned the house plan into his computer and imported it into SketchUp. Here, he could tell the program everything about the appartment, and voilá: SketchUp delivers a full 3D model of the appartment. This isn’t all of it; once the model was ready he added textures to floors, walls etc. and he found models of furniture (in the program) that resembled the furniture he already had or considered buying and that way he was actually capable of furnishing the appartment long before it was ready. Now he already knows where to put the TV, tables, the sofa and so on. On top of it all, you can take a “walk” inside the house to see what it is all like. It should also be possible to enter coordinates and directions and see how the sunlight will be at different times of the day and year. Very cool. This is of course not the only thing SketchUp can do, but it’s the one thing I’ve seen it used for.

I haven’t tried Google Notifier either, but I have a Gmail account and I guess I also have a calendar somewhere. Maybe I should give it a shot and try it out some time. Especially online calendars need to be very convenient and at hand before I want to use them - maybe Google Notifier can change this.

Please feel free to add your experiences with some of these programs in the comments below.

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In these Windows Vista days the differences (or lack hereof) between Mac OS X and Windows Vista are discussed endlessly. Mitch Ratcliffe over at ZDnet has started a series of articles where he compares the two operating systems more in-depth. It’s been running for some months now and has a good hour of interesting reading to offer.

In the latest article, Mitch compares the usablity of the two desktops with focus on the mouse and the functionality available here. Mitch digs up a few good points about usability that you might know of feel but not really think of. In short: Mac OS X is flexible, simple and user friendly, Windows Vista tries to be but fails a bit in being too friendly.

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When I bought my iMac a few months ago, one of the first things I needed installed was office applications. Switching from Linux, the logical choice was OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org suited all my needs, and I would never dream of paying the price for Microsoft Office - I don’t write THAT many documents.

However, I was incredibly disappointed. OpenOffice.org isn’t ported to Mac OS X yet (far from it), but it is still possible to run OpenOffice.org under Mac OS X using the X11 server. X11 is located on one of the Mac OS X Tiger DVDs that came with your machine and it is easily installed (like most other programs for Mac OS X of course). The only problem is that running OpenOffice.org under X11 is so damn slow! It takes an eternity to load and leaves an extra icon running in your dock (the X11 icon). I don’t want to run one program just to run another!

Fortunately there is a solution. Some clever people evolved the OpenOffice.org package into what they baptized NeoOffice and now we’re talking; It runs faster that its cousin and it also comes in Universal Binary for us Intel Mac folks. No more running X11. NeoOffice is more or less OpenOffice.org ported to Mac OS X giving us an enormous amount of features such as MS Office compability, OpenDocument format, 60 languages and much more. Besides that, the developers added some Aqua looks to the buttons, added support for Mac OS X native printer services, drag-and-drop, integration with some mail applications, and support for Mac OS X built-in fonts. Also, NeoOffice comes with extended support for Spotlight enabling your documents to be indexed by the desktop search facilities in Mac OS X.

I highly recommend NeoOffice if you are in need of an office application. Actually, I’d say you need to have very special demands such as a high degree of interoperability with other users’ documents before it is necessary to spend any money on Microsoft Office. NeoOffice does a great job much along the way.

Today, the NeoOffice team released version 2.1 of the application and I’m downloading it this very instant. I bet the upgrading process runs smoothly and problem-free and in ten minutes I’ve forgotten everything about it. But hey, that’s what good software is, isn’t it?

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