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Mac OSX Noob thread of OSX noobs

H

hirokazu

Member
GodfatherX said:
Anybod having issues with iLife 11?

Specifically iPhoto? It is slow as hell now, taking 3-4 minutes to load. Running on a late 2009 13" MBP
Click to expand...
Yeah, it's slow, buggy, and prone to freezing (I had it crash once). But it doesn't take 4 minutes to load for me, unless it's rescanning the library after installing an update, and I'm on a late 2006 24" iMac.

You could probably roll it back provided you've got a backup of your old library. I like some of the new features, so I'm holding it out and hoping it gets better. (It can only get better, right? Right?)

(Also because my Time Machine backup got corrupted a week after I installed iLife '11 and it deleted it and made a new one :x)
 
A

Ashhong

Member
Vox-Pop said:
help me GAF! I'm freaking out.

I'm trying to sync my music on my mac to the music on my external hard drive. What's the best way to do it when all the folders are names of artist. I don't want duplicate songs or files overwritten. I just want to add the songs that are not in my external hard drive.
Click to expand...

Are the music on the external and your Mac organized EXACTLY the same way with the same folder structure?
 
V

Vox-Pop

Contains Sucralose
Ashhong said:
Are the music on the external and your Mac organized EXACTLY the same way with the same folder structure?
Click to expand...
no, the music is my external hd is organized in artist folders and in single songs files. Foe example I have a folder for Arcade Fire, but then I have Arcade Fire's Neon Bible not in th folder but just as individual songs. It was first organize the way itunes does it but I added songs with putting them in folders. It's mess to be honest. I'm not sure what is what.
 
A

Ashhong

Member
Vox-Pop said:
no, the music is my external hd is organized in artist folders and in single songs files. Foe example I have a folder for Arcade Fire, but then I have Arcade Fire's Neon Bible not in th folder but just as individual songs. It was first organize the way itunes does it but I added songs with putting them in folders. It's mess to be honest. I'm not sure what is what.
Click to expand...

I wrote a long ass post about a manual way to do it, but then I realized there must be programs.

Here's one for example http://www.araxis.com/find-duplicate-files/
 
R

robox

Member
hey y'all
i've been thinking of getting a macbook pro, mainly for work. looking at a 15" i5 and getting the upgraded hi-res screen.
i know that the macbook pros are getting long in the tooth, according to the macrumours buyer's guide, and given apple's penchant for announcing and releasing new stuff with very short intervals, it's quite a risky time to dive in. but i also feel it's too close to the mb air launch, as well as the holiday season for them to show anything.

but my question would be, what could they do in the next revision to really make me regret jumping in? a spec bump isn't a big deal to me and the last one came with a price bump too, at the low end.
 
D

Dreams-Visions

Member
r - b - x said:
hey y'all
i've been thinking of getting a macbook pro, mainly for work. looking at a 15" i5 and getting the upgraded hi-res screen.
i know that the macbook pros are getting long in the tooth, according to the macrumours buyer's guide, and given apple's penchant for announcing and releasing new stuff with very short intervals, it's quite a risky time to dive in. but i also feel it's too close to the mb air launch, as well as the holiday season for them to show anything.

but my question would be, what could they do in the next revision to really make me regret jumping in? a spec bump isn't a big deal to me and the last one came with a price bump too, at the low end.
Click to expand...
I don't expect a big jump, no. a few bumps here and there, but nothing game-changing.
 
J

Jasoco

Banned
Interesting. It seems Photo Booth will turn the screen brightness all the way up and flash white when taking the picture, even if you turn the screen brightness all the way off.

Not sure yet if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I was hoping to get rid of the glare in my glasses. But seems the picture with the brightness off looks better than the one with the brightness on. So... hmm...
 
H

hirokazu

Member
Jasoco said:
Interesting. It seems Photo Booth will turn the screen brightness all the way up and flash white when taking the picture, even if you turn the screen brightness all the way off.

Not sure yet if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I was hoping to get rid of the glare in my glasses. But seems the picture with the brightness off looks better than the one with the brightness on. So... hmm...
Click to expand...
IIRC you can disable the screen flash either in the menus or preferences, or via a plist defaults write.
 
S

Sean

Banned
hirokazu said:
IIRC you can disable the screen flash either in the menus or preferences, or via a plist defaults write.
Click to expand...

Can also hold down Shift while taking the pic to turn off the flash thing. And I think either option or command will take the picture automatically rather than doing the 3-2-1 countdown.
 
U

UnluckyKate

Member
I knew the shortcut Command + Tab to naviguate between open app but I just discovered that just taping that shortcut will make you jumpe from the last app used to the one you're using.

MINDBLOWN.

Every time, I discover new thing to get more productive. I've gain so much time using this for massive micro copy pasting the other day
 
M

MCX

Banned
UnluckyKate said:
I knew the shortcut Command + Tab to naviguate between open app but I just discovered that just taping that shortcut will make you jumpe from the last app used to the one you're using.

MINDBLOWN.

Every time, I discover new thing to get more productive. I've gain so much time using this for massive micro copy pasting the other day
Click to expand...
How do you do this?
 
M

Mr. Wonderful

Member
r - b - x said:
hey y'all
i've been thinking of getting a macbook pro, mainly for work. looking at a 15" i5 and getting the upgraded hi-res screen.
i know that the macbook pros are getting long in the tooth, according to the macrumours buyer's guide, and given apple's penchant for announcing and releasing new stuff with very short intervals, it's quite a risky time to dive in. but i also feel it's too close to the mb air launch, as well as the holiday season for them to show anything.

but my question would be, what could they do in the next revision to really make me regret jumping in? a spec bump isn't a big deal to me and the last one came with a price bump too, at the low end.
Click to expand...
Mid to high probability of happening:
-Higher res screens on at least the 13" MBP. Maybe 1680x1050 standard on 15".
-Apple's new SSD built in to all models. The Macbook Air is "The next generation of Macbooks" ("Instant On" feature added as well? (Does this actually exist, outside of the marketing term for fast SSD speeds, haha.)
-Sandy Bridge CPU. Better performance. Maybe Quad Core standard for the 15". Better battery life too.
-New GPU. The 330M was just good enough at launch. The next refresh could bring something similar from Nvidia's 400 series line.
 
L

Liu Kang Baking A Pie

Member
UnluckyKate said:
I knew the shortcut Command + Tab to naviguate between open app but I just discovered that just taping that shortcut will make you jumpe from the last app used to the one you're using.

MINDBLOWN.

Every time, I discover new thing to get more productive. I've gain so much time using this for massive micro copy pasting the other day
Click to expand...
Command + ~ (tilde, the key right above tab) often switches windows within the same application too.
 
M

MCX

Banned
Is inadequate RAM the primary cause of beachballing? My summer '09 MBP came with 2GB and beachballs all the time in Snow Leopard. I ordered 8GB (2x4GB) Kingston - this should hopefully fix this, right?
 
M

Mecha_Infantry

Banned
Since we're on the subject of shortcuts, my cat was crawling and my keyboard and somehow brought up a finder window I had open in the background. I shut that that window, but then to my astonishment (not really) EVERY finder window I had open was the next active window

So in another words there seems to be a command that the feline race know, which you can allow all windows of it's existence to be successively active
 
M

mrklaw

MrArseFace
I just bought a Kensington expresscard SD card reader - I figured it'd be useful for getting photos off our cameras without messing about with USB readers. But now my MBP doesn't sleep.

Is this a known issue with OSX? Apple forums don't seem hugely helpful other than 'yes, some USB devices can affect sleep'.

If it can't work I can return it, but it'll be annoying as it would have been very handy to have a built in SD card reader.
 
S

smuf

Member
MCX said:
Is inadequate RAM the primary cause of beachballing? My summer '09 MBP came with 2GB and beachballs all the time in Snow Leopard. I ordered 8GB (2x4GB) Kingston - this should hopefully fix this, right?
Click to expand...

Slow harddrives can cause a lot of beachballs too.
 
T

timnich

Member
I have a weird issue with Perrian, Seems that every time I put my macbook pro into sleep mode(or whatever closing the lid does), upon waking, perrian is no longer working and quicktime refuses to play avi, flv or any other type of file other than mov. Reinstalling Perrian only works until I close the lid again, at which point the issue comes up again. I'm at 10.6.4 and have the latest version of Perrian. Can anyone help? Thanks.
 
D

Dreams-Visions

Member
MCX said:
Is inadequate RAM the primary cause of beachballing? My summer '09 MBP came with 2GB and beachballs all the time in Snow Leopard. I ordered 8GB (2x4GB) Kingston - this should hopefully fix this, right?
Click to expand...
it's is your ram if you have a lot of Page Outs.

check your Activity Monitor. if you have an extremely high number of Page Out's, it means memory is grabbing info that would ordinarily be stored in high-speed RAM from the extremely slow HDD thus slowing down the party.
 
Burger

Burger

Member
timnich said:
I have a weird issue with Perrian, Seems that every time I put my macbook pro into sleep mode(or whatever closing the lid does), upon waking, perrian is no longer working and quicktime refuses to play avi, flv or any other type of file other than mov. Reinstalling Perrian only works until I close the lid again, at which point the issue comes up again. I'm at 10.6.4 and have the latest version of Perrian. Can anyone help? Thanks.
Click to expand...

Is there anything weird in Console when you wake up your PC? (Spotlight -> Console)
 
N

NumberTwo

Paper or plastic?
Dreams-Visions said:
it's is your ram if you have a lot of Page Outs.

check your Activity Monitor. if you have an extremely high number of Page Out's, it means memory is grabbing info that would ordinarily be stored in high-speed RAM from the extremely slow HDD thus slowing down the party.
Click to expand...
[layman]Why do page outs happen?[/layman]
 
Burger

Burger

Member
Topher said:
[layman]Why do page outs happen?[/layman]
Click to expand...

A page out is when the OS references virtual memory (page file), as opposed to physical memory.

If you have 4GB of RAM, but to run the OS and your desired applications you need say, 6GB of RAM, instead of giving you errors, the OS writes 2GB out to your HDD (stuff that's running in the background hopefully). When it needs to access that 'virtual' RAM, it reads off the HDD, which can be extremely slow compared to your physical RAM.

Hence the beachballing.
 
D

Dreams-Visions

Member
Topher said:
[layman]Why do page outs happen?[/layman]
Click to expand...
so when you have programs open, they store various parts of themselves and subsequent data in memory. That is the process of "Paging In". when memory on your memory stick(s) starts to reach their storage limits, OSX uses a swapfile (an invisible file on your hard drive) to offload some of its storage needs by moving things not currently active to the hard drive. this is a "Page out". When THAT data is re-accessed, it has to be gathered from the HDD and will take longer.

Over time, both numbers will increase. If the total pageouts is low--around 1% or 2% of your Page Ins total--(compared to the number of pageins after having used your Mac for hours of work, you may have sufficient RAM. Otherwise, you should install more RAM.

To see your number of Page Ins and Page Outs per second do this:

Utilities --> Terminal --> type "top" (without the quotes)

You'll see information like the following:

Code: 
Processes: 78 total, 2 running, 76 sleeping, 461 threads               21:10:34
Load Avg: 0.19, 0.60, 0.84  CPU usage: 4.44% user, 5.62% sys, 89.92% idle
SharedLibs: 6580K resident, 6660K data, 0B linkedit.
MemRegions: 24112 total, 1737M resident, 50M private, 754M shared.
PhysMem: 1376M wired, 3000M active, 2991M inactive, 7366M used, 828M free.
VM: 195G vsize, 1042M framework vsize, 463160(0) pageins, 730(0) pageouts.
Networks: packets: 20479366/16G in, 15784761/5897M out.
Disks: 1903083/19G read, 2150504/30G written.

in my case, I have this: 463160(0) pageins, 730(0) pageouts.

the number in between the parenthesis represents the number per second. This is the most important indicator of memory burden at any given moment. if you see the page outs/second high and your machine is slow, you can fairly assume it's the memory. at which time you can either turn off some of your programs or install more RAM.
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging
 
L

LCfiner

Member
Firestorm said:
Is there a way to make Flash videos not suck on OSX?
Click to expand...


not really.

install click2flash and it will replace flash video with html5 player for some sites, like youtube, if you choose.

just keep your ear to the ground for sites that have optional html5 players, like vimeo, dailymotion, etc. they’re not always heavily advertised.
 
B

Blackhead

Redarse
Firestorm said:
Is there a way to make Flash videos not suck on OSX?
Click to expand...
Also try getting the Flash beta with hardware acceleration for videos (if your machine supports it). Google Chrome rolls its own implementation of flash so that's another area to explore. I'm pleasantly surprised at how well flash performs in Chrome actually. It doesn't make Flash awesome but I see a noticeable difference to how often, and how loud, the fans come on.
 
Burger

Burger

Member
Firestorm said:
Is there a way to make Flash videos not suck on OSX?
Click to expand...

http://www.verticalforest.com/2010/10/27/youtube5-version-2/

This clever little Safari extension tells YouTube and Vimeo that you don't actually have Flash installed, and that you would pretty please like an HTML video.

Also... instead of using the shitty HTML5 video player, it works like it does in the iPad, you get nice Quicktime X controls.

*oh snap it's now another HTML 5 player, not QTX
 
M

Mairu

Member
There isn't a MBA specific thread so I figured I'd ask here.

I'm going to be selling my ~4 year old C2D MBP and I've narrowed down my choices to a 13" MacBook Air (among other things). Considering the new MBA is a new product, is there anything I should know about it's downsides or any random issues I might find getting the new MBA?

I'll likely be getting the 13" 128GB version with the 1.86 C2D (bumping up the RAM to 4GB though!)
 
H

H_Prestige

Banned
Mairu said:
There isn't a MBA specific thread so I figured I'd ask here.

I'm going to be selling my ~4 year old C2D MBP and I've narrowed down my choices to a 13" MacBook Air (among other things). Considering the new MBA is a new product, is there anything I should know about it's downsides or any random issues I might find getting the new MBA?

I'll likely be getting the 13" 128GB version with the 1.86 C2D (bumping up the RAM to 4GB though!)
Click to expand...

It doesn't have a backlit keyboard like the old MBA. The display quality is also not as good apparently, but I'm not sure about that.
 
M

Mairu

Member
H_Prestige said:
It doesn't have a backlit keyboard like the old MBA. The display quality is also not as good apparently, but I'm not sure about that.
Click to expand...
I can deal with the lack of backlit keyboard as I've used my netbook a bit which has no backlit keyboard either. I guess I'll have to look into the display issues though :O
 
K

Killthee

helped a brotha out on multiple separate occasions!
Jasoco said:
10.6.5 went live earlier today. So what changed? (I haven't installed it yet)
Click to expand...
This is the change log Apple posted:

* Improves reliability with Microsoft Exchange servers.
* Addresses performance of some image-processing operations in iPhoto and Aperture.
* Addresses stability and performance of graphics applications and games.
* Resolves a delay between print jobs.
* Addresses a printing issue for some HP printers connected to an AirPort Extreme.
* Resolves an issue when dragging contacts from Address Book to iCal.
* Addresses an issue in which dragging an item from a stack causes the Dock to not automatically hide.
* Resolves an issue in which Wikipedia information may not display correctly in Dictionary.
* Improves performance of MainStage on certain Macs.
* Resolves spacing issues with OpenType fonts.
* Improves reliability with some Bluetooth braille displays.
* Resolves a VoiceOver issue when browsing some websites with Safari 5.
* Improves Bluetooth pairing with Magic Trackpad.
* Resolves performance issues with third-party displays that use InstaPort technology.
* Add SSL support for transferring files with iDisk.
* Resolves an issue when opening 4-up Photo Booth pictures in Preview.
* Addresses keyboard responsiveness issues in the Dock when Spaces is turned on.
* Resolves an issue syncing Address Book with Google.
* Fixes an issue when replying to a Mail message sent by a person whose name contains certain characters such as é or ü.
* Improves performance for users bound to an Active Directory domain.
* Improves reliability of Ethernet connections.
* Systems with a Mac Pro RAID Card (Early 2009) installed can now be put to sleep.
* Improves reliability of fibre channel connections, resolving a potential Xsan volume availability issue.
* Adds RAW image compatibility for additional digital cameras.
Click to expand...

I can't say I've noticed a difference since installing it.
 
H

hirokazu

Member
Jasoco said:
For what it's worth, HyperDock also works great and was just updated to add some new stuff today. In case you use that too.
Click to expand...
HyperDock seems to conflict with certain BTT-assigned gestures to activate middle click on Magic Trackpad. Kinda annoying, but the latest BTT alpha sort of gets around it at least. :/
 
U

UnluckyKate

Member
H_Prestige said:
It doesn't have a backlit keyboard like the old MBA. The display quality is also not as good apparently, but I'm not sure about that.
Click to expand...

This sucks. It should be a standart features for all laptops nowadays
 
M

Mr. Wonderful

Member
Jasoco said:
Me neither. Another point update where I notice no changes. Whatever. Bring on 10.7. Oh, and iOS 4.2...
Click to expand...
They've improved the performance of the graphics drivers again, and lain some of the foundation for AirPrint support, if we ever get the full version anymore.
 
J

Jasoco

Banned
hirokazu said:
HyperDock seems to conflict with certain BTT-assigned gestures to activate middle click on Magic Trackpad. Kinda annoying, but the latest BTT alpha sort of gets around it at least. :/
Click to expand...
I don't know. I know BTT says there might be a conflict, but I've never had a problem myself.

Though I don't know if I use middleclick. I use Command+Click via three-finger click, but not specifically middleclick. What's the difference between them? In Chrome at least, they both do the same thing. Do some apps use middleclick differently?

Mr. Wonderful said:
They've improved the performance of the graphics drivers again, and lain some of the foundation for AirPrint support, if we ever get the full version anymore.
Click to expand...
What did it change? I never had problems on my 13" 2010 MBP.
 
D

Doytch

Member
Anyone have issues with Spaces when using the switch-to-x keyboard shortcuts (or emulating them with BTT gestures)? Frequently the Spaces display will stay on my screen and the keyboard goes unresponsive until I shut the lid and re-open it (Macbook). Never have problems with using BTT to tile the spaces and click on the one I want, for whatever reason.
 
D

Dreams-Visions

Member
Jasoco said:
For what it's worth, HyperDock also works great and was just updated to add some new stuff today. In case you use that too.
Click to expand...
yep. I'm just glad the memory leak issue has been addressed.

at one point, HyperDock was eating 600MB of memory before restarting that app. lol

I've yet to explore beyond HyperDock's default settings. anyone have any recommendations?
 
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