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Mac OSX Noob thread of OSX noobs

LCfiner said:
yup, it's all the little things that add up and make OS X so easy to use (most of the time)

plus the overall quality and polish on most 3rd party apps is incredible.

Seriously. I cant believe Quicksilver isn't a official Mac app.
 

giga

Member
Flo_Evans said:
Yeah could never be precious apples fault. :lol

Despite what mac loons will tell you, safari is a slow ass browser. The problem with the flash player is related to text rendering on safari.

http://www.craftymind.com/guimark/

don't worry though, they are working on it! http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2...flash-10-for-mac-should-boost-performance.ars
:D
No.

Adobe's Flash plugin on any mac browser is absolute shit and it's not limited to text rendering. Go try it on Firefox/Camino, OmniWeb, Shiira, or Opera.

Further, Flash 10 has been out for ages. As has Safari 4. (alright 4 is new, but it's not a "slow ass browser")
 
Flo_Evans said:
Yeah could never be precious apples fault. :lol

Despite what mac loons will tell you, safari is a slow ass browser. The problem with the flash player is related to text rendering on safari.

http://www.craftymind.com/guimark/

don't worry though, they are working on it! http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2...flash-10-for-mac-should-boost-performance.ars
:D
Uh, it's slow on every browser in OS X, Chrome and Safari are about tied for fastest rendering performance, and Flash 10 has been out for almost a year.
 

giga

Member
That first link of yours Flo, has an update which I forgot to read.

John Dowdell from Adobe brought up a valid point that plugin vendors are restricted by the browser environments they run in. This is true to an extent, but the limitations enforced on plugins don’t come into play with the GUIMark test. Browsers typically restrict the number of event loops available to a plugin which caps the framerate to around 40 - 50 fps. GUIMark doesn’t come anywhere close to hitting that limit on Mac. There are also no restrictions to the amount of cpu available to a plugin running within the browser which is why all of them peg the cpu to 100%. To illustrate the point, I created an AIR implementation of GUIMark and ran it on my Powerbook and here are the results I got. The Flash players rendering engine performs no differently outside the browser then it does inside the browser. Until plugins start bumping up against the event loop or Beam Sync restrictions, Adobe, Sun, and Microsoft don’t get a free pass for slow performance on Mac.


Lol?
 

CTLance

Member
Flash on any non-Windows non-x86 platform is an unoptimized mess. I cannot wait for <video> and <audio> etc in HTML5. Will be the same bugfest, methinks, but at least I'll get to resent someone different for a change.

Has the Unarchiver been mentioned yet? I see AppTrap and Cyberduck have been, as well as Textwrangler and Transmission. Good.

Something nice that is a bit hard to track down and that has been crippled by iTunes updates: Synctunes. This little scripts-with-gui abdomination allows your non-ipod to sync with iTunes, and rather comfortably at that. I'd be delighted to see an update that restores it to its former glory, but the dev has abandoned it (and taken the downloads off the net). Works well enough though, better than manually filling my Sansa. If anyone knows an alternative it'd be nice to hear about it.

Just because I'm an old fart: Sidplay & CocoModX. The latter is kinda buggy sometimes, but still quite fun to use. The former has an awesome HVSID support, with automagical updates and stuff. Quite nice.
 

Mar

Member
CTLance said:
Just because I'm an old fart: Sidplay & CocoModX. The latter is kinda buggy sometimes, but still quite fun to use. The former has an awesome HVSID support, with automagical updates and stuff. Quite nice.

Yeah I use Sidplay on my MBA, it's great. It took me a while to figure out how to actually get it to play everything in random mode (select 'play random tune' and ensure shuffle is on), but besides the ui quirks, it's an awesome application.
 

Killthee

helped a brotha out on multiple separate occasions!
Flo_Evans said:
Is there anyway to get folders to always list 1st in finder?

I have to manage several large websites and its annoying as fuck to have all the subfolders mixed in with the files.
I hated that about Finder. You can manually edit Finder to fix it or you can dump Finder for Path Finder.
Flo_Evans said:
I also found the "path bar" nice, but I wish I could put it at the top, and I wish you could click on it to navigate with it (I know you can right click, but thats annoying).
Never really an issue for me (especially the navigation part since you can double click to jump to a location), but Path Finder once again does not have this issue. You can place the path bar at the bottom or top and it has one click jump instead of double click.



Ugh....I'm starting to sound like Brimstone.... : /
 
Where can I find a good driver for my Nvidia 9400M Graphics card that's in my iMac for Bootcamp?

Apple doesn't seem to release anything in that matter anymore and the nvidia site isn't helping me either..
 

Flo_Evans

Member
Killthee said:
I hated that about Finder. You can manually edit Finder to fix it or you can dump Finder for Path Finder.

Never really an issue for me (especially the navigation part since you can double click to jump to a location), but Path Finder once again does not have this issue. You can place the path bar at the bottom or top and it has one click jump instead of double click.



Ugh....I'm starting to sound like Brimstone.... : /

1000x thank yous!

and geez maybe adobe does just suck. But how does that explain how the flash plugin was crap on a mac all the way back since macromedia made it? Why is EVERY 3rd party plugin on a mac slower? why does itunes suck on windows? I remember an old flash hack was to publish the movie at an odd integer frame rate and it would magically play within 90% of the target (instead of 50%) on a mac. :lol
 
Flo_Evans said:
1000x thank yous!

and geez maybe adobe does just suck. But how does that explain how the flash plugin was crap on a mac all the way back since macromedia made it? Why is EVERY 3rd party plugin on a mac slower? why does itunes suck on windows? I remember an old flash hack was to publish the movie at an odd integer frame rate and it would magically play within 90% of the target (instead of 50%) on a mac. :lol
Macromedia sucked too.

What other plugins are slow on OS X?
 

giga

Member
Flo_Evans said:
Why is EVERY 3rd party plugin on a mac slower? why does itunes suck on windows?
Which 3rd party plugin is slower? Why does Office 2008 and Messenger for mac suck? (how is this even relevant?)
 

Flo_Evans

Member
Why does everything suck? IDK it's probably a combination of lower userbase, B-team porting the code, and legacy support for powerPC.

It runs well enough now thats it's not really an issue if you have a newer mac.
 

Kryten

Member
Hitokage said:
Just got Freespace 2 up and running. Didn't know they ported it!

You can't just leave it at that! Details man, we need details! (specifically, I have the GOG PC version - how do I make it work natively under OSX?).

I've made extensive use of both Skitch and Jumpcut this week, thanks all for the recommendations :)
 

Ember128

Member
Trying to find something as simple as a DHCP clients table and attempting to use command line on a mac is probably among the more frustrating things I have ever attempted. I found the next closest thing eventually though.
 

Guled

Member
just a question, if I buy a macbook pro at an apple store, could I pick configurations like a bigger HD or more ram, or is that only online?
 

Phobophile

A scientist and gentleman in the manner of Batman.
Guled said:
just a question, if I buy a macbook pro at an apple store, could I pick configurations like a bigger HD or more ram, or is that only online?
They'll have to special order it for you. Through the online store.

I learned that the hard way when I wanted a video card upgrade on my PowerBook. You're better off buying it yourself.

And never buy RAM from them. Upgrades are easy enough to do on your own.
 

CTLance

Member
Kryten said:
You can't just leave it at that! Details man, we need details! (specifically, I have the GOG PC version - how do I make it work natively under OSX?).
You will have to get at the relevant files under Windows - be that an emulated or real one. The gog installer can't be opened under OSX, as far as I know.

You can test if the game runs well enough by getting the net installer from here. Can be confusing at first, but the linked site is full of tips&tricks, so keep cool and everything is gonna be fine.
 

Mar

Member
Ember128 said:
Trying to find something as simple as a DHCP clients table and attempting to use command line on a mac is probably among the more frustrating things I have ever attempted. I found the next closest thing eventually though.

Huh? Open a terminal. End, conundrum.
 

Guled

Member
Phobophile said:
They'll have to special order it for you. Through the online store.

I learned that the hard way when I wanted a video card upgrade on my PowerBook. You're better off buying it yourself.

And never buy RAM from them. Upgrades are easy enough to do on your own.
thanks, also is the price difference worth it on the 13" 2.52ghz, or should I save 200 and get the 2.2ghz?
 

giga

Member
Guled said:
thanks, also is the price difference worth it on the 13" 2.52ghz, or should I save 200 and get the 2.2ghz?
300mhz is not a big enough difference compared to 4gb ram and a faster, larger capacity hard drive.
 

Guled

Member
giga said:
300mhz is not a big enough difference compared to 4gb ram and a faster, larger capacity hard drive.
I know that, the price difference is 350, and I think for less then 200 I can upgrade the 13" with 4gigs and the same HD. Thats why I was asking if the 200 difference after the upgrade was worth it, and I guess its not
 

Ashhong

Member
Banzaiaap said:
Where can I find a good driver for my Nvidia 9400M Graphics card that's in my iMac for Bootcamp?

Apple doesn't seem to release anything in that matter anymore and the nvidia site isn't helping me either..

hmm? im assuming this is the same one as the one in the macbooks right? i downloaded new drivers from the Nvidia site that made it work great instantly in Windows 7.

while on graphics and bootcamp, can anyone explain why the bootcamp DVD installs ATI graphics drivers?

Guled said:
I know that, the price difference is 350, and I think for less then 200 I can upgrade the 13" with 4gigs and the same HD. Thats why I was asking if the 200 difference after the upgrade was worth it, and I guess its not

my friend recently upgraded his to 4gb for 45 bucks. corsair memory too, not the crappy memory apple puts in (forgot the name atm). throw in a harddrive and you can easily upgrade for under 100.
 

Phobophile

A scientist and gentleman in the manner of Batman.
Ashhong said:
my friend recently upgraded his to 4gb for 45 bucks. corsair memory too, not the crappy memory apple puts in (forgot the name atm). throw in a harddrive and you can easily upgrade for under 100.
Apple put in fucking high quality Samsung RAM in my PowerBook 4 years ago. And I'm sure it's still Samsung in my 2 year old iMac.
 

Hitokage

Setec Astronomer
Kryten said:
You can't just leave it at that! Details man, we need details! (specifically, I have the GOG PC version - how do I make it work natively under OSX?).

I've made extensive use of both Skitch and Jumpcut this week, thanks all for the recommendations :)
http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Installing_fs2_open

Easiest way if you have windows: Install everything in windows(FS2 and FS2 Open). Make sure all movie files normally kept on CD are in data\movies\. Copy the folder to mac. Extract the mac binary from the dmg and put it in the folder, then download the launcher app and put it in the folder.

Also, if you own Quake 3 for windows, you can install it on mac using ioquake3 and just copy over the pak0.pk3 file as directed then use your cd key.

Speaking of games, if you have an intel mac get your tetris fix with this.
Flo_Evans said:
why does itunes suck on windows?
Unless a program is written with a language or API that's multiplatform like Java or Qt, then it's likely a non-native port is going to suck. This goes both ways.
Ember128 said:
Trying to find something as simple as a DHCP clients table and attempting to use command line on a mac is probably among the more frustrating things I have ever attempted. I found the next closest thing eventually though.
It's a bash shell, same as most linux distributions although the backend is different. If you've used any sort of UNIX command line before there isn't much to it.
 

Hitokage

Setec Astronomer
Crossposting from another thread:

Don't forget DOSBox is on Mac, along with many other programs of that nature.

dosbox_zpsc9755458.jpg
 

Mar

Member
DOSBox you say...

That reminds me. I've been thinking about getting into Diablo. The pack that you can buy is for non intel OSX. Is it easy to get it all running under intel OSX? What's involved?
 

Hitokage

Setec Astronomer
Mar_ said:
DOSBox you say...

That reminds me. I've been thinking about getting into Diablo. The pack that you can buy is for non intel OSX. Is it easy to get it all running under intel OSX? What's involved?
With Rosetta it should be seamless aside from the performance hit.
 
Tieno said:
What's the best free alternative to photoshop? Gimp?

GIMP's been mentioned, but if you are willing to pay a little bit, Pixlemator is amazing. It does everything I needed Photoshop for, which is light to medium image editing. It's $59 (vs Photoshop's $699 price tag), but you should be able to find a rebate code online to knock a little off that. And it's pretty as hell.
 

RubxQub

φίλω ἐξεχέγλουτον καί ψευδολόγον οὖκ εἰπόν
Mar_ said:
DOSBox you say...

That reminds me. I've been thinking about getting into Diablo. The pack that you can buy is for non intel OSX. Is it easy to get it all running under intel OSX? What's involved?
You can buy Blizzard games directly from battle.net that will work in OSX without any kind of emulation.

This also allows you to redownload the game as many times as you like (I believe) as well as have your CD-Key stored online.

I rebought Diablo, Warcraft and Starcraft this way, and had my WoW accounts linked into it.

Blizzards got a good thing going with their battle.net store.
 

Flo_Evans

Member
wow Motion is blowing my mind... really, really nice!!! IDK if I am digging final cut as much as some people hyped it up, better than iMovie BS for sure but I am not seeing anything thats more impressive than Premiere so far. Soundtrack pro is also very very good from what I have played around with so far.

Aperture is also nice, but not that much of an improvement over iphoto IMHO. Cooler dock icon and interface basically but not much more image editing power.
 

suffah

Does maths and stuff
Mar_ said:
DOSBox you say...

That reminds me. I've been thinking about getting into Diablo. The pack that you can buy is for non intel OSX. Is it easy to get it all running under intel OSX? What's involved?

I bought Warcraft III, Diablo 2, and Starcraft straight from battle.net. (Well, actually I bought the keys from one of those cd key sale websites. Are those legit?) Downloaded the Mac versions and they run perfect.

Edit: Beatn by Rub :p
 

Mar

Member
RubxQub said:
You can buy Blizzard games directly from battle.net that will work in OSX without any kind of emulation.

This also allows you to redownload the game as many times as you like (I believe) as well as have your CD-Key stored online.

I rebought Diablo, Warcraft and Starcraft this way, and had my WoW accounts linked into it.

Blizzards got a good thing going with their battle.net store.

Thanks. Looks like I'll jump in then. I've been itching to play Diablo 2 in particular since I got hooked on Underworlds on iPhone.
 

giga

Member
Flo_Evans said:
Aperture is also nice, but not that much of an improvement over iphoto IMHO. Cooler dock icon and interface basically but not much more image editing power.
Aperture is a ton more useful if you shoot raw. Quick Preview mode (so much faster if your entire library is raw) Just the nested library management itself with projects/albums as more useful. Select/compare tool. Hell, I don't even think iPhoto has Photoshop integration.

I hope you're kidding about the editing power though. No recovery slider (for recovering highlights). No vibrancy slider. (a ton more practical than saturation adjustment) No curves. No expandability with plugins. (viveza/dodge/burn, etc) No selective color adjustments. (so you can adjust just a specific hue) No lift/stamp tool.
 
I was in Greece during WWDC without internet. Snow Leopard is only going to cost 29.99 to upgrade? After paying 100 for my copy of leopard, this makes snow leopard a day one purchase.
 

mrkgoo

Member
giga said:
Aperture is a ton more useful if you shoot raw. Quick Preview mode (so much faster if your entire library is raw) Just the nested library management itself with projects/albums as more useful. Select/compare tool. Hell, I don't even think iPhoto has Photoshop integration.

I hope you're kidding about the editing power though. No recovery slider (for recovering highlights). No vibrancy slider. (a ton more practical than saturation adjustment) No curves. No expandability with plugins. (viveza/dodge/burn, etc) No selective color adjustments. (so you can adjust just a specific hue) No lift/stamp tool.

Lies!

iPhoto has:
Recovery slider for highlights and shadows.
It has a 'do not saturate skin tones' for the saturation slider, which I've been told is what the vibrancy slider is.
I thought iPhoto did have plugin architecture, but possibly this is gone now. edit: Nope, it's there, but it's for exports.
You can select an 'external editor' for iPhoto, so when you click edit, it opens the other app (say, photoshop), and when you save, it saves it right back into iPhoto, with correct thumbnails an everything.

But yes, it is minimal compared to a full fledged editor.

Still, it does do RAW, it can edit RAW, uses the same converting engine, but with way less options. I'd probably use RAW in iPhoto if it allowed sRGB colour profiling (edits on RAWs save as jpg with adobe RGB embedded).
 

Alfarif

This picture? uhh I can explain really!
giga said:
Aperture is a ton more useful if you shoot raw. Quick Preview mode (so much faster if your entire library is raw) Just the nested library management itself with projects/albums as more useful. Select/compare tool. Hell, I don't even think iPhoto has Photoshop integration.

I hope you're kidding about the editing power though. No recovery slider (for recovering highlights). No vibrancy slider. (a ton more practical than saturation adjustment) No curves. No expandability with plugins. (viveza/dodge/burn, etc) No selective color adjustments. (so you can adjust just a specific hue) No lift/stamp tool.

I think people sometimes forget that Aperture and Final Cut, out of the box, are major upgrades to iPhoto and iMovie, that can be expanded even further with plugins.
 

giga

Member
mrkgoo said:
Lies!

iPhoto has:
Recovery slider for highlights and shadows.
It has a 'do not saturate skin tones' for the saturation slider, which I've been told is what the vibrancy slider is.
I thought iPhoto did have plugin architecture, but possibly this is gone now. edit: Nope, it's there, but it's for exports.
You can select an 'external editor' for iPhoto, so when you click edit, it opens the other app (say, photoshop), and when you save, it saves it right back into iPhoto, with correct thumbnails an everything.

But yes, it is minimal compared to a full fledged editor.

Still, it does do RAW, it can edit RAW, uses the same converting engine, but with way less options. I'd probably use RAW in iPhoto if it allowed sRGB colour profiling (edits on RAWs save as jpg with adobe RGB embedded).
Forgot about the recovery slider, but 'do not saturate skin tones' isn't the same as vibrance. Not all photographs are of humans.

For the external editor, can you select 16-bit tiff/psd? It's been a while since I uninstalled iPhoto.
 

mrkgoo

Member
giga said:
Forgot about the recovery slider, but 'do not saturate skin tones' isn't the same as vibrance. Not all photographs are of humans.


I don't know too much about it, but:
The Vibrancy effect adjusts saturation, but minimizes the effect on skin tones in a photo; if iPhoto’s face-recognition feature recognizes that a photo has a face—or you’ve added a missing face to a photo—the Saturation control automatically has the “Avoid saturating the skin tones” box checked, which uses Vibrancy instead of Saturation.

From this, it sounds like the check mark essentially makes the saturation bar close too a vibrancy slider, but like I said I don't know much about 'vibrancy'. But like you said, for humans.

For the external editor, can you select 16-bit tiff/psd? It's been a while since I uninstalled iPhoto.
It has a check mark for transferring the RAW entirely, and one for making edits as a 16-bit tiff. I assume if you don't have the former checked, but the second one, it might export as a 16-bit Tiff.

aw9hl1.png
 

Phoenix

Member
The_Inquisitor said:
I was in Greece during WWDC without internet. Snow Leopard is only going to cost 29.99 to upgrade? After paying 100 for my copy of leopard, this makes snow leopard a day one purchase.


That's what they want. Snow Leopard is a gateway to some of the l33t stuff they've been talking about for a few WWDCs now.
 
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