I saw the announcement come through yesterday for the “developer preview” of the new Google Quick Search Box for the Mac. I immediately downloaded it and started working with it, not fully knowing what to expect.

My initial response: wow, this could replace Quicksilver. For being a dev preview it seems quite impressive already. I did hear from a friend that it kept crashing on his computer, but it seems to be working just fine on mine.

A lot of the actions seem very similar to what you get with Quicksilver. At this point you don’t have any triggering or plugin capabilities, but from an application launcher standpoint, it is very nice. And it has the benefit of being a Google tool, where you can enter your Google account information, from multiple Google accounts, and it will index your Gmail, Docs, etc.

Then I saw this post about QSB today from Macworld, and it all made sense as I was reading the comments. Stated in comment number 2, referring to Nicholas Jitkoff, one of the devs working on QSB:

Nicholas is the guy that did Quicksilver, so this is the future if you are a Quicksilver fan.

Yep, I’m on board.

There are a lot of options out there for the instant messaging crowd. There are probably three multi-protocol clients available for every one single-protocol (standalone) client. There are two related multi-protocol clients, that work pretty much across the board on the three major flavors of operating systems, that I think are flat out better than anything else out there.

If I’m installing an IM client on a Windows or Linux box I’m going with Pidgin. Pidgin is released under GPLv2, and has implemented (at present count) 16 IM protocols, ranging from the standard ones — MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, and Jabber — to the no-so-standard — Gadu-Gadu, MySpaceIM, and Groupwise to name a few. While this does require the GTK libraries to be installed on Windows, they have seamlessly integrated this into the installer, so there is no pain involved. There are lots of plugins available, including my favorite — Psychic Mode.

Adium is a cousin of Pidgin. Adium is built on the libraries behind Pidgin, and is only for Mac OS X. Where Pidgin doesn’t quite seem to carry the look and feel of Windows, Adium is 100% Mac in its look and feel. Adium also integrates perfectly with Growl. The protocol support is a little bit less with Adium compared to Pidgin, but I’ll never use the obscure ones it doesn’t support. It does, however, pickup support for the .Mac protocol.

You may say, “What about Trillian? What about iChat?” What about them? With Trillian, you have to buy the pro version to get the Jabber protocol. With iChat you only have .Mac, Jabber, AIM, and Bonjour protocols; no MSN or Yahoo! support. I’ve tried using Trillian and iChat, but I always end up back with Pidgin and Adium.

iChat does have one major advantage over Adium at this point: voice and video chat. While Adium (and Pidgin) is currently working on this issue, you have to go to iChat to take advantage of that functionality.

The school that I work at has a program where every traditional undergraduate student is “given” a laptop (the cost of the computer is baked into their tuition). Following (or leading) industry trends, we have had a growing number of new students choosing Macs rather than Windows-based computers. So much so, for the Fall 2008 entry we will only be offering Apple hardware, but with the option of running Windows or Mac (or both).

All of that said, in my new role I’ve been given a MacBook, amongst my other systems, for use and testing. I’ve wanted to run OS X professionally (not just at home), so I’ve made that my main system, and use my Windows box when I must. Being a Windows convert I immediately setup Firefox because it was familiar to me. That, and I’ve grown accustom to my array of extensions.

It’s been 3 months on now, and I figured I best give Safari a fair shake. I’m forcing myself to spend a week with Safari as my browser, using Firefox only when I must. I haven’t been a full week yet, but I think I can comfortably say that I “enjoy” using Safari more than Firefox. I really can’t tell why I enjoy it better. Is it the interface? Extension overload/abuse in FF? There’s nothing logical or rational that I can put my finger on yet; I’ll let you know if I figure it out.

This is not to say that the experience is not without pain. The two hardest things I’m having to overcome are my expectations for tab management, and muscle memory.

In my opinion, there is no FF plugin better than Tab Mix Plus. Period. I keep expecting Safari to function how I have FF setup with my TMP preferences. I am putting out a call for someone to make a plugin for Safari that will extend the tab management functionality along the lines of TMP. I want my bookmarks to open in new tabs. I want my searches to open in new tabs. And I don’t want to hold down cmd to get that to happen, because I forget to do it.

Muscle memory is good, and muscle memory sucks. I’ve got the FF keystrokes so ingrained in my head, that I forget that cmd-k does nothing in Safari, it’s cmd-opt-f to select the search box. There is some overlap, but I’ve just been leaving a Safari shortcut guide up constantly in one tab so I can take a peek when I need something.

Inversely to how there are sites that only work on IE, there are sites that just don’t work on Safari. For that reason I’m going to keep FF around (plus for web testing needs), but I think I’m going to roll with Safari for now. And I reserve the right to change my mind whenever I please.

If you have heard about Parallels for running a virtualized OS within Mac OS X (Intel) chances are you have heard about VMWare Fusion.  Parallels has a feature called Coherence that pulls the virtualized applications out of the “boxed in” interface, and allows them to “mingle” with the OS X apps.  VMWare obviously has picked up on this, taken a cue from Emeril, and kicked it up a huge notch with Unity.  I can’t wait to try it out.

[HT TUAW]

If you are a Mac user, and also use the Cisco VPN client to connect to your corporate (or any other) network, have I got a treat for you. The product name is Shimo, and your VPN experience just became truly Mac-like.

The initial reason for the development of Shimo was the lousy software implementation of the Cisco VPNClient for MacOS. Shimo wants to do it the MacOS way: That means to reduce the interface to the important features and integrate it right into the user interface of the OS. Thus the interaction with this piece of software is absolutely intuitive and self explanatory. Try it out and you will see what we are speaking of…

I told Bren about it before I had a chance to install it, and he’s thanked me for it multiple times. I finally installed it tonight, and this what Cisco should have done with their Mac client. I pretty much guarantee that you’ll never go back to the Cisco client again.

[HT MacUpdate]

I’ve seen some chatter about the Mac utility, Paparazzi, that captures the entire length of a webpage into an image. Great product, but limited to those of us who have chosen to “walk in the light” of Mac OS X. I was looking for something similar, but for Windows.

Enter Screengrab!. Screengrab! is a Firefox extension that “will save what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves webpages as images.” You can save the image as a PNG, JPEG, or save it to the clipboard. IMHO Screengrab! trumps Paparazzi in two ways:

1. It is crossplatform
2. You operate it from right in your browser, without launching an external application

Check it out.  You’ll wonder how you lived life without it.

Mac OS X only — that I know of, any word to the contrary is welcome.

I was doing some WordPress development this weekend while listening to my team on MLB Gameday Audio. While I attempted to Cmd-Tab to another application I miskeyed and hit Cmd-` (` is right above Tab on my keyboard) which gave me a pleasent surprise.

Because MLB Gameday and Gameday Audio each open in their own windows I typically resorted to using F9 to move to either of those windows. However, as long as I’ve got Firefox (or any application for that matter) I can use Cmd-` to cycle through the open Firefox windows. This goes for Finder windows, open photos in Photoshop, open documents in Word, etc. Great time saver.

In the little rant I gave on the baked-in Windows screenshot capabilities the other day I mentioned the simplicity of the baked-in Mac screenshot process. Like Windows there are multiple keystrokes to achieve the various types of screenshots.

• Cmd-Shift-3 will capture the entire screen.
• Cmd-Shift-4 then click-n-drag will capture a specific section of the screen.
• Cmd-Shift-4 then mouse-hover then SpaceBar will capture the highlighted window.

With all three of these it saves the screenshot to the desktop. In OS10.4 it saves as a PNG, and I believe in OS10.3 and earlier it saves as a PDF.

I did not know this until I did a little searching, but there is a utility application (in your Applications > Utilities folder) called Grab. This tutorial is a wee bit old, but it does a good job of talking about Grab.

Just like Windows there are other screenshot titles that are fairly popular (Snapz Pro X and Skitch come to mind), but what comes standard with OSX is already beyond what you get with Windows out of the box.

Most people in the tech industry are familiar with the accronym LAMP (if not, follow that link). MAMP is a variation on LAMP, but for Mac.

I need to preface this post with the advice that the product I’m about to show is not for “production” type environments. The official word is:

MAMP was created primarily as a PHP development environment for Macintosh computer and should therefore not be used as Live Webserver for the Internet. In this case, we recommend that you use Mac OS X server with the provided Apache or a Linux server.

That out of the way, this is THE BEST web development environment when working on a Mac. To install, drag the MAMP folder to your Applications folder. You don’t have to install Apache, PHP, and MySQL separately, and configure them to work together; it just works.

You don’t have to run any scripts to get it to load, you just launch the MAMP application and Apache and MySQL services start (it does require you to enter your Administrator credentials). The configuration is done through a simple preferences menu, allowing you to modify Apache and MySQL ports, whether to use PHP4 or PHP5, and the Apache document root folder, plus some other minor settings.

Everything is local, so you can use your favorite PHP/HTML/CSS editor (I use Smultron), save your changes, and immediately check the results. I love WordPress, but the native template and plugin editor forms are just basic textarea form elements. With MAMP I’ve got a WordPress installation where I can do my template/plugin work in Smultron, and instantly see the results without having to upload anything to a server out on the interwebs.

A Top 10 Free Mac Apps list was just made over at Lifehacker. I was satisfied with their list, but was a little sad to not see MAMP on it. Check MAMP out, you won’t be disappointed. It’ll probably make your top 10 list, just like it’s on mine.

Frank Ohlhorst just asked if the penguin is listening. I haven’t thought much about Linux since I made my home computer switch to Mac about a year ago, but he poses some very good ideas.

The Mac guy, the PC guy and a penguin are all standing around having a conversation. The Mac guy, of course, would be pointing out the flaws of Vista, but there would be a twist, the Penguin would be asking, “Why do I have to buy a new computer to avoid all of those Vista problems?”

All fun aside, he gives a strong call to arms for the enterprise Linux distros:

Commercial Linux vendors need to pay attention. The year 2007 very likely will become the year of change on the desktop thanks to Vista and the next generation of the Mac OS, and if the commercial Linux vendors don’t seize the day, the future may very well become bleak for Linux on the desktop.

Vista is not the “minor” migration that going from Win2k to WinXP was. Vista is a major upgrade, albeit with minor benefits IMHO. I know my company is going to hold out until SP1 before taking a serious look at upgrading our systems. Who knows even if Vista will be the preferred OS among users.

For years people have been wondering if Apple can get out of the home and media markets, and into the “regular” business world. I think Apple is in position now to make that serious push, especially with OS 10.5 coming very soon.

Is Linux read to move out from the server and tech enthusiast markets, and into the Joe Average Home User and enterprise markets? That’s a murky question. I like Linux, but I fit into the tech enthusiast category (my favorite distro is Gentoo BTW). I know the kernel is ready, but are Gnome and KDE ready for the non-tech world?

Is there enough momentum left in the Linux machine to take advantage of this situation, or has the fruit-train stolen the proverbial thunder from the penguin?

via Linux Today