Tidbits
Sleepover at Ikea - Maybe this is the only way to get to the $1 early enough…
A ramen bath - Japanese spa with special baths resembling instant noodles. I wanna play!
Old age homes for dogs - 1) Old dogs don’t like to be abandoned at strange places. 2) Playing with young puppies will probably cause the older dogs to die faster due to exhaustion.
A remote-controlled pigeon - Oh the poor thing…
An article on a brilliant method of teaching grade schoolers about bats and rabies. I smell a lawsuit.
Will trade beer for Crumpler bags. Tempted by the beanbag and messenger bags…
Photos
Things I Like About My Mac - Part 1
August 24, 2006, 2:49 am
It’s been what, a month since I’ve switched to Mac? The transition have been pretty easy, though I have yet to really explore all the neat features yet. So I figure I should start at list about my discoveries.
Bluetooth
Mike’s going to his cousin’s wedding in the States this weekend, so he stole my phone and left me his unlocked RAZR. Since all my numbers are saved to the phone itself instead of the SIM card, I tried to backup the data on my phone with Motorola PhoneTools. Well first, the software is Windows only, so I had to use my notebook. And it just REFUSED to connect to my phone. It kept saying that it cannot detect my SIM card, I can’t switch my carrier properly, and I couldn’t even browse the content of my phone. It would try to connect, freeze, crash. I tinkered with it for half and hour and then just gave up. My notebook wasn’t connected to the net, but that shouldn’t stop the program from working.
I then turned on bluetooth on my mac. When I clicked on the little Bluetooth icon at the top of the screen, I see an option for “Browse Device...” Curious, I connected to my phone, and I had immediate access to all my audio, video, and picture files. I could drag and drop files between my phone and Finder with no hassles at all. Now I can add photos and ringtones to my phone at will, it’s just so simple.
Address Book
MacOS also comes with all these little apps like an address book and calendar, applications that Google made web versions for. I figured I would not have much use for iCal since I have Google Calendar, but it is useful for adding reminder alerts for things, as it will pop up a window on top of whatever I am doing. It can also pull events from Google Calendar, but I have yet to try that part.
As for the Address Book, I thought I also won’t need it, as I use Gmail to store most of my contacts. But then I saw the Dashboard Widget for it, which makes searching for people so much faster. It is also a good place to store phone numbers, as I’ve relied mostly on my cell for that (and I wasn’t about to give Mr. Google address and phone numbers of all my friends).
It was a bit of work importing my Gmail contacts and phone contacts, but once it’s done, searching for someone’s info has never been easier.
Adium
Adium is the multi-client IM software for macs. I’ve been using Miranda on Windows, but Adium is the app to use for Mac. My first impression is that it’s pretty functional and minimalistic. The flapping duck icon is cute, but gets boring after a while. It was only recently that I discovered my favourite feature. One of the problem with multi-client IM is that I can be talking to the same person through their MSN account, their ICQ account, or the GTalk account. So when it comes time to search for something in your chat history, you had to go through each account’s history. Adium gives you the option to search across ALL your contact history, making things much much simpler. (I’m not sure if other multi-client IM apps have this feature, but I certainly didn’t notice this in Miranda).
I guess overall, searching for things on MacOS is just so much better.
Still Missing Picasa
Unfortunately, not everything is better on the mac. I miss some of the navigation and context menu options of Windows Explorer. Window’s image thumbnail view is better than the one on Finder, for example, it has more keyboard shortcut keys. Which brings me to my next point, I really miss Picasa! iPhoto sucks, Adobe Lightroom is still inadequate. Picasa allowed me to do photo sorting, touchup, and exporting to Flickr so much faster and simpler. When is Google going to make Picasa available on MacOS?? (I don’t think I want to try the Linux version yet...)
Tagged: Apple
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