Macgasm

I noticed something today that I’ve never noticed before. I’m not sure if it’s that my home town just got access to it, or if it’s something that Google Inc recently let us have access to, but either way, it’s damn handy.

We’ve all seen street view before, and we’ve probably used it whenever possible. Today, I used it in a way that it’s meant to be used, and I have to say, it makes me love the Maps app on my iPhone just a little bit more.

I took a quick trip to pick up some Macgasm stickers from a print shop that I’ve never actually been to before, in a part of town that I might visit once ever year or so, and I was a little worried that I’d get lost. Google Maps lets me know when I’m in the right area, but if doesn’t exactly direct you to a parking lot for the store. A picture would go a long way in letting me know just what this place looked like. Much to my delight, the address had a weird avatar icon on the push pin for the location. Having never seen it before, I clicked, and next thing I knew I was looking at the store front. Blew my mind. I started showing it to everyone in the room, and I even busted out a “can your GPS do that?”

Then it got even better. I accidentally swiped the screen while showing it off, and next thing I knew I was moving down the street. You can get a 360 degree view of that point on the map, that you can follow on down the street. Apparently, at some point in the relative past, Google decided to give iPhone users access to Street View, and I had no idea that it was there. This changes everything.

This is why I love technology. Technology companies are constantly evolving and making things better, and this is a huge step in the right direction for map applications. It certainly makes that AT&T GPS application look like a Rand McNally map. It going to be hard going back to another application now that I can see a real shot of where I’m going. If I could get that in a live view, I’d be in heaven.

I outlined all of the big features I desire in a web browser in Part I of this series. Now, I want to take some time to explain point by point why I feel this way. Today, I am going to discuss the benefits of rearranging tabs and having a small visual footprint.

Rearranging Tabs

For a long while, I didn’t even realize how important this feature is to me. I always have a handful of tabs open, and I’m usually doing some sort of research. As soon as I have more than three or four tabs open, it starts getting hard to manage what information is in what tab. Being able to pick them up and move them is invaluable. It makes organizing your data an order of magnitude simpler.

Not only is it important to be able to reorder the tabs in one browser window, but it is also very important to be able to drag a tab to another window. Keeping multiple tabs open in different windows is a very easy way to categorize what information goes where. If you do any sort of multitasking, this feature is a must have.

Small Visual Footprint

For nerdy folks like myself, there is an impulse to have every button, slider, and doodad displayed at all times. Who knows when you might want to fiddle with something? That might sound good at first, but you’ll quickly realize that too many clickable items makes it hard to function. You’ll end up spending a lot of time trying to manipulate simple things that shouldn’t require a second thought.

Also, it is important to be able to see as much of a web page at a time as is possible on your monitor. When you start dealing with multimedia sites, scrolling around to see the rest of an image or movie becomes ridiculous. I truly believe that everyone can agree that minimizing scrolling is beneficial to both content creators and consumers.

In Part III of this series, I’ll discuss the benefits of having a customizable search bar and adhering to web standards.

Photo Credit: NeoGaboX

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In this episode, we talk about Benedict Seinfeld.

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If there’s one thing going for the Apple lineup that Windows pundits can’t take a pot shot at, it’s that they’re drop dead gorgeous. We here at Macgasm think that there’s a lot more to the Mac then how hot it looks on your desk or on your lap, but we’re not going to wax philosophical about those right now.

What’s the point of having a gorgeous laptop and a gorgeous operating system if your laptop stand is as ugly as they come? I mean, it would look sexy sitting on a desk, but it would certainly look a lot sexier sitting in a BookArc stand.

It’s brushed metal, it’s minimal, and it puts the focus on the that sexy laptop of yours in ways that very view laptop stands think to do.

The positives

This thing comes wrapped in a pretty sexy box, taking a page directly out of Apple’s playbook, but it’s not the box that made my day. It was the realization that the Book Arc team had the foresight to provide me with a bunch of different grommets to fit a variety of Apple Laptops, right in the box. If you don’t know what model grommet you need, don’t worry about it, it comes with all the options you need. Have a MacBook, Macbook Air, or MacBook Pro? It ships with three rubbers that not only let you use the appropriate one, but also let you interchange them at any point.

The negative

There’s not much you can say about a laptop stand that would be a negative, outside of aesthetic reasons if it doesn’t meet your taste requirements, but something that stood out was that the stand doesn’t seem to support my laptop sitting Apple emblem upwards. It’s hard to put into words, but you know how your laptop has the Apple logo facing the proper way these days, unlike they did in the G3 models? Well, when I try putting my laptop in the stand that way, the laptop pops open instead of remaining closed. I have a feeling it has something to do with the magnets in the laptop lid.

I did, however, test it on a couple of MacBook Pros and not all of them acted in the same way. So it could just be my laptop acting up just to be difficult. It wouldn’t be the first time that happens.

All in all, it’s probably the best laptop stand I’ve come across. It looks good, it functions the way a stand should, and it gets the laptop up off the desk, and gives me back some much needed real estate. Sounds like a success to me.

SERIOUSLY! Macs have had the ability to right-click for a very long time. In fact, Apple sells a mouse with built-in right-clicking. Despite all of that, people still don’t know that right-clicking exists in the context of the Mac. Just the other day, my own father (FLESH AND BLOOD!) asked me if I could right-click on my Macs. This needs to stop.

I don’t know how we can accomplish this outside of explaining it to every potential switcher. Maybe Apple could run one of their magical commercials about right-clicking? That probably won’t happen any time soon. Until then, the Mac community is stuck explaining that right-clicking is Jetsons-easy here on the light side of computing. Fear not, right-clickers!

Photo Credit: dsasso

So, you’ve been using your Mac for awhile now, and things aren’t quite as responsive as they once were. That is totally normal, sadly. That said, there is an easy trick that you can do that can help speed up your machine substantially.

In System Preferences, go to the Accounts pane. Now, go to the Login Items tab. Look over what is on the auto-launch list. There might be some stuff that you want to leave alone. For example, iTunesHelper and SpeechSynthesisServer. That doesn’t mean you can’t start tossing out third party apps that you don’t need to auto-launch every time you log into your account. Trimming out a couple apps here and there will make your start-up time much shorter, and will probably help out in overall performance as well.

Photo Credit: mikel_duke

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In this episode, we talk about the dating on the iPhone with OKCupid and DatingDNA.

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I sat down to write a review about Virus Barrier X5, but I think I stumbled on a loophole that not too many people talk about. How the heck do you recommend a virus protection application, and more importantly, how do you test its success?

I mean, it probably works in theory, but unless you’re planning on tossing viruses at your machine, and seeing just how well you fare, you’re probably crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.

Short of downloading a bunch of known viruses and sacrificing one of my machines for an entire day of reinstalls and quarantines, I figured the best bet would be to let you know just what the application does “allegedly”, and let you take it from there.

Oh, don’t rule out the Macgasm computer sacrifice to test an anti-virus application just yet, it’s going to happen at some point in the future, just not today.

For those of you not in the know, the Macheist gang has released a bunch of free applications for charity recently, and today they’ve released a free anti-virus application to go along with the bundle.

Virus Barrier is an acclaimed application, but I, like most of you Mac converts, have been running virus protector free since back in 2005. I feel dirty, and I’m pretty surprised that there haven’t been any emergency visits to the clinic, but to this day I’ve been virus free. Virus Barrier X5 confirmed it. So, I guess that means I’m all good.

Virus Barrier provides real time scans, and internet updates, just like every other anti virus package out there, and it doesn’t seem to be killing my CPU and RAM cycles like some other known packages. That’s a huge plus. The application sits in your menubar and does it’s thing, and goes unnoticed for the most part. The NetUpdate package lets you schedule your virus definitions at any frequency you’d like, which is a huge plus, and it gives you the ability to pick with definition updates you want to download manually, if you’re brave enough to do that.

It’s only been on my machine for a few days, and I haven’t gotten a virus since my last install (about two months ago), so I guess it’s working alright. I’ll probably do another follow up post in a couple of months to see if it catches anything, but until then, I’m as clean as a new born OS, and it’s just the way I like it.

As for the OS sacrifice to the Virus Gods, we’ll do some backing up, and unleash all we can on it to see how well this sucker handles. I just need to make sure I get everything important off it before I infect it. Keep your eyes open for that.