Macgasm

I was advised today by Mr. Macgasm that native builds of Chrome were finally being released by the fine folks at Google. Naturally, being a huge fan of the new browser, I rushed straight off to download (after I opened a new browser to replace the Firefox session that had just crashed on me again).

Upon installing I discovered, as is always the case with me and a new browser, that the shortcut keys weren’t to my liking. Luckily, as a Mac user, this is not a problem.

Apple gives easy instructions for how to fix this problem, but they lack.. well.. graphics. I love instructional graphics (yet, I hate screencasts. Go figure).

So, I thought I’d throw together a quick Macgasm how-to for those of you who want to fix this pesky problem in a new browser, or just any program that has keyboard shortcuts that you’d like to bend to your will (this also worked on Camino, which I have recently switched to as my “œbrowsing” browser – Firefox being reserved for dev work – yes, I’m a complicated person).

Firstly, I open the offending application and check out the menu option I’d like to assign a keyboard shortcut to (yes, it must be an existing menu option). Then, I make a note of the exact text, capitalization included. As such:

You can see that the current shortcut is option-apple-left-arrow (that’s right, I’m an “œapple-key” holdout). This, for me, is particularly pesky, as I have this set globally to go to the previous track in iTunes (thanks to SizzlingKeys). So, having made a note of the exact menu option “” “œPrevious Tab” “” I’m now ready for the next step.

Next, I open System Preferences and click on “œKeyboard & Mouse”, click on the “œKeyboard Shortcuts” tab, and scroll down to “œApplication Keyboard Shortcuts”.

I click the “œ+”, which brings up a dialog to add a shortcut (go figure!). Clicking the “œApplication” drop-down lets me select an application to add a shortcut to (in my case, Chromium).

Then, in the “œMenu Title” entry field, I type in the text I made a note of earlier, then click on the “œKeyboard Shortcut” field, and perform the keyboard shortcut exactly as I would when using the program.

Lastly, clicking “œAdd” saves the new shortcut. I’ve had mixed results with having to restart the affected program after creating a new shortcut. Basically, I just try it out and restart if need be.

That’s it! Now, my “œPrevious Tab” shortcut is the same in Chromium as it is in several other programs, including the venerable MacVim. I’m not actually sure where I first started using that shortcut, but it’s really stuck with me. I seem to swap tabs a lot, so it comes in very handy.

Enjoy, and let me know if you have any issues or find any programs that seems to be immune to this process.

Check this !#$% out.

Hopefully we’ve all heard about the Codeweavers “Lame Duck Challenge Free Offer” whereby Codeweavers are offering FREE copies of their signature software CrossOver Pro. If you haven’t, check out the vid:

Let’s say that again: FREE SOFTWARE. Seriously. FREE.

So, it’s awesome! Unfortunately, the problem that pretty much everyone has had so far is that the whole thing is just TOO popular, and thus it’s impossible to get your registration and download.

Today, though, and today only the good people at Codeweavers are offering FULL VERSION DOWNLOADS. Do I have to say anymore? You’ll still need your serial number (which can also be gotten from the link above), but you won’t have to wait for registration to get things rocking.

PS – If you’re a paid user already, you’ll be able to use this offer to get another year’s support, which is a nice way to keep existing paid customers happy with an offer like this.

What.. You’re still reading? I feel like Ferris Bueller.. GO!

I think I have a new favorite software company.

This just in: Marketcircle, makers of every freelancer’s best friend software “Billings 3″ have just released the news that they will be offering their own “bailout” for the Mac-loving freelancers of the world.

From their email press release:

As the U.S. Federal Government is busy managing a $700 billion bailout for Wall Street, Marketcircle Inc. has decided to give Main Street America’s Mac freelancers and small businesses a break – 20 bucks at a time – by lowering the price on Billings 3 time tracking and invoicing software from US$59.95 to US$39.95 for a seven week period.

That’s so hot. Love the price, and the political humor there.

They’re also, by the way, offering a “bailout” price on upgrades for Billings 2.x users, which is particularly good (and might even coax an upgrade out of me).

So, Mac freelancers (like yours truly) rush over to billings3.com and snap up your extra cheap copy of Billings (cheap at any price really). If you’re freelancing or running your own small business from a Mac and not already using Billings, then you REALLY need to head over there. If you’ve tried any other billing software for the Mac, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Let the bailout begin!

I shouldn’t be blogging right now. Really.

There are roughly 254 “more important things”, at last count, that I should be doing before I blog. So, why blog now?

Well, because I like it, and because I don’t do it enough.

So why not blog sooner? Because my mind just hasn’t been on Apple stuff at ALL. What it has been on (besides those 254 things) is politics. I confess that until the last 2 years or so — ie, the rise of Obama — I hadn’t been interested in politics for a LONG time. This is partially because, like Michelle Obama, I haven’t been proud of my country — or, at the very least my country’s politics — in a long, long time (luckily, unlike her, I can say that and not have to retract it with my tail between my legs tomorrow). Being overseas and watching through the eyes of the native country-men of where you live will do that to you. Everything about America looks worse when you live in a relatively peaceful country with socialized healthcare and an almost total ban on guns.

But, I digress.

It occurred to me that if my mind is on politics, but I need and want to write about Apple stuff, I’d better find some common ground. Here, then, is my attempt.

A warning, by the way. If you lack an even casual interest in the current American Presidential campaign, you may or may not find the rest of the article interesting in any way.

I’m a passive Obama supporter, who dreamed of him running for president even before he actually announced. So, that’s obviously going to slant anything I write about politics. Thus I hit google news, combining search terms like “obama”, “apple”, “aapl”, “steve jobs” and “woz” in really interesting and creative ways. Well, maybe just fairly random and desperate ways. I haven’t found a lot, I’ll confess. But, the things I have found have given me a lot to think about. Here are a couple of my favorites:

Up first, Mike Smock over at “Citizen Strategist” asks “Why Isn’t Steve Jobs Running Barack Obama’s Campaign?“. I dig this idea.. Sorta. Mostly because I just think it would be cool to see the two on stage together. What Mike’s getting at here is the idea that Obama should be “comparing and contrasting” his potential policies with that of the current administration, and the potential policies of his campaign adversary. He points out the “Mac Vs. PC” ad campaign as a good example of what he would like to see. While I agree that Liberals as a whole should be combatting the popularly held notion that they would “be reduced to a quivering, whiny mass of ineffective policies and tactics” by a military enemy, I can’t help balking at the notion that something as important as foreign / military policy could be reduced to something as glib as the format used in the “Mac Vs. PC” ad campaign. Like any good latte-sipping, Mac using, pseudo-intellectual liberal, I’d much rather see a solid debate on the topic. I have to admit that the idea of seeing an ad depicting McCain with Bush’s policies hastily tacked on to his own (similar to the ad where PC has a webcam taped to his head as an “upgrade”) would give me a giggle. The point, though, that there needs to be a strong response, which makes use of Obama’s brand as a candidate is an important one. The phrase “Think Different” also springs to mind. I suppose it’s no great surprise that I’d feel this way, as one of the Apple faithful. After all, the “Mac Vs. PC” ad’s weren’t exactly targeted at we, the faithful, except, perhaps, for the sake of humor.

This all ties in well with my next find. Jim Geraghty from the National Review weighs in with a missive titled “Mac vs. PC“, which addresses the at-best-ridiculously-ill-advised “Seal of Obamerica”. The less said about that thing the better, although, as usual I think most of the negative press was little more than cheap shots at an easy target. It would, however, be nice if the targets weren’t so soft to begin with. He makes a nice correlation between the way that the Obama campaign are perceived by their opponents, and the way that we Apple-freaks are seen by the outside world. His musings on “change for the sake of change”, and whether “change” is synonymous with “improvement” particularly struck home. Is being different enough, and do Obama supporters and Mac-lovers come off as too cultish in our devotion? Given the current administration, though, and the refusal of the Republican party as a whole to cut their losses and admit some fairly serious mistakes, even if it’s not the answer, change for the sake of change may be a damned good start.

Both of these really center on the branding of the candidates, which really is where computers, and especially Apple, intersect with politics. On both sides it seems there are only two choices. Just like you COULD vote for the green candidate, you COULD choose a Dell with Ubuntu. Most of us, however are going to buy a Mac or a Windows PC, because, like it or not, they’re the accepted options. In a similar vein, those of us that vote in the US elections this year are going to vote for one of these two candidates – and some of us are going to make a choice based, at least partially, on the brand that has been built-up around the candidate. Just like the Mac Vs. PC ad’s, though, such marketing would really only matter to the “swing” buyers, those who might “switch”, or, indeed, have yet to “buy”. The faithful will, for better or worse, always remain as such. In the end, though, I hope the presidential choice boils down to more than just marketing, and something along the lines of “conscience” and “good faith”. Hopefully there are enough of us on both sides to not be swayed by marketing to at least keep things interesting. I hate to think my country’s future lies in the hands of switchers.

A confession

So, even as a wholly dedicated Mac weenie / freak / guru (I prefer the third option, but have often been saddled with the other two) I sometimes need windows.

Well, to be more precise, because the intended audience for most of my work as a web developer tends not to have the taste in computers I have, I sometimes need windows.

As our fearless leader, Josh, put it this morning in a gtalk message:

I generally don’t mind [CSS coding] except when it comes to IE

The discussion about IE CSS coding is a subject for another, much longer, exceedingly vitriolic post — and many hours with a therapist — but the idea of being a web developer who uses a Mac means that without question you’re going to need some method of testing your code on windows (at least until the revolution, when windows will be the first against the wall.. followed closely by HP-UX).

A crisis

Until a few weeks ago, my reliable method for testing web code on windows had been very simple: RDP to a windows box on my home network reserved for just such a task, and run IE. Simple. Effective. Non-intrusive, and non-ram-intensive for my low end MacBook. Nice. Unfortunately, being the nice guy I am, I gave away my little low-profile Pentium 4 Compaq to a good cause, and have since had to rely on a little Mini-ATX box I’ve had for years. Definitely not as grunty, but as I don’t use it very often I didn’t mind.

Then, of course, it died.

My thoughts turned quickly to virtualization. I have in the past used Parallels and VMWare Fusion on my MacBook and never been truly happy with either of them. I tend to run one of the several versions of “slimmed down” Windows XP, but even then the performance has never been anything more than “tolerable”. Plus, they cost, and I’m broke, so I never used them for any longer than their respective trial periods (I promise, no, really..). Still, they were all I knew, so I figured that in this case I’d probably go with one or the other.

A cry for help

So, as has become my habit lately, I turned to twitter for advice. I sent out the tweet, requesting preference between the two choices, and wasn’t exactly overwhelmed with replies. The consensus, though, seemed to be that Fusion was the way forward (I admit, I’m not a patient person, so I only gave it a few minutes or so). Thus, I started the download, and went searching for my windows install iso. Just then, however, I got a reply from the wise and benevolent @stilgherrian who suggested that I check out the stream of one @brendanb who had replied to Stil when he kindly re- tweeted my question. The tweet got my blood flowing:

“try Sun’s recently aquired VirtualBox – works quite well under OS X and is helluva lot less resource hungry”

Short and to the point (thanks to the twitter format) but a lot of goodness there, for sure. From Sun, which means another competitor in the ring, and “less resource hungry” had to be a good thing. I followed the link, and found, well.. virtual nirvana:

Sweet, sweet freedom

That’s right. It’s free.

I’ve never clicked the download button faster, I’m sure of it. Think of it. All the pleasures of virtualization, brought to you by a reputable — well, mostly, you can’t blame Sun entirely for what Java has become — vendor, for zip, nada, zilch, 2/3 of SFA (that’s for you, my Aussie readers).

All thoughts of the original two choices went immediately out the window. I had to try this thing out. Then, to pile ridiculous ecstasy on top of ridiculous ecstasy, the whole thing is less than 20M to download? Whatever Sun are smoking, they should be passing to the left.

Down to business

I was going to include exciting screenshots here of the ever-so-interesting install procedure.. But, alas, there wasn’t much to see. It was very, very simple.

A couple of the installer screens caught my eye, though. Here’s the license screen:

This outlines the “VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL)”. I gathered from the name that I would not be able to use the product for free in perpetuity, and sure enough, in the text you’ll find:

Sun grants you a personal right to install and execute the Product on a Host Computer for Personal Use or Educational Use or for Evaluation .. “œEvaluation” means testing the product for a reasonable period (that is, normally for a few weeks); after expiry of that term, you are no longer permitted to evaluate the Product.”

Ah, well. No free lunch after all. I’ll come back to the licensing a bit later.

Carrying on with the ridiculously easy install procedure, the only thing that really caught my eye was this:

I always click customize in installers. I like knowing exactly what’s going to be installed — or at least having some vague idea — and I like being able to turn off the chaff whenever possible. In this case, though, there was only one option to turn on / off, the “Sun xVM VirtualBox Command Line Utilities”. The description, “Installs the Sun xVM VirtualBox command line utilities into /usr/bin”, definitely sounds interesting. I’m still a unix geek at heart, so anything command line always gets me excited (sad, but true). I’ll come back to this later, if I figure out what the hell it does, exactly.

Running it up.

Upon starting the software for the first time I was presented with startup screens fitting the profile of most virtualization products. I was prompted to create my first VM, with questions regarding the intended OS, the name of the VM-to-be, the amount of RAM, and, of course, the creation of the virtual hard disk.

Welcome!

Ooo.. A wizard!

That list of supported OS’s is crazy long!

Yeah, very little RAM. I only have 1G total!

Time to set up the virtual hard disk.

I chose a “fixed size” disk image, as I have a general belief that a dynamically sized disk will be more resource intensive for the host machine as the disk is re sized on the fly. Also, I prefer to set aside the full amount of space from the start rather than getting a nasty surprise later on if the disk suddenly grows to full size and takes over my host hard disk.

The disk image creation was swift, to say the least, although admittedly I created a very small disk image, as my only intended use for the VM is as a web testing machine.

Once the disk image (or images, if you prefer multiple disks from the start) has been created, you can move forward with the install of the OS on the VM.

Before I dove in, though, I wanted to have a look around at the VM config. I like to know what I can screw around with before I get started, plus I want to know what I can expect from devices (whether the ethernet will be configured, in particular).

The VM browser screen (see “Welcome!” above) shows three tabs. The default tab “Details” and two others, “Snapshots”, and “Description”. A quick look at the “Description” shows us we can add a fulltext description for the VM. I don’t know if this will be particularly helpful, being that I’ll probably only be running the one VM, and therefore won’t be very likely to forget what it’s for, but I rather like the idea.

The “Snapshots” tab is reminiscent of functionality from competing products, whereby you can easily rollback a VM to a certain period in time. Think of it as Time Machine for VM’s. We’ll definitely come back to this, post-install.

That brings us back to the meat of this screen, the “Details” tab. A quick looks shows me all the things I already know: My VM is named “MiniXP”, has 192M of RAM, and a 2G disk image. I can also see a lot of PC BIOS style information like the boot order. I can also see that there is indeed a virtual ethernet card already “installed”. This gives me hope that I’ll be able to easily share my MacBook’s Airport Express to give the little beast network. Fingers crossed.

Pre-install Tweakery

Clicking on any of the headings on the Details screen brings up the “Settings” dialog. Cool. Very “Parallels like”, one might say. Let’s dig in here a little bit, to make sure things are configured properly pre-install:

There is, for better or worse, a HELL of a lot here, as it turns out, so I’ll stick to highlighting the bits I’ll be changing, and leave the rest to your imagination for now.

Firstly, I want to make sure my install media gets mounted on first boot, so I can actually install windows. Selecting “CD/DVD-ROM” from the left hand menu gives me exactly what I’m looking for:

I select “Mount CD/DVD Drive” and click the “ISO Image File” radio button then browse for my windows ISO (I’m using an ISO, your mileage may vary depending on your chosen install method, but a normal windows install CD/DVD should certainly work).

I wasn’t game to change any of the network settings, but I LOVE that it’s seemingly easy to add up to four adapters. Very nice idea.

I went ahead and set up my Mac desktop as a “Shared Folder”, as I like the idea of having an easy way to share files with the VM (assuming there’s no “drag n drop” support.. That would just be too good to be true).

That’s it for my pre-install tweaks. Let’s get an OS running!

Installing the guest OS (Windows XP)

Back at the summary screen, I made sure my new VM was highlighted and jumped in, finally, by hitting the “Start” button.

After a moment or two, I was presented with the expected little black box of a VM, along with a warning message.

This helpful little screen let me know that my keyboard would be automagically directed to the VM once it was running, and that I could break free by pressing the “host key” The default host key in my case, is “Left Command”. Handy to know, thanks.

Next, came a very brief, and not-entirely-unattractive, splash screen:

Followed by the blue-install-screen of death. Oh man, I’m glad this is a virtual machine.. Shudder. I was gonna screenshot it, but I just couldn’t bear it. You know what it looks like. I won’t bore you with the ugly details of a Windows XP install, but I will say that it went by as fast as I’ve come to expect from other virtualization products. Suffice to say that after about 20 minutes and the odd mouse click — selecting languages, timezones, etc — I was presented with another exceedingly depressing screen (for any self-respecting Mac user, anyway):

The next screen got me interested, as I was really hoping that network wouldn’t require any voodoo to get working:

To my utter delight and surprise, my windows activation quickly went through, which meant my network connection was working. Fantastic.

Now what?

Other than installing MultipleIE, so I can effectively web test (don’t tell me you expect one version of IE to behave like any other.. What fun would that be?) I really wasn’t looking for very much more.

For the sake of testing, however, I decided to put the software through a few of its paces.

Time Machine for VM’s

I mentioned the “Snapshot” feature earlier, and I think it’s worth coming back to. If you’ve used any virtualization before, you’ll be well aware of the value of this feature. If not, you’re in for a treat. Earlier, I referred to snap-shotting as “Time Machine for VM’s”, and that’s a pretty good description. The basic idea is that once you’ve got your install just right, you can snapshot the entire VM — not just the settings, not just the disk contents, but the whole momma lovin’ thing — to a file. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, the software allows you to roll back to that time. Thus, if you’ve installed some very silly software, you can roll your VM back to a time before the install and all the ill-effects it caused will magically be gone (this is all probably very novel to windows users who have never used Leopard, I’m sure). For the sake of brevity, let me say that this worked, and worked well beyond my expectations. Creating the snapshot took less than a minute, which was no doubt due in some part to the fact that I have a very small hard disk. Still, I’ve built a LOT of low-fi VM’s — particularly on various VMWare products — and snapshotting them was NEVER this quick. Once my snapshot was created — by choosing “Take Snapshot” from the “Machine” menu — I went ahead and polluted my beautiful image with some software. In this case, Safari for windows (seemed apropos).

Next, the rollback. I wasn’t really sure how to do it, I must admit. I actually stumbled across it by mistake. I thought it might be prudent to stop the VM before rolling it back, and decided to just try clicking the handy old red button. Upon doing so, I was presented with the “Close virtual machine” dialog.

I chose the “Power off machine” option and its sub-option “Revert to the current snapshot”, said a little prayer, and clicked “OK”. I got a new dialog, very reminiscent of the snapshot dialog, which advised me that I was not only “Discarding current machine..” but “Restoring the execution state”. I was lucky to get in a screenshot, by the way, as this went away very, very quickly as my machine shut down.

I guess that means success. Again, most impressed by the speed with which this occurred. Impressed is not the word, actually. I believe “Schwing!” is the word.

Still, schwing or not, before I could call the snapshot/rollback procedure a success, I needed to make sure the machine was still functioning and that the evil software install was gone (“a backup routine is only as good as its restore”, don’t ya know). VirtualBox closed down when I stopped the VM (this is probably configurable) so I restarted it. Once the VM browser came up, I clicked start again and, this time too quickly for me, a dialog reading “Restoring machine”, or something to that effect, came and went and I was presented with my beautiful VM, restored to it’s pre-Safari state. Running and ready to go.

Schwing. Yes, again. I’m only 33.

But wait, there’s more.. Seriously.

One feature people always want to know about is “Unity”, the feature in VMWare (which is, of course, matched by Parallels) which allows you to run guest OS programs in an “integrated” fashion with the rest of your desktop, with the guest OS desktop hidden. To be honest, I wasn’t overly concerned with this feature, but I was reminded by my good twitter buddy @lewellyn that it’s not JUST about me, as it was pretty much the first feature he asked me about once I had things running. This one’s for you, @lewellyn!

In case you hadn’t noticed, I tend NOT to read documentation. It’s more fun this way. Really. So, I decided to poke around and try to find the feature, which I found out was called “Seamless Mode”. Makes more sense than “Unity” if you ask me. Unity has that icky “marketing-speak” ring to it. A quick look in my old friend the “Machine” menu revealed it to me very quickly. It also revealed that the option was greyed out. D’oh.

From past experiences with desktop VM software, I had an inkling that I might need to install the “Guest” software on the windows VM before this would work. So, I looked for that option. I very quickly found it under the “Devices” menu (not entirely sure why it lives there, other than the fact that I presume, like other desktop VM software, it needs to mount a disk image first). I clicked on “Install Guest Additions”, and waited.

…

Oh yeah, right. My custom XP install turns off auto-run. Right. Ok. Open “My Computer”, yep, just as I thought, a disk image has been mounted. Right-click, “Autoplay”, bang. Installer screen.

Next, next, accept, next, etc. Followed by the fairly standard windows installer screen showing the progress of the install. Aside from the windows install, this has been the longest step since I built the VM. Oh well. It should pay dividends if I get the wondrous, shiny “Seamless Mode” working, right? After the wait, I was presented with everyone’s least favorite install screen. The notorious prompt to reboot. Sigh. What else to do? I accepted my fate and rebooted. Seamless mode here we come..

I admit, aside from the much-vaunted Seamless Mode, I had no further aspirations as to what good, if any, the “Guest Additions” install might be to me. As the VM booted back into windows, however, I began to get some inkling of what else would be in store.

The gist of the message seemed to be that my mouse would no longer be held captive by the guest OS. Most handy. I was getting tired of using that handy “Lock” key to get my mouse back. Once I cleared the message, I had my normal windows desktop. Time to try out the “killer” feature. I started a browser, and clicked on the now un-greyed “Seamless mode” menu item. The result:

Well.. The immediate result is that I was taken to yet another handy dialog letting me know that I could escape seamless mode with a key combination (specifically left-command-l). Once I cleared that dialog, however..

Ok. Even I can admit that’s kind of cool.

Given the new appearance of the cute little VirtualBox in my windows system tray, I presume there must be myriad other new bits of functionality available to me now, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll leave them for the reader to explore. The mouse, by the way, really is no longer held captive by the VM. I like that. “Guest Additions” turn out to be pretty handy. I might do a new snapshot to make sure they’re kept safe.

Final thoughts

There is probably plenty more I could say about this wonderful product. I said I’d say a little more about the licensing, so I will. There is a very, very long page with the details of the “Virtualbox PUEL” T’s and C’s, which, of course makes no mention of price. It does give the full text of the license which, like the copy in the installer, makes mention of a very, very vague “evaluation period”. A cursory look through Sun’s corporate site yielded no pricing information either. Thus, for the moment, I’m sticking with “Free”, even though I will be using the software in a business environment (I will do a little more looking, though, as I don’t want to expose my clients unnecessarily).

As for features, Sun provide rather a lot of information very little of which, I’ll admit, I bothered to read. It has everything I want, and a few things I didn’t even know I wanted until I tried them. This is more than good enough for me.

The bottom line.

I’m very, very impressed with this software. Sun seem to have, as has become their recent habit, snapped up a winner in VirtualBox (it was originally an open source project). They’ve kept its roots intact, by offering an open source version to download and compile (which I won’t be trying, sorry). Apparently the open source version lacks a few features, which will be rolled in at a later time (more info on the wikipedia page).

What surprised me most about VirtualBox, aside from the price, is the fact that it seems to be feature complete in every way. I was sure there would be some huge gaping feature hole between it and its competitors. However, from my experience, there seems to be no such problem, as far as desktop virtualization goes (I have yet to explore Sun’s server-side product range, so I don’t know yet how it will compare with VMWare ESX, for example). For a desktop user, there really doesn’t seem to be anything missing (please correct me if I’m wrong. I tend to “under-use” software at times in favor of getting my work done).

@vmwarefusion on twitter approached me after my initial tweet for help, with the humble suggestion that I use Fusion (a little creepy, but OK). Once I had decided on VirtualBox, I informed “it” to this effect, and “it” asked, quite reasonably “Why?”. I stand by my reply, that the price is right, and the performance is so much better that I wouldn’t think of trying another product. For my somewhat humble purposes, I’d stack this software up against its competitors any day, and I’m most grateful to the nice people at Sun for a fine product and a very vague license.

I’m no gamer.

I’m a geek. I spend most of my days writing PHP, or blogging / reading blogs, or wasting time on <insert favorite socnet site here>.

I spend the odd night once or maybe twice a month playing with a friend’s game console, or maybe with a little time waster game on my Mac, but that’s the extent of my game mania.

All of this is just as well, it seems, as the state of gaming on the Mac just never seems to improve. This was brought to my attention today, as I received a lovely birthday gift from my kids: a $150 gift card from.. Well, we’ll just call them SurlyPCSnobGameStore. I was stoked. Especially when I found out that there was a new local branch of SurlyPCSnobGameStore right here in our little suburb of Sydney. Sweet. Off me and the wife and kids went to spend my happy little piece of plastic.

I admit, I was a little worried right off the bat. Way, way back in my pre-professional-geek history — let’s call these my “joe job” years — I worked for a retail software chain back in the US that bears a lot of similarities to SurlyPCSnobGameStore (their stores are branded in outlandish purple, hint hint). In those days, if you came into our store asking for Mac games we didn’t even try not to laugh at you. In fact, we used to get the guy from the Arby’s across the concourse to come over and help us laugh at you. It was a niche market that we didn’t care about and didn’t want to know about. We couldn’t imagine anyone gaming on a Mac.

It’s good to know that in these times of upheaval and rampant change that somethings still hold true: Gamers think Mac users are weenies.

Because I’m a big wussy, and because I knew what I would be in for the instant I spoke to the little GameMonkeyBoy behind the counter I couldn’t bring myself to even ask questions about Mac software. I didn’t want to give the little bastard the satisfaction, or, worse, wind up ranting incoherently about his lack of knowledge / care factor with regards to Mac software. Because they love me, however, my family were willing to take the bullet for me. “So. Do you have <awesome game for Brad> on the Mac?”, my youngest, a fellow Mac user, kindly asked of GameMonkeyBoy. The inevitable response came, “No. It hasn’t been released”. I really did try to hold my tongue, but my sense of disbelief and anger prevailed. “Of course it has, we know someone who owns it, it’s been out for nearly a year!”, I bravely intoned, poking my head out from behind the shelves I’d been cowering behind carefully studying. I instantly flushed with shame. Not only had I outed myself as a Mac weenie, I’d given into the temptation to enter combat with an unarmed man. Most dishonorable.

The trip ended fairly quickly after that. I considered a couple of non-platform options (mice, etc), but really wanted to get the hell out of there and return to the safety of the SurlyPCSnobGameStore website where I could surreptitiously find something Mac-Compatible and then go to the retail outlet armed with the knowledge of what exactly I can expect.

Unfortunately for me, this exercise has proven equally futile. They sell damn near every bit of game gear and game software imaginable, as long as it’s not Mac compatible. It’s like a bizarro world where Mac’s were never invented, and you need a Windows machine, a gaming console, a frontal lobotomy, or preferably all three in order to play video games.

Seriously. WTF.

We’re not talking about talking about some mom-and-pop operation here, either. This is “Australia and New Zealands largest video game retailer. With over 250 stores located throughout Australia and over 30 in New Zealand”. To quote their “About” page. They’re owned by a large American company by the same name. These guys, Jobs help us, are the pros. Shocking.

I’m still looking at their site, hoping desperately to find something, mainly for the sake of my lovely children who have already shelled out for the non-transferable gift card which I don’t want them to think is useless. I’m sure I can reach some compromise with these people. I really could use a new mouse. It pains me to think, though, that in the nearly fifteen years since I left the purple software retailer of death that things have failed to move forward at all. I admit, I’m not terribly well-informed on the topic. As I said, I don’t game. I’m hoping you, dear readers, can help bring some sense to the situation. Convince me this is an isolated incident, console me with similar stories so that I know I’m not alone, or, just send me a windows machine, an xbox and a long piece of wire coat hanger to shove up my nose.. Surely therein lies the road to gaming happiness.

Applicable OSX Versions: Tiger and Leopard (That I know of!)

Because I’m a MAJOR keyboard junkie, I tend to find little nuggets of hidden OSX fun from time-to-time. This is just such an occasion. While looking at the Dashboard today to see what time it was in Macgasm-land (aka Ottawa) it occurred to me to try a screenshot — Apple-Shift-3 — for no REAL reason other than to see what would happen. I didn’t REALLY expect it to work, but when I heard the familiar “shutter” noise, I quickly jumped to the desktop to find this:

This is by far not the first time that something like this has happened. Often, I feel like Apple reads my mind with these things. Stuff like this is what I’m talking about when I tell people that OSX “just works”.

Ok, that’s a little fanboy-ish, but you see what I mean.

Of course, I’m not entirely sure how useful this will be, although off the top of my head I’d say it could be very useful if you happen to be a Dashboard Widget developer. Luckily, I’m geeky enough not to really care how useful things are, as long as they’re obscure and a bit fun.

Comments with similar keyboard goodness are most welcome!