One of today’s most interesting technological developments are portable Ebook readers. The two most popular readers are Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony Reader. Unfortunately for the Mac both of these companies are lacking compared to their Windows counterparts in terms of support, but I will give it to Amazon that they are least a little better. However the Kindle’s lack of support for .pdf files and it’s design was too ludicrous for me so I purchased a Sony Reader.

To get my Reader working with my Mac was fairly simple after a little research. There are a few options, but the best and most popular is an application called libprs500, the home site is located here.

libprs500 is open source, cross-platform and will work on Linux, Windows and most importantly OSX. Just do the usual install for .app files, click on here to download the app and move it to your /Applications folder.

To use it just connect your Reader to your computer and libprs500 will recognize the device automatically (libprs500 supports both the older PRS-500 and the newest PRS-505.) Click on whatever storage area you’re going to put your Eboks, it could be either the Reader’s own built-in space or your own SD or ProDuo card.

Then go up click on “Add books” and then navigate to the Ebook you want to put on, if you click the little arrow beside the “Add books” you have different options for adding multiple Ebooks, one for putting multiple pdf pages together to make a single Ebook, and another for getting different individual Ebooks from a folder.

I put together a screenshot (shown below) that shows the steps to add in Ebooks, just follow the numbers (1-3.)

Note: if you get a little error popping telling you that there is no folder, or something on those lines make sure you have the destination selected.

ExpanDrive is a beautiful OS X applications that mounts an SFTP (Secure FTP) connection as if it were another hard drive. It allows you to easily upload, delete, edit or move files like they were already on your computer.

I read John Gruber’s review of ExpanDrive a few weeks ago and decided to give it a try based on his recommendation.

The interface reminds me of Transmission, another extremely simple and sexy OS X application.

Setting up a new drive is extremely simple:

After connecting to the drive, you’ll see a new mounted drive in your finder window:

Changing directories, editing files and uploading is surprisingly fast. I wouldn’t recommend working remotely on files through this system, as a connection error can leave files corrupted. I learned that lesson the hard way.

I pulled up some remote images through quick look to see how ExpanDrive handled and was amazed how fast ExpanDrive actually works.

Of course, part of this is because of my Internet connection–but ExpanDrive only had a slight delay while displaying files. It emulates the file system very well.

There’s nothing to customize with ExpanDrive. The preferences page has four options:

ExpanDrive is simple but elegant. It stays out of the way in the menubar and delivers exactly what it promises.

If you’d like to access remote files through a network drive, ExpanDrive seems to be your best solution.

ExpanDrive costs $29, but has a fully functional trial you can try before you buy.

For Emacs users on Linux one of the most efficient and important things to
do is remap your Control Key to your Caps Lock key. This is because the Caps
Lock key has such a prominent position on the home row and yet it is rarely
used compared to the Control key.

On Linux you can change your xmodmap, on Windows it’s even trickier,
however on the Mac is only takes a few clicks.

1. Open up your System & Preferences
2. Go to Keyboard and Mouse
3. Click on the Keyboard tab
4. On the bottom left corner click on “Modifier Keys…”
5. Change the Caps Lock Key to the Control key and the Caps Lock key for the Control Key.

And you’re done, now it’s much easier to use your Control key. It’s even smart , the light on the Caps Lock key will light up only when you hit the newly remapped key for Caps Lock and not the traditional one. Unfortunately
for the Vim users there doesn’t seem to be a way to move your Esc key to the
Caps Lock right so we’ll just have to live it or find some other way.

I just recently noticed a simple method of making certain applications start themselves up upon logging in. If an application is in the dock, you can right-click it, and put a check next to “Open at Login”. This automatically adds it to your list of startup items.

Alternatively, you can open System Preferences, the go to the Accounts tab, and click on the Login items tab. Here, you can delete startup items, as well as add new ones.

Some applications which I suggest you run upon login (which aren’t already automatically launched upon Login) are Caffeine, NetNewsWire, and Mail.app. While Login applications may be convenient in many cases, don’t have too many of them, or else it could affect the performance of your computer.

Macworld has put together an article for their “Leopard Survival Guide” about the Dock and Stacks. The article explains how to optimize and hack your Dock and Stacks to better fit your needs. Let’s start off with Stacks.

They go over a variety of small hacks that can be made to Stacks in order to improve your life. My favorite is the addition of a Trash Can Stack. To do this, open a new window in Finder, and type in “~/.Trash” then drag the folder into the dock, next to the other Stacks. Take not that the .Trash folder has no icon and thus shows up as a plain folder (see picture).

Another hack they go over is one we’ve already covered here at MacTips, and that is the addition of a Recent Items Stack. To read more about this, click here. This Stack is particularly useful because it can display all kinds of information such as Recent Documents, Recent Applications, Favorite Volumes, etc. To select which mode you wish to use, right click the stack and put a check next to the desired setting.

There are a few other interesting Stacks hacks, but let’s move on to the Dock. There’s one hack that allows you to add spacers to your dock, much like adding spacers to your Finder bar; but my personal favorite is the ability to temporarily enable Dock magnification.

I usually have Dock magnification off because it eats a little RAM and is quite pointless in most cases. But sometimes, late at night, or early in the morning, my eyes just refuse to work; for these scenarios, I can hold control+shift while mousing over the dock. This temporarily enables magnification.

To read the whole article, click on the link below

[Macworld]

For the all the geeks out there who read a lot of README, config, and MAKE files (and other text\* files without extensions) but hate having to either browse the file in TextEdit or if they want to look at it in their favorite text-editor; second-click, and then select Open With MacVim (or other) rather than simply double-clicking. Thankfully there is a way to fix it and here’s how:

1. Get RCDefaultApp
2. In RCDefaultApp go to the MIME Types tab
3. In “text/*”, “text/plain”, and “text/rtf” settings set the Default Application to your text-editor

And you’re done; now you just have to double-click on the file and it will open in your editor automatically.

Here’s how to use RCDefaultApp for assigning default applications to files with extensions easily.

Your Mac already comes with Apache installed, but getting PHP and MySQL setup can be a headache. Marc Liyanage has a great set of packaged software for making this easier, but this can still be too advanced for some users.

Introducing MAMP, Mac - Apache - MySQL - PHP. MAMP is the easiest way to get MySQL and PHP running on your Mac. Simply download, run the installer and you’re ready to go. Running the MAMP application brings up a very simple dialog for starting and stopping the services:

What I find most interesting about MAMP is you can run either PHP 4 or PHP 5. You can also enable the Zend Optimizer and various caching systems such as xCache and eAccelerator.

MAMP allows you to configure the default ports for MySQL and Apache and change your document root. It provides enough configuration to give you some customization without becoming overwhelming.

MAMP also comes standard with phpMyAdmin, a great tool for working with MySQL.

PHP comes configured with most packages you’d need: GDLib, Zlib, Mcrypt, Curl, SSL and many more.

Overall I was impressed with how simple MAMP is to setup, and how much flexibility it allows in configuring your services. It even comes with a dashboard widget.

On one or two occasions I’ve had a problem stopping and starting the services. Besides that I’ve found MAMP a great solution for anyone who wants to get a MySQL/PHP development running on OS X with no fuss.

Download MAMP (MAMP is big at 127MB)

We’ve talked about VIM before as one of the most powerful text editors ever created. For your normal Mac user, the power in VIM is not needed. But for developers, VIM can send your productivity through the roof.

Recently I lost all of my VIM settings due to a malformed script. Little did I know it was a blessing in disguise. As I rebuilt my settings I discovered over 15 built in color schemes.

To access these color schemes, open VIM. Hit : (colon) to enter a command. Type “colorscheme” followed by a space. Now you can press the Tab key and cycle through every available scheme.

This is much easier than designing your own scheme, which we may cover in a later tip.

Highlighted below are some of the more appealing ones I’ve found:

Elflord

Slate

More previews after the jump.

Continue Reading This Article…

Recently we released the MacTips widget with a lot of success. Because of this, I decided to create a video explaining how to create your own widget.

In this video, I talk about the basics of creating your own Dashboard Widget with Dashcode. I also dabble in some of the more advanced features in Dashcode such as the debugger and inspector. Enjoy.

Wired’s How-To Wiki recently put up an article on how to speed up your Mac. A lot of it is just regular maintenance such as deleting unused applications and clearing the caches of your web browsers and uninstalling plug-ins that aren’t often used, but there are a few tips in there that stand out as news to me.

Did you know that many widgets use your RAM even when Dashboard isn’t open? Open up Activity monitor and check to see if you are currently using any of these widgets. If you are, then ask, “Do I really need a widget that tells me where I can find the Gemini constellation in the night sky?”.

Another Interesting fact is that a cluttered desktop bogs down performance. OS X treats each individual icon as an open window. This means each icon will eat up a minute amount of RAM. If you only have a few, this shouldn’t affect your machine’s performance, but for those of you with dozens of icons on your desktop, think about grouping them into folders.

The amount of free space on your hard drive is also a huge factor in how well your computer runs. If your hard drive is around 90% full you will notice a huge decrease in performance. In this scenario you should either upgrade it, or clear out some space by deleting unused languages and applications or moving photos and videos onto an external hard drive.

Along with the list of how to speed up your Mac, there is also a brief list of actions which will not speed up your Mac. These are tips which are often suggested by tech support forum members which, in reality, don’t do anything, such as repairing file permissions

[Wired How-To]