Adam's Blog

If you have ever been on a Mac, then you know that getting rid of applications is very easy. All you do is drag an application into the trash and empty it. However, did you know that almost every application leaves behind some files from that deleted application. Well instead of digging through your Mac for the extra files, why not let another application do it for you? Well, your in luck because AppZapper does just that. On top of having a very nice and simple interface, AppZapper is basically an application where you drag an app or search for an app via its interface and zap the application AND the extra files to the trash. There are 2 options of deleting files: dragging then application into it or using the interface to search through applications, preference panes, etc. AppZapper has a really stable and well designed interface. On another note, it makes a zap noise when you delete an application and its files. I would strongly suggest it to any Mac user, but one of the let downs about it is that it costs $12.95, but it is worth the investment if you don’t want to spend a lot of your time looking for files all over your Mac.

I have been using Google Chrome as my default browser for about a week now. The official beta just recently came out for Mac, so I decided to give it a try. Even though it is still in the early stages of development, it is a really nice browser. It has a nice and simple interface, which is nice, but hopefully it will get more when comes to features. It does have themes, which are very nice, and hopefully there will be a wider variety of them later. It has only a few preferences, one of the most useful, in my opinion, would be the Privacy settings. The biggest reason why I picked Google Chrome as my default browser is its speed because it is one of the fastest browsers I have ever used. Since it is a beta, they have a good bit of bugs such as crashes, flash problems (not just because flash sucks), and problems loading pages sometimes. There are a lot more bugs than I have put here, but I am confident that Google will continue to fix these throughout the beta.

I have used a few programs in the past that automatically upload screenshots to your website, but I think ScreenGrab, so far, is the best. ScreenGrab is a free piece of software developed my someone named Mikey that I know on the Wyldryde IRC Network. The application, for Mac OS X (Windows and Linux versions are made by a different developer), uploads screenshots automatically to your website. All you have to do is install the software, put in some FTP and set some options as you like it. You can download this software from apps.mikebuntu.info. The screenshot below is the program it self and it automatically uploaded to my website via ScreenGrab.

Since I am short on time, this will be a post on my thoughts on the latest version of iTunes. At first, I wasn’t to fond of the new iTunes Store look, but after I started to adjust to it, things got better. The nice UI is definitely a win when it comes to iTunes. The iTunes DJ, in my opinion, is pretty good….. if your a DJ. The home sharing feature is excellent, especially since I got my MacBook. I can transfer everything I have on iTunes via this feature and it has saved me a LOT of time. As I said, this is a short post, but my overall opinion of iTunes 9 is that it is the best one yet.

2 weeks ago today, the latest release of Mac OS X, 10.6 (Snow Leopard), was released. I was one of the many “Apple fanatics” who went out and bought it the day it came out. Since I have installed Snow Leopard, I have absolutely loved it. I have noticed a bunch of minor bug fixes and a major performance boost. The one noticeable thing is the speed of everything. One of my personal favorite updates would be that Finder has been re-written in Cocoa and it is really great. The new Quicktime X is really nice, but in my opinion, it has slimmed down a little too much. It has a really nice interface, but they need to bring back some of the features they had in Quicktime 7. Also, for Quicktime Pro users, it is a little disappointing that there is no support for that now. The new 64 Bit support has really taken advantage of the graphics card and everything is looking amazing. The few little things that I found wrong with Snow Leopard is that some of my USB devices don’t work when I initially boot up. Another thing, that is not really Snow Leopard’s fault is that 2 applications I use, Grabup and Carbonite Backup, do not yet support Snow Leopard. I really am enjoying Snow Leopard and I rate it a 5/5. I do not, however, say that you have to rush an get it as soon as possible if you haven’t got it already. It can wait for a little while.

Now, I am sure at some point in time you have heard of a VoIP client called Ventrilo. It is usually used for gaming, but some people use it just to talk with their friends. I have been using Ventrilo for a good year now and it has been a really good experience. It is easy to setup and use, and if you have a server, setting up a Ventrilo Server on it is easy. The client is only available for Windows and Mac, but a Linux client is still in development. It is really good for a big group of people that want to talk to each other at once and also for big groups of gamers. Not to mention, it is free.

For a few days now, I have been using something on my server to connect to IRC from called Ezbounce. This is basically some software for a *nix server where it acts sort of like a IRC server. You connect to it and log in and then you can connect to any IRC network of your choice from the server. Whenever you disconnect from that server, you still stay on, but it changes your nick to something else and you can always “reattach” yourself to that connection. So basically it kind of acts like an IRC proxy. I really like this software, and if you try it I am sure you would like it too.

I have been a Mac user for over a year now, but never have used iChat until now for some certain reasons. I have been using Adium, which is a great client, and I would suggest to anybody, but I wanted to stick more to using the Apple software already on the Mac. To me, iChat is missing 3 features that I would want. More IM support (like MSN), ability to use just 1 window to have all your contacts, and a way to disable having to accept every IM you get. It came to my attention today about a few tweaks you can do to fix this. For the last 2 on my list, there is a 3rd Party piece of software called Chax. This gives you a few more preferences to customize. Then to get MSN on there, I had to go through a little bit of a long process to get it setup via a Jabber account. Despite those missing features, I think iChat is a great client, and with a little more work, it will be my absolute favorite.