Posts Filed Under ‘Desktop’
March 26th, 2009, 8 comments
If you need your Unix command line on a Windows PC, chances are you use a terminal emulator like Cygwin--and if you do, you want to check out MinTTY. The MinTTY terminal window for Cygwin puts a native Windows interface on Cygwin which offers more keyboard shortcuts and colors and styles. Check out the difference between Cygwin and MinTTY side-by-side in the thumbnail on the right. Using MinTTY you can turn on window transparency, set your font, and colors, copy and paste output by just selecting it with your mouse, and scroll up using the Shift+arrow key combination. (Once it's installed, right-click on the MinTTY window and choose Options to customize its look and keyboard shortcuts.) Here's what the full MinTTY window with transparency turned on looks like.
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March 19th, 2009
Mac-using sports fans (and those who love them) looking to catch some college basketball online this month should grab the Plex media center's new March Madness plug-in.
Watch live games as they happen or completed games full-screen in HD on your Mac using the plug-in (which is a good way to watch two games at the same time--one on your computer and one on your TV). Plex's interface is a lot nicer than streaming it from CBSSports.com in your regular old web browser, especially if you hook your Mac up to a TV. To get the plug-in, run Plex, and install it from the App Store. Then go to the "Watch My Videos" section and you'll see "March Madness" listed there.
Here's what this afternoon's selection of games looked like:
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March 17th, 2009, 2 comments
Mac user Grant Lucas is putting the Todo.txt CLI and GeekTool to great use on his Mac, pictured above. (Click to enlarge, or check out the annotated Flickr page.) GeekTool affixes the output from command line scripts (and more) to your Mac desktop, so when everything is minimized, it's still visible. Starting at the top left corner and going clockwise, you can see he's got the weather, his project status overview, today's tasks, a calendar, iTunes, and system information up, which automatically updates in the background. Just so happens this setup is very similar to my own. Lucas explains how he wound up with this good-looking display:
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February 25th, 2009, 4 comments
Apple's done a nice job of raising the browser visuals bar with yesterday's release of the Safari 4 public beta web browser. This thing is very unstable, but very pretty--kind of like your ex. Here's my full screenshot tour, published over at Lifehacker this morning: A Hands On Look at Safari 4's (Crashy) Eye Candy.
February 23rd, 2009, 3 comments
After all the hullabaloo last week about Hulu dropping support for Boxee, the popular Mac-based XBMC port, a new beta of Plex (another Mac XBMC port) drops, which offers a working Hulu plug-in in its new App Store.
As a fan of the entire XBMC project, any new release on any platform is exciting, but besides the original Xbox version, I've spent the most time with Plex. (Here's a Plex writeup I did over at Macworld last October.) To install Plex plug-ins via the new App Store, install the latest beta version 0.7.8, and under Applications visit the store. There you can install apps--like the Hulu, YouTube, TED Talks, and TWiT viewers, for example--upgrade and restart them. Right now I'm streaming red carpet highlights from the Oscars last night thanks to Hulu through Plex without a hitch (or a hack).
Nice work, Plex crew.
Update: I asked Plex's lead developer Elan Feingold if he could explain why Hulu got pulled from Boxee and other XBMC ports but works on Plex. He said,
Basically, Boxee was keeping around Hulu data on their servers, and XBMC reverse engineered the player to come up with their hack. Obviously not kosher. We use WebKit to display the site just like Safari does, and make sure it fits in the Plex window, so in a sense we're just a specialized web browser for the TV.
January 28th, 2009, 9 comments
Author Steven Johnson describes what software he uses to write his books, including an insanely useful research database for the Mac, DEVONThink Pro ($79, Mac only).
DEVONThink is a desktop document database, where you can save snippets of web pages, PDF's, and any other kind of document. Its killer feature is its ability to determine which documents deal with similar subject matter based on the frequency of the words that appear in them. More powerful than just a regular keyword search, when you've got a DT database of thousands of documents, this relationship ranker helps you connect ideas you may not on your own.
Back in 2005, Johnson inspired me to try out DEVONThink, and I used it to put together the first edition of the Lifehacker book. Here's what my database at that time looked like:
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