MacTips - for Mark's new Mac

Kosmo · June 2006

Well MMORPGs are my #1 favourite, for the last 6-7years I have been constantly a subscriber to some MMOG or other. Mac has WoW which is my current venue, but then there are some shooters (popular ones get ports fo shizzle) Battlefield 1942, HALO, UT2004, Doom3, Quake 4, Call of Duty 2 and believe me when I say Civilization 4 is INSANE, I'm a fan of Sid's games and have been from the first Pirates and Civ4 hooked me so bad. Also one of the best lan games is Command & Conquer Generals and I usually start some shit with my cousin in it, that and Warcraft 3 ofcourse. Darwinia is THE awesum! From those what I mentioned I propably own all of them in some form or another (read. PC/Console) but what I play on my Mac is WoW, UT2004, C&C Generals, Warcraft 3 and Civ 4. And when Parallels gets the DirectX9 fix just go to the game store and buy yourself some PC games and run them no problem 100% ok you the man!

3stripe · June 2006

Well aye, but not if you bought an iMac a couple of months before they went Intel, like me :( I played Command & Conquer to death on a PC (altough I think the first one is still my fav, mostly because of that cheat were you could build things anywhere you wanted)

Kosmo · June 2006

I think it's a bad move on Apple's part not to do something to those who bought PPC Mac just few months before they introduced Intel Macs. Even a rebate could help a litte. But there is a non universal version of all of those games (or most of them) I mentioned. It's a misperception that Macs don't have games, they have all the good games, just the games that suck ass haven't had the Mac treatment, and honestly, do we miss something if we can't play a game that sucks ass?

3stripe · June 2006

Mac games would be all graphics and no gameplay I reckon... ahahhahah

Kosmo · June 2006

I really don't understand the funny behind that, have you looked lately what kind of GPUs Macs have these days? Power Mac comes with GeForce 7800 GTX with 256MB memory, that is the "older" (7900 is same chip just clocked higher) flagship nVidia card (I have one of those in my PC) and the ATI Radeon x1600 is more than enough to run modern games with all graphics settings to the max. Only Macs that can't run modern games on max settings are Macbook and Mac Mini. (and what I heard about Macbook, the integrated graphics chip has some kick to it)

3stripe · June 2006

I mean OS X and Apple products in general are very pleasing in the eye, so it follows that their games would be, possibly to the detriment of the gameplay...

Kosmo · June 2006

Well, despite the neat look of the Mac OS X it has superior usability over Winnie the Crash and Linux. Few weeks ago I applied to the beta of Vista, and all I got from it was that I'm not going to upgrade. It was neat and all, had some very welcome additions but.. it was still windows, which in turn means that it still had it's flaws and own quirks. Don't get me wrong, it again was far superior to XP like XP was to 2k and so on, but if the core ideology of the OS is flawed, no amount of bettering will remove it if it is built on top of the core ideology. I propably will be in contact with Vista enough through work, but I have decided to let go of windows PCs, I'm going for Macs and Consoles. Macs will get hell of a lot more attenttion now that porting games to it is easier than before and the virtualization seems promising so if I ever need to pop to windows I still can do it without a commitment.

jsanders · June 2006

had a discussion just like this in my little corner of the internet when i bought my mac.

two things i didn't see mentioned:

SSHKeychain - gui ssh keychain, interfaces with the apple keychain for passphrases.
Fugu - gui scp client. i haven't had a lot of opportunity to use this yet, but don't let the website throw you off... it looks a lot better than their site.

edit: also, textwrangler, is a feature-stripped, free version of bbedit, for those of us who only want to edit save and exit.

Quicksilver does so much more than just launching apps.

like what? i've had a nagging suspicion that there's a LOT more to this little program than just launching programs via the keyboard (which is cool as hell), but no one that i've seen use it really knows. what more can it do?

imathis · June 2006

9. iAlertU (link)
An alarm system for your MacBook Pro. Use your remote to "lock" your mac. If someone moves it (setting off the built in motion sensor), closes the screen, or touches the trackpad / keyboard the alarm will sound. Muting doesn't work as it overrides that option. Oh and it also makes a cool car lock and unlock sound. Even if you don't use it for "security" it's still pretty jiggy.

Bruce A · July 2006

Well, it's not a first person shooter or a heavy strategy game, but I'd like to recommend Quinn. It's a Tetris clone, and it has a network play feature so you can play against your friends (assuming you've got any ;) ). It's free, too, though sadly it's not yet Universal.

Kosmo · July 2006

I got friends, honestly. Tho, 99% of my friends are gamers so care to give a guess how many of them owns a Mac :D

pbear · July 2006

I'd recommend MAMP (Apache/PHP/MySQL) for offline development. You already have Apache on the Mac (and PHP, just needs to be enabled) but this is a nice distribution. Don't have to open up your machine with Personal Web Sharing. When you're done with it (or mess it up, like me) just drag it to the Trash.

I e-mail with PowerMail. Not free, but it searches wicked fast. Thorough filtering system. PowerMail + SpamSieve = perfect!

Personally I hide the Dock as far away as possible and use DragThing as my application launcher. Completely customizable. Depending on how you work, Butler or Quicksilver may be better. Give DragThing a spin just for kicks though. :)

I also find Unsanity's FruitMenu indispensable. People have differing opinions about "haxies," but on my 1024x768 tiny iBook screen it's a must.

precid · July 2006

someone above mentioned you needed to install the entropy packages for php and mysql, but it's actually already there. open up your httpd.conf /etc/httpd/httpd.conf uncomment the following LoadModule php4_module libexec/httpd/libphp4.so AddModule mod_php4.c save and restart apache and you're off to the races. mysql is also installed by default, and you can get at it through the command line or through what I think is the rock awesomest mysql gui, CocoaMySQL. using personal file sharing isn't really opening up your machine, it's just a switch for apachectl, and apache has a virtual host running at /~user/ but you can set up your own virtual hosts pretty easily. Here is a guide http://www.evolt.org/article/Enabling_Virtual_Hosts_on_MacOS_X/18/13138/

imathis · July 2006

BootCamp (link)
I just played battlefield 2 and Oblivion last night on my BootCamped Mac. I've never seen these games run so smoothly and look so nice! I was getting at least 100fps in bf2 even with 4x anti-aliasing and all the settings cranked as high as they go. I can't believe the power in this can trounce all my other computers.

ellin · July 2006

'While typing this I can press cmd+shift+; to do a spell check on this input field... pretty sweet." This doesn't work for me? Does it matter what programe you're in? Usining Firefox..

Kosmo · July 2006

Suweet, just ordered my own MacBook Pro 15,4" 2.16Ghz - 2gb ram - x1600 256mb - 100gb hdd - Superdrive It should arrive sometime next week if all goes well.

imathis · July 2006

yeah... I think you have to be in a cocoa application, such as safari. If you like FF better... you can use Butler for a quick dictionary check. I can hover my mouse over any word and press ctrl+cmd+d and it does a sweet dictionary check overlay.

bugsmi0 · August 2006

Butler is not better than quicksilver not even close, I actually uninstalled butler it was crap and slowed the mac down. quicksilver is high recommended though its fast as lightening. also recommoended url well and tiger lanuch

imathis · August 2006

it doesn't slow me down...

bugsmi0 · August 2006

Butler is a joke if you ask me along with the other nonsense apps used to lure people into paying for other useless apps

imathis · August 2006

Wow you're pretty passionate with your ad hominem attack there. I'll give quicksilver another try, perhaps it has improved some since I last used it.

Colin · August 2006

Back on track - Stattoo (http://www.panic.com/stattoo/) rocks. Unobtrusive quick access to Mail, iCal, Weather, clock, and more on your desktop. Blends right in.

bugsmi0 · August 2006

quicksilver rocks I only recommend sure things that work!!

nothing against butler just that it is too buggy and very slow and unreponsive, it freezes up most of the time
so I don't recommend it, I think they tried to put too many things into one basket. Quicksilver is awsome and no app can replace it not even butler.

panic.com has some cool apps, I use transmit that's a great FTP for mac

Howdy, Stranger!

Categories

In this Discussion

MacTips - for Mark's new Mac

Comments