A number of my friends and coworkers have recently purchased Mac computers, and so I thought it would be appropriate to share a little guidance to help them get started. Below is a list of free applications and other goodies that will enhance your Mac experience. Of course, it’s a good idea to install only the things you think you will need or use.
Some of these are applications you would not use every day, but are nonetheless good to have around for special situations or needs.
If you would like free weather reports in Apple’s iCal (which can be synced to your iPhone or iPod Touch), there’s good news: Weather Underground supports the iCal .ics format as a subscription format. (It also offers RSS.) And unlike the shareware application WeatherCal (which provides the same service), it is free.
What this means is that you can subscribe to weather reports for any city, and have the forecast appear within iCal. The 7-day forecast will display as a series of all-day events in the calendar. (All-day events appear as headers at the top of each day.) Weather details older than one day are automatically deleted, which is nice; it doesn’t fill up your calendar.
In case you missed it, the MacHeist 3 bundle has been released. It’s really great this year; I’ve already purchased mine.
For today, October 28 only, CodeWeavers is giving away free, fully licensed copies of their Windows virtualization software for Mac and Linux. Download the software, and enter your email address to receive a license (very important).
From the website: (more…)
One thing I like about Apple’s OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is the built-in Time Machine backup software. I purchased a Time Capsule backup drive to go with it. Although the system apparently works well — I haven’t had to restore anything yet — it is quite slow, and by default runs every hour. It seemed that every time I wanted to log out, restart, or shut down my computer, it was in the middle of a backup.
Unfortunately, Time Machine does not include any settings to control the frequency of backup. Fortunately, changing how often backups occur is not hard to do. There are basically three routes you can take; they all do precisely the same thing (change a particular configuration file): (more…)
