Another vote for Adium. Never tried the others, but I was happy with Adium and even happier with the last upgrade. It's so much prettier than any windows IM client, and on top of that works better too. The logging and the aliases are what I really like.

Matthew

I have been taken to task elsewhere for implying that SMB sucks. However, if you can play VOBs via SMB currently, then you can use a utility to extract the DVD data to your hard drive (DVDShrink comes to mind) and use a number of DVD players to play that instead of a disc. I believe VLC will do it, but I'm sure there are other choices, too.

Hm. Okay, I'll try both Adium and Proteus. Thanks.

You might want to try Colloquy for IRC.

http://colloquy.info/

And Adium does Zephyr if you're crazy enough to be from somewhere that uses it, so Adium has big points in my book.

Okay, yeah, Adium is the business.

There's only one thing I'd like to do with it that I can't figure out how. I want to take all the ICQ names and have it change the "number" into the "nick". Even if I go View, Contact Name format, User Name (Alias), I don't see their nick unless I manually edit the alias and paste their nick in there by hand. Tedious.

Okay, that's sorted. Now on to Mail Checkers.

I'm looking for a universal mail checker for OSX that will check Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo mail accounts, and notify me. As a bonus, maybe it could actually launch that account and sign into it for me. Right now, Trillian does all that for me on the PC side (Yahoo and Hotmail are native, Gmail is a plug in).

I just tried "eCheck 0.5" and it's, um, bad. It gets odd error messages that overflow its user interface and cause the program to malfunction. I'm now wondering how to deinstall the thing.

Anyone got any ideas?

Well, I'm specifically wanting to keep those as webmail services, and most emphatically, deliberataly, and specifically NOT forwarding them or POP-retrieving mail from them. All I want is new mail notification for those locations.

You could go to eCheck's web site and click on "Un-installing eCheck".

However, it has existed for less than a month. Give the guy a bug report.

It would be a lot mroe useful if it weren't a widget. Everyone seems to be in a scramble to make widgets for absolutely everything, disregarding the fact that some things just don't serve much of a purpose as a widget. Or at least should have an equivalent desktop-deployable version.

Yes, you can drag a widget to the desktop. But when you recall dashboard it will pop back to the dashboard.

Dashboard is the number two most underwhelming feature in Tiger. Right next to Spotlight - number one with a bullet because it barely works and most definitely does not find/index all files (even when searching by something as simple as filename).

Bruno

Coolness. I shall do preciesly that, thanks.

Tony, you may want to poke at Automator to get started first. It's kinda a quick drag and drop applescript editor that in some cases may do exactly what you need, and failing that at least give you a good start. Apple's site has a ton of automator scripts now, and odds are some functions are already out there so you don't have to start with nothing.

Quote:
Right next to Spotlight - number one with a bullet because it barely works

Spotlight for me has been pretty useful. I threw on about 5 gb of technical PDF and webpages on my Powerbook,and can search for specifics usually faster then some of the web tools we have internally. Since it also can show results from e-mail where a lot of technical discussions go on, I find myself getting answers to problems quicker then I used to. Add to that the fact that my mail reading is so much easier now with about 20 smart folders instead of my old manual system of folders and filters, and well Spotlight is now a must have feature for me.

I completly redid my work e-mail to just have the IMAP folders be 2000-Q1, 2000-Q2 and so on. Then the smart folders setup I have a "Product" folder that has e-mails that talk about an MSA1000, or EVA, or whatever. Then I have other smart folders for certain e-mail lists, and certain groups of people. Lastly, I have a "Last Day" "Last Week" and "Last Month" folders to quickly glance to see if I missed anything.

I'm really considering doing similar to my home e-mail as well, but the one disadvantage would be losing the universal access I now have. Currently the exact folder structure is in the web interface, Mail on the Mac, or Thunderbird on the PC.


Dashboard, well, it has some use for me, but only in having a calculator right there instead of using Quicksilver to launch the app. I could easially live without it.

Spotlight only finds "some" content. That's a big proiblem because you never know what you're missing. That problem exists on the desktop as well as mail. I have verified this on my machine as well as other peoples' computers. And I'm talking about simple search criteria like filenames and standard headers in mail like FROM, TO and SUBJECT.

When searching files you can't set a NOT operand on any of the search criteria. Big minus.

Mail smart folder also have some really odd bugs. For instance, I can have a smart folder with 10 different criteria, all on the subject, with the whole thing set to match ANY. If I add one more criteria set to BODY and type "the" as the match word, it should produce a much bigger smart folder, right? Because in addition to the specific subject matches it will pick up anything with the word "the" in the body. The results? It brings back a handful of messages only. Much LESS than before adding the "the" body criteria.

I also can't stand that the whole folder has to be set to match ANY or ALL criteria. Basically this is an OR operand between all criteria or AND. I want to be able to use both, allowing me to have a few items that MUST be matched and a few which are optional. For instance, a smart folder for all mail from "John" that includes the words "hockey" OR "baseball" in the subject. Can't do that now.

Just recently I was searching for a filename I knew existed on my machine. Not within any hidden or system domain either. It didn't find the file nor a few others that also should have matched my partial text. I located them myself in the finder and opened one. Did the search again. Now it would find the file I opened but not the others. I had to open one at a time in it appropriate application to get Spotlight to recognise them. If it worked 100% 100% of the time or never worked, those two extremes I could deal with. This unknown is a big problem though.

Bruno

1. Open Dashboard with F12
2. Click the "+" icon in the bottom left (the more dashboard widgets button)
3. Click and drag any widget into the dashboard area - DO NOT RELEASE THE MOUSE BUTTON
4. Press F12 (while still holding the mouse button)
5. Release the mouse button

The widget will now be on your desktop and can be dragged around while alwayys floating over other windows.

Pressing F12 again to access the rest of the dashboard will cause the widget on your desktop to be hidden with all the other widgets when you close the dashboard. And you can't put it back on your desktop unless you drag it from the "more widgets" area. lame.

The steps above to get it to appear on your desktop are from Apple, so it's a supported procedure. The whole widget system is just something that wasn't thought through very carefully though. It's so much an ugly hack with terrible usability.

Bruno

The NOT and OR operators are undocumented in spotlight at the moment. The syntax is a bit odd and picky which is probably why it's undocumented.

You can use the NOT operator by doing empeg(-rio) if you wanted everything with empeg in but not rio. | is OR and space is AND so don't add any extra ones to your query.

foo|bar(-baz) is foo or bar but not baz.

the default buffer sizes are small.. can't remmeber why exactly, but I bet the Samba FAQ is where I saw it. it even shows where to set the buffer to 8mb in the config

Yeah, what he said. The send and receive buffers should be at least 8192. Actually, this just jogged my memory that I had been meaning to test out larger values, and after a short test, it appears bumping the buffer up to 65536 seems to have bumped up my speed by 20% or so.

Right now, here's the relevant line in my smb.conf:

socket options = TCP_NODELAY, IPTOS_LOWDELAY, SO_KEEPALIVE, SO_SNDBUF=65536, SO_RCVBUF=65536

Those other flags are things I've found along the way that were also said to improve performance.

Try the tests using a Linux SMB client and server. Odds are, you will see speed improvements there as well. While Windows SMB implementation isn't the greatest, a lot of tweaking has gone into Samba, to the point I now use it in most situations, no matter the OS.

When I tried to open a .DOC file on the mac, it installed and ran a 30-day trial version of Microsoft Office 2004 for the Mac. Which is nice, but I'm not certain I want to buy the full version just to open the occasional Doc file.

I notice OpenOffice.Org doesn't have a final Mac port yet, so what other options do I have?

First, tell people not to distribute proprietary files that don't necessarily even look the same on different computers running the same version of Word.

Second, try NeoOffice. I haven't given it a shot yet, but it ought to be pretty good. Let me know.

There's also icWord, which is a $20 viewer.

You can also try using the builtin TextEdit app. That'll probably support it enough for you to read the text, anyway.

Gah. I assumed that, because double-clicking on the DOC file launched the Microsoft Office installer, that there wasn't any native support for the file format.

Ah well. I'm sure I'll enjoy this OpenOffice port I just installed.

Quick tip in case you don't know. Right click a file, and go to Open With. That works similar to how it does on Windows. If you want to open it just once with a different program, pick a program in that menu. Otherwise, to change what opens that type of dicument by default, choose "Other", then pick the application and check "Always open with".