…To MacBook

I usually try to post tutorials on this blog to help users figure out how to do things on their new macbook, it’s also mostly for my own benefit because I look back 6 months later and wonder “how did I do that?”. Today I will be posting a product review (angry rant) about the $70 Mighty Mouse from Apple which people shouldn’t even waste time on even if it was given to them for free.

First off, what is the Mighty Mouse? it’s a wireless mouse by Apple that looks cool and works great when you first start off. Here’s a description off of Apple’s own product page:

“How do you improve on the mouse that has everything? Remove its tail. Mighty Mouse — the mouse that changed the way you scroll — has gone wireless. Now you can take that seamless, touch-sensitive, 360-degree scrolling design with you wherever you go.“

I was given one at work left over from another colleague who switched jobs. Setting the mouse up was pretty easy and straightforward. The mouse worked great. The wireless feature is amazing because you don’t need to pull the wire as it gets stuck on something on the desk.

The pain started shortly after setting it up and using it for about a week. The mouse scroll just stopped working. First it wouldn’t scroll up, then it would’nt scroll at all. Since it’s a mouse ball as a scroll wheel, I knew this had to be issue with dirt. No problem, I remember the old days when there were no lasers for mice and the ball would collect dirt and get stuck. I’ll just open up the hood and clean the scroll ball… how do you open up the hood to this thing?  The bottom door just leads to the battery. Maybe I need to take the batteries out. Nope nothing there. I’ll look online. wow, there’s actually no easy way to open up and clean the scroll ball. 

This problem isn’t just something that happened to me. I went around the office and found out the same issue with a wired mouse that comes with the iMac. I also found other who had the same problem that comes and goes every now and then. A google search turned up many results for this issue, here’s one of them from http://www.tinyscreenfuls.com:

“The fix? Blow compressed air around the scroll ball, or just push on it really hard and roll it around (that worked for me). If you’re lucky (I was), it will start working again.”

“If you’re lucky”? is this what we’ve come down to? luck of the draw to fix a hardware issue? Apparently I’m not lucky this time. That solution has worked in the past but now it has been two days and nothing seems to work. I will have to just open up this mouse and hope it’ll be as good as new when I put it back together. If it doesn’t, I don’t really care anymore because I’m going to dump this $70 dollar mouse and get a cheap $5 one that will probably work without causing this many problems.

While using the macbook I’ve picked up a few keyboard shortcuts that I now use all the time. Here is a list of them:

1. Command+tab: to switch between different applications. This is similar to window’s alt+tab. You can hold down the command button and press/release tab and a prompt will come up to show you all the currently open programs. If you press and release the tab button it will then go to the next program and so on until you find the one you want and you let the command button go. This is extremely useful when you have multiple applications open and switching between them often. The biggest difference between windows and linux is that you switch between different application and not different windows of an application. For example if you have three different windows of firefox open comman+tab will not switch between those windows whereas alt+tab on other systems will. Mac OS X has a different keyboard shortcut to accomplish just that and it’s the next on the list.
2. Command+~: Switching between different windows of the same application. Just as the case specified above, when you have three windows of firefox open and you want to switch between then, you just use the command+~ shortcut.
3. Command+C: Copy.
4. Command+V: Paste.
5. Command+X: Cut.
6. Command+Q: Quit the current application. This is similar to pressing Alt+F4 on a windows machine but the greatest difference is that with Alt+F4 you only close the current window or instance of that application you are looking at, whereas with Command+Q you are quitting the whole application. If we continue our example of having three firefox windows open, on a windows machine Alt+F4 will close the current window and when you are at the last window it will quit the whole application. On a macbook Command+Q will wuit the application closing all three windows at once. Just like Command+Tab there is a window specific shortcut and that is next.
7. Command+W: Close only the current window of an application. This key is what is probably the closest to Alt+F4 on a windows machine because it will close the current window of the application you are on. Unlike windows’ shortcut though it will not quit the application if you close the last window. You will notice that the application is still showing as active in the Dock as well as the menu bar showing up at the top. If we follow the firefox example, closing the last window will still keep firefox open and you could open firefox again very fast because it’s still running in memory. You could use the next shortcut to open the new widnow.
8. Command+N: Open a new window of the application. This is application specific.
9. Command+Space: Open the spotlight prompt. You can use spotlight to find any files or even start up an application for you. Once you get used to this you will see that you rarely use finder or even the Dock to start your application. you want to open up firefox, just press Command+Space and then start typing the name “fire” you won’t even need to finish it and you’ll see firefox come up in the list. Use the arrow keys to go up and down the list to highlight the firefox Application and press enter.
10. Command+Shift+3 and Command+Shift+4: Take a screenshot. For more information look at our screen capture post.
11. Shift+Fn+Left Arrow: Home. This works in different ways on different application. I use terminal a lot and in terminal it will be like pressing “Home” on a keyboard and go to the beginning of the command. In other applications I’ve seen it go to the top of the text (like this input box in the browser jumps to the first character). In other applications you also don’t need to press the Shift key but you do in terminal.
12. Shift+Fn+Right Arrow: End. Works the same way as the home button.
13. Shift+Fn+Up Arrow or Down Arrow: Page Up and Page Down respectively. Works the same way as the home button
14. Fn+Delete: Delete. The way the delete button alone works is more commonly known as backspace in other systems, it will delete the text found right behind (to the left of) the cursor. To delete the text found in front (to the right of) the cursor you need to press Fn+Delete.
15. Fn+FX where X is a number between 1 and 12: Issues that function key as pressed. You will notice that the Function keys (F1, F2, … F12) have other uses like dimming the screen, controlling the speaker, starting spaces or expose and so on. Sometimes though you just want to press the F1 button, in those cases you need to use it in conjunction with the Fn key.
16. Ctrl+Eject: Brings up the shutdown prompt to easily issue a shutdown or restart command.

These are the most common keyboard shortcuts that I use and can think of right now. Let me know if you have a favorite one and I’ll add that to the list.

Recently we’ve started using some packages in java that require us to use Java 1.6 (sometimes refered to as Java 6. Which one is it java, 1.6 or 6? We’re at war, pick a side!). If you have Mac OSX leopard then you should have both 1.5 and 1.6 installed on the system but by default 1.5 is used.

To check which version is being used when you log in, open up terminal and type:

java -version
You should see something like:

java version “1.5.0_16″
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_16-b06-284)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_16-133, mixed mode, sharing)

To switch this to use 1.6 instead, you need to add the following to your .bashrc:

alias java=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Commands/java
export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/

Remember to either exit your terminal and start a new session or just run the command:

source ~/.bashrc

for the changes to take effect.

I’m finally back. I had to close the site for a while because of a bad spam problem. While I was away I learned something new about the macbook. How to get some diagnostic data on your battery.

Issues with my battery started recently. What would happen is the battery would be chargning, reaches “finishing charge”, then the adapter light turns green and the battery indicator turns to “Charged”. A few seconds later though the adapter light turns orange again and the indicator goes back to “Charging” then “Finishing Charge”. It basically looks like it continuously charges and doesn’t stop once done. This definitely can’t be good for the battery.

Well I took it into the apple store and a genius looked at it and basically told me that my battery has passed the recommended number of cycles and it is pretty much downhill from here. The typical “Cycal count” is around 300 and I was at 318. You can tell this by going to the apple icon at the top left of your screen, click on “About this mac”, in the dialog that comes up click on the “More Info” button and then under hardware find the “Power” section. In that section you should be able to see more details about your battery including the cycle count.

A few tools I found useful for battery info:

1. Coconut Batter: http://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/
   if you don’t want to go throught he “About this mac” dialog. You can download coconut battery. This will pretty much tell you the same info but also allows you to save the details at any point in time so you can view it again later. It also has the default charge for most mac laptops so you can tell how much charge your battery has lost.
2. iStat Pro by iSlayer: http://www.islayer.com/index.php?op=item&id=7
   iSlayer has a cool widget that tells you the overall health of your laptop. Things like CPU load, heat of the processor, the heatsink, the hard drive and battery info as well.

I thought this was going to be hard but there’s a company out there called flip4mac which provides a program that allows you to play avi and wmv files inside quicktime. What’s really good about that is that you can watch those videos in front row too.

To download the free player, go to Microsoft’s page describing the flip4mac product and offering a free download link.

If you want to convert your wmv videos to be able to play them on your iPod, then you’ll have to buy the home version of flip4mac wmv from their site.

In the Mac world, what PC users call the touchpad mouse is called the trackpad. When I first got this macbook, I started playing around with some of the settings. Here is a screen shot of my current settings:

Our blog now has iTunes podcasts thanks to Bluegrind.com. You can find our podcast within iTunes if you go to “iTunes Store” and search for “Bluegrind to macbook”. You can also see it by clicking the following link and subscribing to our feed:

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=260340833

I am using firefox and when I click on that link, I get a dialog box that tells me firefox will launch an application. Just click on the “Launch Application” button and iTunes will automatically open.

What’s cool about bluegrind is that you don’t need to manually create your podcasts, it will automatically generate it for you. All you need to do is register at bluegrind, then go to:

http://www.bluegrind.com/blogs/register_blog.html

Put your blog’s URL and bluegrind will do the rest for you. From then on, it will automatically generate the audio version of your blog posts. If you want to have that audio player on your own blogs as well (like you see on this blog), go to bluegrind’s “My Account” page while logged in and click on the “View all blogs and instructions to place audio in your posts” link. From there, choose which blogging software you use and follow the instructions on placing the code in your template. All you need to do is copy and paste that code block at the position you want. On this blog I prefer having it at the top of each post.

Bluegrind does not yet have an automated way to register your blog on iTunes. You need to contact them and they will register it. It takes a few days though because Apple places all new blog registration under a review cycle.

So now you can enjoy our podcasts in iTunes and more specifically, if you register our podcast, then all our latest articles will automatically be downloaded and you can have them on your ipod to listen to.

If you installed the developer tools on macbook as I did the moment I started it up, you should have VI on your system. I’m used to the syntax highlighting in VI but macs don’t have that enabled by default. You could just run the command:

:syntax onÂ

And immediately you’ll have syntax highlighting. The issue with this method though is that once you quit VI and open a new file, there will be no syntax highlighting and you will need to run the command again.

To have highlighting always enabled, just create or edit the file $HOME/.vimrc and add the following line to it:

:syntax on

Open a new file in VI to test and you should see your code in color.

Here’s a feature I didn’t know the macbook had until I saw someone using it and asked them how they did it. One of the accessibility features of the macbook is zooming. I’ve seen this in other operating systems where a box comes up next to the mouse with a zoomed in view around the mouse pointer. On the macbook, if you have accessibility turned on, you can zoom into the desktop by pressing and holding the “CTRL” key and then using two fingers on the trackpad, next to each other, move your fingers up towards the monitor. You will immediately notice the screen has now zoomed in. Unfortunately, taking a screenshot doesn’t really show the zoomed in effect properly.

Once you have zoomed in, moving the mouse/trackpad will make it seem like you are dragging the entire screen. And when you don’t need to be zoomed in anymore, press “CTRL” key and with both fingers on the trackpad move down (away from the monitor) until the screen is back to normal.

You can enable and disable the zooming feature by going to System Preferences -> Universal Access and change the Zoom setting to off. You can also change which keys will zoom in and out and even have a hot key to turn zooming on or off.

I discussed this briefly in my post on installing subversion but I think it deserves a post of it’s own mostly because I forgot how to accomplish this task and couldn’t find it again as easily.

If you are a windows user, .bashrc may be completely unfamiliar to you. It’s basically a file that you place in your home directory (that would be /Users/your_username on macbook) where you can define environment variables and command aliases. You can actually run any bash command int hat file since it would be a bash script that runs on startup.

The macbook though does not startup with that file sourced automatically. You need to configure it to get it working.

Mac OS X sources /etc/profile when terminal starts off, so all you need to do is add the following line to your /etc/profile file:

[ -r $HOME/.bashrc ] && source $HOME/.bashrc

This will source your ~/.bashrc file on startup and the next time you open terminal all your commands in .bashrc will have run.

I like to have the following settings in my .bashrc:

alias ll=’ls -l’

This line creates an alias for the command ll (that’s two Ls). This should be familiar to many linux users. ls -l is probably the most typed command and shortening it to ll makes life mch easier.

export PS1=”\[\e[1;34m\]\u@\H:\[\e[0m\]\[\e[1;36m\]\w\[\e[0m\]\n\[\e[1;34m\]\t->\[\e[0m\]“

This is my favorite configuration for the prompt on the command line. It will produce the following:

smadenian@serge-madenians-computer.local:/usr/local/maven-2.0.4/bin
11:36:38->

What I like about this prompt is that it shows me which computer I’m working on (good when you ssh into other servers/machines). It shows me my full path. It is plit to two lines (anyone who has gone down a long path and reached the end of the line while typing a command will appreciate that). And finally there’s the time which helps me know when I ran a command and when it finished.

I’ve also created other aliases and path configuration that may not be as useful as the above mentioned items.