Status-Q

There’s a new beta of Parallels Desktop for Mac – the virtualisation software that lets you run other operating systems in a window on your Mac. Follow the link to see a whole host of nice new features.

For example, you can resize the Parallels window and it just tells Windows to change to the right resolution. Very nice.

And there’s also the ‘coherence’ mode, which is a bit like a full-screen mode but with the background taken away, so you can see and interact with your Windows windows alongside your Mac ones:

And you can simply drag files from the Finder into your Windows world, which is very convenient. When I tried to go the other way, Windows blue-screened and then rebooted inside the window – remember, this is still a beta.

One thing that virtualisation has really brought home to me is just how little I need Windows. I installed Parallels when it first came out, had a quick check of my web sites to make sure they looked OK under IE, and then shut it down again. Since then I’ve run Ubuntu in a window many times, but I have only started up Windows for two reasons: to upgrade the firmware on my Blackberry, and to upgrade the firmware on my Nokia E61. There are Mac applications for normal interactions with these devices, but not for the low-level grungy stuff.

All of which makes me think that it may be virtualisation, rather than Netscape, that really fulfils Marc Andreessen’s 1995 prophecy about Windows being reduced to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers”.

Here’s a neat utility I’ve just discovered which fixes one of the few things which bug me about the Mac user interface: WindowDragon.

It lets you assign mouse/key combinations to drag and resize windows without having to make your way to the title bar or the bottom right corner.

On my setup, for example, Ctrl-Alt-drag anywhere in the window will drag the window around. (Linux GNOME users, BTW, can also do this with Alt-drag). It’s so much easier than normal, and so much more like moving bits of paper on a desktop. Try moving some things around on your real physical desk, only allowing yourself to grasp them by the top edge, and see whether you think it’s a good interface…

I’ve also set Ctrl-Alt-right-drag to resize, and yes, you can do it from any corner or edge, or even anywhere vaguely in the vicinity of the corner or edge. Very handy, but I’m going to have to find a different combination when I’m using my one-button trackpad…

I thought this might be a good use of the squeezy side-buttons on my Mighty Mouse; you can use them if you set the mouse to treat them as ‘Button 4’. I like the idea of ‘grabbing’ the window like that and moving it around, but I’ve never really been able to grip those buttons and use my mouse easily – they’re just not quite in the right place.

You can disable WindowDragon for particular apps if you need the key assignments for something else.

Here’s a neat little free Mac app that’s getting some attention: Tangerine.

It analyses the music in your iTunes library and works out the BPM (beats per minute) of each track. It’s in beta at present, but works really quite well. There are multiple uses, but I guess the chief benefit will be for those who like to exercise to music and want to jog at a consistent speed!

I could use it to discover that the people running twice as fast as me are only doing so because they’re listening to Hall & Oates’ Maneater (179bpm) while I struggle along with Dylan’s One More Night (89bpm).

Of course, if you’re creating playlists of songs that blend into each other, you can juxtapose songs with a x2 speed multiple and they work rather well…

Mac users should check out the Perian project.

“Perian is a free plugin that enables QuickTime to play almost every popular video format.”

A nice side-effect is that it also enables Front Row to play almost every popular video format. Like the ones that typically float around in Bittorrent space…

I wrote a few days ago about Mojopac, and whether we might get something similar on the Mac.

Steven Talbott pointed me at this interesting patent that Apple was granted yesterday which covers, very approximately, keeping your home directory on an iPod and being able to log in to a machine using that account when you plug the iPod in.

In the corner of my home office, there sits an HP OfficeJet 3330. I’m rather fond of this beast – it has provided us with a copier, scanner, fax and laser printer (albeit b&w) at home for a very reasonable price, and has never given us any trouble. There’s a JetDirect box stuck to the back so that it’s on the network and we can print to it from any machine in the house.

As an aside – I never realised just how useful having a copier at home could be until I got one. Here’s an example: I occasionally like going for longish walks around the Cambridgeshire countryside on Sunday afternoons. I used to stuff a guide book in one pocket and an Ordnance Survey map in another. Now, I just photocopy a couple of pages and the relevant bit of the map. Much easier to deal with in rain or a high wind…

Anyway – the HP software is laughably bad, but we normally only need the printer driver which works just fine. Occasionally, though, I need to scan things. I forget whether there was no HP Mac software which worked with networked scanners, or whether it was so bad that I abandoned it, but for years I’ve been using the web interface to do any scanning. Not very flexible or convenient, but it worked.

Today, however, Dave Hill showed me a much better way, albeit rather more complex to set up. Those who are unlikely to want to try this should probably move on to John’s blog at this point!

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Those of us who love the command line can be keen to point out its advantages over pure GUI-based programs. “Imagine you want to rename a hundred files”, I have been known to say, “to change photo001.jpg to old_paris_photo001.jpg, etc…”

Now, the truth is that, while it would be a real pain to do this in the Finder, it isn’t exactly trivial on the Unix command line either. Which is why I think there’s a room for a utility dedicated to renaming, especially when it’s free, and as nicely implemented as Renamer4Mac. You drop the files onto the window, choose from a variety of filename modifications, and it shows you what the new names will be – a big advantage. Then you just click the button and you’re done.

It can also install itself as a contextual menu plugin, so you can select files in the Finder, right-click on them, and choose “Rename with Renamer4Mac…”

Thanks to the MacBreak vidcast for the link.

Regular readers will know that I was hoping for some update to Apple’s Aperture software to be announced today. And sure enough, Aperture 1.5 will be a free upgrade later this week, with lots of nice new features.

As always with Aperture, there are video tours and tutorials including one which shows you what’s new in this version. (Here’s a direct link to that movie.)