Status-Q

Mmm. It’s too bad. I bought a Mac Mini today for Rose, which is in all respects lovely, except that the text just isn’t quite crisp enough on my VGA monitor. There’s something about the analog output of the Mini, via the DVI-VGA converter, which is not quite right. And I don’t think it’s the converter.

I’m far from being the only one with this problem; see this substantial discussion in the Apple forum, for example.

It seems pretty likely to be fixable in firmware, once Apple really acknowledge the problem. Until then I have to decide whether to return it or to get a DVI monitor…

Navigating the file system.

You may know that the icon in the title bar of a document or Finder window represents the file or folder itself. You can drag a document straight to the trash by dragging this icon, for example, or drop it on another app in your dock.

What I hadn’t realised was that another trick I’ve used in the Finder also works in document windows. Cmd-Click on the icon, and it shows you its position in the folder hierarchy.

You can select one of those folders and it will open in the finder for you. This is really handy if you’re working in a document and want a quick way to jump to something in the same directory.

A thing I sometimes miss when I’m working in the Finder is the ability quickly to create a new file of a particular type. In Windows you right-click and select “New>Word document” or similar. I don’t know why the Mac doesn’t do this, but one way to add it is using this handy Applescript in the Finder toolbar. (It was written by someone whose name I can’t find but who goes under the pseudonym of PCheese.)

For Mac users: Finder windows normally show you an accurate view of what’s in your folders, but occasionally, if something happens behind its back, the Finder doesn’t update the window immediately. This is most common on network shares, and happens on Windows as well. Windows has the F5 key to refresh the current view, though, and there isn’t a Finder equivalent.

Rainer Brockerhoff’s Nudge utility will do the same thing for Mac users.

Jim Heid’s iPoodle – I think this is great!

Update: I’ve posted a new, updated version of wget for OS X which you may want to try instead.

If you want to grab files from the web using the command line, the wget utility is great.

Recent versions of Mac OS X don’t include it. They come with curl instead, which has some good features, but is also missing a great deal.

Here’s wget.zip, which contains wget built for Mac OS X 10.3.
Hope someone finds it useful!

Update: If you like this, you might also like my mtr for Mac OS X, or be interested in lots of other Apple-related stuff here.

Amazon have this Digimate 17″ TFT Monitor for £139.99 now. Add a keyboard and mouse for £9.99 and a basic Mac mini and you can have a flat-screen Mac for under £500. (Though in fact I’d recommend adding a bit more RAM to the Mac, and going for the slightly more pricey Apple keyboard & mouse – total cost about £580 including VAT, or about £500 without)

(Just to maintain a bit of balance after the last posting…)

My Mac let me down in public today. It was only a minor flaw, but it was notable because it’s the first time I can remember such an incident in my three or four years of using Macs.

I was about to give a talk, and had been looking forward to using the new features of Apple’s Keynote 2 presentation software. It has this nice ‘Presenter Screen’ on the built-in display which can show you, amongst other things, the currently displayed slide, the next slide (or the result of the next animation), your notes, and a timer, while your main presentation is shown on the second screen or projector. You can customize this screen layout, and it’s very cute.

Everything was set up and ready to roll a couple of minutes before the talk, when I made the mistake of trying to see if the projector would do a higher resolution. It wouldn’t, but it didn’t tell the Mac that, so it displayed a blue screen while my Mac happily carried on thinking it was driving the projector as its primary display. And unfortunately, when it thinks the display is working OK, then the settings dialog for the display pops up on that display, so I couldn’t change the projector settings back. (You see, it was really the fault of the projector!) What I could do was set the screens into ‘mirroring mode’, meaning that both displays showed the same thing, but whenever I set it back to dual-screen mode, the Mac helpfully restored my previous display settings (a feature I normally love), so giving me the blue screen again. There was no network access, so I couldn’t go the dearly beloved macosxhints.com site and find out how to fix it.

I’d kept the audience waiting long enough, so I had to use it in mirroring mode, which meant I didn’t get the cool Presenter Display. This meant that I didn’t have my notes (and I don’t believe in putting much text on my slides). Nor did I know which slide was coming next, because I’d reordered some of them just before starting. I had no printout of the notes or slides. Things didn’t flow quite as smoothly as they might have done!

Ironically, I think the answer might have simply been to reboot. I so rarely need to reboot my Mac that I didn’t even think of it, or assumed that it would restore the previous settings. But I have read of other Mac users who have been stuck in exactly the same way and fixed it by restarting. It’s what I would have tried first on a Windows machine. But the moral of the story is never to place too much faith in any technology. Even if it’s a Mac.