Tips for new Mac users (Part II)

Posted on the 23rd of September, 2008

A couple of months ago I wrote this article about tips and tricks for new Mac users. I got a lot of feedback through my blog but also a lot of people told me in person that they found useful tips. People seem to like that post. This time I will give you some more tips that might help you even more. These tips would be for new and even more advance Mac users. Again, like the previous post, some of these tips might be well known whereas some others might be new to you. Either case I hope you find something useful. So here we go.

  • If you do lots of blogging, you might want to switch to a blog publishing app. I found MarsEdit which can handle multiple blogging platforms, such as WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, MovableType and even more. It’s pretty simple and has all the functionality of your web based blogging software. You can even work offline and when you get online, sync your changes back to your host.
  • If you want by any chance to load up Finder through the Terminal app you can do it by issuing:
    open -a finder /path/to/open
  • You can make a simple ‘program’ to perform often used basic tasks using the Terminal. So let’s say you want to have an app that will copy all the files from ‘/path/dir1′ to ‘/path/dir2′. To do so, create a file called whatever you want eg. ‘myApp’ and paste the following:#/bin/bash
    cp /path/dir1/* /path/dir2/

    Once you have your file, you must make it executable by issuing:
    chmod +x myAppAnd that’s it. Just fire up Spotlight and type ‘myApp’

  • Previously I mentioned that Transmission didn’t have proxy support thus I recommended Azureus. Well, Transmission does have proxy support, at least on the latest version, which makes it ideally if your ISP is blocking up torrent downloads.
  • For proxy tunneling there is ‘Your-Feedom‘ app which works great with Transmission
  • If you are a twitter freak, Twitterific is for you! Works great with Growl and has lot’s of configurations. If you are leaving outside the ‘SMS-allowed-countries’ then you Twitterific gets you, your friends updates straight to your Mac.
  • To back up your flickr photos to your local disk use ‘flickrEdit‘. Works great if you want to make sure your photos will also be available locally or even if you want to sync them with your iPhone (or any type of handheld device)
  • Skype has a client for Mac already. If you are on another SIP server though you will want to use the free app called ‘X-Lite‘. Works great with SIP servers/providers such as VoipBuster and LowRateVoip.
  • The best DC++ client out there for Mac, is ‘ShakesPeer‘.
  • You can control you iTunes with a lighter interface called ‘You Control Tunes‘. This iTunes engine runs on your taskbar so it takes less space and it is always available to you.
  • For all the RSS junkies out there, a great alternative to a web based RSS Reader, is the app called ‘Times‘. It has a great UI that renders your RSS entries into a nice newspaper-like interface.
  • Macs don’t need antivirus software. If you are on a University campus though or even on a weird LAN that needs to verify that you have an antivirus software running, then download the Virex demo. Once installed it makes your Mac ‘safe from viruses’. Once you are done with it, you will need this uninstaller that will complete wipe Virex out of your Mac.

Well here you have it. Some more tips to make your Mac life easier. If you have any more tips or idea, post them below.