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LTTP: MacBook Pro -- hidden wonders and games
Figgy
Fighter of the night manChampion of the sunRegistered User regular
Fighter of the night manChampion of the sunRegistered User regular
So I was basically forced to pay for a Macbook pro (15.whatever ") for a program I'm taking. Now that it's in my grubby little hands, I want to unlock its full potential.
I am an experienced PC user and a mere novice at Mac. While I can build a PC, it took me a few moments to figure out how to change the desktop image on my Mac.
The deal with this mac is that they have WindowsXP running on a parallel desktop setup, so it essentially has both OSs, although the windows environment is slow due to the fact that both os's run at once. Further, they've got it partitioned in a crazy way, with DeepFreeze installed on the OSX partition that reverts all changes in OSX when you restart the laptop. I managed to convince the tech to disable DeepFreeze on my computer, with the agreement that I won't "tell the other students." In any case, I now want to do things to my Mac that would make my Mother cry salty, salty tears. Tears of sadness? Tears of joy? iTears? You tell me.
In other words, give me some pointers on cool shit I can do with this machine. What games can I load on here that are otherwise unavailable to me on my PC? What software is completely wicked that I simply "have to check out."? What secret little settings should I enable to maximize performance? What applications and features should I definately take advantage of?
Right now, I've got the usual fare of iBullshit programs, along with Garageband, some Word, a little bit of PowerPoints, a dash of Excel, Entourage(whatthe), Soundtrack, Final Cut, and QuarkXpress. Aside from that, not much else. Basically, I turn to the Mac users of G&T to wow and dazzle me with the possibilities of my MacBook Pro.
I am an experienced PC user and a mere novice at Mac. While I can build a PC, it took me a few moments to figure out how to change the desktop image on my Mac.
The deal with this mac is that they have WindowsXP running on a parallel desktop setup, so it essentially has both OSs, although the windows environment is slow due to the fact that both os's run at once. Further, they've got it partitioned in a crazy way, with DeepFreeze installed on the OSX partition that reverts all changes in OSX when you restart the laptop. I managed to convince the tech to disable DeepFreeze on my computer, with the agreement that I won't "tell the other students." In any case, I now want to do things to my Mac that would make my Mother cry salty, salty tears. Tears of sadness? Tears of joy? iTears? You tell me.
In other words, give me some pointers on cool shit I can do with this machine. What games can I load on here that are otherwise unavailable to me on my PC? What software is completely wicked that I simply "have to check out."? What secret little settings should I enable to maximize performance? What applications and features should I definately take advantage of?
Right now, I've got the usual fare of iBullshit programs, along with Garageband, some Word, a little bit of PowerPoints, a dash of Excel, Entourage(whatthe), Soundtrack, Final Cut, and QuarkXpress. Aside from that, not much else. Basically, I turn to the Mac users of G&T to wow and dazzle me with the possibilities of my MacBook Pro.
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Well....just about nothing.
The program setup I use is:
Chat Client - Adium (covers AIM, MSN, everything)
Browser - Firefox
Media - VLC
I use things like iTunes, an old version of Word and iPhoto as well as Azureus.
Other handy things:
iStat pro
There's also a smaller battery menu meter availible, to help save clean things up some. If you search for it, you can find just about anything:
www.macupdate.com
www.versiontracker.com
As for cool programs, if you think the "iApps" are bullshit, there's probably not a whole lot out there you'll like. A computer is a tool. Some things a Mac can do are cool but the novelty wears off like anything else that's new. I use my Mac because of the hassle free experience it gives me along with its look. For more risky tasks, I use my PC. Different computers for different jobs.
As a side note, it sounds like you're trolling. Just my 2 cents.
He sounds sincere enough, so let's welcome him into our warm... erm, hugs. ;-)
Anyway, I'm not here to answer questions, just here to observe, because this might potentially affect whether I get an Apple computer/laptop.
Is there an MSN-able chat client that can use the built in webcam?
Are there any cool games I can get for this machine to play on my breaks at school? I mean, this thing has a 8600, I want to utilize it. It has 2GB of ram, so is that enough to run games under the windows environment? If not Mac-exclusive, something fun to play on the go or some shit. I don't really see any Mac-centered game sites out there.. I'm fearing it's for good reason.
What are some functions I need to fiddle with to make the machine run at full potential? Extra shit that comes enabled by default that I can go and disable/alter.. etc.
Edit: Also, what is the deal with .toast files? I found a game that wouldn't run on this machine.. some error said so. What's the deal?
And how the HELL do you disable the god damned keychain?
Okay. Gotta give some good faith.
It was just the wording that made me think. Like trying to change the desktop wallpaper or listing all those programs and saying, "but just that". I mean Final Cut Studio is a HUGE package. You could spend months at a time just messing around with that. Then you have Quark's.....
What I do is use MAME and load up some old games. It's a quick pick up and play and they sell this nice portable control pad that folds up.
The only games that I find in .toast format are those kinds of games you can't discuss here. On the technical side, toast files are used with Roxio Toast (a CD/DVD burning app). OS X can load some .toast files automatically.
You can't. It's used to house the security keys to program that need more than normal access. I haven't really experienced any problems with this. It asks me once and I never see it again until I install another program that needs keychain write permission.
Mind you it's FC Express, not Pro
I'm mostly wondering what else is out there aside from these 'work' applications. Kind of like when you take an experienced PC users computer and a novice's, you see some software on the former that you wouldn't on the novice's. On a PC: Alternative browsers, ad-free filesharing, etc.
Mac must-haves that don't come packaged with the PC.
http://www.insidemacgames.com
http://www.freeverse.com
(Specifically Wingnuts 2. It's frickin' awesome-sauce.)
http://www.ambrosiasw.com
Those three should handle you for a while.
EDIT: Also http://www.macgamefiles.com/
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There's iAlertU that basically uses the motion sensors on the computer to see if anyone's trying to grab your computer. It takes their picture and a siren goes off. They can't get into the computer and I believe you also can't turn off the computer. There are also scripts that send the picture to the internet so you can get the thief's picture.
You can set your screen saver as your background. Like having the RSS news feed run in place of your desktop background. Instructions
There's a few more but like I said. The novelty wears off in a while and eventually you want a clean system without all the extras.
It's far inferior to Adium as a client, so use it for webcam only. Outside of talking to my parents that abomination never sees the light of day.
(it's not that bad, but compared to Adium? yeeuch)
I use the regular Mac MSN. Is there advantages to using Adium if I only have an MSN contact list and not the other spported ones?
Growl is fun.
For me, OS X on my MacBook Pro is the work OS. Hate to say it, but work is what made me love OS X over XP. It's a million times better at the multitasking thing, and expose surpasses the useful of the Windows taskbar for managing extreme numbers of tasks.
On average, I run Quicksilver, Adium, Mail and Safari beta 3. (No, the Mac version of Firefox is still not very good. Slow as fuck, and the GUI is unpleasant and finicky. Safari 3 is faster, and has integration going for it as well.)
For setup, set screen corners to activate expose, and get to know them. Also, enable all the two-finger things in the trackpad controls.
As for essential software, I recommend Perian for video playback. VLC is decent and all, but there's something to be said for the integration of Quicktime. Combine with NicePlayer for maximum effect.
Other applications as you need them. If you want to run games, you need Boot Camp. The only Mac games I play are WC3 (dota) and Myth 2. I used to recommend anything by Ambrosia software, but I haven't liked any of their recent games, and all their best games aren't universal binary.
As for tweaks, nothing much I'd recommend. If Norton is installed or something, disable it. Give XP 512 MB of RAM to run well in the VM. That's about it. I just stuck another GB of RAM in my MB Pro, bringing it up to 2 GB (man I wish I had an 8600...) and XP runs pretty damn good in VMware Fusion without slowing the rest of the system at all.
It is a lease, but I can buy it out at the end.. so I feel like it's mine in a way. Much like you'd consider a leased car your own.
Edit: $800/term for 4 terms.
Growl (very customizable app notifications) - http://growl.info/
Quicksilver (app launcher/search utility/super awesome thing) - http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/
Cog (alternative to iTunes, plays OGG and FLAC out of the box) - http://cogx.org/
Adium (multi-protocol chat client) - http://adiumx.com/
Textmate (Excellent programming editor, if you're into that sort of thing) - http://macromates.com/
Transmission (torrent client) - http://transmission.m0k.org/
You would also do well to familiarize yourself with the terminal. You've got a full unix toolset at your disposal, and there are a couple of package managers you can use to add anything that's missing (fink or ports). If you don't have any experience running linux, just trust me, knowing how to use the command line is a Very Good Thing. Terminal.app lives in Applications/Utilities.
There are also a few flashy/useful things built into OS X you might like.
F9/F10/F11 are mapped to Expose by default - F9 will show you all windows, F10 shows you all windows in your current application, F11 shows you the desktop.
F12 will bring up Dashboard, which is basically just Konfabulator but less buggy.
Command('Open Apple')-Space will bring up a Spotlight search box.
Command-Shift-3 will take a screenshot and save it to your desktop. There are a bunch of Cmd-Shift-# combos that will do different types of screenshots (selection, current window, etc).
If you go to System Preferences (click the apple in the upper left of the screen, it's one of the menu items) -> Sharing, you can enable all sorts of remote services, inclucing apache (web server), ssh, ftp, vnc, and samba.
As for gaming, yeah, it's true what they say, there's not really a lot on the mac. If you've got bootcamp set up, you can boot to XP and play whatever the hardware can handle in there. I've been having fun playing through old Bioware RPGs with Parallels. There are emulators for most systems available for the mac as well. But you're not going to be playing Bioshock or Crysis on it any time soon.
Finally, I know this sounds really fucking weird when you're coming from windows, but pay the $30 to register quicktime pro. It does not suck at all on OS X. It'll play most formats (once you've downloaded the divx/xvid/wmv/etc codecs), and the pro version lets you do all kinds of nice stuff like saving out sections of a video straight from the player, saving streaming videos, etc. You can probably find a license key for it if you search around, but you'll find you feel less inclined to pirate software on the mac, or at least that's my experience. The cheaper stuff, anyway. I'll be damned if I'm going to give adobe $600 for Photoshop ><
Anyway, welcome to the cult. Kool-aid's on the table in the back. See you at the next Steve Jobs keynote
3DS Friend Code: 0404-6826-4588 PM if you add.
It wasn't an option because the lease fee is included in the tuition. They're crafty fuckers.
It's a journalism program, so we'll use pretty much everything in here.
Did you have any trouble at all with the beta? I tried installing it on my work machine, and Safari stopped working until I reverted to 2.whatever. I suppose it might have been related to some SIMBL plugin I was using, but it was really not a great experience. Maybe I should disable all my plugins and try again.
As far as printsharing.. am I missing something? I can't seem to get the mac to print wirelessly to my PC's canon.
OOooo. If you're writing a lot, I've got two more apps for you:
Writeroom - http://hogbaysoftware.com/projects/writeroom
TextExpander - http://www.smileonmymac.com/textexpander/
The first I've heard raves about from basically anyone who writes things that don't need a compiler.
The second allows you to define snippets of text that you can insert by typing the shortcut you define. It's a little hard to explain, but think of it as sort of an automated pattern-based clipboard hash lookup pasting machine gun thingy. Just take a look.
Jesus Christ! Right through the pants.