The things I use a lot on my mac
are Matlab, Apple mail,
Preview, Safari, LaTeX, Illustrator, PowerPoint, iChat,
iPhoto, Grab. I like the terminal interface, which
motivates quite a bit of the stuff here and on
my applescripts page.
Very Useful Site
Here is a site that is well-maintained. If you are
unix / Latex / matlab / programmer type, I am sure you'll
find many useful things here:
http://tazman.princeton.edu/osx/
3-Button Mouse
Apple seems to have this ridiculous notion that one mouse button
is enough, which is hard to believe, given their UI strengths.
Fortunately, they support the standard 3-button scrolling mouse
just fine. There are some things, like iCal's "mail event" that
the right-click gives you, that are hard to otherwise find.
You can also program the Expose functions to mouse buttons.
Open Terminal Here
This will change your life! Download the app, and put it
on your finder toolbar so that when you need a terminal
in the directory you're at, you can get it with one click!
Open Terminal Here Site.
Note that the next item does the reverse of this!
"Open ."
A great little command from a terminal - "open ." will
open the current directory in finder. Does the reverse of "Open Terminal Here."
However, I'd love to find a way to
disable "open *" which you should avoid!!
Using iTerm and X11
I like to click one button to start a terminal
window and the X11 server. I like iTerm
right now. To set that up I did:
Download/Install iTerm (free, via google) or your terminal program
Copy /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc to ~/.xinitrc
Replace the "xterm &" line near the bottom in
~/.xinitrc with
"open /Applications/iTerm.app"
In X11 Applications->Customize, you can "Add Item"
and add iTerm and the same command above.
Try using bookmarks to map a keystroke to ssh to a
machine that you use frequently.
One glitch - When you ssh to some machines (Red Hat Linux)
the delete key doesn't do "backspace" like I wanted. There
is a fix for this
(source here):
In the Preferences > Profiles > Keyboard > vt100 panel. I added a mapping from "delete" to "backspace" (hexadecimal code 8), and selected option-sends-meta.
Grab
This great screen grab utility is in your Applications->Utilities folder.
What is especially cool is that once you've grabbed a
screen shot, you can copy/paste the image into Powerpoint, Mail
or whatever you are using.
OsiriX is a fantastic Dicom Image Viewer. I have started to
write some
plugins for OsiriX to aid MRI research.
Cell Phone
I have just switched to a Motorola V180 cell phone.
First, I am cheap! Second, all I want in a cell phone
is phone functions and the ability to sync directory and calendar
with OS X. With a mini USB cable, this phone syncs flawlessly
using iSync. (Currently the iSync page does not list it as
a supported device, which is why I put this info here.)
There is a group trying to get together a driver so that the
mac recognizes the V180 as a storage device so you can
send pictures etc to it. I don't know much about that, but
they do mention iSync working fine with iCal and Addressbook
as well.
Any Comments? Please send me email.