Brian's Mac Stuff

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:
  1. Download/Install iTerm (free, via google) or your terminal program
  2. Copy /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc to ~/.xinitrc
  3. Replace the "xterm &" line near the bottom in ~/.xinitrc with "open /Applications/iTerm.app"
  4. 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.

BibDesk

If you use LaTeX, try BibDesk, a GUI bib manager.

OsiriX

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.