The Ultimate macOS Thread

nouseforaname90: First generation MacBook with a 60 or 80GB drive? Those were real lemons, the hard drives fitted were a bad series of Seagates which failed all the time and Apple kept replacing them with the same series until one day when they switched to Fujitsu.

I have the 2ghz 120 gb one. it was the base black macbook of the time
 
I'm having a bit of trouble playing WMVs with Flip4Mac. I found a workaround, but I'm not too happy with it.

*edit

Just used the cover flow on finder. Awesome.

I am upgrading NeoOffice. Earlier I was trying to export a document as a pdf, but it didn't work.

If you just upgraded to Snow Leopard, then make sure you have the latest BETA version of Flip4Mac from their website, and I hear you may have to remove QT7 as well until the problem is fixed.
 
Hum, I didn't ran into any problems with my old flip4mac and the fact that I didn't uninstall QT7. Even perian continues to read my flvs perfectly into Quicktime X!
 
Yeah, I haven't noticed any troubles either, but I hear that if you do, that is what to try. Even my NTFS drivers which supposedly "definitely wouldn't work with Snow" work just fine.
 
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I don't see any big differences between this and Tiger. Glad I skipped Leopard and only paid $30.

But one thing that's different is that...

I used to have a "network" icon in the finder sidebar.
I could click on that and my PC would show up as an icon.
I could double-click on that to connect.

Now...

There doesn't seem to be an option to put the network icon in the sidebar.
And my PC doesn't automatically show up as a shortcut in the network - only after I've connected.
I have to click go>connect to server.

Oh, and when I used to connect to the PC (public folder), that folder would show up in the sidebar so I could drag and drop files from my Mac straight into that folder from the one finder window. Now just the server shows up in the sidebar so I need 2 windows open to drag and drop files from my Mac to my PC. Grrr.

I guess it's not a big deal, but it just seems like a step backward. Why can't I have a network icon in the sidebar and why is there no shortcut icon for the PC?
 
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What's your workaround for WMV? I don't have any problems with them, Flip4Mac and Quicktime X.
You can also try with VLC!

Oh and to export as PDF, just do File => Print, you will then see a little PDF button on the bottom left :)

When I was on tiger and I clicked on a WMV it would bring up a pop up showing it loading, and after maybe 20 seconds or so it would be done.

With the beta version of Flip4mac it immediately brings up the video with a few seconds of video loaded, and the rest loads very very slowly. Like maybe several minutes for one minute of video. This is on quicktime X and 7.

The workaround was to go into preferences and set the option to pre-load the video. It works, so I'm happy.

For neooffice, I used to just go to export as pdf and it was done. I upgraded to 3.0 and i'm not having issues with that anymore. So it's all good.
 
Just upgraded the rest of my family to Snow and we did some video chatting (which is very important to us, as we are often separated by great distances). The newly improved iChat is certainly more reliable and a bit higher quality. The big difference is with iChat theatre, however. When you share a video or image, it used to come through in horrible video conference quality. Now shared files are crystal clear. It is very impressive.
 
OK I discovered that I can put the connect to server icon on the finder toolbar (damn ugly icon) so that fixes half the problem. Still need 2 windows open as far as I can tell, though.

I like QT's ability to encode vids for my ipod and whack em in itunes in one go. Don't know why they end up so big, I guess it makes them big enough for the iphone even though I have an old ipod with small screen.

I didn't like the new trim interface until I figured out how to use it just now. But without pro I can't export an image sequence, that's all I used pro for, trimming and exporting image sequences to make gifs.

Had flip4mac once but after some trouble I found there was a conflict between it and, I forgot, maybe airtunes (which I don't use anymore), so I got rid of it. VLC is all you need. Although if I could trim and export image sequences from WMV I would be happy.

Never used ichat, might make sense if all your friends have macs or you live in the states where people actually use AIM or AOL or whatever, otherwise Skype is best. I'd like to try it but it just isn't practical.
 
You try this?
14j5g8m.png


iChat supports the Jabber protocol, so we use Google's infrastructure to make the video calls.
 
Right click the sidebar in the finder. Click "Open Sidebar Preferences". Check that top one that shows a computer icon and the name of your comp.
1267aqv.png

Dunno why you can't have Network on the sidebar directly. Of course, you can always access Network from the Go menu at the top of your screen.

Yes, you use your Google/Gmail login. PC users can't participate though. Since we are a Mac family, it isn't a problem, but occasionally we'll use Skype when PC people are involved.
 
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You can hit Command-Shift-K to access the Network browser directly :)


My main use of Skype is when iChat doesn't work properly to do audio and video conferences but since it seems it may be fixed with the new iChat, I may ditch Skype altogether :-D
 
Yep, that does it as well. :)

I think that the iChat issues may finally be 100% fixed with the latest version. Supposedly it uses just two thirds the bandwidth and is far more reliable.
 
I have to do some tests but it would be very cool if the fix allowed older versions to work as well as my mom won't see Snow Leopard (or even Leopard for that matter) anytime soon with her old iMac G4 (the most reliable computer on earth by the way, basically on all day long since 2002 without any issue whatsoever, original hard drive and everything, the last batch of ?ber-reliable computers from Apple...).
 
I know that iChat theatre still looks horrible on Tiger machines, even if the originating computer is Snow Leopard, but beyond that I'm unsure.
 
I'll try to do some tests this week-end, my connexion is so crappy that if it works that means they've fixed everything :-D
 
I've done some searching but haven't come up with answers.

Going to server browser doesn't help because nothing shows up in the server browser.

It seems that other people are having trouble with finder not recognising other computers on the network automatically.
Some of them can still connect via go>connect to server and typing in ip address.
(I was able to do that a while ago and now I can connect at all, but I can ping the ip address)
Some people still can't connect via go>connect to server (like me, now).

When I first tried to connect via go, it automatically added AFP prefix, which didn't work, so I tried SMB prefix which did work.

I wish I could get this sorted as all the benefits aren't that great if networking is screwed. Hopefully it's a bug that'll be fixed.

And Skype>ichat.

EDIT: Well I can connect to the windoze machine using a remote desktop client by typing in IP address so the problem has to be with 10.6, right?
 
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I am upgrading NeoOffice. Earlier I was trying to export a document as a pdf, but it didn't work.
Why use NeoOffice when OpenOffice 3.0 is native OS X software as well? From my experience, OpenOffice is much more reliable than NeoOffice.
 
Does anyone use Office:Mac 2008? I'm getting increasingly annoyed by iWork (Pages and Numbers).
 
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