A View on View :: Mac Woes

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the person - lives in Toronto, CA with his wife and three children, and works as director of community with PlanetEye Inc.

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Mac Woes

by Mark Evans on Mon 29 May 2006 11:16 AM EDT | Permanent Link

I'm trying out a beautiful, new MacBook (black) - thin, lightweight, nice screen. It's frustrating, however, that I can't use many of my favourites applications such as FeedDemon, Google Talk and Roboform.

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Re: Mac Woes

by Dan Sinai on Mon 29 May 2006 11:21 AM EDT | Permanent Link

Mark.....I use iChat as my google talk client....works great...configuration is here:

http://www.google.com/support/talk/bin/answer.py?answer=24076

Re: Mac Woes

by Ben Wong on Mon 29 May 2006 12:26 PM EDT | Permanent Link

There is NetNewsWire for RSS feeds.
Adium for MSN, Jabber (Google Talk), ICQ, AIM, etc. etc. IM'ing
There's a few things for Roboform, but I haven't tested them out much. Blog if you find something of similar functionality that works out for you.

Re: Mac Woes

by bsharwood on Mon 29 May 2006 01:04 PM EDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Was going to echo exactly the above. NetNewsWire is my favourite RSS feed right now, and googletalk seems to work fine on my mac. There's a few Firefox and Safari plug-ins for Roboform too.

Re: Mac Woes

by Andy Abramson on Mon 29 May 2006 02:44 PM EDT | Profile | Permanent Link

I got my Black Book also (Om will be jealous I suspect) but when did Google Talk come out as an App, or are you saying in the browser?

Andy

Re: Re: Mac Woes

by Mark Evans on Mon 29 May 2006 02:48 PM EDT | Profile | Permanent Link

as far as i can tell, google talk (http://www.google.com/talk/) is only available to windows users (XP, 2000).

Re: Mac Woes

by Larry Borsato on Mon 29 May 2006 04:21 PM EDT | Profile | Permanent Link

You'll want NetNewsWire for feeds (though there are free ones that are just as good), Adium for chat (it does GoogleTalk and everything else), and Keychain (standard on Macs) will handle the Roboform tasks just fine.

Re: Mac Woes

by Larry Borsato on Mon 29 May 2006 04:22 PM EDT | Profile | Permanent Link

You'll also find that Camino runs much better that Firefox. At least pre-Firefox 2.0 anyway. I can also recommend some other stuff you might like to have if need be.

Re: Re: Mac Woes

by Mark Evans on Mon 29 May 2006 04:34 PM EDT | Profile | Permanent Link

thanks for the roadmap! cheers, mark

Re: Re: Re: Mac Woes

by Tyler on Mon 29 May 2006 05:24 PM EDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Hey Mark, just looking at the comment on this post and was wondering: Is Web 2.0 going to get anywhere beyond the techheads? I mean, I bet 95 per cent of Web users haven't a clue how RSS feed works, let alone what they do. These are all cool apps, but from my experiences they're not always easy for the average computer user to use. Might make a good discussion for the next Mesh.

Re: Mac Woes

by David Crow on Tue 30 May 2006 12:09 PM EDT | Permanent Link

Ben and Larry identify the key candidates Adium, NetNewsWire and Camino for a better faster experince. Don't forget to check out Quicksilver and TextWrangler.

There are a few lists of must have apps:

10 apps every new mac user should download
Brad Choate's OS X software inventory no guarrantee that these apps are Universal Binaries

Re: Mac Woes

by gfox on Tue 30 May 2006 02:29 PM EDT | Permanent Link

You're kidding right? Why would you expect them to work? It is a different OS. Would you expect your win32 apps to run under linux?

To me this is like saying "I picked up a betamax tape at a yard sale, and I'm upset since it won't play in my VHS player".

Re: Mac Woes

by Roustem Karimov on Sat 03 Jun 2006 10:43 PM EDT | Permanent Link

Mark,

Regarding RoboForm -- we just released an updated version of 1Passwd (http://1passwd.com). This version is integrated with Safari and Firefox and it can import roboform passcards.

Re: Re: Mac Woes

by Mark Evans on Mon 05 Jun 2006 10:52 AM EDT | Profile | Permanent Link

great. i'll check it out.

mark

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\n"; return $new_ad_params; } } /** BEGIN Backwards Compatibility Routines */ if (! function_exists('array_combine')) { function array_combine($keys, $values) { foreach($keys as $key) $out[$key] = array_shift($values); return $out; } } if (!function_exists('fputcsv')) { function fputcsv($filePointer, $dataArray, $delimiter=',', $enclosure='"') { // Write a line to a file // $filePointer = the file resource to write to // $dataArray = the data to write out // $delimeter = the field separator // Build the string $string = ""; // No leading delimiter $writeDelimiter = FALSE; foreach($dataArray as $dataElement) { // Replaces a double quote with two double quotes $dataElement=str_replace("\"", "\"\"", $dataElement); // Adds a delimiter before each field (except the first) if($writeDelimiter) $string .= $delimiter; // Encloses each field with $enclosure and adds it to the string $string .= $enclosure . $dataElement . $enclosure; // Delimiters are used every time except the first. $writeDelimiter = TRUE; } // end foreach($dataArray as $dataElement) // Append new line $string .= "\n"; // Write the string to the file return fwrite($filePointer,$string); } } if (!function_exists('fgetcsv')) { #TODO - Remove or ??? #Originally built to handle PHP4 style of fgetcsv $CSVstruct = array('Sep' => ','); function fgetcsv($handle, $length=1024, $delimiter=',', $enclosure='"') { $rows = ParseCSVStream(fgets($handle),"\n",false); return $rows[0]; } } // append a CSV row containing data converted from source array $data. Actual conversion is done by ExCSVRowWalker() function AppendCSVRow($data) { global $CSVstruct; array_walk($data,'ExCSVRowWalker'.($CSVstruct['OutEOL']=="\n"?'N':'')); $CSVstruct['File'] .= implode($CSVstruct['Sep'],$data).$CSVstruct['OutEOL']; } // returns an array of rows (each row being an array of columns) with parsed data. Returns false when conversion fails. Auto-detects Win/Mac/*nix newline characters, which are converted all to the sequence specified (defaults to $CSVstruct['OutEOL']) for your convenience. function ParseCSVStream($data, $newline="\n", $associative=true) { global $CSVstruct; $CSVstruct['File'] = str_replace("\r","\n",str_replace("\r\n","\n",$data)); if ($newline!="\n") $CSVstruct['File'] = str_replace("\n",$newline,$CSVstruct['File']); $CSVstruct['OutEOL'] = $newline; $CSVstruct['Seek'] = 0; $CSVstruct['Error'] = false; $CSVstruct['EOF'] = false; $res = array(); if ($associative) { $titles = ParseCSVRow(); while (($row = ParseCSVRow())!==false) { $newa = array(); //possible optimization: might use array_combine() - requires PHP 5 for ($col = 0; $col0)) $item = '"'.str_replace('"','""',str_replace($CSVstruct['OutEOL'],"\n",$item)).'"'; } function ExCSVRowWalkerN(&$item) { if (!is_numeric($item)&&(strlen($item)>0)) $item = '"'.str_replace('"','""',$item).'"'; } // read next line from buffer. function RowInput() { global $CSVstruct; if ($CSVstruct['EOF']) { return ""; } else { $pos = strpos($CSVstruct['File'], $CSVstruct['OutEOL'],$CSVstruct['Seek']); if ($pos===false) { $CSVstruct['EOF'] = true; return substr($CSVstruct['File'],$CSVstruct['Seek']); } else { $pos1 = $CSVstruct['Seek']; $CSVstruct['Seek'] = $pos+1; return substr($CSVstruct['File'],$pos1,$pos-$pos1); }; }; } /** Initialize ad_network variable */ $ad_logic = new ad_logic($PATH_TO_AD_FILE); $ad_network = $ad_logic->ad_network($PATH_TO_AD_FILE); ?>