Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Games, Review, Software
Friday May 9, 2008
The deal here is that you can go and download this free game called Cubes, which comes in Mac and Windows versions. The company behind it offers several other games but most of them are not free, and you can’t tell which are free and which are not from the main page. You should assume that if you are downloading a demo version of one of their games, you’ll only be able to play a limited number of times. We suspect that Grass Games is giving away Cubes in the hope that you’ll come back and perhaps download something else and buy it (and this is reinforced by the fact that you see an ad for another of their games when you exit Cubes), but as far as we can tell you can play Cubes as often as you want without payment or registration.
So, what is Cubes? It’s a falling brick game - in other words, it’s whole lot like a very popular computer game of Russian origin, that’s been around for at least a couple decades now. The game is highly configurable and has more options than you might expect, and while we couldn’t find any documentation, the effects of most options are fairly obvious. The nice thing is that you can pick the screen resolution you want the game to run in (up to 1920×1200!) and run it in full screen mode, or in a window (interestingly, there seems to be a bug where you have to select your desired resolution while full screen mode is selected, and only then switch to windowed mode). If you run it in full screen mode, the effect is much like playing on an arcade machine, except that the sound of your Mac’s fan screaming may alert you to the fact that your CPU is being pushed to the max (unless maybe you have a newer multi-core system). You can mitigate this somewhat by going into the options and under the “MISC” section, set the “PROCESSING POWER” to a lower value.
Our screenshot (showing the options selections) don’t really do the game justice, because we selected a low screen resolution to minimize page download time. They could have used a typeface that renders a bit better, but it’s not as cramped as it looks here if you’re using a decent screen resolution. Not that it matters when you’re playing the game - you’re looking at colored falling bricks, which could probably be successfully rendered on an old Apple II, though the overall effect wouldn’t be nearly as good as what you are getting here.
We do wish this game didn’t monopolize the CPU quite so much (we watched the Activity Monitor during one run in Windowed mode and Cubes was far and away the biggest user of CPU power, even making Firefox look like a lightweight), but then we did play it quite successfully on a dual-core Mac Mini without any apparent problem (well, except for the fact that Big Crab stinks at these kinds of games!)
Related posts
Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Configuration, Review, Software, Utility
Thursday May 8, 2008
Every so often we like to call your attention to some cool Mac-related articles, even if we didn’t write them. In this case, the articles cover a couple of ways to explore your Time Machine backups, and both of them are from the folks over at TidBITS. The first, “Prune Your Time Machine Backups Selectively”, tells you how to use a modified version of GrandPerspective to see which files are hogging space in your Time Machine backups. If any of these are files that don’t need to be backed up, you can exclude them from your Time Machine backups to make additional room for the files you do want to preserve.
The second explores a new command-line utility called tms, which is coincidentally enough written by Robert Pointon, who is also the author of the fseventer program that we reviewed previously. That article is called “Time Machine Exposed!” and it explains how you can use tms to get much more information about your Time Machine backups than has hitherto been available.
Now, we are not usually a big fan of command-line hacks here in the CrabApple Forest - if we’d wanted to use the command line we’d have stuck with MS-DOS! Mac users (moreso than, say, Linux users) seem to appreciate the value of a good Graphical User interface (GUI). So we are sort of hoping that either Mr. Pointon or someone else will write a GUI “front end” for tms sooner or later. But in the meantime, those of you who are into doing things from the command line, along with those who simply want to be able to delve into your Time Machine backups and find out “what’s in there”, will surely appreciate the information contained in the above-mentioned two articles.
Related posts
Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Configuration, Review, Software, Utility
Thursday May 8, 2008
Those used to downloading files and software intended for use on Windows-based machines know that there are a wide variety of compression formats out there. Mac users have it a bit easier - it is very rare that you will see a file intended for use with a Mac compressed using anything other than the zip formap. The main exception is that once in a while you’ll get a file with a .tgz extension, which is a compressed Unix tarball, but that’s fairly rare. The main reason for the standardization of the zip format is that it’s the format the Mac uses natively, for example when you right click on a file or folder (or a group of files and/or folders) in Finder, and choose the “Compress” option.
Compressing files saves a lot of space, but one drawback has been that you can’t use Spotlight to find the file within the archive. However, one interesing thing about Mac OS X is that you can extend its capabilities by using plugins. Bartas Technologies offers Ziplight, a freeware Spotlight importer plugin that lets you use Spotlight to find files within zip archives.
We know of only two limitations with this plugin. The first is that it only works under the Tiger or Leopard versions of OS X. The second is that Ziplight will only search the names of the files within a zip archive, not the actual contents (so you can’t search for a text string within a compressed file, for example) - it would take far too long to uncompress every file on every volume on your system, in an attempt to find the searched-for string. But if you know the file name (or a significant portion thereof), and you have installed this plugin, Spotlight should be able to find it for you.
Installing Ziplight is easy - double click on the .dmg file, agree to the license terms, then view the included “Read Me.pdf” file for installation instructions. If you’re new to the Mac you may not quite understand what they are telling you to do, so let us break it down for you. You have to drag the Ziplight plugin (the Ziplight.mdimporter file from the disk image), but since it’s a plugin and not an application, you do not drag it into your Applications directory. Instead, you drag it into a particular directory specifically intended for Spotlight plugins. Easy enough, except there are two such directories on your system - /Library/Spotlight and ~/Library/Spotlight/ (the first is off the root directory, the second off of your user home folder).
If you install the plugin in ~/Library/Spotlight/ it will only be available to you, not to any other user on your Mac. This is probably not what you want (even if you are the only user of your Mac), so we’d suggest dragging the plugin file to the /Library/Spotlight file off the system’s root folder. That will make it useable by all users on your system, plus we think it’s probably better to keep all your Spotlight plugins together in the same directory.
Note that you will need to restart your system, or at least logout and then log back in, before the plugin will become active - and after that it will take some time for Spotlight to index all your zip files. We do wish that maybe there was a way that it could take a bit more time and index the contents of those files (after all, since it’s doing it as a background task, it’s not like it’s under a time constraint) but we’ll take what we can get, and having the ability to find filenames within zip files can be downright handy at times.
There are many other available plugins that can extend the capabilities of your Mac. For example, there is a whole page of plugins that will extend the capabilities of QuickLook, which are installed in a very similar manner (they go into a different directory than the Spotlight plugins, but install just as easily). As you become more familiar with your Mac, you’ll almost certainly want to install more of these little helpers that make OS X work smarter!
Related posts
Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Configuration, Programming, Software
Wednesday May 7, 2008
One of the things that you probably look at a lot more often than you realize is the time display in the top menu bar. If you came from a Windows environment, you may have tweaked out that display to show you the date and/or the day of the week. Apple seems to think it’s sufficient to let you see the time, and if you can figure out how, the (abbreviated) day of the week. We just happen to like having a bit more information available at a glance:
Above you see our top menubar time display, along with the dropdown menu you get if you right-click on that display. As you see, we show the day of the week (non-abbreviated), the full date (again non-abbreviated), the time complete with seconds, and an AM/PM indication (by the way, it’s only highlighted blue like that because we have the dropdown activated - usually it’s the normal black text on the semi-transparent background). As you may have guessed, we have a wide screen display - were it a regular display we might try to conserve a bit more space, but as it is we have enough screen real estate that we can afford to have the display the way we want it. But, you may be wondering how we did it - if so, that’s the purpose of this article.
To begin with, click on “Open Date & Time” in the dropdown shown above. That will open this preference panel (you might have to click on the “Clock” tab at the top):
In this panel, check the options shown above and any others you want EXCEPT for “Show the day of the week” - if you check that, you’ll get an ABBREVIATED day (e.g. Mon Tue Wed etc.). We are too OCD around here to want to stare at an abbreviation, we like seeing the word spelled out! While you’re in this panel, click on the “Date & Time” tab and the display will change to this - make sure you have selected a server and that you have checked the box to set date & time automatically.
We would just point out that if you have another machine acting as a timeserver on your local network, or you prefer to use a non-Apple timeserver, you are perfectly free to enter the address into the text field (this example shows using another machine on your local net as a time reference):
Anyway, see the button at the bottom of that panel labeled “Open International”? You need to click on that now, which will bring up the International preference pane. Select the “Formats” tab and you will see this display:
First note that the Region is set to “Custom” - we don’t remember doing that, and think that it probably changes automatically once you start customizing formats, but just keep in mind that it probably does need to be set to “Custom” for this to work. Now, note the two “Customize” buttons in the Dates and Times sections. We’ll show you the Times section first, so click on the LOWER “Customize” button, so we can show you how we constructed our date and time string. On the panel that appears, be sure to select “Medium” in the “Show” dropdown, because this is the format the menubar display uses (and just about nothing else uses it, as far as we can see):
Unfortunately our string is a bit longer than the display allows, so in order to let you see it all, here’s the same display but with the cursor moved all the way to the right:
When you first enter this panel, it will show you the current time format, except that if you checked the box to show the (abbreviated) day of the week, that will not appear here. What you want to do is insert the elements you want to use to build your date and time string, as we have done. You can drag any of the elements in the bubbles from the list shown, and you can insert normal punctuation such as commas, colons and spaces. But as you may have noticed, we have “bubble” elements that don’t appear in the panel! Where did we get those? Well, if you back out of this panel to the previous one (”international” panel, “Formats” tab), then click on the FIRST “Customize” button (in the Dates section), and then select “Full” from the dropdown, you should see this panel:
Now, here’s the trick. TEMPORARILY drag the date elements you will need into the text field - you don’t have to remove the ones that are already there, just drop these after the existing string. Then use the mouse, or the shift+arrow keys, to highlight just the elements that you temporarily dragged into the field. Press Command-X to “cut” (copy and delete) those elements, leaving only the original format string (if you make a mistake at any point in this process, pressing Command-Z should undo the last thing you did). Now back out of this panel and click the “Customize” button for the Times section again - once again make sure this dropdown shows “Medium”, then use Command-V to paste the copied date elements into the time string! If they aren’t in the correct order you can highlight each individual item and drag it around until you get it right. Insert any desired punctuation (commas and spaces) and you should be good to go.
It is a little tricky to position the cursor properly during this process (between the “bubbles”), so don’t get too frustrated, just realize that it’s tricky for everyone and you should get it in a few tries, and remember to use Command-Z if you make a mistake.
We do realize that someone will probably want to point out that the latest version of iCal displays the current date on its icon in the dock, but we like to see our date and time information in one place at a glance, not have to search the dock for the iCal icon!
Uber-geek tip: The actual menubar time string format definition is stored in the file ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.MenuBarClock.plist, and if you knew the correct format you should (theoretically) be able to change it in that file only, with changing the “Medium” time format for other applications. But unless you are a true geek (or like to live on the edge) we don’t recommend attempting to manually edit that file, because you could really mess up your menubar clock. If you simply must try to do it that way, at least please back up the file someplace safe before you start messing with it, so you can restore it if your edits really mess things up!
Related posts
Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Review, Software
Tuesday May 6, 2008
Have you ever installed a piece of software and wondered exactly what files it is dropping all over your hard drive? Unlike Windows, OS X does not have a central registry file where program preferences can be stored, so if a program needs to store preferences or data between runs, it has to put that information somewhere - sometimes in a preferences file that is easily found (and easily removed if you use one of the programs mentioned in our previous article, “Remove ALL (well, most all) of unwanted programs”), but sometimes in an obscure file that the software author wants to keep hidden for one reason or another (and that usually is not deleted if you uninstall the software).
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a program that could watch your system and show you exactly what files are being installed? Or, perhaps you have a need to just monitor your Mac for a period of time to see what files are being accessed. That is where fseventer may help.
The features of fseventer are listed on their web site as follows:
- Observes filesystem changes using the same underlying API as Spotlight
- Provides a graphical representation of the file activity
- Example use could be to determine what files are changed via software installation, preferences, etc
- Requires admin access & will only work on Mac OS X 10.4+ “Tiger” and “Leopard”
Basically what this does is to show you, in a graphical format, all the file activity on your system during the time you have it enabled (clicking on the button in the upper left hand corner starts and stops tracking). If you don’t like the tree view, you can view the activity in a list format.
fseventer works best if you can quit all programs (other than the ones you are interested in) that may do file creation or modification during the monitoring period. For example, when we were testing it, one of our gabby friends sent us an instant message, and this caused a lot of extra file activity that was totally unrelated to the process we were trying to monitor (you would be amazed at how many temporary files certain programs create and/or access).
Also, in our opinion the tree view format can get totally out of hand (too much information!) if you let it run more than a few minutes (and it will automatically drop events once its internal buffer is full - the limit is set in the preferences). We with there were some way to exclude activity not associated with the processes we are actually interested in, but that would probably be difficult or impossible for the software authors to implement. Even so, this utility provides an interesting view of what’s happening on your Mac, and it is free to download (but the author does accept donations).
This is another tool that some folks will find very useful, while others will see no need for it at all. Those who prefer to use their geek tools from the command line may wish to take note of the “Related Links” at the bottom of the fseventer page.
Related posts
Subscribe to CAF
