Maclord's Blog

Win a free MacBook Air for yourself, and one for your friend!

Enter sweepstakes and receive exclusive offers from AppSumo. Unsubscribe anytime. Apple is not affiliated
with the contest. Read official rules.

Advanced-level Mail.app users of Mac OS X must have noticed that as of Mac OS X Lion (Mac OS X 10.7) the feature of “bouncing messages back to sender” is gone!

There are ongoing debates whether this feature was useful (so as to help fight spam) or not – even totally unnecessary (since many spammers do not use real or valid e-mail addresses, there’s no address to bounce back the junk mail) – the latter probably being Apple’s motive to remove the feature.

For those of you, who need to restore this functionality, there’s good news for intermediate to advanced Mac OS X users who can manage to create an Automator service that will feature an AppleScript to run — at least by following a short simple series of instructions. (See also the screen recording video tutorial below)

Here are the step by step instructions to do so:

1. Launch Automator from your Applications folder
2. Create a new service.
3. At the top of the editing (workflow) pane, select “no input” pull-down menu item just following the label “Service receives”, and select “Mail.app” from the second pull-down menu. The setting should appear like “Service receives no input in Mail.app”
4. Locate “Get Selected Mail items” from the actions list on the left, and then drag it to the editing pane (that is the Workflow)
5. Locate “Run AppleScript” from the actions, and drag it to the workflow.
6. Edit the script so as to look as the following:
   on run {input, parameters}
   tell application "Mail"
      repeat with eachMessage in input
         bounce eachMessage
         delete eachMessage
      end repeat
   end tell
end run
7.  Save your Automator workflow with a name like “Bounce Mail”
8. In Mail(.app) select the message(s) you want to bounce, then under the “Mail” application menu, select “Services > Bounce Mail (or whatever you named when saving the service) menu item

Although a beta version of the new, popular, long-awaited web browser Google Chrome for the Mac has already been released, the download page file has been removed from Google’s own search results.

Luckily I had downloaded a beta version and already using it. You can download it here for your own hands-on experience on Google Chrome on your Mac.

Download Google Chrome for Mac (latest beta) (304) for Mac OS X (supposedly for Intel only)

Google Chrome is made possible by the Chromium open source project and some other open source software.

You may also want to look into

Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard

One of the most annoying and frustrating thing especially for the so-called Windows-converts (i.e. people who “switch to the Mac” from Windows) on Mac OS X is that the maximize button (the small round green button with a ‘+’ sign on the upper-left corner of every window) acts differently on Mac than Windows in most cases. In fact, the maximize button behavior varies from application to application on the Mac, and unlike on Windows, it does not necesseraly maximize the window, but just change its dimensions. (See below and the rest of the article for details and for a couple work-around solutions to making windows full-screen on web browsers such as Safari).

On windows , the maximize button – where the term “maximize” is inherent from Windows operating system anyway - simply enlarges a window to almost full screen except that the window’s title bar, menu bar and the task bar remains visible and the remaining space is allocated to the window and its contents. On the Mac, however, this may not exactly be the case – especially when using Safari.
Read the rest of this entry »

What is VNC?

VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing, and it is a desktop sharing system with a graphic user interface which allows you to connect and control a remote computer over a network or the Internet. Thanks to the RFB (Remote Frame Buffer) protocol it’s using, VNC applications send the keyboard and mouse events to a remote computer on the network (or the Internet) who’s screen is being shared, and it relays back the updates.

RFB (Remote FrameBuffer) is a simple protocol and since operates at the framebuffer level, it can be used on all operating systems with a GUI including Windows, Macintosh (Mac OS X) and Linux. Although RFB started as a very simple protocol used by VNC and its derivatives, it has been improved so as to support file sharing, advanced compression and security techniques in its development cycle.

Why VNC is used and How

With VNC you can display the screen of a remote computer on your own computer in a window or in full screen mode, and using your own keyboard and mouse on this screen, you can control that remote computer as if you are sitting in front of it. All actions taken on the view of the remote desktop on your computer are performed actually on the remote computer itself.

Read the rest of this entry »

It looks like NVIDIA supports the Mac hardware more and more than ever:

According to Engadget(.com) GeForce GTX 285 graphics accelerator card will be available for Macs the beginning of this summer (expected to be shipping June 2009).

The GeForce GTX 285 takes DirectX 10 to gaming beyond HD with a top of 2560×1600 resolution.

Steve Jobs is one of the most impressive keynote address makers that I’ve ever known with his wonderful wits.

While browsing through some videos of the WWDC on YouTube, I ran into the intro of Apple’s WWDC in 2002 which started with a special mourning session for the death of Mac OS 9, and I’d like to share this special video here which is way fun:

You can add the possibility to write / modify NTFS files on Mac OS X now thanks to MacFUSE from Google Code and NTFS-3G from Erik Larsson. MacFUSE allows you to extend Mac OS X’s native file handling capabilities via 3rd-party file systems. As a normal user, installing the MacFUSE software package will let you use any 3rd-party file system written on top of  MacFUSE, such as NTFS-3G from Erik Larsson which will allow you to not only read NTFS volumes, but also give you the ability to write (finally) to NTFS volumes. In order to have the functionality MacFUSE and NTFS-3G must respectively be installed on your Mac (and the system be rebooted after respective installation). MacFUSE can be downloaded from the following address: http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/ or the cross-platform utilities section of OzarWEB downloads

.

Read the rest of this entry »