Maclord's Blog

Apple discontinued development of their Safari web browser for Windows, and the last version of Safari they have ever released for Windows is 5.1.7. While the latest version of Safari for the Mac was 6.0.3 as of this writing with a few enhancements and the removal of the built-in RSS reader, the Windows version (which was left at 5.1.7) is not likely to be maintained by Apple any more.

There’s no direct link to download Safari for Windows from Apple’s web site either, so I decided to make it easy for those who would rather download it from here.

Safari for the Windows PCs is still a cool browser with some nifty features such as HTML 5 support, fast page rendering, advanced security and privacy options, 3D top sites view showing the most frequently visited sites, history viewing with page snapshots as cover flow, the ability to search through history as well as bookmarks, a robust web page elements inspector, a sleek RSS reader where you can adjust the feed length with a slider bar, an optional developer (tools) menu, and many more.

You got your new iPhone or new iPad, then a time came when you wanted to have some extra-ordinary file on your PC or your android device to be opened up on your other device and it turned out that iTunes will not sync it or you just don’t wanna bother transferring the file first to iTunes and then whatever.

Dropbox comes to the rescue. Thanks to Dropbox, once you put any file in it whether you are on your computer, or your mobile device, it will store them in the cloud and sync it to all of your devices such as your PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch even devices running on Android, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry and  Linux. What’s more, you can use Dropbox not only for personal synchronization needs, but also for sharing files with others and collaboration in real-time. Dropbox offers both free and paid services.

Why DropBox?

There are dozens of other applications either as SaaS or PaaS and all claiming to get the same job done. Among all, Dropbox was and still the best and painless (even Apple attempted to buy Dropbox before their iCloud venture – an argument for another post) I’ve ever used. It’s fast, easy-to-use, practical – the only downside of it is on mobile devices where it doesn’t push the content unlike iCloud, you need to be connected to Internet to access all your files except for the one or two which once you access it on your mobile device is/are cached for offline viewing.

Dropbox replaces

• Emailing file attachments to yourself and other people
• Using USB drives to move files between computers
• Renaming files to keep a history of previous versions
• Complicated backup software and hardware

How Dropbox works

Here’s a short video explaining how it works:

How do I get Dropbox for free?

For a starter you can sign up for a free 2 GB account (if you use my referral code, you will get an additional 250 MB)

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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.
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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.

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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.

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

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