Maclord's Blog

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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Toby Turner a stand-up comedian, actor, songwriter and a YouTube personality has composed and performed a song about Windows 7 coming to the rescue after what we all have suffered from Windows Vista. It looks like he likes Mac OS X better, though, and he probably uses Windows only rarely on his MacBook Pro via BootCamp. Here’s the music video:

You can support Toby by visiting and subscribing to his YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/tobuscus

CHM stands for Compiled HTML, and it’s used by Microsoft Windows for help files, documentation, magazines and eBooks.
There are a lot of eBooks – some being even Mac-related – in .chm format while Mac OS X does not come with any built-in .chm viewer.

There are some 3rd party CHM file viewers for the Mac, though, and some of them are absolutely free:
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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.

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

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