Stupid OS X tricks – window management

04 Jan 2010 No Comments

by ryanin Technology, Uhm... yeah Tags: , , ,

I’m still getting used to my Mac, and one of the things I ran into recently drove me nuts. For a company that prides itself on the user experience, Apple sure does drop the ball in odd ways.

My annoyance was window sizing when switching from docked to not-docked on my MacBook. When docked, I’m running on a larger monitor so I have my windows sized to use more real estate. When I go mobile, the windows remain that size, which is far larger than the MacBook’s monitor size.

Here’s the thing though; you have to get to the bottom-right of the window to resize it, which I couldn’t do. iTunes in particular was giving me a headache because none of the tricks I found were working.

Finally, I stumbled onto this page that revealed the fix (someone else found through guessing it appears). It’s simple when you know it (hold Alt while toggling Window > Zoom), but so esoteric to be confounding. (Side note: for other apps, you can switch the dock location to another edge and then back and the windows seem to come back. Again, really? This was the intended UE?)

Anyway, windows now back to their working sizes, but what a stupid thing to have to deal with. At least Windows let’s you grab any side of the window to resize.

iChat with Google Talk

04 Oct 2009 1 Comment

by ryanin Technology Tags: , , , , ,

After beating my head against a wall for the better part of an hour (I’m on vacation, I had the time to kill), I was completely unable to get iChat to connect to GTalk via the Jabber configuration that used to work prior to my Snow Leoapard install.

After searching around (on Google’s site), I resorted to trolling the Google Talk support forums and stumbled on the solution; you have to use a Captcha unlock to allow the signin to work. Why, I have no idea, but thank you to the person who posted this link on the Google forums.

If you are trying to sign into iChat and constantly get the “Login information is incorrect” message, go here: https://www.google.com/accounts/UnlockCaptcha. I have no idea why you have to do this or what else becomes unlocked through this, but it allowed me to finally log in with iChat 5 on Snow Leopard.

New laptop (part 2)

24 Feb 2009 No Comments

by ryanin Technology Tags: , ,

After a couple of weeks with a new Dell Studio XPS 13, it was obvious that it was not the laptop for me. Don’t get me wrong, it was a fine machine, but with Vista 64-bit and my complete inability to succesfully “upgrade” it to Vista Ultimate 32-bit (yes, I tried to wipe and re-install).

So, with little hope but a “worth a shot” attitude, back to Best Buy I went. After a quick chat with the most helpful people at the Lohr Road (thanks Stefani and Ken!), I swapped the Dell for a MacBook (last of last year’s models); never had to pull out a card.

So far, I’m still getting used to the MacBook. The keyboard layout is just different enough that I keep hitting the Caps Lock key instead of “a”, and I do miss the backlit keyboard, but so far so good.

I’ve never actually owned a Mac before, so this is going to be an interesting trip.

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